Nowhere Else

1. L’Appel du vide

“Lange, if I come into the room, are you going to throw something at me?”

That voice belonged to his least intolerable visitor, Jacob McCreery. The other visitors, better described as jailers or babysitters, flinched and cringed. Not McCreery. He didn’t tiptoe in and out of the room. He talked. Not much, and always with a sort of benevolent exasperation, but Lange could abide him more easily than the others.

He’d had to learn their names and faces—relearn, they insisted—as well as his own. Pointless as it was, he retained what they’d told him: he was called Solomon Lange, which he did not remember; he was a physicist, which seemed equally inconsequential; he’d been trapped in the Nowhere, which was incorrect.

He’d been free in the Nowhere. He was trapped here.

“Here” encompassed the entirety of the physical world. More specifically, it meant an empty grey bedroom in what had once been Quint Services Facility 17, a research station carved into an asteroid. Despite Lange’s evident lack of interest, the crew had kept him informed: Oswin Lewis Quint, trillionaire founder of Quint Services, had died on Earth last night. The government had seized everything—except Facility 17. It remained a secret. The crew members still living here were now in control of the place. There were only seven of them, which was good for Lange. Fewer obstacles between him and his destination.

Lange was going back to the Nowhere. Back to the pristine openness and emptiness, back to the infinite simultaneity, the numb serenity, away from this body and this room and this reality.

McCreery repeated his question. “You gonna throw something at me if I come in?”

“No,” Lange said, still surprised by the low vibration of his own voice. He disliked the sensation. The void of the Nowhere was pure. In his body, there was a filthy, shifting array of hungers and itches and smells, and all of it sickened him. Confinement made him desperate, and when he was desperate, he threw things.

Or rather, things threw themselves.

McCreery had removed the desk and the chair from the room five or six days ago after an altercation where Lange had nearly crushed a man in a suit who’d come to prod at him. That had been Quint himself, apparently, lured by the prospect of studying Lange’s telekinesis. Lange did not care to be studied. Quint had survived their encounter only by virtue of McCreery’s intervention. Lange felt no remorse about his own actions; it was a small mercy that no one had asked him to express any. No one seemed to miss Quint at all.

Now the room contained only the narrow bed with its scratchy sheets where Lange was currently seated, barefoot and in pajamas, because McCreery and the others had emptied the closet and removed the dresser. They’d moved the cat food after a messy incident three days ago, but sometimes the cats still came around.

Lange had yet to hurt the cats.

The same could not be said of the other people in this remote space facility. Lange hadn’t seriously injured McCreery yet, which was why the man made the foolish choice of walking into the room. Lange had no wish to harm McCreery, but this brief moment of the unguarded door was his best chance to escape.

“I brought you a sandwich,” McCreery said, offering a plate to Lange.

McCreery was large. Almost immovably so. Both tall and broad, his size was his most daunting quality. Lange could never have lifted him bodily.

McCreery fell somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five years old. He was white, of a complexion that would probably freckle in the summer sun, but the uniform paleness of his skin suggested years spent in space. His nose had been broken at least once and his hair was a middling blond. A blunt instrument of a man. No subtlety, no sharp edges. Holding still suited him, and he proved surprisingly patient, but Lange made him wait for so long that a fine tremor ran through his outstretched arm.

McCreery said, “You haven’t eaten since yesterday morning. Everyone’s worried about you.”

Doubtful. Their concern about Lange began and ended with his ability to do violence. His health was of no interest to anyone, including himself.

Lange pulled on the plate, an act that no longer required the use of his body. Mental visualization sufficed. Or it would have if McCreery hadn’t tightened his grip on the dish. The unannounced telekinesis had caught him unaware. McCreery frowned, though Lange’s beautifully executed motion should have been no cause for distress.

Lange was rather proud of it, in fact. His best yet. He gave the plate another tug and McCreery let go.

It hovered in the air, carrying an uninspiring stack of wheat bread, sliced cheddar, and salad greens. The food was irrelevant, but the white ceramic dish could do serious damage if telekinetically hurled at someone’s face.

It took a moment to line up his mind and his body, but Lange managed to grab the plate with his hand. A curious appendage—dark brown with long, slender fingers, less responsive than expected. Still, he was able to cup his palm under the plate, catching the edge with his thumb. He lowered the plate to the floor, the sandwich untouched, making a show of his deliberate, jerky movements.

The distance didn’t put the plate out of range of his abilities, but he hoped the gesture would serve as a sign that if it did shatter, that hadn’t been his intention. The thought of a ceramic shard piercing any soft and frail part of the human body disgusted Lange. McCreery didn’t need to bleed or die.

He just needed to stay out of the way.

Lange was about to strike when McCreery said, “I know,” with great sympathy, which startled him.

McCreery cast his gaze toward the discarded sandwich and said, “I miss deli meat, too. But we’re not getting regular shipments from Quint Services anymore, so just be grateful I was able to scrounge up some cheese. If one of those runners doesn’t take pity on us, soon enough we’ll all be surviving off whatever’s in Emil’s greenhouse.”

Lange couldn’t rely on his memory of life before the Nowhere, but it struck him as unusual for McCreery to talk so much at once. The others, when forced to visit him, chattered nervously in the face of Lange’s silence, wondering all the while if he was going to fling them out of the room.

When, not if.

“What would it take for you to eat this sandwich? Or anything?” McCreery asked. “What do you want? I can’t make any promises, but I’m a decent thief. Beer? Cigarettes? Something to read? Eat the sandwich and it’s yours.”

Lange stared at him. It was hard to imagine a man as big as McCreery exercising any kind of stealth. Harder still to imagine himself wanting anything as mundane as alcohol and reading material.

McCreery inclined his head, emphasizing the seriousness of his offer. “If you want more than that, I’m gonna need you to shower, too. Not to be a dick, but it’s been a week since the decontamination and it’s getting rank in here.”

Lange ignored that. But perhaps McCreery was willing to help him. “I want to go back.”

“To Earth? I don’t know if I can swing that, not while you’re still—” McCreery waved a hand in the air, a gesture presumably meant to indicate unpredictably telekinetic “—but I’ll see what I can do.”

“Not to Earth,” Lange clarified. “I want to go back to the Nowhere.”

“You what?” McCreery said, his question punctuated with an incredulous laugh. “Sorry, man, not happening. It almost killed you. And you were… really not yourself in there.”

Yes, exactly. Not being himself was the goal.

McCreery continued, “I can’t let you do that.”

“Unfortunate,” Lange said, and then he hurled McCreery across the room.

McCreery’s shoulders slammed into the back wall. Lange immobilized him there, his feet dangling, and was gratified when McCreery swore at him, because it meant two things: Lange hadn’t killed him, but he couldn’t get free.

It was difficult to hold McCreery in place, more so because he wouldn’t stop struggling and saying, “Lange. Lange, don’t do this. We need you here.”

Lange stood precariously. He’d spent the solitude of the past few days taming his mind, but his body remained an unruly animal. He wobbled, his vision spotting black. His destination was only a few minutes’ walk, but that was more unassisted walking than he’d done in weeks. No matter; he’d slough off this form soon enough. He forced himself to move toward the door.

The lab was just down the hallway. He could feel the gash in the fabric of reality trembling, even from here. The void called to him. Shift weight to one foot, bend the other knee, lift the heel, put the foot forward in a step. Again. He could do this. One step, and then another. He’d exited the room and made it a few steps into the hallway. That was progress.

McCreery thumped against the floor. Damn it. Lange hadn’t meant to drop him, but walking required too much focus, and it was hard to control things he couldn’t see.

McCreery wasn’t quiet when he groaned and stood. “Lange,” he yelled. “Get back here.”

Lange should have knocked him out. He hadn’t wanted to do permanent damage. There was no way he could outrun—outwalk—McCreery. Was Lange strong enough to throw him again? Could he hold McCreery off with his mind alone?

Lange forced the door to slide shut, but it didn’t slow McCreery, who burst into the hallway a moment later, muttering, “Jesus fucking Christ.”

The one object Lange couldn’t move was himself. He’d tried to transport himself both within this world and out of it, and his attempts had come to nothing. He wasn’t a runner. He didn’t have innate access to the Nowhere. His only method of arriving in the lab was his weak, useless legs, so he’d have to continue his painstaking progress while pushing McCreery back with his mind.

McCreery made a long stride down the hallway. Lange shoved him back, the rubber soles of McCreery’s shoes screeching resistance against the floor. Lange couldn’t hold him still, not while walking required so much effort. McCreery fought free an instant later. Another stride. Another shove backward. Then McCreery huffed, rolled his eyes, and took a running leap. He tackled Lange to the ground.

Lange threw him off, or tried to. McCreery wrapped his arms around Lange’s chest so instead the two of them rolled together, landing with McCreery flat on his back and Lange on top of him, glaring at the ceiling. Hanging on was clever, Lange would give him that. It rendered Lange’s one advantage unusable.

“You done now?” McCreery asked, and then, more worried, “You’re okay, right?”

Lange grunted, because there was no strand of the multiverse in which he could bring himself to answer “yes” to either question.

McCreery possessed the core strength to boost himself upright without loosening his grip, which put Lange in the unspeakably awful position of sitting between his spread thighs. Lange was in no pain, which he regretted. Pain, at least, he understood. Its absence made everything—being cradled—so much worse.

No one had touched him so much since he’d returned, everyone else too cowardly or too wise to try. Now he was surrounded, one of McCreery’s thick arms banding his chest and McCreery’s belly pressing into his back. Lange could smell both of them, his own unpleasantly ripe scent under the clean fragrance of McCreery’s soap. The sensory input crashed over him like a wave of static, leaving him unable to think of anything but how confined he was. How utterly, wretchedly human. McCreery was warm. Lange’s heart thudded in his chest, its rhythm erratic from panic and exhaustion. He slumped back against McCreery’s chest, seething and humiliated.

“Should’ve eaten the sandwich,” McCreery told him, his voice right next to Lange’s ear, inescapable.

* * *

Jake had wanted to give Lange a hug a bunch of times since his return, but not like this.

He’d never acted on the urge. They weren’t close. But Jake didn’t have a clue what to do with somebody who’d survived something awful. Some stubborn, animal part of his brain kept proposing hugs as the answer.

Lange didn’t want hugs, even if it seemed like he needed one, and that was reason enough not to do it. Also, Lange was furious most of the time and he could move things with his mind, in case Jake needed extra reminders not to fuck with him.

Touching was a desperate measure, but Lange planning to hurl himself into the breach qualified as desperate times. Welcome to your stay at the Last Resort, Mr. McCreery.

Thankfully, Lange didn’t fight him as they peeled themselves off the hallway floor and made their way back. It was more like helping an unsteady elderly person to bed, except Lange was… what, thirty-five? Jake had no idea. The dark brown skin of his face was unlined. His beard made it even harder to tell.

Lange looked different now. He was still a handsome Black man, but before getting trapped in the Nowhere, he’d been in good health. He’d also kept his hair and beard as short as they were in the professional photo on the back cover of The Physics of the Nowhere. Lange had seemed like a guy who cared about personal grooming. And not that Jake would know—his only goal when getting dressed was not being naked or cold—but Lange had struck him as stylish. They lived in a secret facility in a hollowed-out asteroid with no place fancy to go and no one to impress, and still everything Lange owned fit him just right. Button-down shirts, suits, other things that looked like they required laundry care Jake didn’t know how to provide. He was pretty good at getting engine grease out of clothes, but Lange’s suits wouldn’t need that.

Lange had been like that before, anyway. Whatever happened to him in the Nowhere had swept being presentable right off his list of priorities. All that time in unfolded space had weakened him, and apparently given the guy some kind of need to hurl himself back in.

“What do you want to go back for, anyway?” Jake asked. “Didn’t you spend all your time in there trying to cling to Kit so you could get out? You nearly killed him, you know.”

Instead of answering, Lange reached for the abandoned sandwich and ate it in sullen silence. Thirty-five? More like fourteen.

“We need you to stay, Lange. You’re the only one who can repair the breach,” Jake said. Emil had been on him to bring this topic up.

Everybody had shunted their responsibilities onto Jake. They all said shit like oh you have such a way with him, instead of Lange scares me out of my goddamn mind, which would have been honest, at least. They acted like Jake had an advanced degree in dealing with genius physicists who’d accidentally trapped themselves in a mysterious void and then reappeared with out-of-control superpowers, which was funny, because Jake felt like it was one of those dreams where he was taking the final exam for a class he hadn’t even known he was in.

It was true he’d spent a lot of years working Search and Rescue, pulling injured, scared, or drunk people out of their malfunctioning spacecraft. He’d done some training in field medicine and become pretty good at projecting a calm, steady presence. None of the people he’d rescued had been telekinetic. Or geniuses.

Lange finished the sandwich. The plate rose out of his lap and hovered back down to the floor, clinking when it landed. Lange didn’t want to touch it. He didn’t want to touch anything. Jake caught him shuddering at the brush of his own clothing sometimes. He felt for the guy.

“It calls to me,” Lange said, not looking at Jake.

“The breach in your lab?”

“The Nowhere.”

“L’appel du vide,” Jake said. Jesus. Self-destructive urges on top of it all. Jake had been through some fucked-up shit in his life, but it was just bad parents, no friends, regular misery. Lange blew him out of the water. “That’s French for ‘the call of the void.’”

Lange raised an eyebrow.

“What? I read.” Everyone here was all about not judging people based on appearance, except when it came to the idea that the big guy from the sticks had cracked open a book once or twice in his life. Well, l’appel du vide, that one he’d learned from a crossword puzzle. It still counted.

Jake let go of his indignation and brought the conversation back to what mattered. “I’m not much of an expert on unfolded space, though. That’s all you. Your machine made a door into the Nowhere, and now we need you to close it.”

“Fine,” Lange said. “Take me there and I’ll close it.”

“Uh huh,” Jake said. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Take you there and you’ll throw yourself in, more like. How about I bring Dax in here and you tell them how to close it instead?”

Dax Strickland, the other physicist remaining at Facility 17, had been Lange’s junior colleague. They were brilliant, but they hadn’t been able to repair the damage done by the accident on their own.

Lange responded to the question with silence. Maybe it was stubbornness. Maybe he didn’t know the answer.

“I’m sorry for how things went down just now. I don’t want to do that again. You wanna apologize for throwing me at the wall?” Jake said, pressing his luck. He wasn’t in the habit of asking, but habit didn’t cover any part of this situation. Lange wasn’t in his right mind. He wouldn’t hurt anybody if he were in control of himself. At least, Jake wanted to believe that. An apology would be a sign. A real historic moment—Jake’s first-ever apology from somebody who started a fight with him. They could throw a parade.

Lange offered him half a second of cold eye contact, then looked away. After long enough that Jake thought Lange would change the subject and move on, Lange said, “I regret harming you.”

Maybe not parade-worthy, but better than expected. Still a damn long way from promising not to do it again, but just like with a shitty Christmas present, the thought counted. It was enough for Jake to say, “Good. You could shower and change your clothes and act just a little bit more like a human being. I’d accept that as a peace offering.”

“I will shower and change. Acting is beyond the scope of my abilities.”

“You know I meant behaving, not performing. You can get nitpicky with me when you smell better,” Jake said, tossing a bath towel at Lange. The towel hung in the air, untouched, and Jake sighed. Lange was full of shit, acting like he wasn’t human. So he could juggle with no hands these days, that didn’t make a difference. His bad attitude alone qualified him.

He offered Lange a hand up from the bed. There had been toiletries in the room before the team had removed all the small, hard, throw-able objects. Later, Jake had removed all the large, hard, throw-able objects. There wasn’t much to be done about Lange flinging people. Lange’s previous efforts had been a little gentler. He’d just sort of slid the other team members backwards out of the room and forced the door closed. Jake was lucky enough to get special treatment, apparently. His bruised shoulders throbbed.

Lange had apologized, Jake reminded himself. He unclenched his jaw and clung to that.

Jake walked Lange to the facility’s shared bathroom and neither of them said anything, which was fine. Silence was good for thinking about the upgrades Jake would make to Eliza. Version one of the probe moved on treads, but he wanted more versatility. Version two could hover, maybe.

If the team ever stopped asking him to check on Lange, Jake would have time to make the changes.

Sure, they’d all been switching off shifts outside Lange’s door, worrying. But when it came time to talk to him, that fell to Jake.

Ridiculous. Jake didn’t even know the guy. Felt a kind of frustrated sympathy for him, sure. Weird loner, better with science than people. Jake knew that song. It didn’t make them friends.

He’d thought for a while that it might. Lange was interesting. Jake wasn’t interested in him—Jake wasn’t much for that kind of interest—but buried under that lethal coldness was a brilliant mind. Someone Jake might have enjoyed talking to. It wasn’t that Lange had rejected his friendship. Jake had made a few tentative overtures in their first few months living in Facility 17, and then Lange had—well, not died, exactly. But he hadn’t been around.

Lange was back now, and he was a mess, and Jake was even more of one, because sometimes he still wanted to be friends. He thought about hugs, for fuck’s sake.

It was the social equivalent of standing on a high precipice and looking over the edge. A jump would end in brutal, painful disaster, but those moments of free fall in between—no. Jake was not fucking doing this. The void could stop calling him right the fuck now.

Jake found a clean washcloth and a bar of soap and turned to give them to Lange, who leaned against the wall, brooding, still fully dressed.

Someone quicker with a joke might have teased him—I know it’s been a while since you bathed, but the usual thing is to take your clothes off—but Jake’s throat closed up at the thought. Instead he warmed up the shower and said, “It’s ready. I’ll, uh, wait over here. Yell if you need anything.”

Lange pushed off the wall, jerked his shirt over his head, then dropped it. Jake spun on his heel after catching a flash of brown torso. He probably should have watched Lange totter into the shower to make sure their best chance at fixing the universe didn’t slip and break his neck, but he couldn’t move. Jake didn’t turn around again until he heard the metal stall door latch.

Lange had left the towel and the set of clean clothes hanging on hooks opposite the stall. His discarded clothes lay crumpled on the floor, next to the soap and washcloth Jake had given him. As Jake watched, the toiletries rose from the floor and floated under the stall door.

The power itself was weird, and weirder still was how quickly Lange had adapted to it. He no longer thought to reach for things with his hands. Since his return, Lange acted like his body was some alien punishment that had been forced on him. He didn’t welcome sensations of any kind, even ones Jake thought of as pleasant—clean sheets, hot coffee, a friendly pat on the back. No wonder he’d put this off for so long. The shower was probably making him miserable.

Maybe he really does feel bad about hurting me, Jake thought, and then a spray of warm water jumped out of the stall and splattered his face. He blinked, water catching in his lashes and dripping down his nose to wet his shirt.

“Very funny.”

“Oh, did that hit you?” Lange’s delivery was as dry as ever. “I was experimenting.”

Jake wiped a hand over his face, pushing his wet bangs up. “How about you finish up your experiment and we get back to solving the real problem? You know, the one where your machine ripped open the Nowhere and now it’s spilling?”

The water cut off. Lange’s towel levitated from the wall hook into the stall. “You’ll have to take me to the lab. I can’t solve a problem I can’t see.”

The lab. Not my lab. Lange kept doing things like that. Divorcing himself from his former life.

“Promise me you won’t hurt anybody, including yourself. And jumping into the Nowhere counts as hurting yourself.”

“Remaining here is far more painful.”

“I guess I wouldn’t know,” Jake said, frowning. Lange was unhappy, but who wouldn’t be, after being trapped in the Nowhere for weeks and then stuck in that empty room with nothing to do? He hadn’t realized Lange was suffering. What a fucking mess.

“It is not my intention to hurt you or anyone else,” Lange said after a long pause. “But in my… condition, my intentions are worth very little.”

“No,” Jake said. “They’re worth a lot.”

There was only the sound of water dripping onto the floor.

“Lange, I know things really suck right now, and I’m sorry. If you just hold off on hurling yourself into the void for a little while, I will work with you to make things suck less. You stick around and I will too. Okay?”

“You’re the first person who’s said that.”

“What?”

“That things… suck. Everyone else has been determined to assure me that everything’s okay now.”

“Oh. Well. Clearly it’s not.” Was that gratitude in Lange’s tone? Jake hadn’t done anything but acknowledge reality. He took a breath. “Listen, you fix the world and I will help you fix yourself. Or at least, make sure you’re not in pain anymore. I’m good at fixing stuff. It’s why I’m on the team.”

Jake was good with wiring. Pipes. Engines. Robots. Hardware. Anything mechanical, he could take it apart and put it back together better than he’d found it. People didn’t work like that—and they never wanted him around, so he didn’t know much. But his gut twisted at the idea that Lange was so miserable he wanted to throw himself back into the Nowhere, so Jake had to say something. Lange didn’t deserve to live like that.

There was a long silence as Lange dressed inside the stall. Instead of responding to Jake’s offer, he said, “You don’t know for certain that I am capable of ‘fixing the world.’”

“Yeah.” Jake blew out a breath. “You know someone better qualified, you give them a call.”

“I don’t,” Lange said. The door swung open, his cool regard zeroing in on Jake. “Neither do I know anyone capable of ‘fixing’ my problem.”

Jake could only shrug. It had been easier to talk to Lange with his face out of sight. “Guess we’re stuck with each other.”

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