Out of Nowhere

1. Double

Aidan dropped the notebook, the rustle of pages and the click of its metal spine against the lab bench resounding in the silence of the room. He’d had to turn on the overhead light to take photos. Even lit up, dread haunted the lab.

The notebook splayed open to a random page of observations with neat handwriting in blue ink. It was dated September 20, 2093—six days ago—and the first line said Subject No. 1 resistant, still unable to access the Nowhere.

Damn right he’d been resistant.

Aidan picked up the tablet he’d set aside, snapped a picture, and sent it. He’d already sent dozens of other photos like it, plus a written account of what had happened to him, to his contacts in the Runners’ Union. The first news articles about the experiments Quint Services had performed on Laila and Aidan had already surfaced. It wasn’t enough. Oswin Lewis Quint wasn’t in prison yet.

Shoving aside his revulsion, Aidan lifted the page and flipped it. The scientist who’d written these notes was already serving time. Not for hurting him or Laila, but for fraud. A false charge. Whatever else you could say of Heath and her collaborator Winslow—cruel, greedy assholes, both of them—they’d done their own experiments.

Their careers were over. They’d never do this to anyone again. But Heath and Winslow were lackeys. None of it had touched Quint, that slimy piece of shit. Aidan snapped another picture and sent it. A fucking cover-up. He intended to uncover it.

As long as Quint was out there, unspeakably rich and powerful, no runners would ever be safe. He’d figure out some new impossible prison to hide them in, and then somebody else would get strapped down and starved.

The page in his hand ripped.

“Aidan? What are you doing in here? It’s the middle of the night.”

Caleb. Better him than anyone else who might have caught Aidan here. He unclenched his hand from the crumpled page but didn’t turn around. “We’re in space, it’s always the middle of the night.”

Caleb didn’t laugh. “Aidan.”

It was concern coloring Caleb’s voice, but it felt like a rebuke. Aidan was supposed to be resting, not secretly gathering evidence. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said, which was true. It had been true for days.

“So you broke into Heath’s lab to photograph her notes? What are you doing with those, anyway?” Caleb paused and Aidan heard him walk closer. Caleb yawned. “Is that my tablet?”

Of course it was Caleb’s tablet. Aidan didn’t have any personal possessions at Facility 17 because he’d arrived here by getting fucking kidnapped. It was Caleb’s clothes hanging off his even-scrawnier-than-usual body. He was barefoot because neither of them had thought to grab his shoes out of the cell before blowing it the fuck up. Where else would he have gotten a tablet?

Instead of saying any of that, Aidan said, “I didn’t break in. The door was unlocked.”

It had been deprogrammed after Heath and Winslow had been escorted from the premises three days ago. No one at Facility 17 had had time to go through the labs yet—except Aidan. He had to record this stuff before it was all swept under the rug.

“Hey,” Caleb said, and there was no way his hand could possibly be that hot even through the sleeve of Aidan’s t-shirt. Aidan must have taken a chill in the lab. He hadn’t noticed until now. “Look at me.”

If Aidan did that, it would be his undoing. He could withstand Caleb’s worried voice and even his careful touches, but not his expression. They’d been friends so long that Aidan knew it by heart without looking: the pleading eyes, the strained twist of his mouth.

Aidan didn’t have time to fall apart. He had to put Quint in prison.

Caleb reached across the lab bench and flipped the notebook shut. “It’s four in the morning. We should both be asleep.”

Aidan stared down at Caleb’s hand pinning the notebook closed. It was a nice hand, broad and long-fingered with clean, blunt-tipped nails. That was the problem. Caleb’s hand was attached to a nice forearm, warm beige skin lightly furred with dark brown hair, and a nice bicep, and a nice shoulder, and an even nicer face.

Fuck. He hadn’t meant to look. Now not only was he magnetized by Caleb’s ridiculously, offensively blue eyes, but worse, Caleb could see him. Aidan was mostly bones and under-eye shadows. He’d last combed the nest of black hair on his head three or maybe four days ago, something he only thought about when Caleb was regarding him with his perfect eyebrows drawn together like that. Rage was the only thing keeping Aidan upright, and he couldn’t feel it with that much concern beamed directly at his face.

His shoulders sagged.

Caleb caught him in a hug. His scent was a comfort: clean laundry and a hint of sweat, the only soft thing in the lab’s dry, recycled air. He’d been asleep before he came here; his cheek was marred by a pillow crease and his hair mussed. Caleb was only a couple inches taller. He didn’t used to seem so much bigger. Aidan couldn’t dwell on that, not when Caleb was enveloping him in warmth, not when Caleb’s touch was making it possible to forget the smoking wreck of his life.

Shit. He had fires to put out. Aidan pushed Caleb away, the air cool where they no longer touched. “I just have to finish this.”

“I woke up and you were gone,” Caleb said, obviously still troubled.

Since the rescue six days ago, Aidan had been convalescing in Caleb’s bed, and Caleb had been using an extra mattress that took up most of the remaining floor space in his room. Inconvenient, but familiar. Aidan had spent his vagabond adulthood shuffling from one shared room—or couch, or floor—to another. He’d spent his childhood with Caleb. No doubt this temporary arrangement was more pleasant than whatever came next.

“I’ll be done soon,” Aidan said. He had no way of knowing that. He could photograph every last pen stroke in this laboratory and Quint still might get away.

“You never said what you were doing. Is it Union business?”

Caleb always carefully respected the secrecy of the Runners’ Union. He wasn’t a runner, but for the first few years, he’d helped Aidan talk people into joining.

“I’m exposing Quint.” Might as well be truthful. Caleb had caught him, and anyway, he wasn’t working on behalf of the Union. This was personal. “Or trying, anyway. I’ve been sending evidence for days and it’s still barely making the news.”

“Can I help?”

“No, it’s fine, go back to bed.”

“You should come with me. To sleep, I mean, not—you know what I mean.”

A dull flush crept up his neck. It must be the late hour making Caleb trip over his tongue. He usually treated their closeness as something unquestionably platonic, as though the possibility of sex had never occurred to him. Aidan should know, since he had to put in years’ worth of work to keep his end of that bargain. The possibility occurred to him all the time.

“I worry about you,” Caleb added unnecessarily. “You know this could wait for a more normal hour. You could sleep now and then come back to this.”

“They’ll clean this lab out and then what evidence will I have, besides my testimony and Laila’s?”

“Emil and his team wouldn’t do that, not if they knew what you were working on. They’d want to help you.”

Aidan grimaced. Caleb might trust them, but they were strangers to him. No, worse than strangers: they were people who’d signed up to work for Quint. Aidan could only trust the Union. “I have help. And I’ll sleep when I’m done.”

Caleb searched him with a look, then bit his lip like he was biting back protests, and withdrew. By the time Aidan came to their room, Caleb was asleep. The brush of Aidan’s fingertips against his own skin as he undressed was cold enough to make him shiver.

* * *

The buzz of the tablet woke Caleb. He reached over the edge of his mattress, groping in the dark until his hand hit it. The screen lit up with a message from Deb—answer my texts you jerk, typical little-sister stuff. Caleb unlocked it.

She’d texted him l’shanah tovah on Monday, six days ago. Must have been Rosh Hashanah. Caleb had missed the holiday and Deb’s message, as well as several subsequent messages, because he’d been busy rescuing Aidan.

Aidan, who was—thank fuck—currently asleep in his bed. Whatever he’d been doing in Heath’s lab in the middle of the night, he’d finished.

Sorry, Caleb wrote back. He’d been saying that a lot for the past few months. Nobody had been happy with his decision to take a job with Quint Services, and Caleb couldn’t tell his family he’d done it to spy on the company. They’d been even less thrilled with his transfer to space.

But he’d found Aidan, and now the two of them could go home.

Back down to the surface, back down to the city where he and Aidan had grown up, where Deb still lived. She was in college now, and his parents had retired to warmer climes, so home no longer meant the second-floor of the old brownstone where the three of them had been teenagers together. For a moment, he wished it did.

Happy new year to you too, he wrote to Deb. Talk soon, I promise.

Caleb didn’t know what he was going to tell her. If Aidan’s plan worked, the whole story would be in the news soon enough.

There was no need to keep a strict schedule since Emil’s team had seized control of Facility 17, but Caleb was awake now so he might as well get up. He could check on Laila, who’d been in the cell with Aidan, and Lenny, who’d been wounded during the rescue. Both of them had been more receptive to care than Aidan.

Caleb kept the lights at ten percent while he got dressed, letting Aidan sleep.

He picked up his tablet again and went through the rest of his messages. It wasn’t snooping. The damn thing belonged to him. No new photos. No record of new sent messages, either. Finding nothing made him feel worse for looking in the first place. Guilt and disappointment twisted in his stomach. He just wanted to help.

Being Aidan’s best friend didn’t come with a high enough security clearance for that, apparently. Neither did saving his extremely frustrating life.

Caleb carried the tablet with him to the brightly lit industrial kitchen, which was bustling as though nothing had changed. It smelled like coffee, and he could hear butter sizzling in a skillet. The routine was a comfort, especially since no one knew what to do now that Heath and Winslow were in prison. Caleb wasn’t sure who was in charge, other than Emil. The other top scientist at Facility 17, a physicist named Solomon Lange, had disappeared in a lab accident before Caleb’s arrival. Not died. Vanished into the Nowhere.

The team was still working on a plan to locate and, if possible, revive him. Discovering the secret prison cell where Aidan and Laila had been tortured had interrupted them, but now that they had a measure of control over the facility, Caleb was confident they’d solve that problem and any others that cropped up.

Emil, the team leader, an intimidatingly handsome guy of Indian descent, was seated at the long metal table in the room with a cup of tea and his own tablet in front of him. He smiled at Caleb. “Good morning.”

Caleb smiled back and said good morning to all of them in turn. He liked these people, but he wasn’t one of them. Insinuating himself into social groups, at least superficially, was never hard. People were primed to like him because he was youthful, halfway fit, and blandly symmetrical. He made good on that advantage by smiling a lot and remembering names and personal details for small talk. It felt calculating to think about it in those terms, but he’d had to. Charming his way into a post at Quint Services’ most secret research facility had been a lot of work.

Caleb hadn’t needed to charm Emil’s team into rescuing Aidan, which was a relief. They’d done it because it was the right thing to do.

He didn’t see the violet-haired runner, Kit, who’d been instrumental in discovering the secret cell. Kit must not be a morning person.

Caleb grabbed a couple pieces of toast, sat, searched for Quint Services on the tablet, and sorted the results by most recent. It took several minutes to find any mention of the experiments, and the articles only implicated Heath and Winslow, not Quint himself. None of them were from major news sources. No wonder Aidan was disappointed. A story like that ought to be in the headlines. It ought to have spurred a massive criminal investigation.

Quint had to be burying the articles. That piece of shit.

“Do you think Quint will ever see consequences for what he did up here?” Caleb asked, setting the tablet down.

“Well, Kit vowed to destroy him,” Emil said, as neutrally as if he was reporting the weather. He took a sip of tea. Caleb supposed it was bad form to be openly pessimistic about your boyfriend’s chances of ruining a man with a net worth of 11 trillion dollars. It did seem like a long shot, even if said boyfriend could teleport.

“Are you asking because Aidan’s been leaking sensitive information to the press?” Dax asked. The team’s pale, redheaded physicist was methodically peeling the liner from their blueberry muffin, and they’d spoken without looking up from the task.

The question still gave Caleb pause. He wasn’t here to snitch.

“I’m not mad,” Dax clarified. “No one here cares. But I did notice.”

“How?” Caleb asked. “It’s barely made the news.”

“I keep weird hours and I saw the lights on in Heath’s lab in the middle of the night. Wasn’t hard to put it together after that,” Dax said. “It’s good that he’s trying, but he should be prepared for failure. Quint has a history of crushing journalists or outlets that report negative stuff about him.”

“Yeah,” Caleb said, dismayed. When Aidan had said I’ll sleep when I’m done, he hadn’t been talking about documenting evidence. He’d been talking about ruining Quint.

The conversation moved on, but Caleb didn’t pay attention. He finished eating and put his plate in the dishwasher. Leaving after so little clean-up was definitely shirking, but no one called him on it.

The facility operated by having everyone who worked there take a hand in its maintenance. In his transfer interview, Caleb had claimed to be very handy, fabricating an anecdote about fixing a leaky faucet in his apartment. Any potentially leaky faucets in the facility would just have to keep dripping. There were bigger problems. If Aidan was awake when he got back to the room, Caleb would ask if he wanted breakfast. Then they’d discuss Quint.

He didn’t know what he’d say. There were only so many variations on please let me help you, and none had worked so far. He came to the door of his own room too quickly. Kept walking.

The facility, carved inside of an asteroid, was far larger than it initially seemed and almost all on a single level. The kitchen and the greenhouse were clustered together at one end and there were labs and medical exam rooms at the other. 

This hallway passed by a lab with caution tape on the door. There had once been windows permitting outsider to peer in, but an accident had shattered them and now there was brown paper blocking the view. Inside this space—Dr. Lange’s former lab—was something the team had taken to calling the breach. Dr. Lange had designed a machine meant to open a door into the Nowhere, and in a way, he’d succeeded. The problem was that nobody could close it.

Caleb knew this space disturbed runners. He’d witnessed Kit’s reaction to it. But he couldn’t feel anything wrong with it. The papered-over windows and the caution tape on the door were enough to keep him out, though. He turned the corner.

He ran straight into himself.

It took him a full two minutes to realize that. At first he was only aware of having run into another person, one about the same size as him. How had that happened? He’d been thinking, sure, but his eyes had been open. It was as if the person had materialized right in front of him. A runner?

They both grunted and began to apologize and disentangle themselves, and that was when Caleb began to take stock of the guy. A white man, about the same build as him, dressed in grey and black, with brown hair and blue eyes and—holy fucking shit.

That was his face.

Backwards—no, not backwards, just not a mirror image—and with two days’ scruff on his cheeks, but that was his mouth and those were his cheekbones. That was the angle of his nose and the surprised arch of his eyebrows. Caleb had an absurd moment of thinking wow, handsome, and then he blinked it away and said, “What the fuck.”

Caleb was wearing blue scrubs and sneakers because habit was a powerful force. His double was dressed for some other purpose, way less friendly—boots, a utilitarian black jacket, black jeans, and a gun holstered around his thigh. Panic stabbed through Caleb’s chest. He checked the man’s face again. I wouldn’t shoot anyone, he thought, as though he could will this other man’s body like it was his own.

“Like what you see?”

This motherfucker even had his voice. It was as disconcerting as the gun. The double didn’t reach for the gun, though. He put his hands on Caleb’s shoulders as if to steady him—or to size him up. His grip was heavy but loose, almost lazy. Not a touch intended to force Caleb in any particular direction. Between two people who knew each other, it would have been affection; between two strangers, an advance. Between him and his double, Caleb had no idea.

The sound of his double’s question echoed in his mind. Caleb would use that voice if he was flirting. But why would he flirt with himself? Sure, Caleb wanted people to like him, enjoyed making people giggle and blush, but he’d never been so overtly sexual with another man.

His double was smirking. Caleb had never looked that smug in his life. As for his own face, he wished he could muster an expression other than bewildered. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”

His double pulled him close and kissed Caleb on the mouth.

Stubble scraped Caleb’s skin, a tongue plunged between his lips, and fingers threaded through his hair before he could collect any thoughts. Panic strobed through his brain, flashes of fear and arousal accelerating his pulse. When the kiss continued past its rude beginning, smoothing into something steadier, but still commanding, Caleb leaned into it.

No, that couldn’t be right. He’d meant to back away.

The heat of the kiss melted his resolve and all his common sense. His hands fisted in the thick material of his double’s jacket.

Caleb had kissed a lot of people, none of whom had been men, or total strangers, or identical to him. This wasn’t normal, and he should think carefully—and that was an arm around his back, tugging him closer. A very forceful arm. None of the people Caleb had kissed had ever been this aggressive. He’d never been pressed so close to another man.

He liked it.

It was the best explanation for why he hadn’t squirmed away yet. The magnitude of the realization shook him. Had he really lived his whole life until now without knowing that? What did it mean?

Before he had time to consider it, something pinched the side of his neck and he passed out.