Ultraviolet (20 page)

“You don’t have any idea what they want with you?” I asked.

“No, but I’m pretty sure I know why they brought me here,” she said. “After you broke my nose, they realized I was going to bleed to death if they didn’t do something fast, so they zapped me back here to fix it.”

She spoke so casually, as though it made perfect sense that her vital signs were being broadcast across time and space to a group of alien scientists. I stared at her, baffled and more than a little disturbed—

And then the mystery started to solve itself, one clue at a time.

That golden hair, with its faintly metallic gleam. The peachy glow of her skin, so different from the skin tones of her parents, or anyone else I knew. Those amazing eyes, a turquoise almost as unusual as Faraday’s violet . . .

And the transmitter in her upper arm, just like his.

“So,” I said, clearing my throat, “you know you came from another planet?”

“Of course,” Tori replied. “I’ve known it for thirteen years.”

“About you being . . . from this place?” I said. “I didn’t. I only just figured it out.”

Tori scowled at me. “Oh, right. So ever since seventh grade you’ve been staring at me in class like I was some kind of monster, avoiding me in the halls, getting all jumpy and hostile whenever I talked to you, and all of that meant
nothing
?”

Her accusations left me flabbergasted. I knew we’d misjudged each other, but I’d had no idea how much.

“You scared the crap out of me,” Tori said. She quickened her stride, moving so briskly that I had to scramble to keep up with her. “The way you acted whenever I was around, I was sure you knew I wasn’t human. My parents had a fit when I told them. My mom wanted to pull me out of school—”

“Your parents knew? About you?”

“Of course! They were the ones who took me to the doctor when I was a kid, and then paid him off to keep quiet about all the weird stuff he found. They thought I’d been part of some twisted medical experiment . . . until they found the chip in my arm. Then they got
really
scared, because it was made of this liquid metal stuff that had grown right into the muscle, and no technology on Earth could make something like that.”

She stopped at the formidable-looking barrier that blocked the end of the hallway, and dropped her tool kit in front of it. “For a while my parents wanted to move away, thinking it might keep whoever had abandoned me as a baby from finding me again. But as soon as they drove out of the Sudbury Basin, I started having seizures—big, scary, life-threatening seizures. So once they realized they couldn’t move without killing me, they decided the only solution was to hide in plain sight. We’d all act like I was an ordinary kid, and then maybe everybody else would believe that I was ordinary, too. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it seemed to be working . . . until you came along.”

For years I’d envied Tori her popularity, her accomplishments, her seemingly unassailable self-confidence. Only now was I beginning to realize how fragile all those things had been—and how hard she’d worked to keep them. “Okay,” I said. “But if you were that afraid of me, why go out of your way to make me your enemy?”

“Me? What did I ever do to—”

“The poetry contest? When you got me disqualified by telling Mrs. Mailloux I’d copied my entry out of a magazine?” Which I really had done, to my lasting shame—but I hadn’t known that at the time, and neither had the judges. I’d been disqualified on a suspicion, nothing more.

“I didn’t say anything to Mrs. Mailloux.”

“What do you mean? Of course you did. You even warned me you were going to do it.”

“I told you
somebody
was going to do it,” she retorted. “I never said it would be me. Lara was so upset that her poem didn’t get picked for the contest, she kept saying you must have cheated, and finally I told her I’d talk to you and try to get you to admit it. But you wouldn’t, so I told her to leave you alone.” She crouched and began pulling tools out of the bag, lining them up like surgical instruments. “So you really got disqualified?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Don’t
you
remember? That was right around the time my dad had a heart attack and spent three weeks in the hospital. You really think I’d be paying attention to some stupid poetry contest I didn’t even enter, with that on my mind?”

She spoke with fierce conviction, a truth so raw I could taste it. Which meant . . .Tori really
hadn’t
accused me after all. All this time, I’d been blaming the wrong person.

“And what about you?” Tori demanded. “Accusing me of trashing the sound equipment on Cabaret Night? Why on earth would I do something like that? I wasn’t wrecking that stuff, I was trying to
fix
it.” She dumped the last of her tools onto the floor and tossed the empty bag aside. “Why would I want to ruin an event I’d been helping plan for weeks? Why would I humiliate my best friend in front of everybody? When you came in, I’d just broken up with Brendan because he kept pressuring me to have sex with him. It wasn’t my fault he threw a tantrum like a freaking two-year-old—”

Shame scorched my cheeks. No wonder Tori had been furious with me after the Cabaret, determined to hunt me down and set the matter straight. Still, it must have taken all her courage to face me down in the cafeteria and demand to know what my issue was, especially when she had good reason to be afraid of the answer.

But hearing the Noise from her transmitter, so close and so loud, had pushed me to the edge of panic—and when Tori insisted that I stay and listen to what she had to say, I’d ended up struggling with her. Which was how I’d wound up in after-school detention with her for forty minutes, with the Noise needling at me all the while. Then just as I grabbed my knapsack and hurried out the side door, thinking my torment was over, Tori had caught up with me again. That was when she told me the last thing I wanted to hear—that Mel had been spreading nasty rumors about Tori all over the school, and when Tori’s friends confronted her she’d blamed it all on me.

I wasn’t the one who had torn Tori to atoms. But at that moment, I’d been so hurt and angry that I would have, if I could. That was why I’d always felt responsible for what happened next—why I
was
responsible. Because if I hadn’t lost control and lashed out at her, she wouldn’t be here.

“You were right,” I said.

“About what?”

“About Mel. You told me she was using me, that she wasn’t really my friend.” Maybe once she had been, but over the past couple of years she’d changed, and I’d been too willfully blind to see it. “You were right.”

Slowly Tori straightened up from her crouch until we stood face-to-face. “Okay,” she said. “Good to know. But couldn’t you have figured that out
before
you hit me?”

Embarrassed, I looked away. “I already had. I just didn’t want to admit it. She was my best friend. Pretty much my only friend.”

“You could have had a lot more friends,” said Tori, “if you hadn’t acted so . . .”

“Full of myself?”

“Well, yeah, that was how it looked. Like you knew some big important secret about life, the universe, and everything, and you were keeping it all to yourself because the rest of us weren’t good enough.”

“I wish,” I said, and then with sudden daring, “You want to know the big important secret? Your name tastes like cough medicine.”

Tori’s nose wrinkled in confusion. “What?”

“Well,
Victoria
does, anyway.” And more than once, when I was sick of hearing how perfect and talented and beautiful she was, I’d consoled myself with that thought. “Though
Tori
isn’t so bad. It’s more like black licorice.”

“Wait a minute.” A suspicious look came over her face. “You’re telling me you have—what’s it called—synesthesia?”

I was surprised. “You’ve heard of it?”

“Well, yeah. I read an article on it in a science magazine, just a few months ago. About a guy who could taste words and a woman who could see music . . . can you do that?”

I nodded.

“Oh, that’s
prime
. I am so jealous. What color is my name, then? Does it look like cough medicine too?”

Without the Noise poisoning my senses, without the cloud of suspicion and hostility between us, it was easy now to see what I should have realized a long time ago—that like Micheline, Tori was a better person than I’d given her credit for. “No, it’s kind of bluish-brown,” I said. “But, Tori . . .”

I’d meant to apologize, but as usual, she was quicker than I was. “Truce,” she said, sticking out her hand. “We’ve got other things to worry about right now. You know?”

“I know,” I said, and shook it.

“I’m fine,” I said. “We’re fine. We’re just trying to find a way out of here.”

By now Tori had pried the front panel off the door and was studying the mechanism inside, a bewildering array of silvery globules trapped between two transparent plates. “If this is the sequence when it’s locked,” she murmured, “then maybe if I altered the pattern
here
and
here
—” She picked up a tool that looked like a tire gauge with delusions of grandeur, and set to work coaxing the beads in different directions.

I edged closer to Faraday and whispered, “How does she know all this?”

“Bred into her, I expect.” He raised his voice. “Have you always liked fixing things, Tori?”

“Yeah,” answered Tori over her shoulder. “Even as a little kid, I could see at a glance how stuff worked and how to make it work better. It drove my mother up the wall. She kept trying to get me interested in dance and gymnastics and modeling, and I kept collecting old electronics junk and tinkering with it. The only way to settle her down was to tell her I was going into engineering.”

Faraday nodded. “So one of your biological parents must have been a technician.”

“Not both?” I asked.

“If they had been, she wouldn’t be here right now. I’m guessing she was an unlicensed conception, sold as a fetus for experimental purposes.” He spoke evenly, but with an acrid undertone that assured me he didn’t like that idea any more than I did. “After I left, someone must have gotten the idea to send her through the rift and see how growing up on Earth would affect her.”

I choked. “They did that to a
baby
?”

“It’s okay,” said Tori, still poking at the door, “I got over it. I’m more ticked off about the transmitter thing, especially since it wouldn’t let me go anywhere but Sudbury.”

“Why would that be?” I asked Faraday.

“I don’t know,” he said. “When we sent the first relay through the rift to your world, we suspected that it had been drawn to the Sudbury Basin because of the large amount of nickel in the rock. But that shouldn’t have kept it, or Tori, from going elsewhere.”

“Well, you have a transmitter in your arm too, right?” said Tori to Faraday. “So maybe the relay was trying to stay close to both of us, and it couldn’t do that unless we were in the same place.”

“Yes, but my transmitter was broken,” Faraday said. “If it had been communicating properly, I wouldn’t have had to search for the relay at all. I should have just been able to talk to Mathis—the older apprentice who’d sent me through the relay—and get him to bring me home.”

“But you were still transmitting
something
,” I said. “I could hear it, and even see it, once I’d touched the mark on your arm. And the relay was receiving the signal, too. How else do you think I found it?”

Faraday’s eyes darkened, and I could see I’d troubled him. But then Tori interrupted, “Hey, Sebastian or Faraday or whatever, does this pattern look right to you?”

“I have no idea,” he replied. “Not my genetic expertise. However, if you don’t mind shutting that panel for a moment, we could try this.” He pressed his palm against the door, and it opened.

Tori threw me an exasperated look. “Can I hit him? Please?”

“Sorry,” said Faraday, though he wasn’t. “It seemed worth a try, since I doubted they’d bother to erase my security clearance once they thought I was dead.
If
they thought I was dead.”

The last phrase was telling, and I knew we must be thinking the same thing. What if his fellow scientists had decided to make Faraday part of their experiment, and left him stranded on Earth on purpose?

“You should go back to the cargo hold,” he said, looking at me. “They know Tori’s here, but there’s no reason they need to find out about you.”

“I don’t know why not,” said Tori. “If they’ve been keeping an eye on me, they must have seen Alison by now, unless they’re all asleep or something. What about safety in numbers?” She pulled one of the tools out of her bag, hefted it, and handed it to me. “If anybody tries to grab you, hit him with that.”

I took the makeshift club gladly, though I was sure Faraday would tell Tori she was being ridiculous. After all, if this science base belonged to a technologically advanced alien society, shouldn’t they have guns?

But he only looked resigned. “Fine,” he said. “But let me go first. And stay back a bit, just in case.”

“I don’t understand,” Faraday said. “The project was fully staffed when I left. Where is everyone?”

“Well, we know there’s at least one person here,” said Tori. “The guy who knocked me out and fixed my nose. So all we need to do is find him, and he can tell us what happened to everybody else.” She paused. “Unless he went crazy and murdered them all. Then maybe finding him wouldn’t be such a good idea.”

I’d met a lot of crazy people in the last few weeks, and most of them hadn’t been a danger to anyone but themselves. And yet her words gave me an uneasy feeling, just the same. What if Tori was right about the outcome, even if she wasn’t right about the cause? What if the other scientists were all dead, or dying, because of some plague or environmental disaster—and they’d blocked off half the station not to protect themselves from us, but to protect us from them?

“Faraday,” I said, catching his arm. “The room I woke up in—the window was black. What does that mean?”

“Nothing,” he said. “It was turned off, that’s all.”

“So there aren’t any real windows here? They’re all just . . . screens?”

He nodded. “That way they can serve a variety of functions: communication, work, entertainment. And when you’re done, you can switch it back to show whatever view you prefer.”

“How about the real one?” I said.

“That, too—but when they’re off-duty, most people prefer to look at something else.” Faraday stopped at a junction almost identical to the one I’d first encountered outside the storage room, where a straight corridor ran perpendicular to the curved hallway in which we stood. “There’s nobody in the outer ring,” he said. “They must all be in the observatory.” He headed up the new corridor, and Tori and I followed.

Unlike its dead-end twin on the other side of the base, this particular hallway ended in a door. Solid metal, like all the others we’d seen, but this one had a porthole. Faraday paused briefly to look through it, then turned back to us with a frown. “There’s only one person in there,” he said.

“Then we can take him,” said Tori, slapping a tool against her palm. “Let’s go.”

Faraday touched the door open, and one by one we stepped through. We emerged into an enormous circular room, whose domed ceiling looked out on a dazzling expanse of night sky.

I’d never seen so many stars, all of them unfamiliar. More than half of them were colors I had no names for, and the music they made inside my head was as strange as experimental jazz. But as my gaze traveled slowly from one edge of the dome to the other, what struck me even more was the sheer breadth of the view. No matter where I looked, there was nothing but stars— not a hint of surrounding landscape or civilization in sight.

A shiver ran through me as I realized, in that moment, something I should have guessed long ago: this observatory hadn’t been built on some remote mountaintop of Faraday’s world, as I’d vaguely supposed.

It was a space station.

I was still gazing up at the window—or was it a screen?— when Tori nudged my arm. Across the room stood a young man in a crisp gray tunic and slacks, one hand poised over the console in front of him. He looked not much older than twenty, with bronze hair sleeked back from a long narrow face, and as the three of us walked toward him, he blanched.

“If the viruses and bacteria on Earth didn’t kill me,” said Faraday, “I doubt you have anything to worry about.” He put his hand over his heart and made that odd little bow I’d seen him give before. “Hello, Mathis. It’s been a long time. For one of us, anyway.”

Mathis? I was startled.
This
was Faraday’s fellow apprentice, the boy who’d helped send him to Earth all those years ago? But back then he had been older, and now . . .

For a moment the young scientist remained frozen. Then an incredulous look came over his face. “Sav Astin!” he breathed, then rushed forward and seized Faraday by both arms, gabbling out a torrent of words in a language I’d never heard before. They tugged at my shoulder and raised the fine hairs at the back of my neck, but they were all the same hazy green color, and they refused to tell me what they meant.

“I’m glad to see you alive, too,” Faraday told him, half-smiling. “Though you can leave off the
Sav
part. I’m too old to be anyone’s apprentice now.”

Mathis rattled off another string of syllables that sounded like a question.

“Because,” Faraday said, “Tori and Alison deserve to know what’s going on. And I’m sure you’ve studied enough English by now to understand most of what I’m saying, even if you can’t speak it.”

“He understands English?” asked Tori. “Does that include insults and swear words? Because if he’s the one who locked me up—”

“Wait,” said Faraday. “Give him a chance to explain. That’s only fair, isn’t it?” He raised his eyebrows at Mathis, who seemed to understand. He led us to a circle of chairs on the other side of the observatory, and we all sat down while he launched into his story.

He talked for a long time. I struggled with the unfamiliar words, trying to wring shapes and tastes out of them, but nothing made sense until Faraday spoke up again.

“That’s not your decision,” he said flatly. “Whatever her scientific value, Alison is here as a visitor, not a specimen. As for Tori, I understand that the data you’ve collected from her is extremely important to your research. But whether you paid for her or not, she has a right—”

“
Paid?
” exploded Tori. “You mean this is the guy who’s been experimenting on me?” She lunged forward, but Faraday flung out an arm to hold her back.

“Sit down,” he told her, in an authoritative tone I’d never heard him use before. “We’ll deal with that later.” He held her furious gaze with his own level one until she subsided, then returned his attention to Mathis. “I understand about the war back home,” he said, “and the government’s decision to strip this station down and repurpose it for military use. It’s stupid and infuriating, but it’s the kind of thing I’d expect the Meritocracy to do. And yes, I realize you’ve invested years in studying Tori, and that you didn’t want to leave without finishing the experiment—”

Mathis tried to interrupt, but Faraday cut him off. “I’m explaining it to them, not to you. Be patient.” He turned to Tori and me and went on, “Our homeland is going through a civil war. The State’s running out of money and resources to fight the uprising, so they’re scavenging all the technology and personnel they can get their hands on. That’s why this base is empty, because the scientists have all gone back home and taken a lot of our best equipment with them. Mathis had to fight for the chance to stay behind, and he’s got only a few days until the troops arrive, so he’s been trying to collect as much data as he can before closing the wormhole.”

“Wormhole?” I asked.

“The dimensional rift is enormous,” said Faraday. “And it’s constantly fluctuating, so if you go through it, there’s no telling what part of the universe you’ll end up in. The wormhole is an artificially generated vortex that keeps the rift, or at least one tiny part of it, pointing to a single location—in this case, Earth. But it takes a tremendous amount of energy to keep that connection open, and the government wants to use that power for . . . other things.”

I’d read enough military sci-fi novels to imagine just how ugly those “other things” might be. “So once the wormhole’s gone, the rift won’t be stable anymore.”

He gave a sober nod. “And then we’ll have lost all contact with your world.”

“But we still have time, right?” I said. “As long as you send us back right away, then—”

The rest of the sentence died on my tongue, obliterated by a new and painful thought. If Tori and I returned to Sudbury together, that would prove to everyone that I hadn’t killed her. It might even be enough to prove I wasn’t crazy. I’d be able to go home to my family, my music, my life. . . .

But I’d never see Faraday again.

“That’s what Mathis and I were discussing,” Faraday began, but the younger man interrupted.

“There is nothing to discuss,” he said in English, his accent so heavy it made my knees ache. “All of you will remain here.”

“Oh, really?” said Tori, hefting her tool kit, but Mathis was unmoved.

“There is no point in threatening me,” he said. “There is nothing I can do.”

“What do you mean?” Tori demanded.

“I mean,” Mathis said, “that the wormhole is already closed.”

My heart thudded into my diaphragm. “What? But we just came through it—”

Then it hit me. The flood of sensations that had overwhelmed me when the relay disintegrated Tori, and again right after Faraday and I came to this place . . . they hadn’t happened by accident. The first time it had taken me weeks to recover, but this time I’d felt better almost immediately, and now I knew why.

Because it was exposure to the wormhole that had been affecting my synesthesia. And right after Faraday and I arrived, Mathis had shut the wormhole down.

“But you can open it again, right?” Tori asked Mathis. She looked at Faraday, then at me. “Can’t he?”

I remembered what Faraday had just told us about the rift, and how it kept fluctuating. I remembered the empty rooms and neglected workstations we’d passed on the way here. And most of all, I remembered the flavor of Mathis’s voice as he’d told us, in English, that nothing we could do to him would make any difference.

“No,” I said slowly. “I don’t think he can.”

I knew I ought to cry too, but right now I was too numb to feel anything. I just sat there, staring at the floor, until Faraday edged closer and took my hand. “I’m so sorry, Alison,” he said, his voice pitched low so Mathis couldn’t hear. “This must be a terrible shock for you.”

I gave a shaky laugh. “You mean being trapped in a place I never wanted to be, unable to go home, at the mercy of someone who wants to analyze every detail of my existence but has no interest in me as a person? Actually no, it feels pretty familiar.”

Faraday was silent. Then he said, “I can’t speak for Mathis, but you’re wrong about Dr. Minta. He may be a little clumsy at showing it, but he does care. Did you know that his first wife was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and committed suicide after going off her medication?”

I was taken aback. “No.”

“Then let me tell you something else you probably don’t know,” said Faraday. “When he was eight years old, Kirk set a fire in the basement of his mother’s house, while she and her boyfriend—a drug runner for a motorcycle gang, who had been abusing Kirk physically and sexually for months—were sleeping upstairs. They both died of smoke inhalation, but Kirk doesn’t remember it. Sometimes he still talks as though they’re alive.”

His words stabbed me with an empathy I’d never expected to feel. Had the fire been an accident, or had Kirk set it on purpose? Did even he know the answer anymore? “Why are you telling me all this?” I asked.

“Everybody has a story, Alison,” he said. “Everybody has things they need to hide—sometimes even from themselves. Mathis and I were friends once, but he’s changed, and I need to know what happened to make him this way. Maybe then I’ll be able to get through to him, convince him to let you and Tori go free. If we all work together, we might even find a way to open the wormhole again.”

So there was still a chance of getting home? I wanted to believe it, but I was afraid to let myself hope. “And if you can’t get through to him?”

“Then we’ll have to try something else. But I have to put Mathis at ease, if I want him to open up to me. That’s why I’m asking you to let me talk to him alone, and not interrupt us. Will you do that?” Reluctantly, I nodded, and Faraday’s eyes softened. “Thank you, Alison.”

I clutched his hand. “Be careful. I don’t trust him.”

“You don’t have to,” said Faraday. “Just try to trust me.” He squeezed my fingers, then let me go and walked over to Mathis. The younger scientist looked apprehensive at first, but when Faraday spoke to him in their own language, he relaxed and answered in kind. They exchanged a few sentences, and then Mathis motioned to the console beside him, and Faraday sat down.

It seemed like a natural time for me to leave, so I got up from my chair and walked toward the exit. All the while Mathis’s eyes followed me, but Faraday kept talking to him, in that rich, mellifluous voice that made even the harshest syllables beautiful. And then something he said made Mathis smile.

As soon as I saw that, it was like a key had turned in my head, unlocking a box of knowledge I hadn’t even known I possessed. Suddenly I could smell triumph all over Mathis, the satisfied air of a man who had finally persuaded a fool to see reason. “I’m glad you’ve decided to be sensible about this,” he said—

Only he wasn’t speaking English. And yet the message came through to me just the same:
pleasure—confidence—trust
, with subtle undertones of other emotions that left me in no doubt of what his words meant. I nearly tripped over my own feet, but I managed to catch myself in time. Stepping carefully out of the observatory, I eased the door mostly shut behind me, then crouched and listened through the crack as Mathis went on: