Patrick Lee - The Breach

Paige's mouth fell open slowly. Head shaking a little from side to side. Understanding. Unwanted understanding.

"If the Whisper can predict the lotto," Travis said, "it can predict which vault the amplifier would end up in."

"Oh my God," Paige said.

He returned his eyes to the paper, his mind laboring for what to write. Then Crawford screamed on the phone, and Travis knew it was too late. An instant later Paige's bedroom flared with bright green light, like every room in Border Town, Travis was sure. On instinct he threw his arms around Paige, as if he could protect her from it. The light seemed to shine right through their bodies

Travis had been lying awake in his tent, listening to wolves howling somewhere along the ridge. He'd read that wolf packs randomized the volume of their howling in order to confuse prey-and other wolves-as to their distance. It worked on humans, too. These sounded at least as close as Suddenly he found his eyes shut, and a wild flash of light, like lightning but with a green cast to it, shone bright enough to be visible through his eyelids. It vanished almost at once, though he hardly noticed, because by then he'd realized someone was with him, holding on to him but at the same time struggling He opened his eyes to find himself standing in a room he'd never seen before. The struggling figure wrenched away from him.

It was a very beautiful-and very naked-young woman.

She was holding her right upper arm tightly, her face just now easing from what looked like a contortion of agony; Travis was sure he hadn't grabbed that arm or even bumped it. He had only an instant to consider these things, and then she was screaming at him, her eyes as bewildered as his own must look.

"What is this?" she shouted. "What the fuck is this? Where's my father?"

He reflexively stepped back from her, saying he didn't know, then repeating it; it was the only answer he had for her questions-or his own.

All at once she seemed to recognize the room, though that only confused her further, and then her eyes came to rest on a backpack and rifle leaning against the wall, and before Travis could register the danger, she'd lunged for the weapon, shouldered it and leveled it at his face.

"What the fuck have you people done?"

He had nothing he could say to her. He kept his eyes steady on hers, and shook his head, hands out from his sides to present no threat.

She racked the rifle's action and advanced a step, forcing him back against the wall. In the same moment her gaze dropped; Travis followed the look, and realized he was naked too. He met her eyes again, and saw them narrow as she looked around at the room once more, and then at herself-she noticed her own lack of clothing-as she struggled to piece the moment together. Her aggression faltered; the rifle didn't.

Somewhere nearby, agitated voices had been issuing from a speaker; now they stopped, and a single voice-an older man's voice-said, "Did I hear Paige?"

The woman-Paige, apparently-turned toward the sound, which Travis could now see came from a speakerphone. "Crawford?"

"Paige, where are you?"

She hesitated, as if too confused to say aloud what she knew. "I'm… in my room. Where are you?"

The man's answer was equally tentative. "I thought I was in the conference room, but… I'm down at Secure Storage now-"

A new sound over the phone line interrupted him: a soft computer voice saying, "Inbound… Inbound…"

For the first time, Paige lowered the rifle. That repeating word, coming from the speaker, had taken her full attention. She turned and moved toward the phone.

"Who's in Defense Control?" she said.

A woman answered, sounding as stressed as everyone else. "This is Karen-Karen Lowe. I'm sure I'm not supposed to be up here right now, I was in my room-"

"Forget about that," Paige said. "What's the inbound?"

"Nothing. The radar's blank, all fields. It looks like the gun cameras are up, but I don't know why, there's nothing on them-"

Other voices spoke in the background, and then Karen said, "Okay, yeah. What are they?"

Travis watched Paige lean in close to read the lighted display of an alarm clock. She reacted to it, and whispered, "Three days…"

"I count at least ten of them up there," Karen said, to someone on her end of the call.

"Karen, tell me what you're seeing," Paige said.

"We don't know. They're not aircraft. The thermals are reading them at body temperature; they could be divers, but… are they hostiles, or-"

"Kill them," Paige said. Travis could see in her eyes that she'd jettisoned the confusion for the moment. "Get everyone at the controls and start shooting, right now. And someone hit the dead switch for all the containment levels. Lock everything down and then smash the control boards."

If the people on the other end of the call were confused, her direct tone got them past it. Travis heard alarms begin blaring, and then what sounded like someone following her orders about smashing things. He heard computer cases breaking open, fragile components inside being shattered by some blunt, heavy thing. A chair, maybe.

"Are you shooting yet?" Paige said.

"We're targeting," Karen said. "Ready in five, four, three-"

Suddenly Travis felt a jolt pass through the floor, and then the building shook from the bass wave of an explosion, somewhere high above.

The speakerphone went to static. Paige stared at it for less than a second, and then grabbed a pair of jeans from the floor and threw them at Travis. By the time he caught them, she was reaching for her own clothes.

"You seem to know more than I do," he said. "Mind sharing?"

"I have a guess," she said. "With gaps."

"More than I have." He stepped into the jeans and pulled them up.

Paige buttoned her own pair, then slipped her shirt over her head and grabbed the rifle again.

"Do the words Tangent or Breach mean anything to you?" she said.

"No."

"Then I couldn't explain it if we had an hour-" The hum of an automatic weapon sounded through the nearest air vent. "And we don't have an hour."

She opened the cabinet front of her nightstand and took out a.45, along with two spare magazines.

"Do you know how to shoot a gun?" she said.

He nodded. She took a step toward him, then stopped, sizing him up one last time. More gunfire, and a small popping explosion, transmitted through the ductwork. She came forward and handed him the pistol and ammo. Already she was on her way out of the room, grabbing the backpack and shouldering it as she went.

He followed, as his most obvious question finally surfaced. "How the hell did I get here?"

Paige checked the hallway outside her bedroom, and looked satisfied that it was clear. "I'm pretty damn curious about that myself," she said, and moved out of the room. With the rifle shouldered, Paige made her way toward the living room, ready to kill anything that appeared in front of her. She wasn't crazy about turning her back on the man with her-she realized she hadn't even asked him his name-but the situation demanded a few risks. Whoever he was, her own choice of attire a few moments earlier-none-seemed to imply that she trusted him.

The living room was clear. Beyond the door, shouts echoed along the primary corridor.

How could she have possibly made it back to Border Town alive? She'd been strapped down on a makeshift torture table, probably halfway dead, surrounded by enemies in the most remote place she'd ever seen. How had three days taken her from that place to her bedroom, standing around in the buff with some guy she'd never met before, who hadn't heard of Tangent?

Had her father survived, too?

Hope and fear pulled her concentration in opposite directions, neither useful right now. Facing the door, she blocked off both feelings, then glanced over her shoulder at the stranger.