Том Светерлич - The Gone World

“You have the wrong body,” she said, remembering that she had somehow seen herself in the orange trainee space suit crawling along the tree line. “You have to believe me, please. I’m still down there. Please don’t leave me—”

“No—you’re back on Theseus ,” said her instructor. “We found you in the woods.” He wore blue athletic shorts and white socks pulled to his knees, an NCIS T-shirt, gray. “You’re confused,” he said. “The QTNs are confusing you. They’re in your blood. You have dangerous levels of them inside you.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, trying to remember, but her mind was sluggish. “What’s inside of me? I don’t know what QTNs are.” Her teeth chattered, her body shook. Excruciating pain raked her limbs, bright shoots of nerve pain, but her fingers were deadened, and her toes. She remembered stepping from her space suit by the river, shedding her clothes. She remembered ice burning her shoulders, blistering her. She remembered fire at her wrists and ankles. She remembered that she had hung upside down over that rushing black water for hours, for days maybe. She had been praying to die when she’d seen herself appear through the pines. “I don’t understand,” she said, crying against the pain.

“Our main concern right now is your hypothermia and frostbite,” said her instructor, floating nearer to her feet and peeling back the corner of the blanket to check on her. “Oh, Shannon,” he said. “Oh—”

She lifted her head and saw that her feet were purple-black and swollen, the surrounding skin flaky and yellowed. “God, no. Oh, God, no,” she said, and in her shock almost felt like these feet belonged to someone else, that they were anyone’s but her own. Someone had placed pieces of cotton between her toes. Violet lines stretched up her left leg. Her instructor rubbed her feet with a damp washcloth, but she couldn’t feel the water even as it slid from the cloth over her toes and spun away like beads of glass through the air.

“Your mind was affected, your memory may have been affected by the hypothermia,” he said. “First Lieutenant Stillwell and Petty Officer Alexis rescued you, stabilized you here. You’re not there anymore, you’re here. You’re safe now.”

“I don’t know who they are,” she said, their names unfamiliar. First Lieutenant Ruddiker had piloted the Quad-lander, along with Petty Officer Lee—there was no Stillwell, as far as she knew. The bay window framed a view of Earth, distant now, marbled white with mists and ice. She wondered at her own body dying below in the wilderness, still in her space suit, but she could see that her space suit was locked in one of the pod closets, bright orange like a hunter’s blaze camouflage. What the hell is happening to me? Although her wrists and ankles were covered with bandages that smelled of ointment, she felt her skin burning as if she had been doused with acid.

“This hurts,” she said. “I hurt so much.”

“We’ve let the medics know you’re coming,” said her instructor. “They’ll be ready to treat you once we dock with the ship.”

“What… what was down there? What happened to me?” she asked. “I was hanging. They all were—”

“You saw people who were crucified, along the river,” he said. “I’ve seen them too when I’ve traveled to study the Terminus, many times—we call them the ‘hanged men.’ The QTNs crucify those people. They crucified you.”

“You said they’re in my blood. Get them out, get them out of me—”

“Shannon, we’ve been through this—we can’t get them out. We covered this in training. I thought you were ready. I warned you about them.”

“No, you never did,” she said, fighting to concentrate through the pain, the throbbing burn in her wrists. Her memories were confused, muddled… she remembered she had traveled to Deep Time on the USS William McKinley —to the year 2199, or one of an infinite number of possible 2199s, a distance of nearly two hundred years. A pale radiance hung over the Earth when they arrived, shining like a second sun—the entire crew had been astonished. No one knew what that pale light was. No one had warned her about QTNs or the hanged men. “You said you were taking me home, that’s all you ever said.”

“Shannon,” said her instructor, helpless. He rubbed her feet again with the washcloth. “I don’t know what to say. The hypothermia—it can cause amnesia. Maybe as you recover—”

“Rendezvous with William McKinley . Prepare for docking,” said a voice over the loudspeaker—a voice she didn’t recognize. She remembered black water rushing beneath her. She looked again at her feet. Some color had returned to her right foot, but the toes on her left were still black, and the lines reaching up her left leg had darkened. The sight sickened her.

“What are they? What are QTNs—what’s inside of me?” she asked, rebelling against her bewilderment. “I don’t care if you think we’ve been over this before.”

“We don’t know where they come from, or what they want,” said her instructor. “They might not want anything. Quantum-tunneling nanoparticles. We believe they are extradimensional—they come through the White Hole, that second sun you saw. Sometime in our future. They cause the event we call the Terminus.”

“The crucifixions.”

“The moment humanity ceases to be relevant,” said her instructor. “No one is left alive. Not in the conventional sense, at any rate. There are the hanged men, but there are runners, too. Millions running in great packs until their bodies disintegrate or they run into the ocean to drown. Some dig holes and then lie down inside. Some people stand with their faces toward the sky, their mouths filled with silver liquid. On the beaches they line up and perform what look like calisthenics.”

“Why?”

“We don’t understand why, or to what purpose. Maybe there is no purpose.”

“But this is just a version of the future,” she said, imagining she could feel the QTNs like parasites in her blood. “This is just one of infinite possibilities. So there are other possibilities, other futures. The Terminus doesn’t have to happen.”

“The Terminus is a shadow that falls across the future of our species,” said her instructor. “Every timeline we’ve visited ends in the Terminus. And it’s moving closer. We first dated the event to 2666—but the next travelers to witness the Terminus found that it had moved closer, to 2456. And the Terminus has moved closer still, to 2121. You see, the Terminus is like the blade of a guillotine slicing toward us. Our Navy and its fleet have been tasked to find a way out from that shadow, and our vocation is to support the Navy. Everything I’ll teach you, everything you’ll see, is to help our species avoid the Terminus. We have to find our way out from the shadow.”

“What else will I see?”

“The end of everything.”

“Hello?”

“Special Agent Shannon Moss?”

She didn’t recognize the man’s voice, though she recognized the drawl on the vowels. He’d grown up around here, West Virginia, or Pennsylvania—rural.

“This is Moss,” she said.

“A family’s been killed.” A quaver in his voice. “Washington County dispatch logged the 911 a little after midnight. There’s a missing girl.”

Two a.m., but the news was like an ice bath. She was fully awake now.

“Who am I speaking with?”

“Special Agent Philip Nestor,” he said. “FBI.”

She turned on her bedside lamp. Cream-colored wallpaper patterned with vines and cornflower-blue roses covered her bedroom walls. She traced the lines with her eyes, thinking.