Rachel Caine: Ghost Town

She really couldn’t resist, when he gave her that smile.

Over the next three days, Claire didn’t go home for long. She was obsessive when she got into a problem, and she knew it, but this was so cool . She went to the store and bought cartloads of cheap plastic toys, which she spent hours tossing through the portal to an increasingly bored Eve, then Michael, then Shane. They had their own supply of toys, too, and pitched them through in the opposite direction.

All she got out of it, for two and a half days, was dust—so much of it that Shane told her she was on permanent vacuum duty at home, if she ever came home again. She knew that he was grumpy, both because it was boring pitching toys back and forth, but also because she’d barely seen him for days, except to come home, shovel in food, and fall into bed. She was grumpy about it, too, but there was something inside of her that was locked on target about this stupid problem, and she couldn’t walk away from it. Not until something worked, or she broke.

She didn’t break.

On the third day, Shane was still on catching duty. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the back of the sofa and wearing one of those white cotton breathing masks. He’d bought it in self-defense, he’d told her; he didn’t want to be breathing in plastic toy dust and coughing up a lung.

She didn’t blame him, but it did make a funny picture, at least until she’d realized the same thing on her end and gotten a mask out of Myrnin’s jumbled stash of supplies. And goggles. Shane now envied her the goggles.

“Hang on,” she said, after her last attempt at pitching a neon plastic ball through had turned it to dust on the other end. “I have an idea.”

“So do I,” Shane said. “Movies, hot dogs, and not doing this anymore. Like it?”

“Love it,” she said, and meant it. “But let me do this one thing, okay?”

He sighed and let his head fall back against the sofa. “Sure, whatever.”

She really was a terrible girlfriend, Claire thought, and raced across the lab, careful of all of Myrnin’s various scattered trip hazards that she couldn’t seem to convince him were dangerous. She arrived at the worktable, where her circuitry (with Myrnin’s incomprehensible additions) quietly hummed away.

She shut the power off and checked the connections again. All of the voltage was steady; there was no reason why the other end would be unstable, unless . . .

Unless it was something Myrnin had done.

Claire began tracing the piping, which led to a spring, which led to a complicated series of gears and levers, which led to a bubbling ice-green liquid in a sealed chamber. . . .

Only it wasn’t bubbling. It wasn’t doing anything, even when she turned the power on. She distinctly remembered him explaining that it was supposed to bubble. She had no idea why that was important, but she supposed that maybe the bubbling created some kind of pressure, which . . . did what?

Exasperated, she thumped the thing with her finger.

It started to bubble.

She blinked, watched the whole thing for a while, decided that it wasn’t going to blow up or boil over, and went back to where Shane was pretending to snore on the other side of the portal.

“Heads up, slacker!” she said, and pitched another neon ball at him, hard.

Shane’s reactions were really, really good, and he got his eyes open and hands up at the same time . . .

. . . and the ball smacked firmly into his grip.

Shane stared down at it for a second, then stripped off his mask as he turned it over in his fingers.

“Is it okay?” Claire asked breathlessly. “Is it—”

“Feels fine,” he said. “Damn. Unbelievable.” He pitched it back to her, and she caught it. It felt exactly the same—not even a little warm or a little cool. She threw it back, and he responded, and before long they were laughing and whooping and feeling incredibly giddy. She raised the ball over her head and jumped around in a circle, just like Eve would have, and made herself dizzy.

She whirled around to an unsteady stop, and Shane caught her.

Because he was here , in the lab with her, instead of on the other side of the portal. Her brain sent a message of Oh, he feels so good , just about a half second before the logical part kicked in.

Claire shoved him backward, appalled and scared. “What the hell are you doing?”

“What?” Shane asked. “What did I do?”

“You . . . you came through?”

“The ball was fine.”

“The ball doesn’t have internal organs! Squishy parts! How could you be so crazy?” She was literally shaking now, deeply terrified that he was about to burst into a dust cloud, melt, die in her arms. How could he be so insane ?

Shane looked a little off balance, as if he hadn’t really expected this kind of reception, but he looked back at the portal, the piles of dust, and said, “Oh. Yeah, I see your point. But I’m fine, Claire. It worked.”

“How do you know you’re fine? Shane, you could die !” She rushed at him, threw her arms around him, and now she could feel his heart beating fast. He hugged her, held her while she tried to get her panic under control, and gently kissed the top of her head.

“You’re right; it was dumb,” he said. “Stop. Relax. You did it, okay? You made it work. Just . . . breathe.”

“Not until you go see the doctor,” she said. “Dumb-ass.” She was still scared, still shaking, but she tried to get the old Claire back, the one who could face down snarling vampires. But this was different.

What if she’d just killed him? Broken something inside him that couldn’t grow back?

Myrnin came in from the back room, carrying a load of books, which he dropped with a loud bang on the floor to glare at the two of them. “Excuse me,” he said, “but when did my lab become appropriate for snogging?”

“What’s snogging?” Shane asked.

“Ridiculous displays of inappropriate affection in front of me. Roughly translated. And what are you doing here?” Myrnin was genuinely offended, Claire realized. Not good.

“It’s my fault,” Claire said in a rush, and stepped away from Shane, although she kept holding his hand. “I . . . He was helping me with the experiments.”

“In what, biology?” Myrnin crossed his arms. “Are we running a secret laboratory or not? Because if you’re going to have your friends drop in anytime they please—”

“Back off, man; she said she was sorry,” Shane said. He was watching Myrnin with that cold look in his eyes, the one that was a real danger sign. “It wasn’t her fault, anyway. It was mine.”

“Was it?” Myrnin said softly. “And how is it that you do not understand that here , in this place, this girl belongs to me, not to you?”

Claire turned cold all over, then hot. She felt her cheeks flare red, and she hardly recognized her voice as she yelled, “I don’t belong to you, Myrnin! I work for you! I’m not your . . . your slave!” She was so furious that she wasn’t even shaking anymore. “I fixed your portals. And we’re leaving.”

“You’ll leave when I—Wait, what did you say?”

Claire ignored him and picked up her backpack. She led the way up the stairs. Three steps up, she glanced back. Shane still hadn’t moved. He was still watching Myrnin. Still between her and Myrnin.

“Wait,” Myrnin said in an entirely different tone now. “Claire, wait. Are you saying you successfully transported an object?”

“No, she’s saying she successfully transported me ,” Shane snapped. “And we’re leaving now.”