Grant sighed. “Sasha, stop it. I did exactly what you’re doing for like three weeks. Nobody’s listening.”
“I’m not giving up,” I told him. “I’ve gotten out of worse jams than this before. I’ll get us out of here, too.” The truth was, I’d gotten out of those jams with help from other people, mostly Thomas. But I couldn’t just shut down under the weight of hopelessness the way that Grant had. The only time he ever became animated was when we were fed; otherwise he was as motionless as a stone, sleeping or pretending to sleep as I lay awake thinking up harebrained schemes to get us out. There had to be a way. There just had to be. That was what I kept telling myself, anyway, but the longer Grant and I remained locked in the Hole, the more I accepted that Callum wasn’t coming. I couldn’t even allow myself to hope that Thomas would. Still, every once in a while I let myself believe. This was one of those moments.
“Hey, you come up with a plan, I’ll help you,” Grant said, his mouth full of my bread. “I’m just saying. It doesn’t look great.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I know.”
On the third night—or maybe it was the fourth—of my incarceration, I awoke to the now-familiar sound of the cell doors sliding open. I sat up, wondering what fresh hell awaited me, but it was too dark to see anything until the motion sensors on the fluorescent lights caught whoever had entered the cell and flickered on.
“Sasha?” Grant whispered.
“Grant?” I inched over to the edge of the bed to peek out at the intruder.
“No,” the voice said, sounding a little bewildered. “It’s me.”
Thomas.
I leapt off the top bunk and threw myself at him. He caught me and held me tight. “You’re here,” I said happily, for the moment forgetting everything else. I buried my face in his shoulder, squeezing my eyes shut to keep from crying, but a few tears slipped out anyway. “I thought I would never see you again.”
“Not a chance,” he said, smiling against my cheek. “It took me a while to figure out where you were—Farnham’s a big place, but some of my connections in Adastra told me you might be down here. No wonder they call it the Hole. It’s awful.”
“Sasha, who is it?” Grant rolled out of bed and stood up, squinting into the lights. It took a few seconds for him to register exactly who he was looking at, but once he did his face contorted into an expression of blind fury. “You.”
“Grant, wait!” But he didn’t listen. He might not even have heard. Without pausing to think, Grant lunged for Thomas, and in the split second when his fist connected with Thomas’s jaw, Grant vanished into thin air.
“Grant!” I cried. Thomas fell from the force of Grant’s impact, clutching his face, and the ground rumbled beneath us, throwing me to the floor as well. We watched in horrified shock as the door to the cell slammed shut, locking us in.
“What the—” I couldn’t even get the entire sentence out.
“The disruption event,” Thomas said gravely. “You remember what I told you?”
It took me a second to figure out what he was talking about. The disruption event. The physical event caused by the ripple created when mass traveled between universes. It had knocked the door loose and caused it to close. We were trapped.
“And here I thought I was coming to the rescue,” Thomas said, prodding his jaw tenderly. “I should’ve known he would do that. It’s not the first time.”
“I did tell him about the analog problem,” I said. “Maybe he did it on purpose.”
“I brought this for him,” Thomas said, drawing something out of his pocket. “I was going to send you both back. The ungrateful bastard.”
“The anchors!” I cried triumphantly. “Thomas, we can get out of here. You put on the anchor and we’ll go back to Earth.”
“Bad idea,” Thomas said.
“Why?” My face fell. I was desperate to get out of Farnham, he had a solution in hand, and he was telling me we couldn’t use it?
“I didn’t expect us to stay here,” Thomas explained. “I didn’t map this place. I have no idea what it corresponds to on the other side. We could end up anywhere.”
“But anywhere is better than this,” I protested. Wasn’t it? And if not, then what had happened to Grant? Worry dropped into the pit of my stomach like a stone.
“Oh really? How would you like to land in the foundation of a house? Or maybe you’d prefer to end up under the wheels of a moving moto?”
“Okay, you made your point,” I grumbled. I propped myself up against the wall, too tired to stand.
“Sasha, what happened back there?” Thomas asked. “Why did you run?”
“The General tried to force me to poison Callum,” I told Thomas. “He said he was going to keep me in Aurora forever—in a place just like this, I assume—unless I did what he said. He said he’d send me home if I did it, but I couldn’t. I told Callum and he arranged for an extraction. Apparently he had undercover agents in Columbia City the whole time.”
“That was smart of him.” Thomas hung his head. “I’m sorry, Sasha. I didn’t know.”
I shrugged. “It is what it is.”
“No, it isn’t. This is all my fault. I never should’ve brought you here.” He kneaded his brow with his fingertips.
“Stop it, Thomas. Let’s just forget about that, all right?” I leaned my head back against the wall and sighed. “How did you get here?”
“Just because the General cut me off doesn’t mean I don’t still have my own ways of getting things done,” Thomas said. “Dr. Moss was able to get his hands on the remote that controls your anchor, plus an extra, and smuggled me out of the Citadel, then I used my connections to get here. Took me longer than I would like, but I did it.”
“I guess that means you’re officially fired, huh?” I noticed he was no longer wearing his KES ring.
“Yeah, I guess it does.”
“I’m so glad you’re here,” I told him. I lay my head on his shoulder and closed my eyes. He took my hand and squeezed. I shivered; the cell was always cold. Thomas took off his jacket and wrapped it around my shoulders. I put it on and snuggled up against him. All the talk of analogs and anchors reminded me of something—I’d never had a chance to tell Thomas about my father and his connection to Aurora.
“I found out something else,” I said. “Back at the Citadel. About the tether.”
“Really? What?”
“Dr. Moss came to see me at the gala. He said he consulted with Dr. March and they think—”
“Hold up. Dr. March?”
“Yeah.” I searched his face. “What? What’s wrong with Dr. March?”
“Oh, nothing,” Thomas said offhandedly. “Except I’m pretty sure he doesn’t exist.”
“What?”
“Mossie is a genius, but he’s also a little, you know.” Thomas whistled and whirled his finger in a circular motion around his temple. “He talks about Dr. March all the time, but I’ve never met the man, and never met anybody else who has. I hate to use the word ‘delusion,’ but …”
That was disturbing, but it didn’t change the fact that Dr. Moss had a genuinely possible hypothesis about why I could see Juliana through the tether. “Dr. March or no Dr. March, he had a breakthrough. He says that I can see through the tandem because I have a connection to Aurora.”
“What kind of connection?”
“My father was born here.”
Thomas’s eyes widened in surprise. “Are you sure?”
I nodded. “He showed me the file. Apparently my father was one of the research fellows in Dr. Moss’s lab at the Citadel a long time ago, before he was drafted into the KES for an assignment. On Earth.”