Deep Sky

He found himself going back to the message from the Breach. The understanding that it was about him, and always had been. Even when he was ten years old.

He couldn’t grasp the concept. Couldn’t get within a mile of it. After a while his mind settled on a more material problem. He understood he was only thinking about it for the distraction it offered. He thought of it anyway:

Even if everything went perfectly in the next few minutes, how would he get inside Border Town in 2016? It would be the best-defended military outpost in the world by then. He’d infiltrated the place once before while it was under someone else’s control, but only with the help of an entity—one of the most useful ever to emerge from the Breach.

His stream of thought came to a dead stop.

He stared at the tunnel wall straight across from him, and then at nothing.

“Holy shit,” he said softly.

The others looked at him, but he said no more. He just let go of Paige’s hand and scrambled to his feet and ran for the stairs.

Chapter Thirty-Six

“What are you doing?” Paige shouted.

Travis was two flights up already. Paige’s voice echoed crazily after him, rebounding off the walls.

Travis looked down as he climbed, sprinting, taking the treads three at a time. Paige was just emerging from the tunnel, Bethany and Dyer behind her.

“Follow me!” Travis yelled. “But not all the way. Stay a hundred feet below the top.”

“They’re going to blow the door anytime!” Dyer yelled.

“I know,” Travis said.

In rough shouts as he lunged upward, he explained the idea. The hope. He glanced down again as he finished, and saw that Paige’s eyes had gone wide. She thought it all through for another two seconds.

“Oh my God,” she said.

Travis turned his attention back to the stairs, and after a moment he heard the others’ footsteps following.

He passed the dark tunnel Dyer had emerged from. Two thirds of the shaft’s height still soared above him. The bright square of Raines’s residence chamber appeared very small yet. He kept running, climbing. His lungs already felt like they were submerged in acid. His thighs and ankles were going numb from the shock of repetitive impacts.

He lost his sense of time going by. Even his sense of steps and flights going by. There was only the top of the shaft, the open square full of halogen light, turning and turning above him, growing by imperceptible degrees.

He thought of the little girl at the Third Notch, insisting her mother tell the story of the ghost.

He thought of Jeannie’s inability to dismiss what the kid was saying. The woman had believed, against all her logic, that there really was something haunting the mine entrances.

They say anyone who goes near starts to hear voices, she’d said, whispering right behind them in the trees. Pine boughs around you start to move like the wind’s blowing, even when it isn’t.

He thought of his own words to Paige, regarding the power players her father had allied with. The notion that Peter might’ve given them Breach technology.

Maybe even things he kept off the books in Border Town.

Travis looked up. The top of the shaft was huge now, filling his vision. Three flights left. Two. One.

He vaulted up over the lip into the chamber without slowing, and crossed the room in a burst, blurring past the wall of monitors. He crashed to a stop against the red metal locker mounted waist high on the wall, lifted the drop-latch and tore open the door.

The locker looked empty.

He reached in at the bottom and found that it wasn’t.

There were very rare entities—kinds that’d shown up only two or three times in all the years the Breach had been open. A few had emerged only once. Travis had always believed—was sure every current member of Tangent had always believed—that the transparency suit was in the latter group.

The feel of nearly weightless fabric bunching in his fist, where only thin air was visible, told him otherwise.

He drew the suit from the locker, carefully getting hold of its two halves—top and bottom. It was like pulling clothes out of a hamper in pitch darkness.

Certain he had both components, he pressed them together under his arm and turned back for the stairwell. As he did, his eyes picked out images on the wall of screens. The first thing he saw was that four of the monitors had gone to blue—one for each of the dual cameras inside the two accesses, all of which had been knocked out by the initial explosions. Then he noticed movement in some of the still-active frames. Men were lugging yellow fifty- five gallon drums into the north access, where Dyer had come in. Travis stepped closer and saw boxy attachments stuck to each barrel’s top, wired in with thick red and black cords. He darted his gaze around to find a view of this access—the one that led to the far side of the blast door ten feet away from him.

He saw it: the squared concrete tunnel sticking out of the slope among the redwoods.

There was no one going in.

There was no one anywhere near it.

A second later he found a screen showing the Humvee he and Paige and Bethany had driven up into the trees. It was right where they’d left it, jammed sideways near a trunk. Other Humvees were visible in the frame with it.

There were men crouched on the downhill side of each vehicle.

They were all covering their ears.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Every inch of the sprint felt like too much to ask for. Each vaulting step seemed like it should be the last.

He went back over the lip at the top of the stairs. Jumped with no thought for which tread his foot would land on—the time required for that kind of thinking was also too much to ask for.

It turned out to be the fourth step above the landing. His arch came down right on the drop-off, and only his forward momentum kept him from dumping all his weight onto it and breaking his ankle. He threw his other foot down with more control, rammed it hard and flat onto the steel landing, and brought his forearm up to catch the wall before he shattered his face on it.

The arm took a lot of the blow, but not all. The rest of his body was hurtled against the stone an instant later, the impact wringing the air from his lungs. He sucked it back in and used it to scream for the others to cover their ears, then pivoted toward the next flight and jumped again. He was arcing through the air, aiming for the next landing and clamping his hands over the sides of his head, when it finally happened.

It felt like having a boxcar dropped on him.

The airspace around him seemed to solidify and compress inward in a single, monstrous clap. He saw the stairs beneath him jump and vibrate. Saw the effect race down the shaft, a shockwave trailing a vacuum in its wake. The bass followed, making an eardrum of his whole body. He heard it with his knees and his spine and his fillings.

He kept his feet under him as he plunged ahead toward the landing, and threw both hands forward from his