She smiled at him. “Such a fuss,” she said. “And for what? I just want to see what you’re made of.” She licked her thin lips and set the tube down. “You, it will be useful to preserve for now. After all, there is only one of you, isn’t there?”
She lifted the scalpel from the table.
“Of course, there are four of these others.”
The heat and the woman and her tools, the long tables beyond the door, the knives in the case — all of it pressed on Susan, and the fear was like a physical thing in the room, pounding against her, crushing her chest, squeezing the sight from her eyes. The room tilted and grew dim for a moment. Words pulsed in her head. I need to get out. Out. Out.
Ker turned toward Susan.
“So pretty,” she said as she moved forward. “So smooth.”
Susan watched her come. All she could think of was running, flinging herself from the chair and hurling herself through the red door, out into the hallway, out, somewhere, into the air. And yet the leather straps trapped her, crushing her as the woman approached. Out. Out. Out.
Her heartbeat sliced jaggedly through her chest, and her breath came so fast it ached. Her throat burned. She closed her eyes and wished fiercely the straps would go. She saw them there in her mind’s eye, dissolving, flying away, saw herself running, running. Out. Out. Out.
The woman’s cold hand was on her arm now. She cringed. She could feel the edge of the blade. Out. Out. Out!
A pressure was building in her chest, pumping through her arms, her legs. She shivered, whether with cold or heat she couldn’t tell, but the picture was a living thing now in front of her: the straps flung off, freedom, movement; all glared inside her head with a light much brighter than the one in the room. Pain in her arm. The bite of the knife.
A great force, heavy and swift at once, raced through her, rocketing down her legs, out her arms. Out! Out! Out!
In a sudden rush, Susan felt the great thing pushing inside her jump forward; the room shook. Her eyes flew open. The straps exploded, shooting across the room and hitting the opposite wall. Ker shrieked. Susan jumped to her feet.
The others! The fear leaped at her with such force that she staggered, and the same picture jumped into her mind. Out!
The pressure shot through her again, and she fell. Across the room, the chairs themselves broke open, straps gone, children dumped in heaps on the floor. They scrambled to their feet as Ker screamed and the soldiers, confused, stepped forward.
Out! Susan shouted it inside her head again, and a sudden gust of air slammed across the room, taking Ker and the soldiers with it. It whipped them back into the slick walls, toppling the metal table and the remains of the chairs. The tube of Max’s blood arced through the air and hit the tile with a sharp crack.
“Out!” This time Susan screamed it aloud, and the others heard her and ran. Together they dashed into the hallway, down the corridor, toward the lobby. Soldiers approached, Susan heard distant shouting, but the one word roared in her mind like a wave. And as she repeated it, silently, with force, with terror, soldiers flew backward, doors ripped open, and the five of them were out, out in the sunlight and running down the long empty stretch of road that led away from the Domain.
Max had considered the subject from a variety of angles, and he had come to the conclusion that theoretically or hypothetically, if one were to fall into another universe, the best people to take along would be Sherlock Holmes, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, and Daniel Boone. That was assuming you were allowed somebody fictional and/or dead. And that Einstein and Tesla could run fast. If not, he would have recruited an astronaut, a doctor, a samurai warrior, and a Green Beret. Unfortunately, nobody had asked him, and he’d landed here with Susan, Nell, Kate, and Jean.
Now he’d begun to wonder if any of that mattered at all. What calculations could help you decipher a world in which tornadoes attacked furniture, or the wind started inside and followed you down the street? He’d never read anything on that in The Boy Scout Handbook.
Running after Susan, he’d looked over his shoulder and seen the soldiers bracing against the gale, their dogs hunched beside them, noses to the ground and ears blown back. A moment later, up they all flew — cloaks and paws and arms and legs all waving as they somersaulted like toys. In the room, in the hall, and at the edge of the city, it had happened, until the five of them had crossed from the Domain into the dense woods that smudged the horizon, and lost the city in a mass of green.
They had run without stopping until they couldn’t anymore, and then they had walked, their breath coming in hiccups as they pushed on into the hills, desperate to be as far away from that terrible room as they could get. At last, as the sky overhead began to shift, throwing up strands of vivid confetti clouds shredded through with high branches, Max had begun to breathe again. And so now, with his head aching and his hand stinging and his legs feeling like they had turned to wood or stone, or what was the heaviest metal — maybe uranium? — he set about trying to figure
