‘Look,’ she said, nodding at the d-meter. It showed a d-field rating of zero. Yet they were already deeper into the island than Dutch would have believed possible until the last few days, and with no discernible mental side-effects of any kind.
They drove on until the ocean disappeared from view and tall mountains reared high around them. They climbed a mountain road dense with overhanging foliage, slowing from time to time to skirt around boulders that had come tumbling down from on high over the years. It made for slow going, and Dutch felt sure they’d be toast if they encountered any more Kaiju, but even so they got past the worst of it. But within a few years, erosion and rockfall would make the inland roads forever impassable.
Then, at last, they came to a road high above a valley and saw an ethereal glow coming from behind a mountain peak a little further ahead. They got out of the Coupé, walking to the edge of the road and looking towards it.
‘Is that it?’ asked Dutch. ‘The Rift?’
‘Can’t be anything else.’
She shook her head. ‘In all the years I’ve been coming here, this is the first time I ever saw it with my own two eyes.’ It looked like a column of fire, reaching up to the clouds. It shifted and changed, the contrast of shadows and colours somehow suggestive, as if on the cusp of resolving into objects or some kind of landscape.
Dutch’s voice was halting when she spoke. ‘What Elektron said about the Rift—’
‘Elektron was crazy.’
‘Still, you must have sometimes wondered yourself what it is.’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
She looked at him in surprise. ‘You can’t be serious. Not even once?’
Even as she asked the question, she could see he was telling the truth.
She had a sudden memory, of being in her Dad’s garage and hearing the first reports coming in over the radio that a nuke had hit Teijouan. No one had ever figured out what really happened, not with the d-field to keep those willing or brave enough to find out far from the island’s centre.
But if Strugatsky’s expedition had made it all the way to the Rift…who could say what they’d found there?
* * *
They continued on to the village Nat had mentioned. By then night had come, and Dutch almost drove straight through it before she realised the few scattered shells of buildings strung along the roadside in fact constituted a settlement.
She pulled over, but kept the engine idling. Her vision remained clear, with no shapes crowding the edges of her vision. She was filled with the kind of euphoria she imagined history’s great explorers must have felt.
Beside her, Nat studied a notebook he’d pulled out of his driving suit by the light of a torch. Dutch glanced at the notebook and observed tight lines of spidery handwriting.
He looked up. ‘There should be a general store straight ahead of here.’
Dutch took the brake off and coaxed the Coupé a little further along the narrow, bumpy road. Seeing more than a few metres without headlights was near to impossible, but no way was she risking turning them on.
‘Here,’ said Nat, his voice taut.
They pulled over and got out. The store appeared to be little more than a tin shack, its shelves still piled high with ageing canned goods.
Nat studied the notebook again.
‘What is that?’ Dutch asked.
‘This? It belonged to that scientist they recovered.’ He switched the torch off. ‘The RV should be around the next corner.’
Dutch followed him around past the store to a row of small, pitiful-looking houses that weren’t much more than shacks themselves. Thin saplings pushed through the windows, their roofs green with moss. He led her further, down a narrow, muddy lane that led to an empty lot occupied by a couple of rusted cars and an articulated RV of much more recent design.
A ladder beneath a door set into the side of the RV led up and inside its darkened interior. Dutch stood back as Nat ascended the steps, flicked on his torch, and stepped inside.
He reappeared within moments, one hand clamped over his face. He made his way over to the edge of the lot and retched into the grass.
‘What did you see?’
He wiped his mouth and coughed. ‘There’s a body. The smell’s pretty bad.’
She stepped towards him. ‘Give me your torch.’
He passed it over and Dutch pulled a bandana out of her jeans, wrapping it tight over her mouth and nose before taking her turn to look inside the truck. She saw workbenches and scientific equipment, and a body sprawled on the floor. If she kept her breathing even and shallow and didn’t breathe through her nose, she could just about bear the stink of putrefaction. Even so, she pulled off her bandana and sucked down a deep lungful of jasmine-scented air the moment she stepped out into open air.
‘That’s one dead in the truck apart from the one who died after they rescued him,’ she said. ‘How many others were in the expedition?’
‘Four.’
So there’d been six to start with. ‘Elektron seemed to think they’d all passed through the Rift. Looks like some of them didn’t make it that far after all.’
Nat groaned. ‘I don’t know why you even let him talk.’
She heard a rustling in the trees and glanced up. A pair of tiny eyes looked down at her and blinked, and then their owner shot off along a branch. Nothing more than a squirrel, but any normal animal was a rarity on Teijouan these days. That, even more than the car’s d-meter, convinced her they were safe.
What was it Elektron had told her? That the Rift was a crossroads, with a million different roads. She remembered talking to some scientist at a pre-race event in Hong Kong, years before. He’d told her there was more than one reality, an infinite number of universes each just a tiny bit different from the next, all stacked
