3:59

FORTY-FIVE

9:35 P.M.

“I KNOW,” TONY SAID. “BELIEVING I WAS DEAD might have been better than this.”

“How?”

“It’s a long story.”

Nick reached his hand behind his back, groping blindly for Josie’s hand. When his fingers found her own, he laced them together. “We’re not going anywhere.”

Tony walked to the far side of the table. He turned up the flame on the burner, which shifted hues from orange to bluish white, casting a brighter light across the room. For the first time, Josie really saw Tony. His outline was sharp and defined against the lit interior of the shed, and though there were no defined features to his form, there was depth to the shadow, an infinite void that was there but not there. To say that he was dark or black didn’t do justice to the intensity of what he was. His body was like the absence of light, the opposite of light. There wasn’t a surface for light to reflect off or illuminate, and judging by the fact that there was no shadow cast by his body on the floor or walls, it was as if the light was absorbed by his very being.

“Something happened that day in the lab,” Tony started. The voice sounded so real and normal, like a regular human body was in the room talking to them instead of a wraith.

“The explosion,” Nick said. He squeezed Josie’s hand.

“Project Raze had exhausted almost every possibility: vaccines with killed Nox cellular matter, toxoids, live viruses that were supposed to infect the Nox population, DNA and photon therapies, genetically engineered bacterial proteins. Nothing worked. The Nox themselves seemed immune to everything we threw at them.”

Tony leaned his arms against the table. It creaked in protest as it accepted his weight, which seemed so odd to Josie since his body appeared to have no depth.

“Then last year, we made a breakthrough. The reason we can’t affect the Nox? They don’t exist in this universe.”

Josie sat straight up. “What?”

Tony tilted his head to the side. “I thought you’d appreciate that. Just like you, they come from another place.”

“Is that why I can see them?” Josie said.

“Yes.”

Nick stared at her. “You can see them?”

“Er, kinda,” Josie said. “Just for like a second.”

“Like a flash? Tony asked. “As if the Nox were illuminated by a spotlight for an instant?”

Josie’s eyes grew wide. “Yeah. That’s exactly what they look like.”

“Interesting.” Tony paced back and forth. “We’d always believed that the Nox were accidentally brought to our world through some sort of dimensional portal,” Tony continued. “Which was only partially true. Their universe and our universe have somehow gotten stuck together, like two pages in a book. You’re supposed to flip them separately, but suddenly you’re going from page forty-eight to fifty-one.”

“Brane multiverses,” Josie breathed. “Just like Penelope suggested. That’s how the Nox are coming into my world. Instead of two pages stuck together, now it’s three. You’re turning from page forty-eight to fifty-three.”

“Smart girl.” Tony continued to pace aimlessly behind the table, his shadow eating the light as he moved from point to point.

“But why can’t we catch one?” Nick asked. “If they can attack us, kill us, feed on us, why can’t we do the same to them?”

Tony laughed. “Who says we can’t catch one?”

“But I thought . . . ,” Nick started.

“That’s what the government wants you to believe. The last thing they need is heavily armed lynch mobs tracking incredibly dangerous prey. They have government hit squads that are barely able to accomplish that. It would be a bloodbath if your average neighborhood watch tried to take matters into their own hands.”

“Why is it so difficult to catch them?” Josie asked.

“They exist in a complex quantum state, without a fixed superposition,” Tony said. “And they can shift between universes at will.” He turned to Josie. “I think that’s when when you can see them, in the instant that they phase shift, like they’re cycling through the dimension you belong to.”

“Wow,” Josie said. “That blows the rules of quantum properties out of the water.”

Nick shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“They’re like me,” Tony said simply. “I mean, I’m here and I’m not. You can feel me and hear me and smell me when I choose to shift my mass into this universe. But as you can tell, I’m not quite of this world anymore. And not of any other. I’m something in between, the glue that’s holding the pages of the book together.”

“So the Nox are the same?” Nick asked, rubbing the circulation back into his wrists.

“Yes,” Tony said. “They can shift their mass at will between our world and their own. And they’ve adapted to it relatively quickly, just like they adapted to a penchant for humans as dinner.”

“The space in the portal,” Josie said. She thought of the darkness that seemed to engulf her, the weight of an entire universe trying to squeeze the life out of her. She tugged on Nick’s hand. “Remember when you were checking out the portal that day you tried to kill me?”

Nick flinched. “I wasn’t going to kill you.”

“Whatever. But remember the inky blackness that oozed all around you when the portal started to close?”

“Exactly,” Tony said. “That’s exactly what I am.”

“What you are?” Josie asked. The viability of Tony’s experimental antidote being a way home was quickly diminishing.

“I am the stuff of the portal now.”

“How?”

“My first attempt at an injectable was an inoculation, designed for humans. Like the eventual formula, it was deuterium-rich, and the idea was to phase-shift humans ever so slightly so we could coexist in the same universe with the Nox without them even knowing we were there.

“The problem was that it was too dangerous to attempt a phase shift. I even injected myself with the antidote last year, in the hopes I could get the green light to attempt the experiment on myself, but I was shut down.”

“I had no idea,” Nick said. He sounded hurt.

“Sorry, Nicky. Sharing my work around the dinner table would violate about a half dozen nondisclosure agreements. We had a few Nox in captivity to experiment on—again, not dinner-table conversation—and I’d spent a year adjusting the formula to use it on them instead of us.”

“Amazing,” Josie said.

“We had injected two Nox, and Dr. Byrne was attempting to create a micro black hole to suck them beyond the event horizon before it collapsed on itself.”

“So what happened?” Nick asked.

“The explosion. I was in the other room, testing the controls that would raise and lower the blast glass to expose the Nox to the beam. Dr. Byrne was in the main chamber, finishing the last calibrations. We hadn’t even started the process when a blinding flash tore through the room. I’d never experienced anything so intense. It actually threw me to the ground.”

“I remember,” Josie mumbled.

“When I came to, your mom was sprawled on the floor and the Nox were gone.”

“So that’s how they got into your world,” Nick said. “Two Nox, already breeding. That’s not good.”

Tony whistled. “No, not good at all.” He shook his head. “Anyway, I helped who I thought was Dr. Byrne get to her feet and realized something was wrong. Her lab coat. Her hair. Her shoes. Physically she looked exactly like Dr. Byrne, but it wasn’t her.”

“My mom.”

Tony sighed. “She was disoriented, confused. The lab was different, and then she saw me.” He paused. “I didn’t know yet what had happened to me, how the explosion had reacted with the antidote in my system. She completely freaked out.”

Nick placed his hand gently on Josie’s shoulder. “Your poor mom.”

“I could hear boots pounding down the hallway outside the lab. I only had a few seconds to make a decision. I’m sorry I had to abandon her. I didn’t know what else to do. I had to find out who wanted us dead, and I figured the best way to do that was to actually be dead.”

“Because someone sabotaged the experiment?” Josie asked.

“Exactly. The security and medical teams arrived within moments of the blast. Once I realized what had happened to me, I literally disappeared into the shadows of the room and waited. The blast had knocked out the security cameras, so once they removed your mom from the lab, I had a few seconds to examine the blast radius. The laser itself exploded, not the deuterium.”

“So anyone could have tampered with the laser,” Nick said.

“In theory, yes.”

“Even Dr. Byrne.” Josie recalled the conversation she’d overheard in one of Jo’s dreams. Jo’s mom seemed anxious to get her hands on the vial that contained the antidote. Desperate, even.

“It makes the most sense,” Nick said with a glance at Josie. “She could have had access to the equipment, and we know for a fact there was an insider willing to sabotage the experiment and sell your formula at a massive price tag.”

“I suppose,” Tony said. He sounded unconvinced. “But Dr. Byrne was a scientist. She was just as invested in the outcome of the experiment as Dr. Cho and I.”

Josie’s eyebrows shot up. “Dr. Cho?”

“Yes, she worked on my team.”

Josie was on her feet in an instant. “Nick, Dr. Cho is the one ‘treating’ my mom at Old St. Mary’s. I assumed she was a psychiatrist or something.”

“Geneticist,” Tony corrected. “She specialized in mapping the genetic code from the unstable tissue samples we’d managed to retrieve from the Nox.”

“What are the odds it’s the same Dr. Cho?” Nick asked.

“High.” Tony began pacing again.

Nick turned to Josie. “What would she want with your mom?”

Tony walked faster this time, his dark silhouette a metronome’s pulse between the two walls of the shed. “The antidote. They’d want the formula for the antidote.”

“But Dr. Byrne didn’t develop it,” Nick said.

“Yes, but she was the last one with it. There were two vials of it on her desk when we began the experiment. After the explosion, only one.”

“It passed through the portal,” Josie said. “With Dr. Byrne.”

Tony caught his breath. “How do you know?”

Nick pulled the vial out of his pocket and handed it to Tony. “Because it passed back through.”

“Amazing,” Tony said.

“Yeah,” Josie added. “And Dr. Byrne is desperate to get it back.”

“With two breeding Nox, a swarm large enough to threaten the human existence could exist in just a few years.” Tony handed the vial back to Nick. “There, as here, whoever controls the antidote would be very powerful. That’s why I’ve been trying to re-create it here, in secret. I figured that way, no single government entity would have control over it. I’m only missing a powerful enough laser to make a real test. If it works, it would be enough to kill for.”

Something clicked in Josie’s brain. “Enough to kill for? Enough to send a swarm of Nox to attack?”

Tony stared at her, the faceless black giving no hint of emotion. “Yes, absolutely.”

“They were sent after us?” Nick asked.

“Like I said, it was a coordinated attack,” Tony said. “The generator was disabled. Someone knew where you would be and when.”

Nick touched the back of his head and winced. “But how could they . . .” His voice trailed off and he turned suddenly to Josie.

She came to the same realization at the same time. The three of them were supposed to meet at the warehouse that night: Nick, Josie, and Penelope. “If they came after us, then they’ll go after Penelope too.”

Nick sprang to his feet. “Then let’s get there first.”