Chapter Nine

They closed all the drapes in the suite's living room and shut the doors to the adjoining areas. The resulting near darkness allowed their eyes to adjust a little, but it made no difference as far as the opening was concerned. The place on the other side still looked pitch-black.

Travis stepped into the projected beam of light and faced the hole directly. If the blue light had any effect where it shone on his back, he couldn't feel it. Even the exposed skin on his neck and arms felt normal.

Travis stood there a moment and let the wind rush over him. He closed his eyes. He listened. Behind him he could hear the ambience of D.C., even through the closed windows of the suite. The rumble of traffic. The beeping of some kind of construction vehicle on a build site. The drone of a propeller aircraft.

But there were sounds coming from in front of him too, through the opening. Night sounds of insects and maybe frogs. They were very faint. He hadn't noticed them earlier. He tried to isolate them now. The sounds seemed to come from only a few point sources, far away in the darkness. Which made sense. If it'd been a summer night on the other side, the chorus of insect song would've been overwhelming. Literally billions of tiny noisemakers within the nearest mile, any one of them loud enough to be heard at a distance. But the location on the other side of the opening-Canada or wherever it might be-was long past its local summer. The night air called to mind the trailing edge of the living season, when most things had already gone to ground or simply died off. Travis had the sense that he was listening to the region's last few holdouts. A few nights from now, even those would probably be silenced, and there would be nothing but the dead quiet of the oncoming winter.

Travis put his hand through the opening.

In the corner of his eye he saw Bethany flinch a little, even though she'd expected the move.

His hand felt fine.

He lowered it to the bottom edge of the hole, but stopped just shy of touching it. He wondered what the margin was like. Was it a kind of blade-edge between the space on this side and the space on the other? If he ran his hand into it, would it pass right through, cutting his fingers off and dropping them away into the darkness over there? It seemed like Paige would've warned them about something like that, but she hadn't had a lot of time to go into details.

Travis was tempted to grab the bound menu again and test the edge of the hole with it. Instead he lowered his hand another inch, slowly, ready to retract it.

His fingers settled onto a smooth, rounded edge. Like the tubing of a hula hoop. It was cool and rigid as steel. Travis applied a few pounds of force to it. It didn't budge. Strange-the cylinder's movement on the couch a few minutes earlier had made the opening bob up and down easily, but the opening itself couldn't be moved by direct force against it. It was as fixed as a hole cut into an iron wall.

Travis ducked and leaned his upper body through the hole, into the night on the other side.

At once he saw what'd been impossible to see from inside the suite: a sky shot full of stars, sharp and clear in the unhindered darkness. The hazy band of the Milky Way defined a long arc from one horizon to the other. A crescent moon hung like a blade, an hour from setting or having risen-Travis wasn't sure which. But it was definitely the same moon he'd grown up under. He was staring at a nightscape somewhere on Earth, at least.

His eyes were already adjusting to the dark, much deeper on this side of the opening than in the suite, even with the drapes closed.

As the seconds drew out he began to discern details in the night around him, both near and distant. He saw the canopy of a forest, the treetops maybe twenty feet below his viewpoint. Spires of pine trees and the rough curves of hardwoods, all of them pale in the faint light of the moon.

There were other shapes, but he couldn't make sense of them. Strange geometric forms, like huge scaffolding assemblies or bamboo towers, jutted up from the forest here and there. The light was too poor to offer any detail about them. Even their distances were hard to gauge. Travis looked down and saw the footings of one of the structures right below. Its complex form rose into the darkness just behind his position.

The only other shape he could resolve was something very tall and narrow, and solid in appearance, standing on the horizon at least a mile away. Its height was imposing even at that distance: it towered above the trees, easily five times their height. He focused on it but could perceive no detail beyond its bulk and rough size. He thought of an enormous smokestack rising from a factory complex. The problem was that there was no smoke, and no factory, either, unless all its lights were shut off.

He saw movement in his peripheral vision and then Bethany was there, leaning into the darkness beside him. He edged over a few inches to give her room.

For a moment they just stood there in silence, side by side. They listened to the night. Travis looked at the moon again and judged that it was higher than when he'd first seen it. The crescent was very narrow, which meant the sun couldn't be far below the horizon. Dawn was no more than an hour away, though there was no hint of it yet.

"I've never seen any place this dark," Bethany said. "There's not the least bit of light pollution on the horizon. We'd have to be over a hundred miles from even a mid-sized town for it to look like this. But at the same time it's a place where people have built large structures, whatever these are. And whatever that is." She waved a hand to indicate the towering form in the distance. "It has to be forty stories tall. Maybe taller." She was quiet for a moment and then she turned to him. "Where the hell are we?"

Travis had no answer. He had a vague notion that it could be a military installation, built in remote wilderness out of concern for public safety or-more likely-secrecy. But why would an alien-made device just happen to show them a place like that? Why would it show them any place in particular, as opposed to some random location? Even if the place on the other side were some fixed distance and direction from here, it should still be someplace purely random. Simple probability said they should be looking out at the ocean right now, or a wide-open prairie, or an arctic tundra, or a city street with a McDonalds and a Starbucks and half a dozen stoplights.

"I don't know," Travis said.

Bethany started to speak, but before she could, a high-pitched cry rose from the trees right below them. Bethany flinched hard and grabbed onto his arm. Travis was glad for that: it masked the fact that his own muscles had tensed pretty damn hard.

He grew calm at once, recognizing the sound: a wolf's howl. As it died away Travis cocked his head and listened. He heard the clatter of running footsteps as the pack went by right beneath their position. Their claws scrabbled on ground that sounded unusually hard. Stone, he'd have guessed-if a forest could grow from stone.

A hundred yards off, the wolves stopped and howled again, first one and then another. Seconds passed, and then a series of answering cries resonated from the trees half a mile away. The nearer set of wolves had just begun to respond when a new sound erupted somewhere between the packs, silencing both of them. Bethany didn't exactly flinch, but Travis felt her body shudder. He felt his own blood go cold, and wasn't surprised that it did. He was biologically wired to fear this sound, courtesy of a long chain of ancestors who'd survived to pass on their genes. It was the guttural bass wave of a lion's roar.

A lion. Among wolves. In a temperate forest far enough north that it felt like late fall during the month of August.

"Okay: Where the hell are we? is the wrong question," Bethany said. "Where the fuck are we?" T en minutes later the first glow of dawn came to the horizon. Five minutes after that there was enough light to show them everything. They saw what the scaffoldlike things around them really were. And they recognized the towering shape on the horizon. They'd seen it in movies and on television all their lives.

They knew exactly where they were.

And they knew that where really was the wrong question to ask.

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