It burns, but that’s too simple a term. It burns like opening your eyes in the light burns, like being born probably burns. It doesn’t feel like my body is responding to a foreign substance, but like the substance is awakening cells usually dormant.
Once the wave has reached every inch of my body, Dell comes with the collar. The serum opens my cells to having their vibrations altered, but it is the collar that will control them, that will send me away and bring me home. It doesn’t need to be a collar. I could just carry the marker at the center of the collar and Dell could do a proximity pull for anything in its radius. But Eldridge doesn’t trust us not to lose this key to Earth Zero unless it’s hanging off of our necks. That, and I think they like reminding us we’re pets.
Dell’s fingers graze my neck and I shudder with what she thinks is pain. She doesn’t know the serum doesn’t just open my cells, it hones my senses until all I can think about is how loud the world is and how good she smells.
I climb the ladder of the hatch—a ten-foot-tall metal sphere that gained its name from the hole at the top you use to enter it, and what it looks like when you emerge. Once I secure the door, the hatch is as dark as an empty universe. I’m not allowed to know what material makes up the sphere, but even without its proper name, I would know it anywhere.
Outside, Dell will be putting on headphones and concentrating, like the DJ or safecracker she’ll never be. I’ve always assumed she closes her eyes when she’s listening for that corresponding hum, changing the output of the hatch until it matches. Even before Dell has begun the sequence it feels like I’m gone, like the empty space isn’t in Earth Zero anymore, isn’t anywhere. I stop existing the moment the door is closed, and when Dell enters my coordinates it will feel more like being reborn in the same place than traveling.
The humming in the walls gets louder. Or maybe it’s my skin. Doesn’t matter. The humming grows until I am the hum, nothing but my own frequency. Dell is adjusting the transmitter, seeking entrance. Science says she’s tuning into my destination, but Jean would say she’s petitioning a god, adjusting frequencies the way monks hum to access the divine.
I know I am on my way by the sudden feeling of someone else’s breath on my neck. Scientists call the pressure along my skin resistance from imperfect frequencies, an atmospheric barrier I have to slide through before I can appear in another world. But Jean calls it Nyame’s muzzle, sniffing at me for worth like a wolf determining friend from threat.
Just when my skin begins to bristle, she retreats and I am standing beneath a tree that looks almost familiar. It feels like waking up despite my eyes never closing. I take a moment to orient myself. The tree is familiar because I’ve landed here before to pull from 238. I visualize my task in detail until I know I won’t get confused, won’t start believing my real life is a dream and this Earth is my real place.
“Status?” Dell asks, a small voice in my ear. The quality of the audio is like a child’s walkie-talkie, and it’s the limit of technology that can travel with me.
I let her call me a few more times before I answer.
“Moving,” I say, pulling up directions on my cuff.
I make sure the obscurer on my chest is lit and working.
“How far away did you put me?” I ask.
“Oh…about two and a half miles.”
I ignore the satisfaction in her voice and start walking.
CHAPTER FOUR
By the time I’ve checked back in with Jean, I’m ready to be in any world that isn’t this one. I failed. I got 68 percent on Jean’s mock quiz of the first forty Earths. Not a miserable failure, but it might as well be a zero when I don’t know how to change it. I read the reports. I wrote the facts over and over again and nothing has helped me retain enough to pass.
Maybe there’s something to classism. Maybe eating caviar growing up gives you a bigger brain. Maybe eating dirt poisons your memory.
Or maybe it’s just easier to think something is impossible than to try.
Sitting at my desk, I look back over my notes. I know the facts about each world when I see them, but I’m storing them in some part of my mind I can’t access when there’s a question in front of me and something on the line. It all becomes too important, like I have my own life in my hands, and I choke. I’ve made a copy of the stat page, but with the info left blank. I’ll quiz myself until I get 100 percent, before I move on to memorizing for next week.
“Headache?”
When I look up, Dell’s studying me like a map. I’ve been off observation since the bruising faded, but that doesn’t mean she won’t put me right back on.
“No, just concentrating.”
I usually have time to brace myself before I see her. I didn’t think she’d come here more than once in the same month. It’s no secret that anything below the fiftieth floor is for traversers, clerks, Maintenance, and other support staff. We’re classified as nonspecialists because there was no degree or expert knowledge or developed skill to get us here. With the exception of some of the traversers, we are stunningly expendable.
But she’s here now, breathtaking and disapproving, and maybe the latter enhances the former because, like her panic when she says my name off-world, I can convince myself it signals concern.
“What?”
“Are you sure you’re not experiencing headaches? Blurred vision?”
“I’ll get an aneurism from irritating questions before I get one from traversing.”
“Don’t treat this lightly. Even the tiniest vibration in the mind is a trauma.”
I snort at the princess telling me about trauma. Traversing shakes me, but it’s not a trauma. The deepest bruises I’ve gotten world walking are a warm bath next to trauma.
“Is that why you’re here? To check me for nosebleeds?”
“Your trip to Earth 175 is to be an extended one,” she says.
“How extended?”
“You’ll need to download from the area’s backup ports after your pull.”
“How many?”
“Four.”
The number is high, but not extraordinary. The main port has the most information, and usually what we see in the backups is just redundant. But sometimes there is a piece of data that never makes it to the main port. If I’m having to do four, Starla must have been fired just before their quarterly clearing.
“Four? So I’ll be there an extra forty-eight hours?”
“Seventy-two. There will be a solar event during your pull. You shouldn’t be there for that, but we don’t know what the conditions will be leading up to it, so we’re giving you a buffer.”