CHAPTER 4

  "In a world

  Passing through

  My fingers

  I still chase the wind

  How quickly I forget

  That this is meaningless..."

  — As I Lay Dying

  Carl sat across from a tall, thin Black man. The nameplate on the desk read Phillip Royles. The man’s eyes studied him with practiced precision. This was someone very good at his job. It wasn’t just the plaques and awards lining the walls, Carl had seen that look before. A certain focus. A certain hunger for answers.

  “You’re an interesting individual, Mr. Maitland.”

  “Uh, thanks.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Straight to the point. I like it. I’m trying to leave. I fight supervillains, and one of them, possibly a demon, knocked me out of my dimension. Rather than die in the void, I found my way to the first dimension I could. Yours.”

  Royles leaned back and steepled his fingers.

  “So what were your plans?”

  “Food. Water. Then I’d try another jump. The thing with the cop happened, though, and if there’s anything I can do to, uh… repay my debt, so to speak, I’ll do it.”

  “I watched the interview,” Royles said. “You seem less panicked than someone desperate to go home.”

  “Oh, yeah. This isn’t the first time.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. A while back I got thrown through time into a war. Didn’t have my suit, so I couldn’t jump back. My wife had to come get me.”

  “Your suit,” Royles said slowly, “is capable of time travel?”

  “Yes.”

  Royles said nothing. He didn’t blink. The silence stretched just long enough to become uncomfortable.

  Finally, he leaned forward.

  “You said you wanted to pay your debt. What if I gave you a way to do that?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Work with us. With me, specifically. I run a group that handles the stranger things in our world. Department 7. Help me with a problem, and I’ll personally see to it that you leave here with food, water, and everything you need to get home.”

  “Sure. I don’t have anywhere to stay, though.”

  “That will be handled.”

  Carl hesitated. “Are you sure about this? The guys outside don’t seem like the flexible type.”

  “I’ll deal with them,” Royles said, already standing. “Follow me.”

  They walked down a long corridor, the hum of the building a constant low drone. Conversations died as they passed. Every pair of eyes tracked Carl.

  “Before we go any further,” Royles said, stopping at a reinforced door, “we need to make this official. Temporary consultant, Department 7. You get access, authority, and freedom to operate, but only for this mission.”

  “Official how?” Carl asked, eyeing the card reader.

  “Forms. A signature. An NDA. You promise not to do anything unless I tell you to.”

  Carl raised an eyebrow. “Fair enough.”

  A young woman at a terminal slid a clipboard across the desk.

  “Sign here. Initial there. Read the NDA,” she said without looking up. “Everything you see is classified. No exceptions.”

  Carl skimmed the dense legal jargon and nodded. “Fine. Just don’t make it sound like I’m being drafted.”

  “You’re not,” Royles said. “You report to me. That’s it.”

  “Any chance I can get a patch?” Carl asked. “A souvenir.”

  He pulled the Sentinel 26 patch from his shoulder, the Velcro tearing loudly in the quiet room.

  Royles smirked. “We’ll see.”

  “Stand there,” the woman said, pointing at a white wall.

  “Smile.”

  The camera flashed.

  “Give me a minute to print and laminate.”

  Carl reached into a glass bowl and grabbed a couple jellybeans. The green one tasted unfamiliar. There was still a lot about this world he didn’t understand.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  She handed him a thin card.

  “This is your ID. It grants access to secure areas for the duration of your assignment. Keep it on you at all times.”

  Carl examined it, then tucked it into his pocket.

  “So I’m officially a government lackey now?”

  “No,” Royles said.

  “You’re our ace in the hole. You do your part, you stay alive, and we help you get home.”

  Carl leaned back, absorbing the absurdity.

  “Ace in the hole,” he said.

  “I like the sound of that. Let’s get cracking.”

  Royles led him to an elevator. There were no doors, just a circular opening that rotated into place.

  “Your elevator’s odd,” Carl said.

  “No doors?”

  “It’s central to the building,” Royles replied.

  “It rotates depending on the floor.”

  The elevator descended deep underground. When it stopped, the opening rotated again, revealing a keypad.

  “Twenty-thirty,” Royles said.

  Carl entered the code. The door slid open onto a long concrete hallway lined with sealed doors.

  “Welcome to Department 7,” Royles said. “I’ll introduce you to the team later. For now, you get an office.”

  “An office? I thought I’d be doing fieldwork.”

  “You will. But you’ll also write reports. Detailed ones. If this is going to work, you need to behave like an agent.”

  Carl nodded.

  “I can do that.”

  “Good.”

  Royles opened a small, empty office at the end of the hall.

  “There’s a couch,” he said. “You can sleep here tonight until better accommodations are arranged.”

  “This works,” Carl said.

  “There’s a key on the desk. Don’t lose it.”

  Carl pocketed it.

  “Now let’s go,” Royles said.

  “I’ll brief you on the way.”

  “As it stands,” Royles said from the driver’s seat,

  “you’re the only person on this planet with firsthand experience of alternate dimensions. Our scientists can’t make sense of this site.”

  “I wouldn’t call myself an expert.”

  “No,” Royles said.

  “But you’ve crossed dimensions. That gives you perspective. And right now, perspective is everything.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Two years ago, we believe a rift opened between realities. We sent probes through. None returned. One soldier was brave enough to step through and was never heard from again. The facility was sealed, and Department 7 was formed to handle matters like this.”

  “The strange and unusual.”

  “Yes.”

  “I myself am strange and unusual,” Carl said, grinning.

  Royles glanced at him. “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “I need your head in the game, Carl.”

  “It is,” Carl said.

  “I joke when I’m nervous.”

  Royles said nothing. Carl watched the scenery blur past the window.

  They arrived at a massive warehouse surrounded by a chain-link fence threaded with red warning tape.

  KEEP OUT — BY ORDER OF THE PROTECTORATE

  Royles unlocked three heavy padlocks.

  “This is as far as I go,” he said. “There are random electrical discharges near the rift. It’s dangerous.”

  Carl’s armor formed around him, plates locking into place as his helmet sealed shut. Blue eyes flickered to life.

  “Alright,” Carl said.

  “I’ll check it out. I’ll be back as soon as I can, assuming nothing goes wrong.”

  Royles nodded.

  The interior of the warehouse was worse than Carl expected.

  The air hummed. Not audibly at first, more like a pressure behind the eyes. His suit’s sensors lit up with warnings that meant nothing to him, strings of symbols and alerts scrolling past faster than he could read. Static crawled across his vision, then vanished.

  At the center of the warehouse, the rift hung in the air like a wound that refused to close.

  It wasn’t a clean tear. It twisted, folded in on itself, light bending wrong around its edges. Colors bled inward and vanished, as if the hole was drinking them. Thin arcs of electricity snapped outward, cracking against the concrete floor and the steel beams above. There were black scorch marks scattered across the walls and floors. It smelt of ozone and burnt wiring.

  Carl took a slow breath.

  “Okay,” he muttered.

  “I’ve seen worse.”

  That was only mostly true.

  He stepped closer. An arc of electricity hit his shoulder and he froze for a second before moving closer. The closer he got, the lighter he felt, like the world was slowly letting go of him.

  Carl reached out.

  The moment his hand crossed the threshold, the warehouse vanished.

  He was falling.

  No transition. No warning. Just open air and a violent drop that slammed his stomach into his throat.

  “Shit...”

  The wind howled past him, louder than any skydiving jump he’d ever done. His suit screamed alerts now, red overlays flashing as altitude dropped fast, too fast.

  Carl fired his thrusters.

  The sudden deceleration nearly snapped his neck. He spun, fought the momentum, corrected. The ground rushed up to meet him, flat empty grasslands, shadows cast by a pale, unfamiliar sky.

  He hit hard.

  The impact was muted by the grass beneath his boots and drove the breath from his lungs, but the suit held. Carl dropped to one knee, one hand braced against the ground, chest heaving.

  For a long second, he didn’t move.

  Then he looked around.

  He wasn’t alone.

  Scattered across the grassy terrain below the rift were twisted shapes, scorched and broken...the probes. Government issued, by the look of them. Some had broken open, bit they were all dead.

  And then he saw the body.

  The soldier had dragged himself a short distance away, legs bent at angles that made Carl’s jaw tighten. Time and exposure had done their work. The man had survived the fall.

  Briefly.

  Carl stood slowly and approached, his footsteps unnaturally loud in the thin, still air.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly, though no one could hear him.

  He bent and searched for dog tags, he didnt know if they used dog tags or not. He found them, they were circular. The mans name had been Charlie Givens. He dropped them in his pocket to give to Royles.

  He looked up.

  Far above, impossibly high, the rift shimmered like a distant star. A doorway in the sky. No wonder nothing ever came back.

  Carl activated a beacon on his suit, marking the location, then turned his gaze outward, to the landscape stretching beyond the impact zone.

  The world was wrong.

  Not hostile. Not immediately. Just… unfamiliar in a way that set his instincts humming. Strange structures dotted the horizon, half-formed silhouettes that looked grown rather than built. The sky shifted color slowly, there were hues of yellow and purple, like a bruise healing in reverse.

  Carl exhaled.

  “Well,” he said to no one,

  “that explains a lot. Nano, get some pictures for the file."

  He looked at the organic structures, then the probes, and finally the soldier.

  "Did you get them?"

  "Yes Carl."

  "Good, lets get out of here."

  He lifted off, thrusters humming as he ascended toward the rift.

  Royles needed to hear this.

  Royles was sitting in his car when Carl emerged from the warehouse. Carl slid into the passenger seat, he rummaged in his pocket and pulled the tags out.

  "I think you'll want these."

  Royles looked at them and slowly closed his hand over them.

  "Thank you."

  "I took pictures. The rift on the other side is a thousand feet in the air. Your man survived the fall but died of...I dont know, blood loss? Exposure? Its hard to tell, hes been there a long time."

  "At least we know now. Let's get back."

  He started the vehicle and they left, the ride back was quiet.

  Carl walked into his office, they had put a blanket and pillow on the couch for him. On the desk was a couple of pads of report forms And some pens. There was a computer and printer set up as well.

  "Nano, can you print the pictures you took? I'm going to get started on my report."

  "Of course Carl."

  A small blob of nanomaterial dropped from his arm and crawled up the printer cord and into the machine. Carl sat down and began to write down everything he had seen.

  When he was done, he leaned back in the squeaky office chair and looked at the little room. How strange it all was. One minute he's bounty hunting, a couple days later, he's filling out reports in an office on another world. He laughed, this was normal in his life. Oh well, if he can help them solve this, maybe he won't feel quite so guilty about the guy he threw into a roof. He got up, clicked the light off, and laid on the couch. He wasn't sure he'd be able to sleep, he had too many questions about this world. He adjusted the pillow and closed his eyes, he might as well try.