Nash and Greg returned to the control room just in time to see it all unravel. The frail PA system failed to do the sound justice, as Zol’s deafening cry rang forth from the precipice of another world. Kory, who reclined on a table with a box fan pointed at her head, shot bolt upright at once. She switched off the fan and motioned for Greg and Nash to keep silent. Beyond the safety of their glass wall, a massive display of electric force like they’d never seen before sprang to life, until it threatened to set the whole sky on fire. Even more terrifying than the scope of it was the intangible aspect. The light of his power faltered, like a child playing with a light switch. They all saw it.

  One final bloodcurdling screech resounded from the tangle of flickering beams, with a voice not fully Zol’s. On the last piercing note of the refrain all the light ceased. Any power that might have blunted his descent vanished, rendering his landing less graceful than Kory’s. He lay there in the dust; pelted as if he were at the end of a driving range.

  “You shouldn’t have let him do that,” Kory spoke in a low, anxious voice, her eyes wide, but steady. Greg gave her a nervous, almost guilty look, then ran from the room without a word to scramble into the hole once more.

  Nash came to a startling realization of her own. “He’s probably fried now…” she said.

  “Who?” Kory asked, shifting to the edge of the table. Her jumpsuit was unzipped to the waist and dragged behind her. The black tank she wore underneath left plenty of real estate open for the chill of fear.

  “Sohrab!” she cried, turning to her friend. “He was down there, on the side of the pit when you went up. I told him to leave with me, but he didn’t listen, so now he could only be –”

  “Here. He came in just a few minutes after I did. After that, I don’t know…” Kory twirled her finger broadly in the air to indicate the foul spirit might haunt any corner of the building.

  “That’s good,” Nash breathed a partial sigh of relief. “Now hang tight a minute, I’m going down there.”

  Before Kory could speak a word of protest at being relegated to the tower, Nash was gone. She shoved herself off of the table and darted to the window, desperate for a glimpse of what transpired below. In the intervening moment, goosebumps appeared on her bare shoulders and the hair on the back of her neck rose on instinct. She kept her eyes forward, aware of who watched her from a balcony in the back of the room, but unwilling to give him the acknowledgement she knew he craved.

  He knew she resisted him automatically, but decided her permission to speak wasn’t needed. “She’ll ask you to go again, to dig deeper, no matter what he says he saw out there. Are you prepared to answer when that moment comes?”

  Kory pressed the tips of her fingers hard into the glass, wishing it were paper she could rip through. “Sometimes, I wish you’d just shut up,” she growled.

  “Don’t we all?” He mocked from the catwalk, trailing a finger over the railing as he went along. “I’ve thought as much before, but I’m sure you can’t imagine how exhausting it is to be me…”

  “I’m sure I can’t, but this isn’t about you!” She reared her head around and snarled at him, raising her voice across the vastness of the room to ensure he heard her. “And it’s not about me either. Don’t you see this is bigger than all of us?”

  “I’m sure some part of you believes that, just as some part of me envies you for that which allows you to…” he sneered, leaning over the barrier once more. “Oh, to become unknowable, to have no desire to be perceived at all. To be you must be bliss.”

  “You call this bliss!?” Kory shouted, shooting one arm back towards the window at the chaotic scene unfolding without.

  “Seems you have your answer,” he smirked, disappearing into another corridor as quickly as he’d appeared.

  It was easier to tell herself she hated him than that he might have a point. As the heat rushed back to Kory’s face, an unwelcome sting built behind her eyes. She steeled herself against the feeling and clenched her hands into fists. Just then, a sudden crash sent her spinning around yet again towards the door opening at the center of the glass. Her attention diverted to the calamitous arrival of the remaining three.

  Nash levitated into the room, suspending Greg by the scruff of his neck like a housecat who’d been told one too many times to get off of the counter. She dropped him to his feet as they exchanged an unintelligible flurry of commands, questions, and scientific jargon. Zol was there too, still held aloft by the force of her power, barely coherent, and struggling to focus. Nash laid him gently on a worktable. The lower halves of his legs dangled off and one arm as well, but it would have to do.

  “Golf balls! Literal golf balls! Can you believe it? Last time it was what – beans and specks, but this is, just… I mean has anyone seen it freshly made before!?” Greg flustered, excitedly offloading hastily gathered samples from his coat pockets.

  “Nobody ever knew where it came from,” Nash spoke wistfully, her eyes misty and full of the wonder of implication as she tended to Zol.

  “What happened?” Kory exclaimed.

  “You’re not going to believe this…” Greg started, turning to Nash to let her have the triumph of explaining it.

  With a gleam in her eye, she summoned a wet rag through the air from a sink on the edge of the room. “Our hypothesis is true! It just appears right there! I don’t know where from, but it’s –” she pressed the cool cloth passively to Zol’s brow. The jolt of it shook him to sense at last.

  “– the city…”

  “Zol, what are you talking about –”

  “It’s out there. It’s dead and it’s out there!” he shot up at once and grabbed Nash by the shoulders, burying his heavy hands in the flesh of her limbs. He was dripping with sweat and trembling, his face twisted into an unworldly expression of fury and fear. “It’s dead! And we’ll all be dead too, just like them! We can’t go back there, destruction is coming, we can’t go back!”

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  “Who’s dead!?” Kory shouted, realizing too late the gravity of her error.

  Zol’s hands fell from Nash, and his face went pale as he turned to Kory. “They kicked me out for a reason,” he warned. “It’s you they want.”

  #

  “How much of that did you get?” Nash asked Sohrab as they both stood over the unconscious figure of Zol. He laid peacefully in his bed, having been given something ‘for his nerves’ shortly after the outburst. She still felt the force of his grasp as he lay limp before her.

  “Pitifully little,” the psychic replied, “What bits I could make out, or can even now, are clouded by the limits of his own understanding. I’m afraid he’s processing this ‘vision’ on no higher level than a poor tortured animal.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Nash stroked her chin thoughtfully. “Because what we found down there could change everything, you see that right?”

  “Of course I see that,” he sighed, unsure of how to proceed but charging forward all the same. “There’s no road we can take that isn’t rough.”

  “Speak clearly,” she said.

  “What few images I’ve gleaned from him resonate with me. Perhaps he peeled back the veil, in a sense, decoding some aspect of existence that remains unseen to us. It’s what I’ve searched for… and still do; not for just my own meaning, but for the meaning of it all.”

  “Do you need a better mind to read?” She said bluntly.

  “Perhaps one more…” he stalled, averting his gaze towards the door. “…attuned.”

  “Conditioned.”

  “Yes, but…” he ran a hand through his heavy hair, then turned his eyes to hers with a look that almost mirrored sadness. “These experiments will harm them. Are you prepared to sacrifice their wellbeing?”

  “I’m prepared to sacrifice anything.”

  #

  They reconvened later that night, contemplating, figuring, and scheming as they were wont to do. The testing of number three was postponed to the next day; a decision announced by Nash just after putting Zol to bed. He’d woken up a few hours later, angry, and unsure of where he was. Kory went in to calm him down, and after convincing him to eat a bowl of heavily medicated food, he drifted off to sleep once more. She returned from his room with the half-consumed dish and flung it into the trash, unaware it ever contained anything stronger than a little extra muscle relaxer.

  At a table on the distant edge of the space, she saw the wheels turn. Nash, Greg, and Sohrab whispered amongst themselves, illuminated by a single light, drinks and plans laid before them. They ceased as she approached, as if they were the deer and she were the truck.

  “That was a metal bowl you just threw out,” Nash scolded as Kory sat across from her. “We could have used that again.”

  “Dig it back out if you like it so much,” Kory scoffed, scraping the wobbly legs of the ancient stool across the tile as she took the remaining seat at the table.

  “Never mind the bowl, we’ve got some things to discuss.” Nash refilled her glass of wine and slid the bottle over to Kory.

  “Discuss… like, you all talk while I listen?” Kory looked Nash square in the eye, gripped the bottle, and poured the contents deliberately onto the floor.

  “Don’t do that!” Greg fretted as he took the wine from her and set it back on the table. “That’s good stuff you’re wasting!”

  “You liked the beach and the pretty blue glass! Ron Drangus doesn’t make good wine!” Kory called over her shoulder as he shuffled off to search for a towel.

  “Maybe he doesn’t,” Nash conceded as she sniffed her glass dismissively.

  “Wasting time with that stuff, where’s your sense of efficiency?” Sohrab said, cracking the seal on a new bottle of the spirit that haunted him.

  “I’m sure you need every drop, must be hard to be you,” Kory jabbed. At their feet, Greg sopped up the wine spill with an old rag, muttering to himself all the while.

  “What is it with you tonight?” Nash half-interrogated, half-whined.

  “The same thing I said down in those tunnels under Innovar just before your little boyfriend popped up, you brought us, or at least me, here to die!” Is what Kory would have said if she wanted to start a real fight, but she didn’t have the heart. Instead, she mustered up: “That stuff we’re testing isn’t safe, or else Zol wouldn’t be in such bad shape.” She shot Sohrab a preemptive glance, knowing he’d caught the prologue left unsaid. “And before you say one more thing, he’s stronger than me. I know it, you know it, everybody knows it. So, who’s to say whatever affected him out there won’t hit me harder?”

  By then Greg had rejoined them in a huff, relegating the wine-soaked rag to a nearby table. Sohrab looked to the Iolite in that calculating way, as if to say the audience was here whether they’d rehearsed or not. Nash went stone-faced for a moment, choosing her next words with care. At once she imagined what sort of trap Kory must have been caught in when she first approached the table. With caution, she raised her eyes to meet her friend’s. “You’re right, everybody knows it. The upper limit of his power is higher than yours, and like most men he can hit harder…”

  “Sure,” Kory said.

  “…and lift more,” Nash went on.

  “Yeah.”

  “And I’m sure he’s faster.”

  “Okay, and?” Kory scrunched her face up into a snotty expression, while motioning for her to get on with it.

  “But he’s missing a key aspect that may be more valuable than any physical show of strength…” Nash’s voice softened.

  “You’ve never called me smart once. Why start now?” Kory mocked, crossing her arms over her chest as she rocked back and forth on the stool’s uneven legs.

  “And that’s the thing…” a familiar old sense of wonder crept into Nash’s voice, as if she were selling something to the most sentimental customer. “…it goes so far beyond conventional understanding…” she trailed off into a misty-eyed, diatribe about ability and destiny, half-plagiarized from her own longings.

  Kory imagined she’d heard it all before. The words fell to the floor as quickly as they were spoken, replaced by a peaceful haze that seemed to wash over her from some plane of emotion yet undisclosed. Something about the feeling reminded her vaguely of the singular time in her childhood she’d been sick, when coolness had seeped into her scorching delirium with whispers of a future not yet realized. Whether or not she believed the message, she believed the sensation it was packaged in, and so she shook herself sleepily of the delusion and gave her answer at last. “Nash, it’s okay. You know I’m going to do it, right?”

  “You will?” Her friend asked hopefully.

  “Number three, first thing tomorrow.” Kory laughed, nearly falling forward onto the table. A spontaneous cheer rang forth from the group. She felt Greg’s heavy hand on her left shoulder and Sohrab’s cold one on her right.

  Nash leant forward and gripped Kory on the back of the head, pulling her close. “You better be serious,” she charged, grinning severely.

  “Deadly,” she joked, offering up a confidence that wasn’t hers to give.

  “Marvelous!” Greg exclaimed, pouring himself what little remained in the pretty blue glass of the insufficient bottle. “Shall we toast… to progress of course?”

  “I’m still not having that Drangus,” Kory remarked, to riotous laughter.