Chapter 2 — The Glitch

Nobody asked Eevi what happened during the twenty-three minutes.

This was, Eevi thought, one of the things about the House of Confidence that she'd never been able to explain to anyone outside it: they waited. Not because they didn't want to know. She could feel the wanting, the careful holding-back. But because they'd learned, or decided, or simply come to understand somewhere along the way, that some things needed to be offered before they could be asked for.

She sat in the upper branches after breakfast with her feet hanging and her jacket drying in the slow warmth of the late morning, and she thought about the twenty-three minutes.

The burgers were still warm when she arrived. Which meant the time had passed somewhere that wasn't here.

She heard footsteps on the branch below — recognizable before she looked, because Marcus had a way of climbing that wasn't quite careful and wasn't quite careless, somewhere in the middle.

He sat on the branch below hers. They were quiet for a while, which was also a Marcus thing — the man could fill a silence without a word.

"The jump takes something out of you," he said. Eventually.

"Yeah." She looked at her hands. They were steady. They looked the same as they'd looked this morning. She knew they wouldn't feel the same until tomorrow, minimum. "We still don't know how it works."

"We'll figure it out."

"Roger that, captain." She saluted with nothing, because the bag was downstairs.

He was quiet again for a moment. Then: "The shoulder was acting up this morning. Nothing serious."

She looked down at him. He wasn't looking at her. He was looking out at the grove.

"You climbed a Klak tree on it," she said.

"The grip is the left arm mostly."

"Marcus."

"It's fine."

It wasn't fine and they both knew it, and both of them were going to leave it there for now, which was a form of agreement. She leaned back against the bark. Above her, the Klak leaves moved in the breeze that came through the grove around mid-morning, steady and soft, carrying the smell of the soil and the bark and somewhere under that, the plateau beyond.

"Test the jump again," he said.

She looked at him.

"Small distance. I'll come with you."

She'd done accompanied jumps three times. Each one had gone — differently. The displacement affected other bodies unpredictably. Sam had reported nausea. Akio had reported nothing because Akio reported nothing, which itself was a report. Marcus had said "interesting" and meant it.

"Short," she said.

"Your call."

She stood on the branch. "Keep your feet together when we land."

She took his arm.

Everything went dark for half a second that felt considerably longer, the way it always did — not the comfortable dark of sleep but the dark of being between where you were and where you're going, the dark that has a direction to it.

Then they were in the living room of Big T.

Marcus looked around. The mv3s in the corner. The flatscreen they'd spent ten months of workshop wages on. The light through the Klak leaves hitting the windows from a different angle than it hit them outside, filtered twice over.

He exhaled slowly.

"We have the goods," he said. Not calling out, just saying it, to the room.

From somewhere below, the kitchen: the sound of a nose working overtime. Then footsteps on the staircase, the particular rhythm of someone ascending two at a time, and then Akio in the doorway with his long curls falling across his forehead and his eyes doing a rapid inventory of — nothing. No bags.

"I smell something," he said. "Something spicy."

"Naka," Amy said from the other doorway, leaning against the frame with the ease of someone who had been standing there for a while, "you really know your stuff."

She looked at Eevi's jacket. The soil on the boot. The slight stillness in how she was sitting, the careful way she'd taken the chair rather than the couch.

"Chrys is in the lab," she said. Not a question.

"Was asleep a few hours ago," Akio said, blowing the curls out of his face. "Maybe still."

Amy nodded. She already knew. She'd felt the absence of his footsteps on the stairs around three in the morning, which was how she tracked where he was when he didn't track himself. She'd been awake at three. She was often awake at three.

Eevi watched Amy's face while she watched Akio's face while Akio watched the doorway that the food had not come through.

"He's in the lab," Amy said. "He has something to show everyone."

"Then we go," Marcus said.

"After breakfast," Eevi said.

Akio turned to her with an expression of profound relief. "After breakfast," he agreed.

They went down to the kitchen. The burgers were bear, which meant from the place behind the mountains, which meant Eevi had gone across the mountain this morning. The distance was the distance. Nobody said anything about it.

The kitchen smelled like warming food and the oil Sienna put in the pan for the eggs, which was a specific kind of oil that she'd brought from somewhere and never told them where. The twins set the table without being asked, which they did every morning, which was one of those small facts about people that you stop noticing until the day it doesn't happen.

"Tell me something," Akio said, pulling a chair out with his foot.

"Something," Sam said.

"Something useful."

"I'm going to reorganize the training schedule this week."

"Useful to me."

"That's useful to everyone."

"Tell me something useful to me."

"Your grip is wrong on the downswing," she said. "I've been watching it for a month."

Akio thought about this while eating. He chewed slowly. "I appreciate you sitting on that for a month," he said.

"I was waiting for the right moment."

"And this is the right moment."

"There was food," she said. "You can't be upset when there's food."

He looked down at his plate. "That's a reasonable policy," he said.

Eevi ate quietly. The food was warm and specific — it had the taste of the place behind the mountains, which was different from anywhere else, the particular combination of spices they used that she'd tried to describe once and failed, which had led to a fifteen-minute conversation about whether some tastes were fundamentally non-transferable into words. Chrys had said yes, definitely. Sam had said that was a convenient excuse to avoid trying.

She ate. The twenty-three minutes sat somewhere at the back of her awareness, not demanding anything. Just there, the way a sound is there when you've learned to stop reacting to it.

She'd figure out what it was later. For now, there was breakfast, and below them, in the lab underground, Chrys was awake and waiting to show them something.

For now, that was enough.