Chapter 13

Just before the pod went into its landing pattern, Cleo felt something, and looked up.

A featherlight stroke of a finger over her heart. Familiar, somehow, like it belonged to a hand that had touched her before. But before she could parse it, before she could remember, the feeling was gone.

"Cleo?" Abe said softly, reaching over from the opposite seat to put a hand on her shoulder. "Are you—"

"Don't touch me, Abe," Cleo hissed, and folded back in on herself.

***

Here are some things they didn't tell us about Proxima B, because they couldn't have known from just the probes and the telescopes:

The terminator zone is really fucking cold. I mean, we knew that going in, but we didn't know. It's cold enough that the air burns going down. Cold enough to drive you a little crazy, if you're here long enough.

With the tidal locking giving you endless sunset and the tepid red dwarf star giving you endless winter, it starts to feel like time is meaningless and nothing matters. However, that's nothing compared to being trapped in a conterminous dimension, where time actually is meaningless. And I've managed not to become a supervillain, so what's Kris's excuse?

The Starshot probes found life, of course, but they couldn't have predicted how weird it would be. Like how the purple-gray flora that we might call lichen tends to grow in incomprehensible spiral formations that look almost intentional. How those little furry four-legged things that we might call moles turn out to have poisonous fangs and dead, black eyes. And those oddly circular tunnels? They lead down to the much warmer underground where many more things live. Some of them are less terrifying because they live in the warmth; some of them are more so because they live in the darkness. Whatever made the tunnels went extinct a long time ago. Probably. That's what you have to believe to live there.

(God, come on, Cleo. I hate waiting. I really do get bored easily.)

***

Later, Cleo would remember Ros handing her a thermoregulating face mask and a pair of heavy snow boots but not how she managed to put them on; she would remember Kaleisha flinging open the escape pod hatch but not where she'd found the pulse rifle she thrust upon Abe. Cleo only faintly registered the biting blast of wind that rushed in, and barely saw the landscape around them when she followed the other three out.

If she cared enough to look, though, Cleo would have seen the snow-streaked mountains reflecting the Technicolor sky, the red sun twinkling in the barren distance, the clouds catching shades of scarlet she'd never seen before. She would have seen Kaleisha and Ros and Abe staring, mouths open and heads swiveling hungrily, as they crunched through the snowbanks coating the valley the pod had landed in. She would have seen an alien world, for the first time, just like Billie had said—

Goddamnit, Billie—

But Cleo couldn't see anything except the memory of Billie, lit up every which color against the alien sky as she went to her death. So she stood numbly while the others stared, pain occasionally slashing across her head and her heart.

Abe's voice wobbled through the haze. "Kal, what—what's the plan?"

Kaleisha adjusted her pack on her shoulders. "I think," she said slowly, "we should focus on finding shelter and fuel for a fire. Then we can go from there."

"What about Halvorsen?" Ros's voice was quiet, as if saying the name would cause an avalanche.

"What about him, Ros? I don't think we're in any kind of state to take him—"

Lightning crashed across Cleo's mind, bending her double. Bone-deep weariness and cave walls glowing mossy blue; anger at yet another setback but not despair, never despair—

Cleo felt Kaleisha's hands on her back, at her temples. "See, Ros?" Kaleisha said. "We can't go after Halvorsen with Cleo like this."

"But he's making Cleo like this, don't you think we should—"

"Stop that," Cleo said through gritted teeth. She straightened up, blinking Halvorsen from her eyes. She was more awake now, to the world and to what she needed to do. "Stop talking about me like I'm not here."

"Sorry, love." Kaleisha rubbed circles between her shoulder blades. "I just don't think we should get any closer to Halvorsen, for your own—"

"I think I should." The other three looked at Cleo with that same corrosive pity, obvious even through their masks, that made her want to climb out of her skin. "I want to finish this."

Kaleisha rubbed her forehead wearily. "Okay, but let's think about this, because there has to be a way we can do it without putting you in any more danger—"

"What happened to flying by the seat of our pants, hmm? I'm the one who knows where he is. I'm going to lead the way."

"Or maybe you could tell Kaleisha where he is?" Abe looked Cleo in the eye tentatively. "And she could fold the three of us over there, and we could take care of Halvorsen, and you could stay here and be safe."

Cleo clenched her teeth against the anger that was either hers or Halvorsen's or both. "You gonna stop me from doing this too, Abe?"

Abe inhaled sharply, like Cleo had burned him. "Come on, Cleo, you know I didn't have a—"

"What I know is that you and Halvorsen are both the reason Billie's gone, and since I can't kick your ass—"

"Cleo." Kaleisha's hand tightened on her shoulder. Cleo tried to shrug it off, but she just squeezed harder. "Watch yourself. This is not his fault."

"What was I supposed to do, huh?" Abe spread his arms helplessly. "Let you stay there and die? So we'd have to lose you and Billie?"

"I could have done something," Cleo shouted. "I could have figured something out, you know I could've."

"What would you have done, Cleo?" Abe was close to tears, tears that reflected the shifting rainbow light as they threatened to spill over. "In the four minutes between when we left the flight deck and when the ship crashed, with Halvorsen messing with your head and Billie's, what would you have done?"

Cleo opened and closed her mouth. "Something. I could have tried."

"I wasn't gonna risk it—"

Cleo wrenched herself forward and shoved Abe in his down-covered chest with the hand that Kaleisha wasn't holding back. "It wasn't your risk to take!"

With a crack, Cleo and Abe were suddenly fifteen feet apart, both of them stumbling into the snow where the fold in space had dropped them. Between them, Kaleisha was panting, her arms spread, Ros standing frozen behind her. Kaleisha looked at Cleo, angry and scared and tired, her eyes wet.

"Cleo," she said, "you need to stop. I know how much you're hurting right now—"

"Like hell you—"

"We all lost Billie, Cleo!" Kaleisha shouted, and Cleo fell silent. "I know it's different for you, but we cared about her too."

"And lashing out at Abe won't fix anything," Ros piped up from over Kaleisha's shoulder.

"We all have to take care of each other." Kaleisha blinked hard. "Especially now. If I never get to see a flower again, you can bet your ass I'm going to do everything I can to take care of you people."

Abe made a quiet snuffling sound, and Cleo looked over in time to see his eyes crinkling at her, in spite of the tears finally falling down his mask and into the snow.

"Fuck," Cleo said, and she crossed the distance between them. She launched herself into a hug, and he caught her. "I'm sorry, Abe."

"I'm sorry too," Abe said, giving her a squeeze that lifted her feet off the ground. "You know that all I want is for you to be okay."

"I know," Cleo said in his ear.

Abe put her down gently. "Then tell me you're going to be okay."

"I'll work on it," Cleo said, "but you're gonna have to let me brain-blast Halvorsen into next Sunday. Because my seizures will keep coming, and none of us will be safe"—and Billie's death won't fucking mean anything—"until I deal with him."

Ros clapped a hand onto Cleo's shoulder. "Until we deal with him."

Kaleisha's eyes got smiley too. "Yeah, you're not getting rid of us that easy."

Abe wrapped them all up in a bear hug. "Can you find him without hurting yourself too badly, Clo?"

"I think so."

"Then what are you waiting for?" Kaleisha said. "Lead the way."

***

A shudder runs along the boundary, like a subway shaking the dust loose from under your feet. It's all I can do to hold on, and not get knocked back to my empty body in my empty room.

Kris.

He's still working, whatever the hell that means. Pounding on the doors of the Other Place with his messed-up mind powers. And it's clearly paying off—every second there are more places where the boundary is so thin that I worry I could punch right through. I can't, of course. But someone else could. Kris could, with Cleo's help.

I should reach out for her again. It's been too long, I think.

My feelers go out again, through the widening gaps in the honey-viscous membrane between the two universes. But then there's another quake, and I'm thrown, almost knocked off-kilter—

And I almost slip, then I do, then I'm tumbling through nothing and something's dragging me away from her—

And I'm on my back in my room, Neil's snarling face looming over me.

"What have you done?" the Other Place screams, forgetting that Neil's voice doesn't sound like the screeching of steel getting struck by lightning.

"I think you know," I say, and I reach out one last time, just for the space of a breath—come on, Cleo, follow the feeling of me—before they cut me off.

***

There it was again. That faintly swelling something in Cleo's chest that felt almost like happiness. Something like a hand in hers, pulling her forward, away from the cold and the grief and the near-certainty of death—

"I can go again."

"Are you sure, Cleo?" Ros put their hands out to catch her as she stood on wobbling legs, but she waved them away. The feeling had cut off sharply, gone as quickly as it had come, but she still felt the strength of it in her blood.

"I'm sure," she said, and shuffled through the snow to stand on the crest of the hill Kaleisha had folded them to. It was closer to the hot side of the planet, a few degrees warmer, the snowflakes bigger and softer. The escape pod was hundreds of miles behind them now, and Halvorsen still hundreds ahead, but Cleo could already feel him more clearly, sharper at the back of her throat, and she knew they were getting closer.

She reached for Halvorsen again, letting the burn overtake her for just a moment—it was getting easier, too easy, to fall into the inferno at the end of her mind—

That's right, Ms. McQueary, keep coming, and you'll see how much better it can be if we work together—

"That way," Cleo gasped, and pointed between two mountains in the distance.

Kaleisha nodded, taking Cleo's hand and waiting for Abe and Ros to link up too. "All secure?" she asked, and as soon as they nodded, space bent around them, mountains and snow and rainbows folding and flowing—

And with a thunderclap, it was over, and they were standing by a frozen lake. And Cleo's head hurt worse than ever, because it was the same lake she'd seen in her vision, and there, against the horizon, was that tall arrowhead of a mountain where Halvorsen was hiding himself.

"Okay, break time," Ros said firmly, pushing a groaning Cleo and a panting Kaleisha over to some rocks they could sit on. While they both ripped their masks off and ate a small pile of the nutrition bars Ros had pilfered from the other survival packs in the pod, Kaleisha eyed Cleo piercingly.

"Are you good?"

"Sure." Cleo's head was between her knees, so she knew she didn't look particularly convincing. "Peachy."

"Somehow, I'm having a hard time believing that."

"Alright, Kal, no, I am extremely not good." Cleo straightened up, and Kaleisha's face wavered hazily red and gold before coming into focus. "Probably never been worse, actually."

Kaleisha took Cleo's gloved hands in her own and started rubbing them, so they could both get the feeling back. "I guess a better question would be: Are you going to be able to keep going?"

Cleo looked past her, toward Proxima Centauri casting long red shadows over the lake.

("I guess I was looking forward to the perpetual sunset."

"How romantic.")

She pressed her eyes shut. "Big question, Kal."

Kaleisha squeezed her hands. "You know, once we take care of Halvorsen, we can figure out how to get back into the Other Place. Then you could—"

Cleo groaned and let her head fall forward into Kaleisha's lap. "Let me stop you right there."

"Why?" Kaleisha extracted a hand to brush the hair out of Cleo's face. "What are you scared of?"

Of a Billie that doesn't know me.

"I just don't want to think about that right now," Cleo said into their joined hands.

Kaleisha kept stroking her curls, slow and soft. "Okay."

Of a different Billie, changed by the Other Place, or just not quite my Billie, because maybe she never was.

"Kal." Cleo's voice was so small, she was surprised it wasn't carried away on the freezing wind. "I'm such an idiot."

"Babe, no, not at all—"

"I just—" Good thing her face was hidden in Kaleisha's coat, because Cleo was dangerously close to crying. "It was never going to be okay, the thing with Billie, and I knew that, because it was a fluke, but I wanted so badly—"

Of losing her all over again because God, Kal, it wasn't real—

"Hey." Kaleisha pulled Cleo up by the coat and looked her right in the eye, deeper and clearer that she had ever looked at her before, maybe. "Nothing about the two of you was a fluke. You loved her, and she loved you back. That was real, okay?" Cleo nodded, but Kaleisha pressed on. "Billie is still out there, inthe Other Place, and she's the exact same person who you fell in love with. She loved you once, and she can love you again."

"It just feels like it was an accident. Like an experiment I'm not going to be able to replicate." Cleo looked up at the stars that peeked hazily through the darkest parts of the sky, wondering which one was the Sun, wondering whether anyone had ever given names to these slightly askew constellations.

"Yeah, yeah, your mom left and your dad checked out and it convinced you that love can't be safe and reliable," Kaleisha said, with so much tenderness behind the sarcasm that Cleo couldn't even think about sticking her tongue out at her. "Are you going to believe that forever? After everything we've been through?"

Cleo's lip trembled, and she let it. "I feel like the answer you're fishing for is no."

"Of course not, dummy. Give love a little more credit. Give Billie a little more credit. Love—real, honest love—is safe, and it is reliable, and you're so fucking lovable that there's no way Billie won't really, honestly love you. I love you. We all love you—not because you lucked into it, and not because you ply us with jokes to keep us happy, and not because you've managed to hide your true, unlovable nature or whatever. You care so much, and you want so badly for things to be good. You help me believe that things can be good, even when the plan's gone to shit and I don't know how. I love you so much, babe. Here at, like, the end of all things, especially."

Cleo pressed her face back into Kaleisha's coat and let the tears fall. "Fuck, Kal."

Kaleisha squeezed her tight. "It's gonna be okay."

Cleo swallowed. Nodded. Breathed until the tears dried up.

"I can go again," she said, and her voice was bigger this time.

Ros and Abe looked over from their rock, Abe's mouth still stuffed with protein bar. "Are you sure?" Ros asked.

"I'm sure."

***

"We told you, you cannot leave."

Before, I might have laughed in their face just to piss them off, but now I just state the facts plainly. "I wasn't trying to. Just trying to show Cleo how to bust us out."

The Other Place snarls. "Did you not listen when we told you that doing so would destroy everything?"

"Agree to disagree."

They sit back on Neil's heels, then, with a lost look in their eyes. "Captain Lucas, our plan is well on its way. You must let us see it through."

I scramble to my feet. "What are you talking about?"

"Cleo McQueary and her companions are at Halvorsen's doorstep. They will reach him any moment now."

"No." I try to see back into the universe, try to see what could have gone so horribly wrong since the last time I checked. I can only get flashes—Cleo crying, the Providence burning through the multicolor atmosphere of Proxima B—before the Other Place cuts me off again. "You have to let me—"

"We do not have to do anything except wait. Do you not understand? To do otherwise would mean the end of us all."

I grit my teeth, ready to fight or run or dive back into the boundary. "You can't let them die fixing your mess for you."

The Other Place rises to Neil's feet, radiating power and terror, panic twitching that muscle in Neil's jaw. "You misunderstand the situation again, Lucas."

"No, I understand perfectly." I clench my fists. Elijah's not here, this time, to hold me back. "You just don't want to admit that you fucked up. That you can see everything and do anything, and you're still losing control."

"Do you forget so easily how this all began?" Electricity crackles through Neil's eyes and the air around me. All the breath leaves my body. "We did not create this conflict. You did. You creatures, who destroyed your own world in your never-ending quest for profit and progress, who could not devise any solution but seeking out new worlds to conquer, who would have drained us of everything we have if we had not stopped you—what makes you think that you know any better than us? How are we to know that you are capable of anything but devastation?"

All the breath leaves my body, because they're right. They're so right. And at last, I really do understand. Appeal to love, Eli said. Doubt thou the stars.

"I'm sorry," I say, sucking in a shaking breath. "I know how it feels to lose your home."

The static around me relaxes a bit. The Other Place eyes me warily.

"We were stupid," I continue. "I was stupid, and Halvorsen was stupid, and every human that ever came before us was stupid. We're stupid, shortsighted creatures, and I used to think that I could somehow cure myself of it if I just didn't let myself feel anything, and look how that turned out." I think of Eli, of Neil. Of Cleo. "I don't know if you have a concept of love. You must be feeling something like it, to care this much about saving your home and all your... selves."

"Self." Neil's face grows thoughtful. "Selves. Is there a difference?"

I nod, frantically latching on to this scrap of understanding. "For us, there is. But love is the feeling you get when two separate selves get less... you know, separate."

I suck at this. Eli should be here. I scrub a hand against the furrows in my brow and keep going anyway.

"It's like—it's like when someone else's needs become just as important to you as your own. When that other person becomes more important than your fear, or your anger, or your selfishness. And the thing is, I think love is the antidote to everything you've described: our greedy, universe-conquering impulses, and our worst, most self-serving behaviors, and absolutely everything that Kris has going on. He forgot that the worst atrocities happen when you're only thinking of yourself. He forgot that progress is worse than nothing without love.

"For a while, I thought that love made you stupid. But now, I see that it's entirely the opposite. I'm in love, and I've never felt less stupid. I think I need to follow that feeling. And I hope you'll let me, if only because love is the opposite of destruction."

The Other Place blinks Neil's eyes at me. "What is your love telling you?"

"That Cleo can save us all. Including you."

"Do you really believe that she could release you without allowing Halvorsen to destroy the boundary?"

"Yes." My hands relax. "I think she and her friends can do anything."

The Other Place looks out the window, at those infinite fields that must mean something to them, even if they look like nothing to me. "Then you may do what you will. But we will be watching."

***

Cleo knew when they reached the cave. Not because she recognized it immediately—it looked too much like every other eerily round tunnel mouth they'd passed—but because the crackling interference in her head disappeared. The others noticed it too, even, because her spine uncurved, her jaw unclenched, and her whole body unwound for the first time in weeks.

"Cleo?" Ros said.

"He's here." Cleo could feel it, even without the constant burning assault on her mind. "I guess he's letting us approach peacefully, or something."

"Yikes." Kaleisha shook the snow out of her locs and squared her shoulders. "I guess we always knew a surprise attack was out of the question. So we're gonna go in slowly, and Cleo, let us know if you sense any shift in Halvorsen's vibe."

Cleo nodded. She got three nods back, and they started moving.

It was all the same as in her vision—the monstrous mouth of the tunnel, the slow warming of the walls that let them lower their thermoregulating masks, the gradual replacement of the rainbow-red light from outside with the cool pulsing of the mosses. Kaleisha, Ros, and Abe all gasped at it, just like Cleo had the first time. She would have told them to be quiet, if she thought it mattered. If she hadn't been distracted by something, something that wasn't the same, that she hadn't felt when she'd been here as a specter—

"Don't touch it, Abe!" Ros whispered, pulling Abe's hand back from a patch of moss. "Not without..." They trailed off and drew closer, the tip of their freckled nose reflecting the thumping blue-green glow. "Kal, do you think it's a fungus? The stem structure looks more bryophytic to me, but there's no way they photosynthesize, not all the way down here—"

"Can we focus up, please?" Kaleisha whispered, cringing like the effort of not inspecting the alien moss was physically paining her. "We are, tragically, in crisis mode at the moment."

"Sorry—"

Kaleisha stopped walking. "Cleo?"

Because Cleo was standing with her hand on the wall, possibly pathogenic bioluminescent mosses be damned, with her eyes closed and all her senses reaching for the gold-dark vibrations she could feel just under the surface—

"It's the Other Place," she whispered. Because even though it was just a faint scent in the air, instead of a sea flooding her lungs like it had been when she wimped Elijah, it was unmistakable: the jangling weirdness, the upside-down light, the quarks in everything spinning just a little bit wrong. "It's—I don't know, it's like it's closer here, somehow. Like it'd be easier to break through."

"Easier," Ros murmured, their eyes going wide. "Like the last time I went in."

Cleo frowned, trying to dig deeper, trying to find the source. "Almost like—like the boundary is—"

Have you figured it out yet, Ms. McQueary? Can you feel what we could do together?

"Fuck!" Cleo yelled, even though the pain from Halvorsen's intrusion dissipated quickly. The other three rushed over to her, concerned for all the wrong reasons, and she waved them off to keep marching down the tunnel. "Come on, guys. I think I know what that bastard wanted the engine for."

The passage grew wider and wider as they walked until eventually, finally, it opened up into a massive cavern. Cleo could barely make out the ceiling, but the floor and the colossal stalagmites rising up out of it were so covered in the glowing moss that she had no trouble making out the slightly stooped figure standing in the middle of it all.

Kaleisha shoved past Cleo. Cleo could feel the space-collapsing power building between her friend's fingers.

"Hands up," Kaleisha called into the echoing cavern. "Now."

The figure just laughed jovially and stepped closer, and as he did Cleo felt that same clattering chaos, that same discordant brokenness that she'd felt every time Halvorsen invaded her mind—it wasn't just in his head, it was in his skin, his heart, his whole body, veins of white-hot shrieking agony just barely held together by rage and resolve—

"Ms. McQueary," Halvorsen said. "And friends, of course. How nice of you to finally join me."