“You have no idea. Even after we knew what it took, how much force and how long, none of us could get it to open again. It’s damn near impossible. And I opened it the first time without knowing. It was a one-in-a-hundred-thousand fluke.” Her expression changed. It took on the tired nervousness Travis had seen outside the door of his apartment building. “Which makes all of this my fault, if you think about it. The motorcade attack. Everything. If I hadn’t joined Tangent, none of this would be happening. This entity and its counterpart would’ve sat sealed on that shelf forever.”
Travis had been staring away at nothing while she spoke. He’d been thinking it was actually pretty damn unnerving that whoever built these entities put them in something so hard to open. He thought about childproof caps on bottles of chemical cleaners, and for a second he felt a chill because he could almost get a sense of their mindset, whoever they were on the other side of the Breach. These black cylinders might only be power tools to them, but they were dangerous as hell. Dangerous even to their makers.
Travis looked at the button labeled on. He glanced at Bethany and saw her looking down at it too.
The end of the cylinder with the inset lens was pointed outward, into the open space in front of the couch. That face of it cleared the cushion’s edge by an inch. There was nothing obstructing the lens.
“Let’s do it,” Travis said.
Bethany nodded. “Should we count to three?”
“No,” Travis said, and pushed the button.
Chapter Eight
What it did, it did instantly. Travis felt the button click under his fingertip and a cone of light shot from the lens at the end of the cylinder. The cone was long and narrow, fanning out maybe one foot in width for every five feet in length. It had a dark blue cast to it. Almost violet.
Ten feet out from the lens, the light cone simply terminated in midair, as if there were a projector screen there. What it projected in the air was a flat disc, two feet across, perfectly black. The disc was centered at about chest level, due to a slight upward tilt of the cylinder on the couch.
Travis stared at it.
He lost track of seconds.
In his peripheral vision he saw Bethany glance at him, but only briefly. Then her gaze went right back to the disc and stayed there.
More time passed.
Nothing about the disc changed.
Travis wasn’t sure what he expected to happen. Maybe the projection would show them something. A video recorded on the other side of the Breach. That fit the scale of something Paige might have been compelled to show the president. Though how it could’ve touched a nerve with him, Travis couldn’t guess.
He watched. Bethany watched.
Nothing happened.
The black disc just hovered there at the end of the projected beam.
It wasn’t reflective, Travis noticed. The way they were sitting, with large windows full of daylight spanning half the room, a reflective surface would have bounced nothing but glare at their eyes. A glass-screened television, positioned like the disc, would’ve been impossible to watch.
But the disc bounced nothing. It was no more reflective than cloth. And even cloth would’ve picked up plenty of the room’s light and appeared much brighter than true black. It would’ve looked gray, no matter how dark it was colored.
The disc was simply and purely black.
Only one explanation came to Travis’s mind.
“Holy shit,” Bethany said.
Travis turned and saw that she’d drawn the same conclusion he had, and at the same moment.
For a few seconds neither spoke.
Then Travis stood from the couch. The move was almost involuntary. The couch cushion responded to the sudden loss of his weight on it, and as it rose, some of its movement transferred to the middle cushion, where the cylinder rested. Travis saw the black disc—or what looked like a disc—bob up and down a few inches as the light cone shifted and settled. It happened again a second later when Bethany stood.
Travis moved forward. He gave the cone of light a wide berth as he went. He saw Bethany do the same on her side. Then she drew a sharp breath and stopped. Travis looked at her.
Her hair was moving in a steady breeze, though none of the windows in the suite were open. She turned her face directly into the slipstream of air, which was at least as strong as a current driven by a table fan. The wind appeared to be coming from the disc itself. But that wasn’t exactly true.
Because it wasn’t a disc.
It was an opening.
Travis felt the rational parts of his mind gradually coming back to life after their initial freeze—seeing the impossible could have that effect. Now as the seconds drew out he found himself trying to make sense of what he was looking at. Whatever sense could be made of it.
The projection was an opening. A hole in midair. Like a doorway between rooms. On this side was the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C. On the other side was—what, exactly?
The wind through the opening continued blowing Bethany’s hair around. It ruffled the fabric of her shirt. Her expression was nearly blank, as if she wasn’t sure yet what to feel. Travis imagined his own looked similar.
He took another step forward. It put him two feet away from the opening. He could reach it from here. Could reach through it, if he wanted to.