She glanced at him. “You read about him your first day in Border Town, in the journal down on Level 51.”
It came back to him before she’d even finished speaking. In the first hour Travis had spent in Border Town, more than three years earlier, Paige had given him a tour of the essentials. Which was to say she’d shown him the Breach. But first she’d taken him into a fortified bunker down the hall from it, and let him read a bloodstained notebook that dated to the Breach’s creation—March 1978.
That journal had been written by a man named David Bryce, a physicist and a founder of the Very Large Ion Collider project, which had once—very briefly after its completion—resided on the premises. Bryce had decided to keep an informal account of events at the VLIC: a journal that he and others could write in whenever they felt like it. The first entry had been jotted a few hours before the collider’s maiden test shot; Bryce’s tone had been lighthearted and hopeful. The same couldn’t be said for the rest of the entries.
The remainder of the journal chronicled not only the hellish first days after the Breach’s formation, but Bryce’s own descent into something like an animal mind-set, his cognitive functions and his inhibitions stripped away by exposure to the Breach—specifically the sounds that issued from it. Breach Voices, as they were now known.
The journal had also mentioned Ruben Ward, the man who had actually thrown the switch to initiate the VLIC’s first shot. The man who, in the strictest sense, had opened the Breach.
Ward had paid instantly for the privilege. According to the journal, he’d collapsed at the moment of the shot—possibly jolted by the switch or its metal housing—and never woke during the days that followed. Travis had heard a bit more about him afterward: Ward had been transferred to some hospital out east, still unresponsive, and ended up in a coma unit. That was as much as Travis knew. In all the time since he’d first heard the story, he’d never brought it up again. Neither had anyone else.
“I was under the impression he died at Johns Hopkins,” Paige said, “a couple months after the VLIC accident. April or May of 1978.”
“That’s what we told people,” Carrie said. “People who joined Tangent later on, after Scalar had come and gone. Kept them from asking unwanted questions.”
“So where did he really die?” Paige said.
“In a hotel room in Los Angeles, late that summer. August 12. He walked out of the coma unit at Johns Hopkins by himself in the first week of May, vanished off the grid for three months, then checked into a room on Sunset and put a .38 in his mouth. At the time we all thought we understood, more or less. Whatever the VLIC accident did to him must have left him scrambled. Maybe deep depression, maybe anxiety. He struggled with it that summer and then called it good, we figured. It wasn’t until a few years later that we found out we were wrong. Very wrong. At which point Peter launched the Scalar investigation to try to piece together those missing three months. He was desperate to find out where Ward had gone during that time, and what he’d done—desperate to learn anything about him, really.”
“Why desperate?” Travis said.
Carrie met his eyes in the mirror. “Because Ruben Ward knew what’s on the other side of the Breach.”
Chapter Eleven
Travis felt a chill crawl over his scalp. It had nothing to do with the air pouring through the bullet hole in the roof.
“How is that possible?” Paige said. “How could anyone know that?”