“Important ones often are,” Carrie said. “And I had the feeling that whoever they met with agreed to it. Peter seemed relieved when he got back. He called us all together and said the investigation was over—Tangent’s role in it was, anyway. He said what mattered most now was simply forgetting about it. Said the subject was taboo.” She shrugged. “That was it. As far as we knew, the whole thing was settled for good.”
Travis thought of Paige’s encounter with Peter in her memory. The man’s fear that she’d mentioned Scalar to someone outside Border Town. That she might have triggered some unthinkable chain of events simply by doing so. Peter had harbored those fears just five years ago—two decades after shutting down the investigation. Whatever Scalar had uncovered, Travis was pretty certain it wasn’t settled for good.
“What exactly are we saying?” Paige said. “The moment the Breach opened it gave Ruben Ward instructions to do something, right? Something on behalf of whoever’s on the other side. They wanted him to do it. And he did. Then years later, my father learned about it—learned enough anyway, by the end of Scalar, to know Ward’s actions had to be countered.” She paused, thinking. “It’s like Ward set something in motion, and my father stopped it. Halted it, at least, got a lid on it—and spent the rest of his life terrified that the lid would come off. That means whatever this thing was, whatever Ward did, there’s no question it was something bad. Something very bad, with long-term consequences.”
“That’s about the only way to read it,” Carrie said. The fear had risen in her voice again.
Paige looked at her, then at Travis. “So whoever they are on the other side of the Breach,” she said, “they’re . . . malignant. They’re flat-out bad. That’s what we’re saying.”
Travis glanced at her. Saw her expression drawn tight, her own fear unmistakable. And something else—almost a sense of betrayal. He understood why. For as long as he’d known her, Paige had been the closest thing Tangent had to an optimist. She harbored no illusions that those on the other side of the Breach were especially good—there was no basis for believing that—but she’d long held onto the idea that they were at least ambivalent. That they’d never meant for their dangerous technology to come spilling into human hands. That they probably didn’t even know about the accident that’d tapped into one of their transit tunnels. The Breach was dangerous, but only in the way that earthquakes and hurricanes were dangerous. There was no intent behind any of it. Whoever they were over there, they weren’t trying to do us harm. That belief had shored up Paige’s world for a long time. Probably since the first day she’d set foot in Border Town.
The betrayed look flickered through her eyes for maybe a second, and then it was gone, vastly eclipsed by the fear that came with it. Her breathing accelerated and shallowed. For a moment she seemed overwhelmed, unsure how to respond.
Travis felt it too. No doubt Peter had felt the same, by the time he’d finished speaking to Nora. By the time he’d grasped even the basics:
Ward had done something for them.
Something he’d needed to keep secret.
Something he’d killed himself over, after the fact.
Maybe Ward had followed the instructions against his will, his mind as fried by the Breach Voices as David Bryce’s had been.
Travis tried to imagine Peter’s mind-set on that first day, in the summer of 1981—knowing that Ruben Ward’s work from three years before must still be playing out. That somewhere out there, at that moment, the dominoes were falling. Scalar had been a mad scramble to understand. To find the dominoes and stop them before the last one tipped.
Peter had stopped them.
So why was someone trying to set them falling again? One way or another, the people who’d killed Garner and laid the trap in Ouray were working against the end result of Scalar. Someone behind it all, pulling the strings, wanted to overturn the outcome. In all likelihood they’d already begun to do so.
“Whatever Peter did was in all of our best interests,” Travis said. “Who could possibly have the motive to undo it?”
The words hung in the air. No one had an answer. Snowflakes swirled in the headlights like stars broken free of the sky.
“We need details,” Paige said. “We need to know who my father met with in 1987. We need to find one of them, preferably one who still has a copy of the cheat sheet locked away somewhere.”
“It’d be a tall order getting your eyes on that document,” Carrie said. “It’s right up there with finding the original Scalar notebook, which Ward probably burned in a vacant lot before he killed himself.”
At the edge of his vision Travis saw Paige turn to him. He looked at her and didn’t have to ask what she was thinking.
“The Tap,” she said.
“Nora,” Travis said.
Chapter Thirteen