“I don’t understand it either,” Travis said. “Is there a Breach entity that could account for it? Something that ties you into someone else’s senses for a little while?”
“I’ve never heard of one that could do that,” Paige said. “What are you thinking—that if something like that existed, someone could’ve used it on you? That someone wanted you to hear the combination?”
“I don’t know,” Travis said. “I don’t see how that would work, it’s just . . . it did work. Whatever it was, it worked. The door combination was right.”
“There are entities that interact with the brain across distances,” Bethany said. “Blue flares, for example.”
Paige nodded absently, but didn’t look swayed. Blue flares were a fairly common entity type; a couple hundred had emerged from the Breach since the beginning. As with nearly all entities, no one knew what their creators had used them for, but their defining characteristic was that you could make them heat up just by thinking about them—if you focused hard enough and consistently enough. In tests people had gotten them up to over eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit in less than a minute, from distances as great as one hundred feet, and with walls in the way. But heating up was all they did. They didn’t connect one person’s eyes and ears to someone else’s mind.
“If there were an entity like that,” Paige said, “how would someone outside Tangent have control of it? Why wouldn’t I have heard of it?”
Even as she asked the question, her expression changed. Travis saw her feeling the edges of the same possibility he’d begun to consider.
“Your father recruited a group of powerful people in 1987,” Travis said, “to act against what Ruben Ward set in motion. Would it be surprising to learn Peter supplied them with Breach technology, if he thought it would help them? Maybe even things he kept off the books in Border Town?”
Paige bit her lip. The idea didn’t sit well with her, but she couldn’t dismiss it either.
“I know I’m reaching,” Travis said. “I don’t know what else to do. I saw a five-digit number in a dream, and it opened a door in the real world. Something made that possible.”
Paige nodded, still looking uneasy. “I’m sure we’ll find out what it is. One way or another.”
For a while no one else spoke.
The vague thumps against the steel door had ceased.
Bethany frowned. “The dream itself—or whatever it was—doesn’t make sense to me. The old guy was asking what was behind the green door, but he already had the combination. Couldn’t he just come and see for himself? More to the point, wouldn’t he already know what was here? Wouldn’t these people know about the Stargazer? Holt sure as hell should know; he’s working with them—the ones who sent Ruben Ward here to create the damn thing.”
On that point Travis couldn’t even reach. She was exactly right: Holt should know. It made no sense at all for him and his associates to be out of the loop.
“So why didn’t they use the combo?” Paige said. “They had it, and it definitely works—we just proved that. Why not send these contractors in here hours ago to take a look around? They were two hundred yards away at the house. Or if Holt didn’t trust them enough, he could’ve come here himself. None of it adds up.”
Travis nodded slowly. More gaps in the puzzle. The whole middle of the image was nothing but a void.
Every instinct told him that was about to change.
He wasn’t half as sure they’d like what it changed to.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
They found a long switchplate on the wall, just visible in the gloom three feet from the door. Five switches, all down. Travis flipped them up one by one, and the chamber lit up in discrete zones until the whole thing was blazing.
It was bigger than he’d expected—a nearly perfect cube of space, forty feet in each dimension—but its size lost hold of his attention almost at once.
What grabbed it was the layout.