“The explosion,” Nick said. He squeezed Josie’s hand.
“Project Raze had exhausted almost every possibility: vaccines with killed Nox cellular matter, toxoids, live viruses that were supposed to infect the Nox population, DNA and photon therapies, genetically engineered bacterial proteins. Nothing worked. The Nox themselves seemed immune to everything we threw at them.”
Tony leaned his arms against the table. It creaked in protest as it accepted his weight, which seemed so odd to Josie since his body appeared to have no depth.
“Then last year, we made a breakthrough. The reason we can’t affect the Nox? They don’t exist in this universe.”
Josie sat straight up. “What?”
Tony tilted his head to the side. “I thought you’d appreciate that. Just like you, they come from another place.”
“Is that why I can see them?” Josie said.
“Yes.”
Nick stared at her. “You can see them?”
“Er, kinda,” Josie said. “Just for like a second.”
“Like a flash? Tony asked. “As if the Nox were illuminated by a spotlight for an instant?”
Josie’s eyes grew wide. “Yeah. That’s exactly what they look like.”
“Interesting.” Tony paced back and forth. “We’d always believed that the Nox were accidentally brought to our world through some sort of dimensional portal,” Tony continued. “Which was only partially true. Their universe and our universe have somehow gotten stuck together, like two pages in a book. You’re supposed to flip them separately, but suddenly you’re going from page forty-eight to fifty-one.”
“Brane multiverses,” Josie breathed. “Just like Penelope suggested. That’s how the Nox are coming into my world. Instead of two pages stuck together, now it’s three. You’re turning from page forty-eight to fifty-three.”
“Smart girl.” Tony continued to pace aimlessly behind the table, his shadow eating the light as he moved from point to point.
“But why can’t we catch one?” Nick asked. “If they can attack us, kill us, feed on us, why can’t we do the same to them?”
Tony laughed. “Who says we can’t catch one?”
“But I thought . . . ,” Nick started.
“That’s what the government wants you to believe. The last thing they need is heavily armed lynch mobs tracking incredibly dangerous prey. They have government hit squads that are barely able to accomplish that. It would be a bloodbath if your average neighborhood watch tried to take matters into their own hands.”
“Why is it so difficult to catch them?” Josie asked.
“They exist in a complex quantum state, without a fixed superposition,” Tony said. “And they can shift between universes at will.” He turned to Josie. “I think that’s when when you can see them, in the instant that they phase shift, like they’re cycling through the dimension you belong to.”
“Wow,” Josie said. “That blows the rules of quantum properties out of the water.”
Nick shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“They’re like me,” Tony said simply. “I mean, I’m here and I’m not. You can feel me and hear me and smell me when I choose to shift my mass into this universe. But as you can tell, I’m not quite of this world anymore. And not of any other. I’m something in between, the glue that’s holding the pages of the book together.”
“So the Nox are the same?” Nick asked, rubbing the circulation back into his wrists.
“Yes,” Tony said. “They can shift their mass at will between our world and their own. And they’ve adapted to it relatively quickly, just like they adapted to a penchant for humans as dinner.”
“The space in the portal,” Josie said. She thought of the darkness that seemed to engulf her, the weight of an entire universe trying to squeeze the life out of her. She tugged on Nick’s hand. “Remember when you were checking out the portal that day you tried to kill me?”
Nick flinched. “I wasn’t going to kill you.”
“Whatever. But remember the inky blackness that oozed all around you when the portal started to close?”
“Exactly,” Tony said. “That’s exactly what I am.”
“What you are?” Josie asked. The viability of Tony’s experimental antidote being a way home was quickly diminishing.
“I am the stuff of the portal now.”
“How?”
“My first attempt at an injectable was an inoculation, designed for humans. Like the eventual formula, it was deuterium-rich, and the idea was to phase-shift humans ever so slightly so we could coexist in the same universe with the Nox without them even knowing we were there.
“The problem was that it was too dangerous to attempt a phase shift. I even injected myself with the antidote last year, in the hopes I could get the green light to attempt the experiment on myself, but I was shut down.”