“And the box was empty.”
“Yep.” Amanda looks exhausted in the blue light. “Stepping into the box and taking the drug is like walking through a one-way door. There’s no coming back, and no one’s going to risk following us. We’re on our own here. So what do you want to do?”
“Like any good scientist, experiment. Try a door, see what happens.”
“And just to be clear, you have no idea what’s behind any of these doors?”
“None.”
I give Amanda a hand up. As I hoist the backpack onto my shoulders, I note the first mild twinge of thirst and wonder if she brought along any water.
We head down the corridor, and the truth is I’m hesitant to make a choice. If there is an endless possibility of doors, then from a statistical perspective, the choice itself means everything and nothing. Every choice is right. Every choice is wrong.
I finally stop and say, “This one?”
She shrugs. “Sure.”
Grasping the cold, metal handle, I ask, “We have the ampoules, right? Because that would be—”
“I checked the pack when we stopped a minute ago.”
I crank the lever down, hear the latch bolt slide, and pull back.
The door swings inward, clearing the frame.
She whispers, “What do you see out there?”
“Nothing yet. It’s too dark. Here, let me have that.” As I take the lantern from her, I notice that we’re standing in a single box again. “Look,” I say. “The corridor collapsed.”
“That surprises you?”
“Actually, it makes perfect sense. The environment outside the door is interacting with the interior of the box. It destabilized the quantum state.”
I turn back to the open door and hold the lantern out in front of me. All I can see is the ground directly ahead.
Cracked pavement.
Oil stains.
When I step down, glass crunches under my feet.
I help Amanda out, and as we venture the first few steps, the light diffuses, hits a concrete column.
A van.
A convertible.
A sedan.
It’s a parking garage.
We move up a slight incline with cars on either side of us, following the remnants of a white paint stripe that divides the left and right lanes.
The box is a ways behind us now and out of sight, tucked away in the pitch-black.
We pass a sign with an arrow pointing left beside the words—
EXIT TO STREET
Turning a corner, we begin to climb the next ramp.
All along the right side, chunks have fallen out of the ceiling and crushed the windshields, hoods, and roofs of the vehicles. The farther we go, the worse it gets, until we’re scrambling over concrete boulders and weaving around knifelike projections of rusted rebar.
Halfway up the next level, we’re stopped in our tracks by an impassable wall of debris.
“Maybe we should just go back,” I say.
“Look…” She grabs the lantern and I follow her over to a stairwell entry.
The door is cracked open, and Amanda forces it back the rest of the way.
Total darkness.
We ascend to the door at the top of the stairs.
It takes both of us to drag it open.
Wind blows through the lobby straight ahead.
There’s some semblance of ambient light coming through the empty steel frames of what used to be immense, two-story windows.
At first, I think it’s snow on the floor, but it isn’t cold.
I kneel, grasp a handful. It’s dry and a foot deep over the marble flooring. It slides through my fingers.
We trudge past a long reception desk with the name of a hotel still attached in artful block letters across the fa?ade.
At the entrance, we pass between a pair of giant planters holding trees withered down to gnarled branches and brittle leaf shards twittering in the breeze.
Amanda turns off the lantern.
We step through the glassless revolving doors.
Even though it isn’t nearly cold enough, it looks like a raging snowstorm outside.
I walk out into the street and stare up between the dark buildings at a sky tinged with the faintest suggestion of red. It glows the way a city does when the clouds are low and all the lights from the buildings are reflecting off the moisture in the sky.
But there are no lights.
Not a single one as far as I can see.
Though they fall like snow, in torrent-like curtains, the particles that strike my face carry no sting.
“It’s ash,” Amanda says.
A blizzard of ash.
Out here in the street, it’s knee-deep, and the air smells like a cold fireplace the morning after, before the ashes have been carried off.
A dead, burnt stench.
The ash is falling hard enough to obscure the upper stories of the skyscrapers, and there’s no sound but the wind blowing between the buildings and through the buildings and the whoosh of the ash as it piles into gray drifts against long-abandoned cars and buses.
I can’t believe what I’m seeing.
That I’m actually standing in a world that isn’t mine.