“How good are you with that thing?” Donati asked, eyeing the stick into which the whip had receded.
“I guess we’re about to find out,” Raiff said, his whip flashing to life again.
*
“You must believe me, Alex,” the ash man continued, as a hot, static-riddled wave blew out from the entrance of the accelerator, like a wind-powered magnet drawing them toward it. “These aren’t your people, that isn’t even your name. Come with me now, so I may show you the way, the truth. Come with me to the other side, millions of light-years from here where your true destiny awaits.”
The ash man said something else, but Sam didn’t hear him. She looked at his spectral image superimposed against the particle accelerator tunnel behind him, began to consider the incredible amount of energy it would take to fold space over to create a pathway between these two worlds.
Positive energy.
That took her to the projection of the ash man, transmitted almost surely by some sort of electromagnetic energy. And yet Alex had cut that transmission in half, implying the projection must be some hybrid or held together in all likelihood by an excess of electrons.
Negative energy.
The ash man was talking again, Alex still listening, when Sam crept closer to him.
“What causes a spark?” she said softly, hoping he recalled the lesson of their last tutoring session.
Alex cocked his gaze toward her.
“What causes a spark?” Sam repeated.
His eyes widened, realizing what she was getting at, what happened when positive and negative charges collided.
“I’m offering you a chance,” the ash man was saying, “I’m offering you the future.”
“Here’s your future, asshole.”
And with that Alex was in motion. To Sam he looked just as he did on the football field, barreling forward to take down a ball carrier. Only this time it was the ash man he barreled into, slipping partially through his spectral image on contact even as the image was driven backward.
Straight for the entrance to the particle accelerator.
The ash man seemed to float through the air, slipping through the entrance, where his form stretched out to the length of the ceiling, elongated, as if it were made of rubber. Then Sam watched a shower of lightning bolt–like sparks erupt, firing and dancing everywhere, seeming to both strike and emanate from him at the same time.
“Noooooooooooooo!” the ash man wailed.
And then he was gone.
What causes a spark? Sam thought, recalling her lesson with Alex about just this time yesterday in the hospital. A collision of positive and negative energy.
“Come on!” Alex said and tugged her away from the scene unfolding before them, back toward the spiral stairwell that had brought them down here.
Sam rushed toward it with him, aware of the sparks both increasing and thickening, hopefully doing their part to short-out the entire mechanics of the wormhole itself. She ducked into the spiraling stairwell with Alex, felt it starting to spin wildly around them as the glass and steel forming the particle accelerator began to rupture and crack near its entrance and then along its endless reach, faster than her eye could process.
Along with the ash man himself, his image looking like crack lines spreading across fine porcelain.
“Alex!” he screamed. “Allllllexxxxxxxxxx…”
His voice crackling in the last moment before the accelerator exploded silently in a final gush of blinding white light and the stairwell sucked them back upward.
*
Alex gazed about him. He felt exactly as he had the moment before, but this moment found him outside in another place and time entirely: standing with his parents in San Francisco’s Chinatown, celebrating the largest Chinese New Year festival outside of China itself. People packed both sides of a street cluttered with an endless display of colorful floats and displays crawling along.
It had always been one of his parents’ favorite days of the year, the one that still brought a connection to their homeland. But this was different than a dream, since Alex was well aware he couldn’t possibly be here. This was just a transitory illusion of some kind triggered by a boyhood memory.
Except when he looked down he found himself still wearing the jeans, shirt, and sneakers he’d changed into back at his house.
What’s happening?
Alex had no idea, except that it felt real. Like some cosmic trick the wormhole’s destruction was playing on the whole space-time continuum. Like he was in some kind of an alternate reality, where he might be able to remain if he chose. Turn his back on all of it, make believe none of it had ever happened. His parents would be alive again and he with them. Who could blame him?