Hero (Gone 9)

When he looked up and held his gaze steady, he found he could look through every floor above and see blue sky through a shifting forest of objects that obeyed none of the rules of three-dimensional euclidean geometry.

It was disorienting in the extreme, making his stomach churn and his balance fail. He stumbled, tried to stop himself, but fell through a wall and a floor and almost lost his grip on Francis’s hand before he stopped falling for reasons he could not even guess at.

And then, all at once, they were on the casino floor in reassuring 3-D space being stared at, openmouthed, by a blackjack dealer who had just dropped a stack of chips on the floor upon seeing them materialize out of nothing.

“Sorry, we didn’t mean to scare you,” Francis said to the dealer.

“That was amazing,” Malik said. “Incredible! I don’t even . . .” He was breathless with excitement. He’d always liked his physics classes, and this was a wild master class in n-dimensional space, except that this wasn’t a dry discussion of theory. He’d done in reality what in theory was impossible. He had passed through a dimension beyond normal 3-D space. He was a 3-D creature, with 3-D eyes and a 3-D brain, trying to make sense of his world as seen from a very different perspective.

“Amazing,” Malik whispered again. “I . . . I mean . . . wow. Wow.” He felt as if he’d just glimpsed the world like God—if such a creature existed—might see it. No other human being in the history of the world, aside from Francis, had seen what he’d just experienced.

“Yeah. Weird.” Francis did not share Malik’s pleasure; it was all just disorienting and unpleasant to her.

“Let’s go back up. But even slower if you can.”

Once more, with Francis’s small hand held firmly in his, the world unfolded, opened up. Straight lines became curves, curves became curlicues, inside was out, and it was all madness, complete, swirling, colorful, impossible madness. Malik laughed in pure joy, his laughter a paisley fog in the air around him. He reminded himself sternly that he wasn’t an extradimensional tourist: he was searching for answers. Searching for a way out.

Searching . . . for them.

He closed his eyes, trying to regain some sense of perspective, but it was no good: eyelids were just so 3-D. He focused his mind and “listened” for the Dark Watchers. They’d been there with him night and day since he’d been burned beyond saving. But now?

Where are you, my dark, invisible friends?

He could not feel them, which was a wonderful relief, but not the point. If he could not sense them, how could he find them?

The world around him was made entirely of bits and pieces: gypsum board walls, lumber, structural steel, the fabric of carpets, wires buzzing with electricity, which he saw as a pulsing green glow. Mixed in like croutons in a salad were humans, bulging water balloons of guts and muscle and blood that, when looked at from a certain angle, exploded outward in a disturbing vivisection, like something out of a Guillermo del Toro movie, strange and unsettling—and the more strange and unsettling for being recognizable.

But none of this was what he was looking for. He needed to look past all the debris. He needed, he told himself, to look in a different direction. But how was he to find that different direction, the direction where the Dark Watchers lurked?

He turned his head this way and that, and caught a glimpse of something. Not light—light was everywhere, seeming to shine right through everything in every direction but one, and in that one direction he saw a hole no bigger than a grapefruit. Inside that hole was not the black of total darkness, but something he could not describe, because inside that hole was nothingness, a pale gray, flat nothingness without surface or depth or feature.

“I want to go there,” Malik said, and watched his technicolor words wrap themselves around the splayed gray mass that was Francis’s brain. He saw the intricate muscles of her eyes contract and turn her gaze in the direction he’d indicated.

Francis moved toward the hole. If she was using her feet, Malik never saw them move. She just seemed to glide, smooth and slow, drawing him along, like he was Wendy to her Peter Pan.

Suddenly Malik felt an electric jolt, not painful, but alarming. And there! There he felt the presence of the Dark Watchers!

From the nothing hole something emerged, something like an amoeba, but too big, and when he stared at it he did not see inside, did not see organs or viscera, just more of the same bland, featureless gray that shaped the rhythmically pulsating mass.

It’s digital, not physical. Or whatever passes for digital in this universe.

The amoeba went straight for him, and all at once it had wrapped itself around his head, fast as a bullwhip. He cried out and tried to take hold of the thing, but his hands . . .

He had let go of Francis’s hand!

He clawed frantically at the amoeba, but his hands would not touch it and just passed through with no resistance. He might as well have been batting at the air.

He twisted frantically, fear swelling inside him. He turned away from the nothing hole, and instantly the amoeba was gone.

Some kind of defense mechanism.

He tested his theory by looking back at the hole, and sure enough, the featureless amoeba went for him again.

He reversed direction, lost the amoeba, and called out in paisley swirls, “Francis! Francis!”

But his words did not reveal her. No answer came.

And now Malik was getting good and scared. Because the power to move between dimensions was Francis’s, not his.