A World Too Near Read Free Page A

come apart with shock. “Hey, don’t worry,” he told her. “They make these trains real strong.”
    Emily’s mouth crumpled, but she held on to her dignity.
    At Quinn’s feet, the locomotive lay, still humming with power. He shut down the system with a signal of his data rings, the ones he’d forgotten he wore, that could have avoided this accident if he’d been paying attention.
    Mateo ran over to survey the damage. “Boy, did you screw up,” he told his sister. “You broke it.”
    Quinn snorted. “Hey, a simple crash like this? Hell no. We’ll just pick it up, okay?”
    She nodded, sniffing back tears. “We’ll fix it?”
    He paused, thinking of a small alien girl who had recently been sure he was a man who could fix things. The day, already rainy, seemed darker for a moment. There were things he’d done on his mission for Minerva Company that haunted him.
    “Sure, we’ll fix it. But later.” He stood up, needing some fresh air, even if it was sodden with cold spring fog. “Get your coats, guys.”
    “It’s raining,” Mateo said.
    “You bet. That’s why the coats.” Quinn led the way, stopping Emily on the porch to redo the mismatched buttoning of her yellow jacket.
    Outside, the rain had upgraded into a wet fog, with the sky brightening to a lighter shade of gray.
    Not like the bright . The bright sky of the Entire. The place that, after only a few weeks’ absence, had begun to pull on him like a force of gravity. When he went back, he would be not a sojourner, but a strike force. Fire, oh fire , the navitar had said on that impossible river of the Entire. And, Johanna is at the center of it. In two utterances predicting that the Tarig would burn this universe, and that Johanna would warn him of it. Before she died.
    “Uncle Titus?” Emily gazed at him. He was still holding on to her yellow jacket.
    How could they burn a universe—collapse it in an instant? There was a way, the physics team said, and it elegantly bypassed speed-of-light issues and all the other objections. A quantum transition. If the universe, our universe, was not at the lowest-energy state possible, it could make an instantaneous quantum leap, turning matter—all matter, everywhere—into hot plasma. This was just one theory of a dozen or so that attempted to explain what Johanna said the Tarig knew how to do. And were starting to do, at Ahnenhoon.
    “Uncle Titus?” Emily repeated, trying to pull away.
    He released her. “Stay close so I can see you, okay?”
    She ran off down the strand toward her waiting brother.
    When he was around Emily and Mateo, the Tarig seemed remote, hardly credible. Even after years in their presence, he still knew little of them. Where did the Tarig come from, really, beyond the legends they fostered? Were there limits to their powers? How did they manipulate matter and energy as they did? They hoarded much, and even those sentients who knew them well were not privy to essential Tarig secrets.
    He watched Emily in the hillocky sand, her small legs pounding, hands held out for balance. His daughter had loved the ocean. Did Sydney miss it where she was? She would be grown up now, and beyond sand pails and shell collections. Perhaps beyond him as well, although that did not bear long thought. He lengthened his stride to keep the kids in view. As they raced down the beach, Quinn ran too, into the stinging air, icy with moisture.
    Out of a curl of fog a figure appeared, near the dunes. It startled him. The whole beach hereabouts was his. Others were not welcome.
    The figure stood on the beach, dressed in a parka and what looked like suit pants and city shoes.
    “Who the hell are you?” Quinn said. The stranger remained silent.
    “Kids! Over here now. I want you over here.” Quinn walked up to the intruder. “So who the hell are you?”
    The man sported a day’s growth of beard and piercing blue eyes—but watery, as though unused to salt air. The breeze rustled graying hair. He made no move