Below him, instead of a yard, a short escarpment of twisting grey rock sloped down to a sprawling valley. At the bottom of the valley there was a body of deep emerald water, white clouds of steam rising from the surface to hang against the cliff faces. There was no vegetation, no animals. Nothing moved except the coils of steam.

  Ethan stepped back from the window. He felt that choking sensation again, a tightness gripping his chest, spreading down his arms. His fingertips tingled.

  "Remember to breathe," Mina said from the kitchen.

  "You brought a player?" a male voice asked, angrily, from one of the doors, which was now open.

  "Oh, a guest, how lovely!" a woman's voice exclaimed.

  Ethan saw two people standing in the doorway. They appeared to be the same height, approximately. But something was wrong with the profile. His mind rejected the image as it had the view from the window. Then the two figures came towards him and Ethan's mind reeled.

  Not two figures. One. One body, one pair of legs, two arms...and two heads. The alien form strode forward into the living room where the otherworldly light exposed them in stark contrasts of lurid green.

  "I'm Kate Slater," the head on the left said, smiling. "This is Paul Slater. Say 'hello', Brother."

  "Hello, Brother," the head on the right said, rolling his eyes.

  Ethan's own eyes flicked to Mina, who sipped her coffee. Her eyes appeared to be smiling behind her mug.

  Ethan inched away from the two-headed body toward the front door.

  "He's leaving," the Paul head said. "Sister, I don't understand why you expect a different reaction. Really, will you ever learn?"

  "He's been through a lot," Mina said, putting her mug down.

  "You went off the grid for over six hours," Paul said testily. "We thought you were captured."

  Mina shrugged. "I ran into some...complications."

  The Paul head nodded toward the still inching Ethan. "And he's one of them, I suspect. Miss Mina, why do you insist on bringing in these strays. Really, you ought to know better."

  "He's sweet," Kate said. "Look at those puppy-dog eyes. He thinks he's walked onto a movie set."

  "I-I..." Ethan said, turning to Mina, "...need...to go… Now."

  "Go where?" Mina asked. "Your house is watched, you know that. Lock's got full access to the place. Here you're safe, for the moment."

  Ethan glanced back at the window and the utterly alien landscape beyond, the two-headed person, the exceptionally ugly shag carpet. It was all too much. His knees buckled.

  Then he was drifting.

  16

  "He's waking up."

  "Goody!"

  "Don't sound so bloody excited."

  "He's so dreamy, Brother."

  "Heaven help me."

  "What?"

  "Do I have to spell it out?"

  "Why do you have to be so negative?"

  "To counter your overly optimistic—and dare I say dangerously positive—attitude."

  "There's nothing dangerous about seeing the world in brighter hues, Brother. Try it."

  Ethan swallowed. His throat felt sore. He smelled smoke. Blinking his eyes, he saw two heads looking down at him.

  His stomach turned to ice.

  "Relax," the head on the right said. The female head. Kate.

  Ethan sat up. He was on the couch in the living room of the single-wide trailer. The lights were on. The shades were drawn. He glanced around but saw no sign of Mina Cross.

  "Are you..." Ethan began. His eyes flicked to the window again. He was grateful the blackout curtains had been drawn. But still, he remembered the view that was impossible.

  "Are we...what?" the right head demanded.

  Ethan nodded toward the window.

  The two heads turned, the single body twisting, to see what he meant. They both turned back to him and asked, "What?"

  Fumbling for the right words to the impossible question, Ethan muttered, "F-from out there."

  The Paul head frowned. The Kate head smiled.

  "We're from Colchester," Paul said.

  "England," Kate added.

  Ethan's eyes narrowed. He pointed to the window.

  "He thinks we're a bloody E.T.," Paul said, sounding exasperated.

  Kate chuckled. "My, aren't you cute."

  The Paul head shook in revulsion.

  "You're...?" Ethan croaked. "But I thought...outside... That's not here. I mean, that's not Earth."

  Paul said, "Well, his powers of observation seem to be in working order."

  "Don't mind my brother," Kate said cheerily. "He's just jealous."

  "Pah! Hardly," Paul said.

  "You hate me having a boyfriend," Kate said heatedly.

  "I do not!" Paul countered. "And you've never had a boyfriend for me to hate if I wanted to hate one in the first place, so there."

  "Because you won't let me!"

  Paul sneered. "Imagine having to sit there and listen to you drone on at some silly dolt about love and marriage and all that crock! Spare me!"

  "My only chance at happiness, and you sabotage it," Kate said dramatically.

  "And what exactly, Sister, am I supposed to do during your romantic interludes? Turn the other way? Read a book? This is my body too, you know."

  Kate huffed. "Your body? You're just a filthy minded old sod."

  "Oh, really?"

  "Admit it, you just can't help yourself, always fondling my breast."

  Paul's arm waved around as he said, "Because I am the only one of us who can feel it itching."

  "You're conjoined twins..." Ethan said suddenly.

  The two heads stopped bickering and two sets of eyes fixed on him.

  "But..." Ethan continued, frowning, "conjoined twins can't be different genders...you come from the same egg. How does that work?"

  "It doesn't," Paul said. "Therefore we must be some sinister race of two-headed alien hell-bent on Earth's destruction and the enslavement of all mankind." He turned to his sister. "Except we can never agree on the method of your enslavement, so your emancipation continues, for now."

  Kate's eyes narrowed. "Making us look bad is a full-time job with you, isn't it?"

  Ethan had the impression that if Kate had been a discrete individual—physically speaking—she would have stormed off at that point and left her brother with him. Instead she turned away from her sibling and put her hand on her hip.

  "We," Paul said, "are dizygotic twins that became conjoined during maturation within our mother's womb."

  "That must be rare," Ethan said, trying to regain some semblance of his wits.

  "Exceptionally," Paul said. "As in we're the only ones. And I assure you, any jokes about two heads being better than one or quips about being joined at the hip, and you'll incur my wrath, which is not inconsequential."

  Ethan tried to move his foot off the couch and onto the carpet. It felt stiff, sore. He realized his pants were missing.

  "We had to take care of your wound," Kate said quickly, shyly, smiling again now, as if the tiff with her conjoined brother had been deleted from her memory.

  Ethan grasped at the thin blanket that had been draped on him. He was still in his boxer-briefs, so that was something. Still, he felt naked and vulnerable in front of these people...this person. No, people; he had been right the first time. Two discrete entities that shared the same body. He looked down at his exposed leg and saw that it had been wrapped and bandaged.

  "No break," Paul said. "Nasty flesh wound, though. Bear traps? Who ever heard of such brutality. You yanks really do still live in the Wild West."

  "Not my idea," Ethan croaked. His throat felt patched. "Any chance I could get something to drink?"

  Paul grit his teeth. "We're not a bloody tea-service, and this isn't a bed and breakfast. The only reason you're here at all is because our benefactor hasn't the sense to control her urge to take in strays."

  "She took us in," Kate said.

  Paul sighed. "Quite. But we have our uses."

  "I can find some water," Ethan said. "But I need my pants back, please."

  Paul nodded at the couch. "They're laundered. Your shirt isn't, so you can wash that now."

  "Thanks," Ethan said, "but I wasn't planning on sticking around. Where's Agent Mina?"

  "Sleeping," Kate said. "You had a late night."

  Ethan nodded. "So am I free to leave?"

  "We can't keep you here against your will if that's what you mean," Paul said sharply. "And if you tell anyone about us, you'll never find us again. You pose no danger to us."

  Ethan thought that sounded a tad arrogant. Still, he didn't care. He needed to get away from this circus and figure out a way to get to Lock, wherever the bastard was hiding.

  "You won't find him," Kate said.

  Ethan frowned, a little unnerved he was so easy to read. "Why are you so sure?"

  "Because he's in a superpositional state," Paul said mildly.

  Scooting to the edge of the couch, Ethan reached for his folded pants. He slipped them on under the blanket and stood. "And that means what, exactly?"

  "That you won't find him," Kate said, smiling broadly.

  He found his belt on the arm of the couch, cinched and buckled it around his waist. "I see."

  "No, you don't," Paul insisted. "You saw out that window. There's a close-as-makes-no-difference infinite amount of locations in the universe, and any other universe that may or may not exist simultaneously with this one, and he can occupy any hyperspace at any time, of which access you have zero."

  Ethan shook his head.

  "He doesn't believe us," Kate said.

  "I have eyes, Sister."

  "Brother, can we keep him? Please?"

  At that moment, Mina Cross stepped out of one of the bedrooms. Her hair was tousled, eyes puffy. Still she had a glow of health and vitality about her that was hard to ignore. She wore a violet bathrobe that came down to mid thigh and slippers that matched.

  "Morning Miss Mina," Kate said cheerily.

  "God knows what it is," Mina said, "but it most certainly probably undoubtedly isn't morning."

  Ethan, who by this time was looking around for his shoes before remembering that they had been eaten by bear traps before being burned to oblivion, followed the woman into the kitchen. "I thought you were FBI."

  She barked a laugh. "Whatever gave you that idea?"

  "You did! 'Special Agent'?"

  "I'm very special."

  "Just not of the Federal Bureau kind?"

  "That I am not."

  Ethan shrugged. "So, then, what agency is this, if not some kind of damned circus?"

  Kate gasped.

  Paul chuckled darkly.

  Mina turned on him. "You'd better watch your mouth around here, kid," she said slowly. "My people are kind, but they will not put up with rudeness and incivility."

  Ethan felt his cheeks flush. He clenched his jaw and backed off. "I didn't mean anything by it," he said.

  "Course not," Paul said. "Not everyday you see a two-headed alien, is it, Sis?"

  "But we see one-headed aliens all the time," she said, laughing.

  Just then five men in uniforms Ethan didn't recognize, speaking a language that sounded European, marched out of the same bedroom Mina had emerged from only moments ago. They didn't so much as glance at the three—no, four Ethan realized—of them as they passed. They headed to the door, opened it. Ethan followed. He saw what looked like a cobble-stone street beyond the threshold. Several people on bicycles whizzed past. Then the door slammed shut.

  "What...the hell...was that?" Ethan asked.

  "Gendarmerie, by the looks," Paul said. "Probably on assignment in gay Paris! Oh, I envy them. Here we are, stuck in Jawbone, Middle America, of all places. Well, it's hardly the cultural capital of the West, is it?"

  Ethan continued to stare at the door for a moment before moving to the living room window. He opened the drapes and was confronted with the same green sky as before, but this time a large blue planet had risen above the horizon. "That's no France," Ethan said, breathless.

  "No, it's not," Mina said, fixing coffee in the kitchen.

  "So where are we?" Ethan asked.

  She shrugged. "Told ya, who knows?"

  Fifteen brown-skinned men in fatigues appeared from the bedroom and shuffled through the tiny kitchen. They carried rifles and AK-47s slung across their backs and hips.

  Ethan moved after them and peered out the door. There was jungle out there, he saw, and concrete slab housing with corrugated metal roofs and the sounds of tropical birds and insects.

  The door closed.

  "Coffee?" Mina asked.

  Ethan thumbed at the bedroom doors. "What's back there?"

  "My bedroom," Mina replied.

  Ethan limped to the bedroom door and peered inside. The room was square with a queen-size bed in the middle, a nightstand, a tiny vanity, a closet. The place was a mess. Clothes littered the bed, the floor, the nightstand. Shoes were piled all over.

  He leaned out and closed the door. When he turned around, Mina, Paul and Kate were staring at him.

  Ethan laughed thinly.

  "Remember to breathe," Mina said, sipping her coffee.

  A cold sweat prickled Ethan's brow, the nape of his neck, the small of his back. He had the sense now that he had fallen down a rabbit hole so immense that it was really a quantum singularity, one which had ejected him into a new universe, one that obeyed none of the laws he had taken for granted up until that point. Well, that was okay, wasn't it? He was a creator of worlds, after all, wasn't he? Sure he was. His imagination was vast, his creativity was a honed scalpel with which he regularly peeled back the skin of reality to expose the mystery of reality that lay beneath. And yet, really, when it came down to it, nothing he had created came close to the bizarreness of a single-wide trailer in Black Acres Estates.

  "Either this is one hell of an expensive candid camera or YouTube prank, or this is real," Ethan said.

  "Or you're dreaming," Kate said, unhelpfully. "Or mad!"

  Ethan shook his head. "No. If I were dreaming, I'd have woken up by now."

  "A coma, then?" Mina said.

  Ethan said, "This place, it occupies more than one area...of space-time, right? That's how this works."

  Mina shrugged. "Hell if I know. I just work here."

  Paul waved his arm. "This is an anti-room, a place that has been Pushed into a superpositional state. It has no real position in the universe until you look out the window."

  Ethan walked toward the living room window again. The green skies were whitening as the blue planet continued to rise, filling the horizon. "This only exists when I look at it."

  "No, silly," Kate said. "It always exists, somewhere."

  "We have no idea where," Paul said. "Somewhere in our universe, perhaps, or another. In our Milky Way, or a galaxy far, far away." He chuckled to himself while Kate rolled her eyes.

  "But the door..." Ethan said, moving again to the kitchen and grabbing the door handle. He opened it and found not the streets of Paris or a South American jungle, but the quiet morning streets of Black Acres Estates, dappled in early sunlight.

  He closed the door, opened it. The same view persisted.

  "A superposition is just that," Paul said, seeming to be something of an expert on the subject, "a position that is beyond a mere yes or no, a here or there, a one or a zero, a true or a false."

  Ethan came back to the kitchen where Mina pushed a hot mug into his hands. It smelled like caramel and walnuts. He sat down at the dinette and sipped the hot liquid, grateful to take the weight off his injured leg. The coffee burned his throat, but the sensation seemed to clear the dreck of smokey mucus that clung to his nasal membranes like soot in a flue. He coughed a few times, cleared his throat. Paul and Kate sat down opposite him.

  "This isn't a dream," Ethan said, almost like a mantra. "It's not a dream, because if it were, I'd wake up if I did this..."

  He stuck his index finger into the coffee up to the third knuckle.

  Kate gasped. The piping-hot liquid sent a shot of electricity up Ethan's arm and to his brain. Instinctively he pulled his finger out and waved it, grimacing.

  Paul said, "So, we've established you're not dead, not in a coma, not dreaming, and that hot things are hot."

  "This is nuts," Ethan hissed, rubbing his burned finger.

  "Anyone who thought otherwise would be nuts themselves," Paul said. "So we can rule out madness, too. What does that leave us with?"

  Ethan stared at the Formica dinette table top, which under the circumstances seemed the safest thing he could look at in the entire trailer.

  Mina handed Paul a cup of tea, to which he added two lumps of sugar from a small bowl. Kate received a tall glass of pulpless orange juice.

  "Who...were those people?" Ethan asked cautiously.

  Mina shrugged from her position standing at the end of the dinette. She didn't appear to want to sit with them. She cupped her hands around the mug as if drawing strength from the warmth it imbued.

  "What do you mean?" Ethan asked.

  "Just that," Paul said. "We haven't a clue who they were. Just that they occupied, for a brief time, the same space we do for the same time."

  "How is that possible?" Ethan demanded.

  "Oh, go on, Brother," Kate said, sipping her orange juice, "pretend you know how all this works. Make yourself look proper smart in front of our guest."

  "No one knows how this works," he said, "that's the bloody point."

  "They couldn't see us," Ethan said. "But we saw them."

  "Astute," Paul said, stirring his tea and adding a splash of milk from a creamer. His arm reached for a pencil while Kate's went for a small note pad. For a moment the body worked as a single unit. It was remarkable to watch.

  Paul took the notepad from his sister and pushed it toward the middle of the table. "You make children's games, don't you?" he said.

  Ethan, despite the circumstances, bristled at the description. "Actually, no. None of my electronic entertainment is for children."

  "Oh," Paul said. "Well, you do make video games, correct? That's what Mina told us, anyway. And that means you at least understand the concept of three-dimensional versus two-dimensional representations of a plane."

  Ethan sipped his coffee, glanced at Mina. He nodded. "Sure, yeah."

 

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