before with Shade. It had been her move. The assumption had been that the two guys, Malik and Armo, would share a room, but Shade had said, “I want you close so I can keep an eye on you.”
Awkward had not begun to cover Malik’s feelings. He’d thought of objecting but had not been able to come up with a good rationale. So he’d just nodded and excused himself to take a shower.
I was not hard to persuade.
Then Shade had joined Malik in the shower where they helped each other get very, very clean.
It was the closest Malik had come to being able to ignore the ongoing horror that was his true body now, and the loss of privacy and sanctity that twisted his mind. But even as they were making love, the Dark Watchers had been there, making Malik feel that in some way he was betraying Shade by exposing their intimacy to the voyeurs in the shadows.
Enough. Enough feeling bad. Time to do something.
“Okay, so something simple to start with,” Malik suggested to Francis. “The hallway is on the other side of this wall. Shall we?”
Malik squeezed her hand and smiled encouragingly at Francis, whose eyes became swirling rainbows of color, a rainbow that spread over her face.
There was a sudden feeling of the whole world tilting sideways, like Malik was looking at it through a prism. Colors shifted toward ultraviolet, and then the world seemed to unfold as if every object, the chairs, the bed, the walls, were origami. They unfolded and refolded into impossible shapes, nothing still, nothing permanent. He looked at Francis and saw not a girl but a silhouette of light containing rainbows.
Then he chanced to look down and saw his own feet and legs and nearly screamed, because the view was of the burned-down-to-the-bone legs that were his de-morphed reality.
He quickly looked away and ordered himself to stay calm, but by that point they were standing, still holding hands, in the hallway outside, and reality was reassuringly 3-D again.
“Wow.”
“Are you all right?” Francis asked anxiously.
“That is one serious roller coaster,” Malik said.
“Yeah. Totally freaked me out the first time.”
“I would imagine so,” Malik said dryly. “Are you up for another?”
Francis shrugged assent.
“Do you have any control over how fast we move?”
“I don’t know. You want me to go slow?”
“Try, yes,” Malik said. “How about we go from here down to the casino?”
They were still holding hands, and again the world tilted, shifted toward ultraviolet and came apart as if all of reality was no more substantial than tissue paper. This time Malik carefully avoided looking at his own body, and instead found himself in a slow-moving tornado of things almost impossible to recognize. Was that the floor unfolded? Was that what a bed looked like from extradimensional space? He saw water pipes with water running not through them but beside them. He saw what were surely fiber-optic data lines, but they were writhing blue serpents surrounded by a hurricane of colorful dots.
He passed humans, men, women, a child, the inhabitants of the rooms between the suite and the casino floor far below, though up, down, above, and below had a very different meaning here. He saw people as paper-thin faces glued onto an explosion of gray matter; he saw their intestines sluggishly pumping food; he saw them as arms and legs spread out into a kind of diagram, with bone exposed and muscles twitching unattached, and arteries with blood both inside . . . and somehow not.
With his free hand, Malik reached toward a shimmering light seemingly made up of discrete, sparkling bits like so many fireflies, but there was nothing to touch. He tried again, reaching his hand to touch a deconstructed wall, and saw his fingers trace lines in dust but unable to go deeper into what he could see so clearly.
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