Infinite Horizons

As Grit and Kevin cautiously approached the front door of Elias Thorn’s penthouse in Paris, Cassia circled around the back. She was surprised to find that she trusted Grit to keep Kevin alive, and even more surprised to realize that she wanted Kevin to stay alive at all. She must be getting old and soft.

There was nothing at the back entrance beyond a trash bin. Still, Cassia sat in the shadows of the neighboring building to observe before entering. After a few still moments, she crept forward and jiggled the handle. The door was unlocked, which was not expected. Frowning, Cassia noticed that there were scratches on the handle that indicated the lock had been picked before. She slid the door open and darted inside, quietly closing it behind her. She could hear Grit clearing rooms at the front of the house, the plan being that his noise and weapon would chase any others inside the house straight back to her. Looking around the laundry area that she had entered, Cassia spotted a partial boot print in some dirt on the tile. She pulled her knife out of her belt as Grit continued to draw closer. He hadn’t sprung any hidden strangers and Cassia decided the house was probably empty.

“Clear!” Grit shouted down the hallway as he approached her room. She stood up and shouted back.

“Clear in here, too!” Then, looking suspiciously at the boot print once more, she joined the two men in the hallway.

“Ok, here’s the plan,” Cassia said. “We need whatever information we can find on The Singularity, in particular anything that indicates a home base of sorts.” Grit nodded his affirmation, and Kevin looked scared, like normal. Though perhaps not quite as scared as usual, Cassia noted.

“You two take the other rooms” she continued. “I’ll search that sitting room bookshelf again. I think there’s something more to that room than a trap door exit.” Grit nodded again, and he and Kevin moved off down a hallway. Cassia stepped into the sitting room they had been in the last time they were here and approached the wall to wall bookshelf. She stood to the side and pulled the off white colored book that Thorn had pulled. As before, the trap door slid silently open on the floor, before closing after a moment.

Cassia rolled her neck from side to side as she observed the bookcase. Suddenly, it jumped out at her. The same off white book appeared in four different places on the shelf. Excitedly, she crossed to the other side of the shelf and pulled the book that mirrored the first one. There was a small click, but nothing moved until Cassia pushed lightly on the shelf. The right third of the bookshelf swung backward on a hinge, revealing an office-like area behind.

The first thing she noticed was the ornate Victorian chair in the corner. Then she saw the strange map on the wall, or at least something similar to a map. It had stylized numbers in varying fonts, with little lights in the center of each number. The lights were various colors, and they would blink around the map erratically. She noticed that there were some numbers that occasionally had more than one colored light. Cassia shook her head and told herself to focus. She circled around the desk in the center of the room, but there was no computer on the desk. Nor were there any papers, or anything else that looked like it might have information she needed.

She sat down at the desk and a screen lit up in the center of it. The chair vibrated slightly, and the screen glowed red.

“Access denied,” said a quiet computerized voice. The screen on the desk disappeared. Cassia tapped the desk, then waved her hand over it. The screen appeared again, with the same result. She frowned at the uncooperative desk and its lockout mechanism. If Thorn had gone through the trouble of hiding this room, it surely held valuable information. She examined the room again, her eyes landing back on the strange map with blinking lights.

Suddenly, a realization struck her. The colors and numbers on the map could represent different Elias Thorn’s across the multiverse. The movement of the lights across the map could indicate the current location of each Thorn. Cassia stood up excitedly and approached the map, studying it closely. The light on number forty-one was out, and she was fairly certain that particular Thorn had been moved to a different universe. One number had two lights around it, each a different color. Was that the universe where The Singularity was gathering Thorn copies?

Grit and Kevin were approaching from the entrance hall. Cassia was about to call out to them when there was a small vibration through the room. Initially, she couldn’t place the source, until she noticed a faint glow surrounding the Victorian chair. A form rapidly took shape until a man was seated on the chair, hands gripping the armrests. The man blinked, then caught sight of Cassia and was instantly alarmed.

“What are you doing in here?” he demanded, standing up. “Where’s Fifty Three?” Cassia started to approach him, and he sat back down in the chair.

“Are you a Thorn as well?” she asked. The man looked even more startled. He shook his head and gripped the armrests again.

“She shouldn’t be here,” he said, seemingly to himself. “If Fifty Three and Forty One are both compromised, what does that mean for the rest of us!” His voice rose in panic at the end, and then the chair started glowing and vibrating again.

“Wait!” Cassia shouted, rushing towards it, but the man quickly began to fade from view. Thinking quickly, she darted around the desk back to the map. She was just in time to see a purple-ish light wink out by the number fifty-three. One second later the same colored light lit up within the number twenty-nine.

“That’s it!” Cassia said excitedly.

“You found something?” Grit’s growl of a voice made her jump, and she almost drew her knife before she realized it was him.

“I think I did,” she replied, gesturing for the two men to join her. Quickly, she explained the lights. Grit rubbed his stubbled chin.

“Those are good deductions,” he said. “This means we need to go there?” His large finger stabbed at the number seventy-one. Cassia was about to answer before Kevin broke in.

“That’s getting far away from Earth One,” he noted in a nervous voice. “Cassia, didn’t you tell us that getting far away could make…bad things happen to jumpers?”

“I said unpredictable things,” Cassia said, shrugging. “Besides, we don’t have much of a choice.” Grit nodded his agreement.

“We should check on Mel,” he growled. “If she’s well enough, we can jump right away.” Suddenly the entrance doors burst in for the second time in two days. This time the windows also exploded simultaneously. Through the doorway, Cassia could see men in uniform pouring into the sitting room. She cursed at her ignorance. She should’ve closed the door so the room was again hidden behind the bookshelves.

Fortunately, Grit was already moving. He slammed the door shut, but there didn’t seem to be any lock. They just had to hope that the correct book wasn’t found.

“Who are those guys?” Kevin asked, and Cassia shrugged.

“French police,” Grit grunted. “I caught DST. Similar to the American FBI.” He glanced sideways at Kevin.

“If you have that on your Earth,” he added. Kevin’s audible gulp answered that.

“We’re going to have to jump,” Cassia said.

“But Mel!” Kevin protested. Grit put a large hand on Kevin’s shoulder.

“She will be fine. We can return to her and the ship. This earth does not have widespread jumping knowledge.” Cassia was examining the chair in the corner.

“This must be a jumper,” she said, over the thumps coming from the room. The agents on the other side must be trying each book. She sat down in the chair, but nothing seemed to happen. Then she remembered what the other man had done, and she put her hands on the armrest. Instantly the chair began the same vibration she’d felt earlier.

“Touch the chair!” she shouted at the other two. Grit and Kevin scrambled around the desk to put a hand on the chair. Cassia couldn’t determine any way to choose a destination, so she just focused on an Earth that she knew well. The chair began to glow, and the setting around them quickly began to fade. Still, the jump was moving slower than she was used to. Just as the room fully faded from view, she saw the bookshelf door swing open.

The setting began to shift and Kevin almost squeezed his eyes shut. Before he could, though, he caught a glimpse of images flashing by. Each image was next to an entrance that looked to him like a tunnel leading in a different direction than the one they were in. The images were rushing by so rapidly, though, that they were hard to identify. He couldn’t tell if the rushing noise was real, or if he was imagining it. Suddenly, one image jumped out at him. A silhouette of a man in black, standing in front of a large black letter S. He wondered if that had anything to do with The Singularity, and almost instantly he realized he had veered from the main tunnel and shot straight through the image. There was a brief second of darkness, and then a new setting blinked into view.

He was sitting on a leather couch in a waiting room. There was a reception desk in front of him, but no one was sitting in the chair there. He glanced around. In fact, no one else was in the room at all. He groaned loudly.

“This is not good,” he said.

Cassia’s setting reappeared in a blink. It was different, of course, and she was now sitting on a beach chair in the sand. There was a large blue striped umbrella shading her, and she could see an ocean just down the shore. She heard a sharp intake of breath from Grit, who was standing behind her.

“Did we die?” he asked, and Cassia couldn’t help but laugh. She was shocked at the jump, as well, but she could see a structure of some sort off to the left.

“Not yet,” she said, as she stood up. “Wait a minute, where’s Kevin?” Grit looked surprised, then glanced around the beach. The beach rose behind them a few feet, but there was nowhere else he could’ve gone, especially not quick enough to avoid being seen.

“No idea,” he replied. “I don’t think he came through the jump with us.” Cassia stifled a sudden feeling of worry.

“Did the jump feel weird to you?” she asked Grit, who nodded.

“Yeah, it seemed slower somehow. And maybe like there were sort of…images flashing by. It felt like we were shooting down a tunnel, or a chute, or something.” He looked slightly embarrassed, but Cassia couldn’t tell if it was due to what he’d said, or that he’d spoken more words in one go than he usually did in an hour.

“I saw that,” she said, and he seemed relieved. “I wonder if Kevin ended up down a different chute?” Cassia shrugged, then pointed out the structure in the distance.

“I say we head that direction and find out where we are,” she said. “I think this might be the Earth I was aiming for, but I’ve never been to this part of it before.”

There was a sudden crash of glass, and both of them jumped around to face the rise in the sand. There was a rotund man at the top of the hill, a tray of broken glasses at his feet. He stared in fright at Grit’s pistol and Cassia’s knife.

“Oh dear me, you’re not a Thorn!” he exclaimed, in a surprisingly high pitched voice. “Something’s after us isn’t it?” Cassia doubted he heard the answer, because he immediately plopped face first into the sand. Grit looked at Cassia.

“Weak constitutions, these Thorns, huh?”