Technomancer (Unspeakable Things: Book One)

strange. The twisting air around me was hot. It felt like my body was charged with static—as though a rainstorm were blowing up and filling the air with electricity. McKesson was close behind me. He’d followed me to the very border of the anomaly.
    “What do you care where I go?” I asked.
    “It could be seen as a breach.”
    “Unwritten rules again?” I asked. “They seem to break them at will.”
    “Our side does too, but I don’t.”
    I took a step away from him, and he reached for me. His hand grabbed up a wad of my sweatshirt. In his other hand I saw something that looked like a black, wriggling fish. I figured it was his gun. It was like being at the bottom of a swimming pool and looking up at someone standing on the edge. His image wavered and distorted even at this close range. I could see him, but his face was twisted and almost unrecognizable. His voice was reaching my ears with much less distortion, however. Sights were more disrupted than sounds.
    I can be impulsive at times. It’s a personality flaw to which I freely admit, something I figure must have gotten me into a lot of trouble in my hazy past. I also don’t like being grabbed. I didn’t reach for his gun, or my own. I didn’t want to give him a good excuse to shoot me. Instead, I pulled his hand off my shoulder with both of mine.
    “Get off me,” I said.
    McKesson was much too slow to catch on. As I held his wrist, I pulled off his watch and tossed it into the rip.
    When he realized what I’d done, I thought he really was going to shoot me. He did a very good impression of rage. There was a lot of cursing. The gun was in my face, close enough to make out the black circle of the muzzle despite the blurring.
    “Settle down,” I said. “All we have to do is step inside, grab it, and bring it back.”
    “It doesn’t always work that way, moron,” he said. “I said I was going to blow you away if you didn’t listen. If I do it now and push your sorry sack into this echo, no one will ever know. Do you realize that? There won’t even be any blood.”
    “If you come with me instead, we’ll get the watch back together,” I offered.
    McKesson hesitated, and then serenaded me with a fresh stream of curses. I peered ahead into the rip. Was the unstable opening getting smaller? It seemed that way to me. I wondered what would happen if this rip between existences closed while I stood halfway in and out of it. I knew it couldn’t be anything good.
    “Are we going to go get your watch, or not?” I asked. “I think the echo is getting smaller.”
    Instead of answering, he shoved me through ahead of him, with his gun pressed against the back of my head.

I stood in the open desert, with mountains in most directions, stark and timeless. The apartment complex was gone. The alley was gone. Las Vegas was gone. I was surrounded by sifting sands, spiny trees, flowering weeds, and other desert vegetation. I held my breath for a second, worried the air here might be different. But the temperature of the night, the look of the sky—it all seemed normal enough.
    Then I looked up. The night was falling, darkening the east. The first stars were popping out—but they were
wrong
. I knew that, without picking any particular constellations. That gave me a chill, but it was the red disk on the eastern horizon that really upset me. It was a moon, but not our moon. It was a small, reddish circle of light. It was as if Mars were hanging up there in the east. And that wasn’t all, because the moon wasn’t alone. It had a nearby companion: a thin crescent of bone-white.
    “We’re lucky,” McKesson said. “The rip is still here on this side.”
    “Isn’t it always?” I asked, staring fixedly at the moons. I’d spotted another moon. It was high and small to the north. I couldn’t even be sure it was a moon. It could have been a companion planet or star. Whatever it was, it was clear proof I wasn’t in Nevada anymore.
    “No,” McKesson said. “Sometimes these rips are one-way.”
    I spun around slowly, trying to take in the entire alien sky. Up until this point, I hadn’t really believed there was another place behind these distortions—that I could step through a shimmering rip in space and instantly be someplace else.
    “Seen enough?” asked McKesson. He was walking across the sands and kicking at a tumbleweed. “Did you throw the watch this far out?”
    “I’m not sure,” I said, not even looking at him. I was too busy staring