Technomancer (Unspeakable Things: Book One)

closed the cell phone and never heard if he liked the idea or not. I didn’t care. I only hesitated for one second further before I stepped into the rip. It was like cliff-diving—the best approach was not to think about the craziness of what you were doing. Once inside the blurred region of air, which hovered directly over Holly’s bed, I was able to keep moving forward. My shoes soon crunched on desert sand.
    The scene that appeared to me was both familiar and strange. As before, it greatly resembled the open desert ofsouthern Nevada, but without the structures of man. Instead, a building stood nearby built all of randomly stacked cubes. Windowless and opaque, the structure loomed perhaps a hundred feet high. Off to my left—possibly to the east, was another, much larger structure. That was the city I’d seen before. A stack of cubes so huge it matched the mountains in the region for size and height.
    None of that mattered to me, however, because Holly lay on the ground at my feet. She had been stripped to her skin, and all of her belongings were missing. Even her earrings had been ripped out. Both her earlobes trickled blood.
    I knelt beside her, cradled her head, and spoke to her, but I already knew the truth. There was more blood pooled under her body, caking up the sands. They had shot her through the heart several times.
    My eyes stung, but I couldn’t seem to shed a tear. I wasn’t just sad, I was angry, furious. Holly had shared the only life I knew and now she was dead, and I didn’t know the reason for it. What if there wasn’t a reason for it?
    “Why you and not me?” I asked no one.
    I gazed toward the cubical stack. They had to have gone there. It was less than a mile away. I didn’t see a vehicle, but there were footprints and a single, wide swath in the sand. The strange track led away from this place back toward the smaller pile of cubes. It looked like the sort of track a bulldozer would leave behind.
    I tried to think clearly, to plan my next move, but it was difficult. We hadn’t known one another long, but I definitely felt something for Holly.
    They’d stripped her, presumably to figure out whether any of her possessions were objects, and then shot her and dumped her here. They’d taken everything from her, looking for objects, but left mine alone. Why?
    For the first time, I wondered if my amnesia had been induced by trauma. Had I lost too many friends in just such a manner? Had it broken my mind and left me unable to recall any of it after the accident? I couldn’t be sure.
    I wanted revenge, of course. I burned for it. Not just for Holly, but for all the rest of them. For people I couldn’t remember and for those I didn’t know well. For future victims, of which I was sure there would be many.
    Did I have a chance, given the odds? No, but I stepped onto the path toward the cubes anyway.
    “Don’t do it, Draith,” called a familiar voice. “It’s not the right time.”
    I glanced back to see McKesson. He’d stepped through the rip and stood on the sands behind me.
    “That’s a murder victim,” I said. “You’re a detective. I could use your help.”
    For once, McKesson didn’t have his usual sarcastic swagger. “We can’t win,” he said. “Not here, not now. This is their territory. They outnumber us a billion to one.”
    McKesson knelt beside Holly, checking her pulse. His hand fell away.
    “A sad waste,” he said. “She’s the hooker who found you the night of the accident, right?”
    “Holly wasn’t a hooker,” I said angrily.
    “Yeah, OK. Be cool.”
    “Let’s do something about it,” I said. I lifted my .32 auto and looked at him seriously.
    “Two pistols against a building full of armed aliens?” he asked. “Like I said, I fight when the odds are in my favor, Draith. Come back home with me. This rip is going to fade soon.”
    “I’m not letting them get away with this.”
    McKesson suddenly grew angry. “All right, fine. Go on. March over there and die. They’re watching us right now, you know. They aren’t fools.”
    “They’d have shot us by now if they could.”
    “Maybe. Or maybe we’re part of their plan. They could have killed us by now.”
    “You don’t even care? You just cover their tracks and let more people die? Why not expose them, set up an army of cops to blow them away the next time they step through?”
    McKesson rubbed his face. “It might turn out that way, someday. I’m getting tired of these Gray Men, same