The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

Otherwise, think about it: you’d block the beam with your body before you could climb through the opening.”
    Travis wondered how much of the beam could be cut off before the opening failed. Keeping the menu in the light cone, he moved it slowly toward the couch. Toward the cylinder’s lens, and the narrow part of the beam.
    He watched the opening as he did it. Watched the rectangle of blocked-out light grow until it was well over half of the beam. Then three fourths. The opening showed no effect at all. It didn’t so much as flicker.
    It stayed that way until only a sliver of blue light reached the hole. Maybe five percent of the total. When Travis blocked it further, the opening vanished. At the same time the projected light on the leather menu began to flash symbols in the same text that was engraved on the cylinder. Maybe it said obstruction error. Maybe it said stop blocking the light, asshole. Travis pulled the menu out of the way and the opening immediately reappeared.
    He pressed his other hand to the menu. It felt as cool to the touch as when he’d picked it up. He held it close to his eyes and tilted it so that the gleam of sunlight showed him the surface in detail. It didn’t appear damaged.
    He went back to the opening. He still held the menu. He shared a look with Bethany: Here goes.
    He put the menu fully into the cone of light, and then he put half of it through the hole in the air.
    It met no resistance. The leading half of the menu simply went through, as if the opening were no more than a hole in a wall, with a darkened room on the far side. They could still see the entire menu. It was right there with them—even if part of it was also far, far away from them, in the night air of some rural place halfway around the world.
    Travis drew it back into the room and tossed it onto an armchair a few feet away.
    He turned back to Bethany. “Unless you know a place in D.C. to get lab mice, I’m out of things to try.”
    “I think we’re the lab mice at this point.”

Chapter Nine
    They closed all the drapes in the suite’s living room and shut the doors to the adjoining areas. The resulting near darkness allowed their eyes to adjust a little, but it made no difference as far as the opening was concerned. The place on the other side still looked pitch-black.
    Travis stepped into the projected beam of light and faced the hole directly. If the blue light had any effect where it shone on his back, he couldn’t feel it. Even the exposed skin on his neck and arms felt normal.
    Travis stood there a moment and let the wind rush over him. He closed his eyes. He listened. Behind him he could hear the ambience of D.C., even through the closed windows of the suite. The rumble of traffic. The beeping of some kind of construction vehicle on a build site. The drone of a propeller aircraft.
    But there were sounds coming from in front of him too, through the opening. Night sounds of insects and maybe frogs. They were very faint. He hadn’t noticed them earlier. He tried to isolate them now. The sounds seemed to come from only a few point sources, far away in the darkness. Which made sense. If it’d been a summer night on the other side, the chorus of insect song would’ve been overwhelming. Literally billions of tiny noisemakers within the nearest mile, any one of them loud enough to be heard at a distance. But the location on the other side of the opening—Canada or wherever it might be—was long past its local summer. The night air called to mind the trailing edge of the living season, when most things had already gone to ground or simply died off. Travis had the sense that he was listening to the region’s last few holdouts. A few nights from now, even those would probably be silenced, and there would be nothing but the dead quiet of the oncoming winter.
    Travis put his hand through the opening.
    In the corner of his eye he saw Bethany flinch a little, even though she’d expected the move.
    His hand felt fine.
    He lowered it to the bottom edge of the hole, but stopped just shy of touching it. He wondered what the margin was like. Was it a kind of blade-edge between the space on this side and the space on the other? If he ran his hand into it, would it pass right through, cutting his fingers off and dropping them away into the darkness over there? It seemed like Paige would’ve warned them about something like that, but she hadn’t had a lot of time to go into details.
    Travis was tempted to grab