The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

place.” His hands had become fists in his lap. He looked down, noticed, and slowly relaxed them. “To hell with all of them,” he said. “It is going to happen. For better or worse.”
    Paige seemed to react to Garner’s final sentence. She turned to Travis, her expression haunted by a fear she didn’t need to voice.

Chapter Forty-Six
    Travis took the elevator up to the surface and went running in the desert. The night was cool for early June, the breeze coming in from the Rockies fifty miles away. It was close to midnight, and the stars stood out in vivid contrast on the black sky.
    He ran six miles in a loop and then slowed to a walk one mile shy of the elevator housing. He was barely winded. Not bad for forty-eight.
    He’d covered half the remaining distance back when he stopped altogether. He turned to face north and tilted his head up and found the familiar shape of Cygnus, the swan, seemingly frozen in its slow rotation around the pole star. His eyes went automatically to the faint speck—nearly invisible to naked eyes—of 61 Cygni.
    He stared at it until long after his neck had begun to cramp.
    The bedroom was pitch-black except for the soft blue light from the nightstand clock. It showed 3:06 A.M. Travis lay on his side, his chest against Paige’s back. They were both staring at the digital display.
    It switched to 3:07.
    “Twelve hours,” Paige whispered.
    Travis heard the edge of fear she couldn’t quite hide. He held her tighter and kissed the top of her head.
    “Save tomorrow for tomorrow,” he said.
    “This is tomorrow.”
    He insisted on being alone in front of the Breach when it happened. There was no reason to expect any danger to bystanders, but no reason not to expect it either.
    There was no formality to the event. No grand send-off before Travis stepped into the elevator to head for B51. The group that gathered to see him go consisted of Paige, Bethany, and Garner. They stood together in the corridor on B18, not far from the residence Travis and Paige had moved into when the complex re-opened. To a passerby—of which there weren’t many in Border Town these days—it would’ve looked like four friends standing there talking.
    All three hugged Travis—Paige last, and longest. He held on to her and tried to think of nothing but what she felt like. He shut his eyes and let the moment last as long as he dared.
    The elevator doors parted on the concrete hallway. The only hallway down here at the bottom, its far end open to the vast chamber that held the Breach’s protective dome. Travis walked the corridor’s length. He passed the heavy door to the bunker where, more than thirty-eight years earlier, Ruben Ward had lain in his half sleep, listening to the Breach Voices and understanding them.
    He passed through the opening at the end. He stared at the dome’s colossal profile, barely a silhouette against the unlit ceiling and walls of the old VLIC shot chamber, which had been used for its intended purpose exactly once.
    The dome’s small entry channel, like that of an igloo, lay to the right. Ten feet before it stood a table. Travis crossed to it, removed his phone from his pocket and set it there. He noted the time as he did.
    3:06.
    He went to the entrance and pushed in through the heavy glass door at its mouth, his eyes already losing everything but the Breach.
    Like looking into a depth. Into a furnace.
    Those had been his first impressions of the thing, almost seven years ago, echoing the sentiments of one of the first people to see it—and to die because of it.
    Travis let the door fall shut behind him and stood staring. The Breach hovered, patient as ever, in its soundproof glass enclosure at the center of the dome. The tunnel and its flared opening looked the same as they always had. Blue and purple. Rippling. Flamelike substance the color of a bruise. Travis went to the glass cage’s door and pulled it open.
    The Breach Voices sang. They raked his eardrums, seemingly capable of piercing them. He ignored the pain and stepped across the threshold and stood there, three feet from the opening. There was nothing in the way now except the low-profile receiving platform, like a heavy-duty trampoline that rose eighteen inches from the concrete floor beneath the Breach.
    Travis waited.
    The Voices keened and sighed, multiple tones rising and falling in what sounded like random pitch fluctuations. They were ascending in a harmonic trill when they simply stopped.
    The silence