The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

Something else. Contemplation, he thought. He wondered why.
    “Yeah. I was good at it.”
    Her eyes on him, unblinking. Then narrowing in thought.
    “That might end up being useful,” she said. “It’s not often we get fresh eyes around here. I’ll explain a lot more on the plane. For now I just need you to know what’s at stake.”
    With that, she led him to the dome’s entry, and through its heavy glass door.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
    Like looking into a depth. Into a furnace. As Bryce had written. The Breach was an oval ripped open across thin air, ten feet wide by three high. Blue and violet tendrils of light, flamelike in their substance but not in their shape, capered along the length of the tunnel, which was three feet in diameter and receded to infinity. Only in the nearest yard did the tunnel flare out to the wide oval.
    Within the giant dome that shielded the rest of the building from who knew what, a much smaller containment system encased the Breach to protect anyone who entered this space. This smaller enclosure was a rectangle made of more thick glass, with an airtight door at the front. The glass cage’s purpose was as obvious as the library silence of the room. Travis watched his faint reflection blurring rhythmically on the vibrating glass, and imagined the malignant Breach Voices encased within it, just a few feet away.
    He refocused beyond the glass to the Breach itself, the tunnel stretching away to a vanishing point. He felt his perception bend toward it like a row of iron filings to a magnet.
    “There’s only so much to say about it,” Paige said. “It leads somewhere. We don’t even try to guess where. Nothing can go through from our side. And no living thing has come through from the other side. But objects do. Three or four a day, on average, for over three decades now. Entities.”
    Directly beneath the Breach stood something like an industrial-strength trampoline. It was square, five by five feet. Its fabric looked both flexible and strong, and its legs were wrapped with shock springs. It was positioned to soften the fall for anything that came out of the opening, whether it weighed an ounce or a ton.
    Cameras just inside the glass casing covered the Breach from two angles. No doubt someone watched their feeds day and night, from somewhere in the floors above B51. It would only be necessary to come into this space when things actually emerged from the Breach.
    “Certain entities we see all the time,” Paige said. “The twenty most common probably make up ninety-nine percent of the traffic. A few of them are behind you.”
    Travis drew his eyes from the Breach and turned around. A dry-erase board on the wall proclaimed, NEXT UNIQUE ENTITY WILL BE DESIGNATED 0697. Below the board and to the left was a set of steel shelves. Arrayed along them were a few duplicates of three separate items. One was a kind of string, bright white and a little thicker than floss. Each strand, about a foot long, had been trapped on one end by a paperweight. They’d have floated away otherwise. The strings trailed lazily in space, neither heavier nor lighter than the air. Gravity seemed to just not affect them. On the next level down were a few pink crystals, the length and width of fingers. Travis could see nothing special about them. Beneath those, on the lowest shelf, were two examples of what Bryce had described. Green rags. Travis dropped to a crouch and studied them. They were lying mostly flat. The few wrinkles in the fabric were tight and sharp, like hardened veins. Like the material had been drawn to the surface by vacuum pressure.
    “Try to lift one,” Paige said.
    Travis tried. He grabbed for the nearest as if it were a washcloth, palming it in the middle to gather it in a handful. It was like trying to grab a handful of the shelf surface itself. The cloth didn’t budge. He took the corner of the rag between his thumb and forefinger and found he could lift the first inch. Beyond that, it was just too heavy. He wondered for a moment how the technicians moved these things around, and then he noticed a wheeled chainfall a few feet away, with a vise-grip claw hanging from a cantilevered arm. Built to hoist engines out of cars, it was probably just about suited to lifting these rags.
    “Bryce wasn’t crazy,” Travis said.
    “Not about that.”
    She picked up one of the pink crystals from the middle shelf.
    “For all that we don’t know about the Breach,” she said, “this much is certain: