The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

of view, revealing a dozen people seated in chairs outside the cage, the nearest maybe ten feet away. Men and women, twenties to forties. Dressed casually. Nothing strange about them, except their anxiety. Something was about to happen, and they knew it.
    The man in the cage finished whatever he was doing with the cube: the thing suddenly flared bright, throwing off the camera’s white balance and making the room appear darker. In the same instant, all but three of the seated people turned sharply, regarding the man in the cage with something like surprise.
    Then, as one, they came up out of their chairs and rushed him, like baseball players charging from the dugout to beat the shit out of some opposing player. They hit the cage en masse, trying with all their force to get at the man inside. Arms reached in through the bars. Hands gripped the steel and shook it. A few of the attackers stepped back and aimed heavy kicks at the cage door’s latch. Had they reached the balding man, they would have torn his limbs from his body. There was no question of it.
    By their moves, it was clear that they weren’t seeking the orange cube itself. They weren’t looking to destroy it, or even take it away; they were only reacting to the man who held it. They crouched and reached for his legs. Climbed atop the cage and plunged their arms into it, going for his head. They wanted to kill him. It was that simple.
    Yet beyond the rage, their actions were surprisingly normal. Nothing about them suggested that they were controlled like mindless puppets, or even reduced to some animalistic state of mind. Not even close. They were just extremely pissed-off people focused on a target. Their minds were, if anything, clearer for the adrenaline rush. As Travis watched, two of them conferred and then one took out a set of car keys and tried to pick the cage’s lock with it.
    The man in the cage only stared at the horde around him, rattled by the experience but not at all surprised. Like a marine biologist in a shark cage.
    Travis’s eyes went back to the seats and the three people who remained in them. They were the farthest three from the cage. The farthest from the orange cube. As if the thing had a radius of influence, and they were just outside of it. One of the three looked up, his eyes drawn to someone out of frame. He nodded in response to something he was told, then stood, and took a single step toward the cage. His eyes hardened. His jaw tightened. A second later he was sprinting toward it, crashing into it with the rest of the throng.
    The video ended.
    Travis stared at the blank screen a moment, then met Paige’s eyes.
    “What’s the write-up on that one?” he said. “Pisses people off like nobody’s business?”
    “It does something to the R-complex,” she said. “The reptile foundation of the human brain, where the fight-or-flight response comes from. Where rage comes from. The cube does two things. First, it tags anyone within a couple feet of itself as a target. Then it affects everyone within another twenty feet beyond that, maxing their aggression and turning them inward against the target.”
    “Bet someone at Border Town learned that the hard way,” Travis said.
    Paige nodded, looking away. Travis didn’t bother her for the details.
    “Anything nice ever come out of the Breach?” he said. “Instant puppy generator, something like that?”
    Paige managed a smile. “It’s not all bad. We survive the next thirty-six hours, I’ll show you some of the good stuff.”
    Somewhere over Greenland, Travis reclined his seat and tried to rest. He was asleep within minutes.
    Paige watched him.
    After a moment she felt self-conscious and looked away, even though there was no one else in the room to see her.
    She didn’t trust what she felt about him. There was every reason not to; her feelings were exaggerated all to hell right now. The guy had saved her from the worst thing she’d ever endured—had literally come in with guns blazing—and then carried her over fifteen miles to safety. Her memories of the journey out of the mountains, early on before she’d gone completely comatose, comprised a vignette of little waking moments. Coming to in his arms, being carried like a child. A big part of her had hated that feeling: being unable to stand up for herself after years of training her body to military-specialist standards. But here was the thing, and there was no getting around it: being carried had also felt good.