15
She could’ve screamed.
But the searing fusion of his mouth shocked her into silence, his touch a live wire and a nuclear explosion. His mouth, and—
Forster.
He knew. He knew that name. Her name.
How?
She could’ve wrenched away to slap him and demand an answer. She should’ve—but her free hand was fisted in the collar of his vest, hauling him nearer. Had she meant to strangle him? She couldn’t remember, couldn’t think, mindless, thoughtless, ravenous in his arms, an orbit collapsing, logic collapsing with it, desperate, fierce and angry, starving for his single-minded focus, for this break in his control—and she sank her hungry teeth into his lip.
“Ah!”
His gasp was electric. Erin swallowed it.
Pulling Ethan with her, she backed into an operator desk under the monitors. He must’ve released her wrist while exhaling his surprise, because her other hand was free now to drag through his hair as one ankle hooked around his calf, urging him closer, closer. She stole his balance as she stole his breath; he collapsed beside her onto the desk, a palm at the nape of her neck raking along her braid and the other clutching the base of her spine while she clawed her fingers under his fleece and his shirt.
He hissed at the scrape of her nails up his back. “Erin—”
“No—don’t tell me to go easy, don’t you dare—”
Click.
The door into the control room unlocked.
A system maintenance engineer in a safety vest stood in the hall outside, frozen with a key for the emergency deadbolt in her hand. “Uh.”
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck—
She pushed Ethan off the desk.
Off her.
“The… the XCS hutch is… um, closed for maintenance. The scanner’s malfunctioning, so I had to manually reopen the room after the system check…”
The engineer backed away, eyes wide and oscillating between them, hands raised. “But I can come back later.”
The door closed again. Erin did the only thing she could do, and ran for the hall.
“Wait—”
His voice was raw, rasping.
She didn’t. Stomach churning, eyes blurred under the harsh lights in the corridor, she staggered past the gawking system maintenance engineer and the hutches for Macromolecular Femtosecond Crystallography and Coherent X-ray Imaging. His footsteps beat hard after her, but if she could just reach the parking lot outside, reach her bicycle, she’d be so much faster, could get away from him and herself—and her hallucination, her memory, what the hell?—so she smacked into the West Experimental Hall’s exterior door—
“Forster!”
—and stopped.
Again, that name.
A gust of wind smelling of sunbaked metal whipped inside the vestibule and against her cheeks for a moment, before cutting off as the door ricocheted against its stopper and closed again. She didn’t block it. She remained where she stood, facing an Exit sign and staring straight into a pocket dimension, down the sinkhole of some quantum tunnel, those syllables spoken in Ethan Meyer’s voice echoing through her head…
“Forster.”
He was behind her now, breathless. “Erin.”
Her names. Both of them.
“W-what?”
She reached for the door a second time, but not to shove it open: to brace herself. Her palm squeaked and slid on the metal, and it turned her a hazardous inch away from her goal outside, toward him instead. Was the steel magnetized? Was she? “What… w-what did you say?”
“You’re Forster. The writer.”
He took a step nearer. “Aaron Forster. It… it’s a homophone. Isn’t it?”
“Uh.”
She couldn’t look away, couldn’t breathe.
“Aaron.”
Darkness glittered in his gaze, and her stomach answered with vertigo when he repeated, “Erin.”
“H-how…”
Data.
A few reddish hairs stuck to his jeans below the knees: affectionate canine detritus. Almost invisible, a speck of color under his left thumbnail was ink. The evidence answered her question.
“Bannister.”
A jerk of his chin, a hitch of his inhale.
“…oh.”
Just that, because Forster, Bannister—what more was there to say? What more could she say? What could she say besides everything, which was impossible, because this… this was impossible—so she just blinked back at him, one hand still on the door, the other contracting over and over into a fist, pulsing with the rapid rush of her heart, until—
Click.
Now it was the exterior door into the West Experimental Hall that opened as a badge swiped past the scanner. Arriving to run a data collection cycle for the Relativistic Mechanics group’s binary pulsar study, it was Sandra O’Connor-Young and Leah Haddad who found them locked together this time, not on an operator desk but staring, immobile and silent and impossible, impossible—and really, which situation was worse?
“Dr. Monaghan? And… Dr. Meyer?”
Popcorn.
“I… I’m j-just leaving.”
The muscles in her cheeks were too tense for a casual greeting and a smile. Leaving Ethan in the vestibule, she shouldered past her colleagues as they moved into the hall and groped for her bicycle, bumping its tires down a short flight of external stairs, the helmet dangling from her handlebars banging into the railing. She swung her leg over the seat. Her metal-capped boot slipped off its pedal, leaving her straddling the top tube bar, stupidly flat-footed.
“Erin,”
again. He’d followed her outside.
She singed her fingers on the sun-heated plastic of her chin clip. “What?”
“Are you…”
His boots crunched into a film of industrial grit on the steps. Then, of all the things he could’ve asked: “Can you ride home safely?”
Thank God—because his doubt steadied her like nothing else.
Rallied her.
“Really?”
The hot, familiar prickle of her frustration was so much better than the shiver in her stomach under his unnerving focus—the focus she’d wanted from him, demanded from him, but now? “I’ve been making this ride for over three years. I’ve never had one collision, not even with an autonomous car—”
“I wasn’t—”
“—or is this your clue that I should check my tire pressure again? I could ride through commute traffic into Palo Alto with a flat, and I’d still get there first!”
She snapped her helmet clip.
“Get where first?”
Somehow, his hands were on her handlebars.
“Salt they declined tasting the malted chocolate barley milk, the salted caramel and okara cupcake, or the lemon curd and whey. “No? Then what can I get you two?”
“The goat cheese, marionberry, and habanero, please. In a cone.”
“Boysenberry oat milk sherbet. Cup.”
“Paying—”
“Separately,”
they said together.
“Sure.”
The server slung their orders onto the counter and tossed her used scooper into a bucket of hot water. “You can swipe your cards at the register. There’s a stack of napkins if you need them. Next in line!”
Cup, cone, and napkins in hand, they weaved through an increasingly rowdy after-dinner crowd swarming the creamery, sliding onto a bench outside just as a giggling couple trading a few last licks of ice cream on their spoons vacated it. It was a very public spot. They wouldn’t be whispering sweet nothings like the departing men, however, so it didn’t matter—and if their conversation went according to form, they’d be shouting rather than whispering. Which was… safer. Or rather, their arguments had been safer, until today—
Ethan shoveled a heap of boysenberry sherbet into his mouth.
Erin mirrored him, plucking out a whole marionberry from her dessert. Crunch. Then, “So.”
“So,”
he echoed.
“I’ll start with the obvious question. How did this happen?”
This.
Scramble its letters: shit.
He must’ve said that out loud, because she nodded. Eyes averted, she took another bite of ice cream. “You called me Forster in the experimental hall tonight. But did you already know?”
“What?”
He froze mid-scoop. “No.”
“No?”
“I play sudoku, not poker. I’m not a good liar. If I’d known before—I didn’t. Not until you said that you had plans tonight and mentioned someone named Bannister… It could’ve been another person with that name, though.”
“It wasn’t.”
“No.”
“But you…”
she frowned, digging one metal-capped toe into the pavement, “…you’re good enough with data—well, not mine—that I thought maybe I’d told you too much about myself. Enough that you’d run the numbers and realized who Forster was. Who I… I was wondering during my ride if I’d been making a fool of myself with you at the lab.”
“Only with your research.”
“With my—excuse you?”
She elbowed him, her chin snapping up in standard outrage.
Not standard: the small smear of marionberry juice dotting the corner of her mouth…
“Ouch,”
was his delayed retort. He plunged his spoon back into his sherbet instead of hammering home his point about relativistic mechanics.
She didn’t apologize. But she didn’t continue their usual arguments, either. Instead, after a beat, “So: you didn’t know. I didn’t know. But now we both know. What… what do we do with this information?”
“We’ve been rivals for years,”
he said. Just a fact.
“And we know what happened.”
Bannister, Forster, the kiss. Rash, painful, glorious—
“We have data,”
she continued. “But the question is always: why?”
Right.
He breathed. Blood diverted back to his head. Because that was the root of all scientific inquiry: why? Facts were facts. It was the ability to explain them that brought publication and recognition, however.
And resolution.
“We have a fairly complete data set. Weeks of messages and years of rivalry.”
A quick glance showed her twisting her cone between her fingers, picking at its flaky edges. He added, “We could try to answer the question.”
“Do you want to?”
“Don’t you? Aren’t you curious? Aren’t you—”
but a crumble of waffle broke off under her thumb while he spoke. Melting ice cream began to seep out, threatening her sweater and jeans.
“Oops—”
He didn’t watch her swipe her tongue up the cone to catch the habanero drips. Instead, he cleared his throat, crossed his legs, recited the periodic table of elements, and stared at an advertisement for plant-based lamb kebabs at Oren’s Hummus across the street, counting, counting, cold and precise and sweating under his collar and his belt—
“You forgot to say the ninety-ninth element. Einsteinium.”
Erin flapped a napkin into his face a minute later.
Had he been working through the periodic table verbally?
Oh, God.
Maybe she took pity on him, because she left it at that. She wrapped the napkin around her damp cone and said, “Let’s start at the beginning. I had a fairly major issue with the onboarding documents on my first day. After you shoulder-checked me by the bullpen.”
“You sent my Nature Physics revise-and-resubmit form to the reviewers when I hadn’t finished the edits to Dr. Kramer’s paper,”
he collected himself to retort. “To my paper. You used my initials.”
“They’re also my initials,”
she replied reasonably, then licked her ice cream. Unreasonably. “Human Resources rushed me through the paperwork. I signed what they told me to sign. Your Nature Physics form got in the line-up somehow, so I submitted it, too. And since they took months to return my finalized documents, I only learned about the error after you’d already… But it was an accident.”
He pressed the chilly sherbet cup into his lap. “Which I didn’t know. Not until I’d switched the time zones on your calendar. When I read your introductory email after I got back from CERN, I thought you’d done reconnaissance on me. You’d submitted my paper to the journal with incomplete edits. That made me look like an idiot, and made Dr. Kramer—”
“Why would I have tried to sabotage you at that point? I didn’t know you, and your shoulder-check wasn’t that bad.”
“Um.”
He began to fiddle with his spoon, bending the plastic, testing its tensile strength. “You… you have competitive brothers, right?”
“Why does that matter?”
She shook her head at his nonsequitur, then shrugged again and bit into her ice cream before it seeped through her napkin. “But I do. I didn’t tell them anything about… this, though, because they definitely would’ve tried to sabotage you. I love them, but they can be insane about some things. Not about protecting me from losing at Monopoly or baseball, but everything else? When I mentioned that my doctoral advisor and research cohort—all men, by the way—had tried to scrub my name from a joint research paper before publication, they threatened to break skulls.”
“You didn’t tell your brothers about our rivalry, because they would’ve tried to help you.”
“They would’ve made things worse. I can handle myself.”
“I know you can.”
He dug his spoon deeper into the sherbet. “Uh, I… I also have a brother. But our rivalry isn’t over Monopoly or fast pitches. It’s not… fun. It’s not… nice.”
“Oh.”
She was quiet for a moment, eyebrows pinched over her nose, thinking. Then, with a slow nod, “Right. I guess it makes sense that with the data you had on hand and with physics being such a cutthroat field, it seemed plausible that I’d try something unethical. And, of course, I retaliated to your time zone switch by running a binary program on your data export, which was explicit sabotage—because it seemed like you’d come back from Switzerland and vandalized my calendar unprovoked, since Human Resources still hadn’t told me about the Nature Physics signing error yet. Then you responded by… I don’t even remember. But it was too late by then, anyhow. Neither of us was going to back down at that point, even once we knew… Though what did you do? Let the air out of my tires?”
“Yes. I thought about switching your brake configurations, too. I just never remembered to bring the tools. But that would’ve been actively dangerous—”
Her elbow tapped his arm. “You kept my practical mechanics skills fresh. Not just my relativistic ones. Should I be thanking you for that? Next time my oldest brother’s in town and his rust bucket of a Jeep blows a head gasket, I’ll be primed to fix it.”
He couldn’t laugh with her, though. He could’ve hurt her. Really hurt her. He thrust away his cup, abruptly queasy. “I escalated things. With your bicycle. With everything I said about your research methods and data in that all-hands. I… I’m sorry.”
“We both escalated.”
“Still—”
“No.”
She knocked her boot into his. “Don’t toss that sherbet. You promised that I could have the spoon, remember? Don’t take my narrative from me, either. We each thought that the other person’s actions were tantamount to declaring war, and I can see why we would.”
“That’s not an excuse for what I—”
“—what we did. I know. But based on the data and backgrounds we both brought to the situation, now we understand the why. Ethan…”
She tugged at his sherbet and passed over her ice cream; his fingers automatically curled around the waffle cone, and when he raised his eyes in question, he found the berry-stained curve of her lips parted on an exhale, on his name, her gaze suddenly serious. “Ethan, I’m sorry, too. For my questions during the Department of Energy’s visit, and for afterward. I was trying to even our score. But it wasn’t right. And I… I didn’t know. I only looked at the information I had on you. I didn’t think about what I wasn’t seeing. Bannister. I committed—”
“—the scientific cardinal sin?”
Her teeth clicked together, softness vanishing. But the dimple trembling in her cheek was evidence of a nascent, reluctant smile. “I wouldn’t go that far!”
“Dr. Fong isn’t here. Your secret’s safe.”
He leaned back against their bench, breathing again.
“Maybe. But Forster’s isn’t. There’s no putting Schr?dinger’s cat back in that box.”
“Your odds are fifty-fifty.”
“Generous, but no. Because now I’m in a situation where I know that you know. And since we both know, the cat’s loose.”
She poked his spoon into the sherbet, shaking her head again. “Forster and Bannister—God. Tell me those odds, that we would’ve met this way.”
“Very small. I might not even include their probability in a quantum analysis.”
“Now, that’s just insulting.”
“I’m not wrong. It was unlikely that we would’ve met through Galactica Magazine. Even more unlikely that the editors would’ve paired our submissions together—”
“—and that our work would be complementary: black holes that—no. Wait.”
Gasping, Erin snatched back her cone. “You copied my research for your drawing. The movement of black holes and stars is my specialty!”
What?
He hadn’t drawn inspiration from Dr. Erin Monaghan’s research for Bannister’s art.
Had he?
…had he?
“You—you don’t have a monopoly on the topic. And,”
he stabilized himself with facts, “it’s now the Department of Energy’s topic. The behavior of matter and gravity that’s proximal to black holes? It’s ours.”
Surprisingly, her indignant eyes dropped at that. “Damn.”
“What? I didn’t plagiarize your research.”
“No, not that—it’s… we’re not just rivals anymore. We’re not just Forster and Bannister, either. The odds don’t matter. We’re collaborators on a federal research contract.”
They were.
“So, now what?”
Now what.
“We know the facts,”
he reminded them.
“‘The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling’.”
“Ted Chiang.”
“Yes.”
“So?”
“So…”
Gold-ringed and dusky, her gaze lifted again to meet his. She bit her lip, then posed the very critical, very non-rhetorical question: “What do we do? Because this… this shouldn’t continue. We shouldn’t continue.”
Oat milk curdled in his stomach. “Right.”
“I mean—we shouldn’t, should we? We understand what we—who we… but we’re still competitors for the Eischer-Langhoff grant.”
“But we’re collaborators on the quantum gravity project.”
“Which is a federal research contract that could launch our careers if we succeed, and tank them if we fail! That means I can’t afford distractions from my work. Can you?”
If you fuck up this opportunity for my department, you’re done.
“No.”
The word hurt.
“Plus, we’re both referencing research in our competing Eischer-Langhoff grant applications that we’re using together in our literature review for the Department of Energy. That means we have a conflict of interest somewhere, don’t we?”
“Probably. I’m not sure what. But… probably.”
“Because I’m always right?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Were you thinking it?”
She dabbed her napkin over her cone, nails grazing its waffled texture.
“No.”
He swallowed hard. “I was thinking about… uh—about a hundred other reasons that this is a bad idea.”
“Thousands. And—right. I’m right.”
“Then what’s our process plan?”
“Two key items, I think.”
Lobbing away her napkin, she ticked off the points on her fingers. “One: we’ll keep things strictly professional.”
“No more sabotage.”
“Yes. And two:”
tick, “no more communication as Bannister and Forster. Not until—”
“Until?”
“—until we execute the Department of Energy’s quantum gravity deliverables.”
Oh.
It was a reasonable plan to manage an impossible, untenable situation.
The rules of engagement were clear, the refreshed boundaries between their professional and personal lives neatly drawn. It was all very exact. Very sudoku-like. He usually relished neatness and exactness and sudoku…
“Agreed,”
he said, because what other viable answer was there?
“Good.”
Her thumb returned to scratch at the seam on her cone. “Otherwise, this is how we’ll lose—”
“—the space-time war?”
A snort. “Yes—”
—and then a torrent of sludgy ice cream burst through its waffle container.
“Argh!”
Erin lunged down to suction her lips over the crack. But her eyes flickered sideways to him while she licked up the spill.
Was she laughing?
A disorienting flash of heat through his cold-numbed hands made him fumble his sherbet cup. Melted boysenberries seeped into his jeans.
Fuck.