20
“I’m…”
again, her breath shaking.
“Erin—”
“Uh… I n-need to…”
Her backpack’s zipper snagged under her fumbling fingers as she staggered into the corridor. “I—I… need… just need… tomorrow, I’ll…”
She didn’t answer when he asked if she could get home safely.
Fuck.
This was his fault. He followed her out, because imagining her on the road like this, pedaling among lanes of honking commuters shouting at their phones while driving on autopilot—and yes, she knew her streets, was master of her lanes and traffic lights, but she hadn’t eaten lunch or touched the danish—
The building’s exterior doors clicked behind her. He was alone in the dark, empty hall.
No: almost.
Dr. Kramer was also there.
Locking up his office prior to tomorrow’s departure for CERN, carrying a final archival box with his briefcase under his arm, Ethan’s supervisor hadn’t seen him exit the Sidewinder conference room. He could backtrack inside. He could still dodge Dr. Kramer, could wave him off to Switzerland and its golf courses over email. He hadn’t encountered his department head since yesterday’s status report meeting, and although he’d originally hoped to make amends today if he could, that was before Erin had announced her investigation and he’d understood that pacifying his manager was impossible. So, he could avoid Dr. Kramer for almost an entire year, if he just edged back and closed the door.
But. He had this one chance to make things right for her—for brave, clever, resilient, frightened Erin. Right now.
A bright heat ignited in his chest. Not panic.
Fierce. Protective. And yes: brave.
He would do this for her.
This is how you win the space-time war.
Setting his jaw, crushing years of defensive habit that would’ve had him dodge confrontation, would’ve made him take Dr. Kramer’s punishments and praises in equal indebted silence, he moved down the hall.
“Dr. Kramer,” he said.
“Meyer?”
“Yes.”
He stepped closer, barreling ahead before he could think of anything but what he had to say. “You contacted Dr. Ronald Sams from the Journal of Supermassive Astronomy and Astrophysics with a claim that Dr. Monaghan’s pending paper is fraudulent. That she’s committed scientific misconduct. Retract your allegation.”
Silence.
The demand had surprised his supervisor. Any demand would’ve been a surprise. But it was only a moment before the skin beside Dr. Kramer’s mouth tightened. He didn’t deny the charge. His briefcase gave an ominous creak. “Or? Careful, Meyer.”
He didn’t stop, didn’t breathe, and pushed forward into the danger of his manager’s pause. “Or I’ll update every experimental holometer data set—my data analyses, from my instrument, from my hypotheses—that you’ve ever used in a paper. Change them. Then I’ll contact the journals. Nature Physics. The International Journal of Quantum Information. All of them. The Eischer-Langhoff grant reviewers, too. I’ll give them the new numbers, and I’ll lie. I’ll claim that you manufactured the earlier data sets to support your theories. Fraud.”
“I see.”
A vein ticked over Dr. Kramer’s right eye. Then, “Who do you expect to believe you?”
“I have a paper trail from your revisions to the Eischer-Langhoff grant. You instructed me to change the data in Table 5 when it was already correct—and you might’ve been looking at an older set, but there’s already evidence that you manipulated data on time crystals in an earlier paper, so we—”
Facts. He continued, slower, “Your subordinate on the time crystal project might’ve had to sign a nondisclosure agreement, but we know that you stole and falsified her work. Just like you stole the idea of data fraud in Dr. Monaghan’s research from me. Like you stole everything.”
“You have no proof.”
Leather creaked again. “Which is irrelevant, however. Because the papers that you claim you’d report to the grants and journals list you as a second author. Remember that, Meyer.”
How could he forget?
Erin had nailed the brutal truth months ago with her jeer in the kitchenette, that he was nothing but Dr. Kramer’s lackey and second author.
Except—no. That wasn’t right.
Dr. Ethan Meyer, your work is good, she’d also said.
The holometer was his.
The quantum unit concept was his.
Dr. Kramer’s early exports hadn’t been corrupted, had they? They’d been garbage from the start, generated only to simulate work. They’d never been real.
Nothing original.
All the data—and the evidence for sizing quantum units, preliminarily confirmed by the University of Amsterdam’s black hole model—was his, Ethan’s; Dr. Kramer would have no way to refute his lie by proving that any of the numbers had been retroactively falsified. Since he refused to share their raw exports with other scientists, and the exports themselves were overwritten every month by SVLAC’s budget operational software, there was no one to support a challenge to Ethan’s allegation of fraud by providing backup copies of the holometer data.
The work: mine.
But if all this was accurate, it also didn’t matter. His name was linked with Dr. Kramer’s on their articles. Damaging his supervisor’s credibility would destroy his own. So his threat was a nuclear option. If Dr. Kramer refused to retract his allegations to Sams and if Ethan executed his pledge—committing scientific misconduct himself, knowingly and maliciously falsifying data—then no reputable journal would publish papers from either of them again.
No publication, no funding.
No funding, no research.
No research, no career.
They’d both be blacklisted.
Erin would be safe.
“I know,”
he answered his supervisor now. “Your name is on my research, and if you don’t retract your claim, reporting fraud to the journals could cost me my career. But I won’t lose my ideas—and when did you last publish anything significant that wasn’t based on my work? If you don’t retract the allegation, what will you lose?”
Then he walked away.
As he strode past the empty bullpen and the kitchenette, elation swelled through the adrenaline pulsing in his stomach. His parting shot had been the truth: his work was the backbone of Kramer’s present achievements. My research. My success. Erin was right. Again. It was a truth he’d buried deep and tried to ignore, because there was nothing he could do except endure it and hope that, if he did everything Kramer asked, did everything right, then maybe someday his supervisor would recognize him, would recognize and honor his contributions… so he’d cached his knowledge, hidden it away from himself, but Erin had always gotten under his skin. She’d always found his weak points. Now, she’d found this courage, too.
This truth.
The Modern Physics doors slammed shut at his back.
He crossed the parking lot to his hatchback.
He might be walking away from everything he’d ever worked for.
Everything that gave him value.
He kept going.
He didn’t regret his words or his ultimatum—not at all—and he was actually smiling, even if it was a shivery, unsteady smile with the muscles in his cheeks and jaw twitching—but he couldn’t click his seat belt into its latch. He dropped his keys when he tried to slot them into the ignition. Safe now in his hot car, safe to crack and break, his breath began to hiss in a sickening, erratic whistle.
Fuck, fuck!
He gripped his thighs with both hands, digging his fingers in until his cold, sweating skin blanched under his jeans. He could feel the bruises forming, knew the precise pain that it took to raise them. He chose a fresh spot, and a third, a fourth, pressing and releasing, pressing and releasing, struggling to master himself, to just breathe—
The pen behind his ear clattered down into the hatchback’s center console.
Thud.
…it wasn’t a good pen, not one of his specialized sketching instruments. Just an ordinary ballpoint. He had no drawing paper either.
It didn’t matter, though.
Because, really: what more could he risk today than he already had?
He pushed the cotton knit of his Henley up over his forearm. He pressed the pen against the damp crook of his elbow. Ragged lines began to jerk along his skin, down onto the heel of his hand. The feverish marks didn’t produce the design of alien civilizations or track explorations along the final frontier, however. His precision was gone, vanished into the whorls of pigment twining between his fingers.
But shining in the heart of his palm: her face, barely recognizable, abstract, galaxies in her hair—a girl with kaleidoscope eyes.
And he breathed.
His arms were black with scrawls before he finally accelerated out of the Modern Physics parking lot, up Sand Hill Road to the freeway. His evening run with Bunsen in Stulsaft Park was a sprint. No music. His rhythm was the fast but steady beat of his heart.
He opened Erin’s text thread a dozen times, saw her ellipsis a dozen times, and answered with his. No messages. Maybe they both understood:
Tomorrow.
Again, he breathed.
She was hyperventilating.
Crouched up against her headboard, arms locked around her knees, rocking, rocking, she couldn’t feel the leaden weight in her stomach of the energy bar she’d managed to choke down, couldn’t feel her fingers, couldn’t feel her tongue. A typing ellipsis flickered back and forth in her text thread with Ethan; her thumbs were numb on the screen, her palms flashing hot and cold and wet, and she meant to assure him that she didn’t regret what she’d done, because she didn’t—she really didn’t—scientific parasite—but our editors have received an allegation of fraudulent data, publication of your paper has been suspended—
Ping.
Not the swish of a lightsaber.
Martina
How’d Monday’s spreadsheet analysis go?
She blinked.
Monday.
It was only Wednesday.
How?
Wednesday, just after eleven o’clock at night in Silicon Valley, and the Monaghans would be—should be—asleep in hammocks by the beach, in beds with soft, sagging mattresses where she’d bounced as a child on Christmas morning, or in… well, Adrian probably wasn’t asleep. If Manhattan wasn’t at rest, neither was he. But she couldn’t call him. She was Dr. Erin Monaghan, and she couldn’t have her brother stepping in to fight her battles and lose them—and he would lose, because he was powerless to help her now, no one could—
Martina
You’re still typing. Are you writing your next story by text?
She’d been gripping her phone so hard that its screen registered the pressure of her thumb as a keysmash. A scream of letters, numbers, and symbols spewed under her hold. At least she hadn’t hit Send.
Martina
What’s going on?
Incoming Video Call: Martina Perez
She answered. What else could she do?
Martina filled the screen, her curly bob wrapped in a silk sleep scarf, her phone propped up on the Perezes’ kitchen table and a notepad of dates, names, and numbers—likely the financial dirt she’d found on a city council trustee—receiving her focus instead of a plate of leftovers in plastic wrap by her elbow. But now, she pushed her notes and dinner aside to scrutinize Erin’s face. “Thank God—you’re breathing? You’re safe?”
“Y-yes, but…”
“What’s going on?”
This wasn’t popcorn.
Not anymore.
“Ethan was right,” she said.
Martina dropped her phone onto her enchiladas.
And then, it all came spilling out.
“Ethan was—he said—said that Dr. Kramer would retaliate, after I said he didn’t have anything to contribute to our quantum gravity project, that he’d stolen his subordinates’ research to publish under his name, that he wasn’t a genius, just a parasite—and it was all true—is true—but then he warned me about what Dr. Kramer would do, and I—I laughed. I laughed. I thought I could handle it, because I can always handle it, always have to—but now my paper’s being investigated for fraud, and I—I didn’t falsify my numbers. I didn’t. My name will still be linked with fake data in people’s minds, though, and you know what the field is like. I’m… me. I’m not going to get a second chance at… at…”
She choked to a stop, out of breath, her throat raw. Then, swallowing through her friend’s wide-eyed, open-mouthed stare, “Like I said, Ethan was right.”
“…uh.”
“He’s also Bannister.”
“Bann—what?!”
“Yes.”
“That… that’s… you’re… really? Right. Right. So, first: the situation with Dr. Kramer and your paper is horrible, and I’ll do anything I can to help. Obviously.”
Recovering with impressive speed, Martina brandished her notebook of city council dirt, almost knocking her plate off the table before she dropped the pages and grabbed her phone close, mouthing her words to Erin on the screen. “But also—Dr. Ethan Meyer and Bannister?”
“I know.”
“Did you?”
“Last Friday, but then everything just…”
“I knew before then.”
Martina began to pace her family’s tiny kitchen, weaving between an asthmatic refrigerator and cluttered cabinets of spices. “Not about Bannister—though Jesus, it’s really him?—but about you and Ethan. Because you don’t have a poker face, and he… you were the only person he talked to in anything but monosyllables, if he wasn’t discussing physics. I could tell that, even just from passing him in the office, which—this means that the pop psychology on those daytime talk shows is right! Opposites do attract!”
She’d expected to be flustered and embarrassed and defensive, almost ashamed of the truth, of her own bullheaded blindness.
Instead, despite everything, Erin found herself breathing, relaxing a fraction from her panicky hunch against her headboard when she said, “That’s valid with particle charges, but people aren’t just protons and electrons. There’s only anecdotal evidence about romantic opposites attracting from song lyrics and films. From art.”
“Like yours, and his.”
“Yes.”
“So?”
“When we were first assigned to the quantum gravity project, Nadine told us that there might be more common ground between our work than we thought. She was right. And I…”
She fiddled with the edge of her pillowcase. “I think we might be more similar than we realized, too. Which sounds ridiculous, because we come at everything from very different angles, but—a coin has two sides. An atom has a positive and a negative charge. The universe is built from opposing and inseparable units. Maybe, just like our physics theories, those units aren’t all irreconcilable…”
Dodging a swinging cabinet door, Martina began to laugh.
“Fine. You’ve convinced me. Because the only two hyper-competitive, workaholic, over-caffeinated, data-obsessed, wildly oblivious, oat-milk-swilling, beautiful people whom I can ever imagine applying universal laws to justify falling in love are Dr. Erin Monaghan and Dr. Ethan Meyer. And I want the full story of how you finally figured yourselves out, but,”
sobering, returning to her chair to flip open a fresh page in her notebook, “this isn’t the time.”
Love.
Did she love him?
That was the question.
But it shouldn’t have been.
It wasn’t a question at all.
Martina readied a pencil. “What’s the exact wording of the email about your paper?”
Yes.
She cleared her throat. Later, she’d manage that later, after…
“I received it just after seven o’clock tonight. Four hours ago, and about twenty-two hours after I spoke to Dr. Kramer.”
She swiped her thumb over Martina’s face to minimize their video window while she accessed her inbox, and revealed a push notification hidden by the call:
Journal of Supermassive Astronomy and Astrophysics:
Re: Submission Update
She frowned.
“What is it?”
“The… the journal sent another email.”
“What does it say?”
Dr. Erin Monaghan,
“Investigating the Impact of Tidal Disruption Events on the Axis Rotation of Galaxies Proximal to Black Holes”
has been cleared for publication.
Regards,
Dr. Ronald Sams, Editor-in-Chief
“Uh.”
The short, stark sentence made no sense. There was also no way to misunderstand it. “The journal’s going to print my paper in September.”
“The reviewers didn’t find your nonexistent fraud?”
“It doesn’t say anything about reviewers, or my data, or scientific misconduct, just that I’m reinstated. Which is… clearly, I’m…”
She floundered. Happy? Relieved? Confused. “Why, though? How?”
But that wasn’t a question, either.
Ethan.
He must’ve done—something. Something brave and foolish, and if he’d torpedoed his career to get her paper published in this stupid journal—
“You know.”
Tap, went Martina’s pencil. “Don’t you?”
“I—I need to talk to him.”
“What are you going to say? And no pressure, but if I didn’t have this city council hearing at eight tomorrow morning—I swear, they keep planning for times when they hope the public can’t attend—there’s no possible experiment any physicist might run that could keep me in my control room when you two are—”
“Popcorn. I know.”
“You could pack Oracle Park.”
“Or just the Modern Physics parking lot.”
Shaking her head, she extracted her notebook from beneath a sudoku booklet and This Is How You Lose the Time War on her bedside table.
“Who would’ve thought that a slab of asphalt would be your final frontier? Go conquer it, Dr. Monaghan,”
and their call ended with a wink.
Was this her final frontier, though?
Either way, there was something good waiting for her tomorrow. She knew it. And she began to write. By one o’clock, she had what she needed. The single scribbled page required no revisions. It was messy and rambling and a little illogical, definitely over-dramatic—but right now, so was she. It was… honest. It was perfect. She trusted herself.
She clicked off her light and smiled.
Something good today.
She was in the parking lot again when Ethan pulled into his spot on Thursday morning: sneakers, helmet hair, pink graphic STEMinist t-shirt. She didn’t wrench open his door, however, or throw herself into his passenger seat to take refuge behind the protections of tinted glass and sun visors. Despite the adrenaline thrumming in her stomach and up her spine, she clutched her backpack in full view of the Modern Physics main doors and waited for him on the curb.
“Erin?”
Exhaling her name with hushed urgency, he was beside her in a breath.
She seized his vest, violently. “What the hell did you do?”
“What?”
“The journal reinstated my paper for publication last night—just hours after Dr. Sams pulled it from the lineup to investigate me for data fraud. Hours! Before anyone even knew about the accusation. No review committee works that fast. And don’t claim that Dr. Kramer decided to forgive me for speaking truth to power, either, so that means you must’ve done—I don’t know—something, and thank you, but if you’ve damaged your career so that I—”
He didn’t deny it. Whatever it was. Instead, Ethan smiled into her tirade, softened into her grip.
“—s-so that I…”
She faltered, caught off guard by his calm, and stopped.
“What did I do?”
His fingers lifted to her cheek, tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and lingered with the lightest pressure against her skin. “I gave Dr. Kramer an ultimatum: he’d retract his allegation about your paper, or I’d update all the holometer numbers used in our own publications, then contact the journals and claim that he’d committed scientific misconduct. He’s never touched my data or analyses. He couldn’t reconstruct them. He couldn’t refute my claim without admitting that all the work on quantum units that he’s published under his name is mine—that while he hasn’t committed data fraud with me like he did with Dr. Anders, he plagiarized my research. My ideas. All of them.”
“If he hadn’t complied, you’d have—”
“Been implicated in his misconduct by association. I know. I wouldn’t be forfeiting my theories, though. Or the results of any new research that I’ll do. He would. He had more to lose than I did.”
“But you…”
She twisted her fingers tighter into his fleece. “You still risked your career when you didn’t have to.”
“No. I did have to.”
SVLAC’s shuttle bus growled into the parking lot and he nodded toward it, at its disembarking interns with Leah Haddad in the lead, then turned back to her, so earnest when he continued, “They need someone like you. To help them work the copy machine, to open opportunities and advocate for them, to see their potential when they don’t—or can’t—see it themselves. So I had to make my gamble with Dr. Kramer. Not just for me. For you. For all the ways you’ll keep challenging my research and my field. Challenging my thinking. Challenging me. And for this cohort. The next one, too. Because I… I needed someone like you. And…”
“…and?”
When Leah waved a greeting, she returned it without breaking their gaze. She ignored Sandra O’Connor-Young’s curious eyebrows while her colleague walked toward their office building. Let them have their popcorn. Warmth and wanting stirred, building under his light touch, his pause, his breath, his serious smile.
“And what?”
He opened his left hand. “And I think I still do.”
Oh.
Ink saturated his palm. Lines and curves and angles twined through his fingers, over his knuckles, down his wrist. Vanishing up his forearm under his sleeve were grids and graphs, binary pulsars and constellations—Canis Major galloping, leaving Bunsen-like paw prints in its wake, and in the cradle of his hand: Cassiopeia. The stars were her own freckles.
“Do you see?”
Then risk-averse, cautious, bold, smiling Ethan said, “This was a gamble worth making. I just wish I’d understood that sooner, because I know we agreed to finish our quantum gravity research year first—you insisted that we couldn’t afford distractions, and you were—are—right—but this future is worth waiting for. I want this, and more. I have for a long time. With you, I want to draw in color.”
He wanted to draw in color?
Well, she wanted everything.
Answering his smile with a grin of her own that she knew definitely distracted him, she tugged him a step closer, and as Dr. Tomasz Szymanski opened the Modern Physics doors to hustle the gawking interns inside, she asked, “But what if we didn’t wait?”
“You said—”
“Ethan. Didn’t Ted Chiang’s ‘The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling’ teach us that perfect recall is inexcusable? But if you’re really set on remembering every single thing I say for the rest of my life,”—she extracted a ragged sheet of paper from her pocket, though she looked at him rather than her illegible notes—“then remember this from Aaron Forster’s ‘The Lonely Lunacy of Lactose’, too.”
I took the Neapolitans. I confess it. I destroyed this last Earthly pleasure of ours. Why? Because I saw how we two measured our lives by what we had left behind, how we judged ourselves by servings of ice cream, how we suffocated beneath vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry flavors, beneath the flavor of our fear. Our fear of losing ourselves, and who we had been. I saw how we clung to that fear. But I saw also who we might become, if only we were not afraid. I saw who we might become if—instead of fear—we chose stardust. So rather than ice cream, I give you my hand now—now—looking not into dehydrated foil packets for our joy but outside, to the brilliant void. And I ask: will you brave the darkness to burn brightly with me?
He listened to her in patient silence through the hot sunlight beating down upon their shoulders, through the rumble of traffic and the slam of vehicle doors. But the instant she finished, Ethan said:
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Did you think I’d say no?”
“No, but… just yes? No questions, no challenges, no…”
The tip of his nose brushed hers when he shook his head. “Our rivalry has been beneficial. It’s provided us with the opportunity to head SVLAC’s quantum gravity research, and I’ve done good work to keep ahead of your funding numbers. But I didn’t discover the synchronicity between my quantum unit measurements and Dr. Tuinstra’s electron hop distances alone.”
“I didn’t discover LIGO’s Hawking radiation signals in a vacuum, either.”
“Technically space is a vacuum—”
“I appreciate that very valuable insight, Meyer.”
“You’re welcome, Monaghan.”
They traded crooked smirks for a moment. Then, “So even though we’ve received permanent head damage in paradoxical fields, does your electron hop distance revelation and my Hawking radiation discovery prove that we’re better together than in opposition?”
She bumped her shoulder into his. “All extant data substantiates your theory, yes. And even if we occasionally get distracted from our research—”
“Essential work–life balance,” he said.
“In this economy?”
“For science,”
Ethan reminded her, and then he finally closed the invisible distance between them to kiss her, one hand slipping around her waist, the other wreaking havoc with her ponytail while she stepped up onto his feet to draw him closer still…
Clap. Clap. Clap.
They raised their middle fingers in answer.
“Thank you, Dr. Monaghan and Dr. Meyer. This might be the first National Lab observational experiment that’s ever ended both on budget and on schedule.”
Elias Schulz strolled past them into the Modern Physics building.
That broke them apart.
“Did we just flip off…?”
“…yes.”
“Everyone at SVLAC—up to and including the director!—knew for years, except…”
“…us?”
“It’s almost humiliating, being blindsided by data like this.”
Her indignation turned to laughter against his stubble. “But, um… that does mean I should probably notify you about one other historical data point, just so you know. Promise you won’t mock me?”
“No.”
“Fine.”
She would’ve shuffled her feet if she hadn’t been standing on his sneakers. “You know that I didn’t mean to sabotage your Nature Physics paper. What you don’t know is that I did all that research on you for my introductory email because I was excited to collaborate with you. I admired your work so much, and had so many questions. I even wanted to ask you about quantum gravity.”
Ethan drew back a full inch. “You just wanted to impress me?”
“There’s no just about it. When we ran into each other on my first day, I was starstruck. And it’s probably good for my ego that you went to CERN right afterward. You might’ve been unbearable about my… academic… crush.”
“I want to say I would’ve, yes. But honestly? I probably would’ve avoided you. I wouldn’t have thought that someone like you would be interested in me talking. Despite my—uh, genius at public debate.”
So maybe they really had needed their three years, and everything from Pandora’s box that had happened during them.
“Well, then for the sake of giving you something to talk about,”
she raised her eyes and her smile again, “I’m glad my initials ended up on your Nature Physics form. Look at the data: if I hadn’t made that error and if you hadn’t retaliated, if we hadn’t clashed over funding, publications, and lab time so that we debated the merits of our research areas for the Secretary of Energy, and if we hadn’t been forced to collaborate on SVLAC’s quantum gravity project—just imagine the travesty for science! We never would’ve detected evidence of naturally occurring Hawking radiation.”
“Or the synchronized scale of quantum units and electron hops in black hole models.”
“Except that one of these discoveries is much more important—”
“Which one? There’s solid evidence to support my—”
“God, yes.”
Erin grinned against the laughing outrage on Ethan’s mouth. “Talk data to me.”