Rabbits(94)

Directly across from us as we entered, facing the lake, were enormous floor-to-ceiling windows. The view was impressive. It felt as if somebody had removed everything that wasn’t water, trees, and distant mountains. The dark gray clouds hanging above the lake gave the place a sad but cinematic feel, like a wealthy murderer’s house in a Nordic thriller.

Through a sliding-glass door that opened onto a wide deck, I could see a set of stairs leading down to the conveyer belt we’d just taken to the elevator. Beyond that was nothing but grass and trees.

The interior was perfectly appointed, from the Florence Knoll sofa, Noguchi table, and Nelson ball pendant lamps to the built-in, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and light cork floors.

“Your place is amazing,” I said.

“Me?” Emily laughed a little. “No way. It belongs to a friend.”

“They must be some friend,” I said.

Emily’s smile disappeared and she nodded toward the sofa. “I don’t have much time, so if you have a lot of questions, you’ll want to start asking.”

I took a seat on the sofa. Emily grabbed a nearby molded plywood chair, slid it across the floor, and sat down directly across from me.

For the first time since she’d picked me up at the monorail station, I could see Emily clearly. She looked tired—nothing that a few good nights’ sleep wouldn’t clear up—but there was something else: a look in her eyes, a kind of distance, a sadness.

“The last time I saw you, in that penthouse at WorGames…was that real?” I asked. I figured why not start with a big one.

She didn’t answer me. Instead, she just stared.

I had the feeling she was looking for something behind my eyes, but I had no idea what it was.

“Emily?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You remind me of somebody else.”

“Who?”

She shook her head and answered my earlier question instead. “It was real,” she said. “The penthouse, Crow.”

“What happened? When I went back up there, everything was gone. It was completely different.”

“Everything was gone because Crow moved it.”

“He moved a building?”

“Well, mainly just the top floor, and it’s more like he kind of…changed it.”

“How does that work?”

“It’s similar to the method I used to bring you here.”

“Where is…here?”

“It’s complicated,” Emily said.

“Fine, then. Let me ask you this. Are we in another dimension?”

Emily ran her hands through her hair and exhaled before ignoring my question and asking one of her own.

“How much do you know about quantum physics?”

“Not a lot,” I said. “I mean, I know particles can also be waves, and that in a two-slit experiment, observation affects the outcome, but I’ve always found the probability stuff daunting.”

“Okay, so I’m going to do my best to explain the mechanism behind what’s happening to the best of my ability. Just stop me when you don’t understand.”

I nodded. I had the feeling there was a whole lot I wasn’t going to understand.

“What do you know about the Meechum Radiants?” Emily asked.

“Only what Crow told me, and what you can find online.”

“What did Crow say?”

“He said Kellan Meechum had discovered something he’d likened to ley lines—veins in the fabric of the world—and that Meechum called them Radiants.”

“Good so far,” Emily said.

“He also told me that my parents believed in these Radiants, and that these mysterious lines of energy could be used to somehow manipulate travel between dimensions.”

“A lot of this is going to sound a bit…out there, but…there’s something going on beneath the world, something that you and I take for granted.”

“Some magical multiverse type of thing?”

“Quantum mechanics isn’t magic, K. It’s science.”

“What the hell are the Meechum Radiants?”

“We don’t know exactly, but back in 1945, while Meechum was leading an experiment connected to strange attractors and the butterfly effect, he believed he’d stumbled upon something. He discovered that certain cause-and-effect manipulations, coincidences, and chance encounters were…enhanced in very specific parts of the world—amplified somehow.”

“And this amplification was connected to his Radiants?”

“Yes. By performing certain…movements or patterns, or by following connections and tracking coincidences, Meechum claimed he was able to…manipulate the butterfly effect, that he could perform a series of seemingly unconnected moves and facilitate an effect based on a completely unrelated cause.”

“A series of moves?”

“Okay, the story goes that Meechum had spent years mapping out a number of ostensibly random coincidences and anomalies in and around the city of Seattle. He eventually discovered that, along certain pathways, these anomalies weren’t as random as they appeared. He began noticing groups of highly improbable coincidences the closer he came to successfully engaging certain pathways—what he called Radiants. Meechum believed that these Radiants might be used to facilitate changes in the world, and that the ability to move back and forth between universes was not only possible, but probable. He said that, in one case, he’d been able to successfully manipulate a bank’s interest rate by simply preventing a data analyst in an unrelated field from buying her morning coffee.”