Rabbits(97)
“Your particular set of skills? That sounds like a Liam Neeson movie.”
“You know how I asked you about feeling strange, noticing patterns and coincidences, or missing time?”
“Yeah…”
“Well, that’s because the research our parents were doing at the Gatewick Institute involved them taking a large number of experimental drugs—including a prenatal cocktail our mothers were instructed to continue taking through all three trimesters of their pregnancies.”
“You’re saying these drugs are somehow connected to my experiencing missing time and obsessive behavior around coincidences and patterns?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying, K. My mother took those drugs as well. All of the Gatewick parents did.”
“Wait…so you’ve experienced these things?”
She nodded.
“Does that have anything to do with how you were able to bring me here? To this…dimension, or whatever it is?”
“It has everything to do with that, yes.”
“How does it work?”
“Something happened at Gatewick—something completely unintentional.”
“Which was what?”
“A few of the children born to Gatewick parents who’d been taking part in the prenatal drug study presented with certain…unique abilities.”
“Like what?”
“Under very special circumstances, these children were able to manipulate Meechum’s Radiants without using the advanced mapping techniques and computer systems normally required.”
“What sort of special circumstances?”
“Moments of extreme emotional distress.”
I swallowed hard, my mouth suddenly dry.
“So, you have these…unique abilities?”
“I do—a little.”
“What does that mean?”
“My mother stopped the drug therapy early in her first trimester, so I didn’t end up with very much Gatewick sauce.”
“But you had enough to manipulate Meechum’s Radiants, to bring me here, to this dimension?”
“What I did is like a…trick. I created a kind of temporary bubble that’s going to compress soon—and when that compression happens, I need to be somewhere else.”
“What about me?”
“The compression should take you back to where you began. Or at least, to where you were when you began following this trail.”
“Should?”
“I’m sorry, none of this stuff is…absolute.”
“What about me?”
“What about you?”
“How much…Gatewick sauce do I have?”
“Do you know how long your mother was taking the Gatewick drugs?”
I shook my head.
“Well, then,” Emily said as she stood up and started walking over to the elevator, “it’s a mystery.”
“When I met Crow in The Tower, he told me I wasn’t supposed to be here. Do you know what he meant?”
“Your parents used your ability to hide you from him.”
“My Gatewick sauce.”
“Exactly.”
“Is that why he tracked me down and threatened me?”
“I’m not sure, but he was surprised when you showed up in The Tower, and Crow really doesn’t like surprises.”
“What’s he doing up there?”
“What did he tell you he was doing?”
“Making adjustments for the good of mankind, or something like that.”
Emily shook her head. “When I first started working with him, he genuinely seemed to be trying to continue Worricker’s legacy, working to change the world for the good. But after a while, I started noticing strange patterns and anomalies in Crow’s work.”
“What was happening?”
“It turns out he’d been working on something else in tandem with our work in The Tower.”
“What?”
“A long time ago, something terrible happened while Crow was manipulating the Radiants.”
“What?”
“His daughter disappeared, and ever since, he’s been trying to find a way to use the Radiants to bring her back.”
“Is that possible? Bringing her back?”
“I have no idea, but whatever he’s been doing to try to find his daughter has had an increasingly destabilizing effect on the Radiants. Looking back now, I can see how everything was slowly twisting up his mind. But he’d changed so slowly I almost didn’t notice it happen, the way a frog sitting in cold water doesn’t notice that the water has gradually turned to a boil until it’s too late.”
“Does he know that what he’s doing is messing with the mechanism that stabilizes the multiverse?”
“He knows. I’m just not sure he’s capable of understanding…or caring. Not anymore.”
“And there’s nothing we can do?”
“Rabbits is the only system that can counter what he’s been doing and stabilize the Radiants.”
“So, what, winning Rabbits would help?”
“Win the game, save the world.”
“How the hell are we supposed to do that?”