JP was drifting in and out of consciousness. Every now and again, he's open his eyes, mutter something in Lakota, then fall back into his vegetative state. Dr. Marlene Hutton had started writing down the times when that happened, but those records didn't really help anyone.
Louise didn't leave his side. On occasion, during a brief moment of lucidity, he looked at her, scared, pained, and she couldn't do anything but hold his hand. She ate dinner in the mobile lab, sleeping on the passenger's seat, covered with nothing but a thin blanket.
Dinner in the common house wasn't much fun, either. Riley wasn't there, Jake left early to go stare at the puddle on the clearing - something about the rain not falling right. It was just her, Sadie, Mari and Autumn. They didn't talk much.
Abby didn't want to make eye contact with Sadie. Deep inside her she knew she couldn't blame her for the decision she made, but it stung regardless. Despite everything, despite her family missing her so much, the camp had become a second home. Being there just felt... right. Safe.
Sadie had broken all that. Just outside the window, a few hundred feet away from the clearing, were six pick-up trucks, a mobile lab trailer, and crates of scientific equipment with prices that looked like phone numbers. Abby didn't want to be reminded of what her new home was turning into. She sat with the back to the window.
"I can't believe I almost killed JP." Marigold broke the awkward silence and dropped her fork. "God. Imagine-"
"He's safe now. That's what matters" Sadie interrupted her. "You did what you could."
Marigold gave a short, bitter laugh. "What I could was nearly dehydrating him to death with fuckin' plant magic."
"You couldn't've known" Autumn said, and didn't make eye contact either. "At the end of the day, he's alive because of you."
"He's alive because Sadie made a deal with the feds" Marigold shot back, but her anger dissolved halfway through the sentence. She rubbed her eyes. "Sorry. I just..." She got up and rifled through her pocket, checking for the pack of smokes. She found it. "I'm gonna need a few minutes."
"I thought you quit-" Sadie said, but Mari interrupted her.
"Don't." She stepped outside, closed the door behind her. The wood of the cabin creaked as she leaned against it and lit a cigarette.
Abby didn't eat much after that. The food - vaguely pasta-shaped something Sadie managed to whip up from their dwindling supplies - sat cold on her plate. The air in the common house felt too still.
Autumn excused herself next, muttering something about checking her telescope and the weather. Sadie offered to help clean up, but Abby shook her head.
"I got it." She said, her voice flat. She wasn't sure why she needed to feel useful, only that if she sat any longer she'd dissolve into tears and shame. Sadie nodded and stepped out.
Alone in the common house, Abby cleared the plates. She stacked them in the plastic bin, wiped down the table, then paused. The overhead light - a neon tube wrapped in yellow napkins to mellow the harsh industrial light - flickered. Just for a second.
She looked up, but there was nothing. Just the buzz of the water heater as the sink filled up and the gentle creak of the platform in the wind.
Abby stepped out onto the porch and leaned on the railing. Below, in the clearing, she could see the faint glow coming from the windows of the mobile lab. A spotlight had been set up to illuminate the work zone, casting long shadows of crates and equipment that stretched like fingers into the tree line.
She didn't like the way they moved in the wind. Too sharp. Too clean. Watching. Waiting.
It wasn't much use, she figured. Tomorrow was another day. Had to be.
She cleared down in the common house, left the light on for Sadie to find her way back to her house, but went over the suspension bridges and up the rope ladder back to where she and Riley had slept for the past few weeks. Riley was already inside, lying on her bed, looking up.
"Hey, Ri." Abby said and threw her hoodie on the floor in front of her bed. "You okay?"
"You think it's going to be different?"
"What?"
"When it's over, I mean. When we're all going back to our lives. The Bay Area."
"I... dunno."
"I'll just go back to being a weirdo loner. No friends, no family. Dad's probably going to want to study my power."
"He can't make you do anything." Abby said and got under the covers. Riley didn't answer right away.
"Feels like he already did. He told me that Glen Park is an expensive school. He wants this to be over as soon as possible, so we can go back to the same shitty life we had, with pizza on Fridays being-"
"You're not the same person, Ri. You have me now. Jake. Autumn. We're not going to go away because this... adventure is over."
"What'll happen then? When it's over, I mean. We don't even know if we're going to make it back."
"How do you mean?"
Riley sighed. "You saw it. The space between the world. What if I teleport and just... don't come back?"
Abby reached over to her, fingers firm around Riley's hand. "Then I'll find you."
Riley looked at her, surprised.
"I mean it." Abby said, with a small smile. "You're not allowed to ditch me for the weird extra-dimensional geometry spirit world. I'll drag your butt right back."
Riley let out a breath that turned into a laugh. "Thanks, Abby."
They stayed like that for a while. Quiet, looking up through the slanted window above, listening to the rain buzz faintly.
Eventually Abby spoke again. "I think it will be different. When we go back."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. We'll have each other."
Abby woke to the sound of metal rattling.
At first, she thought it was the wind. Another storm, maybe. But then then bed itself shifted under her, just slightly. Her water cup clattered to the floor.
"Ri-" she started, but before she could finish, a deep, low rumble passed through the floorboards. Riley shot upright in her bed.
"Did you feel that?"
A second pulse. Longer, louder. The rafters creaked. Outside, the suspension bridge groaned.
"Oh, I felt that." Her heart rate spiked. "Was that-"
"An earthquake." Riley was already up, getting dressed and pulling on her boots. "There's not supposed to be earthquakes here."
Down on the clearing, Jacob was pacing around the puddle. "I knew it. I knew it, damn it." Abby and the others quickly approached, and he held up his palm. They stopped.
"What's-"
"There is never any seismic activity here. The entirety of South Dakota is on a craton, that means stable rock, no chance for tectonic-"
Another groan shook the ground, and the water in the puddle rippled. Jake nodded.
"It's coming from underground. Come on. We gotta get to the lab. It might not be safe here."
They made their way to the cabin, squeezed through the tunnel, past the hall of records, which was now illuminated by spotlights and LED tubes. Somehow, that felt wrong too. Too modern, too surgical, not the same passage they went through a week ago.
Down past the spiral corridor, they found Dr. David Vassos.
He looked like he hadn't slept in days. Greasy hair, safety goggles pushed onto his forehead, pacing on the floor like he was waiting for God Himself to answer. Behind him, floodlights illuminated the catwalk to the sphere inside the chamber. But something was different. A fresh borehole was punched directly into the obsidian black shell of the sphere.
"Yes, we breached it." He said before anyone else could speak. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
"You drilled into it?" Riley asked, horrified.
"Not far," her father replied, standing at the viewing gallery. "A few inches. That's when the drill overloaded."
"And the earthquake?" Abby asked.
"The sphere responded."
"What does that mean, it responded?" Jacob asked and picked up a few technical drawings of the sphere off of the table in front of the viewing gallery.
"It means," Vassos said, stopping to look him in the eye. "That something inside the sphere moved."
The silence that followed Dr. Vassos' words was heavy, trembling with tension so thick it most definitely showed up on the seismographs. Even the machines seemed quieter now.
Then the sound began.
A creaking, popping whisper like ice expanding under the weight of a lake. Jake flinched. Riley stepped back from the window.
Then, it cracked.
A jagged fracture split across the surface of the sphere. Only a few inches, but unmistakably new. It glowed faintly at the edges, but with darkness, not with light. A pitch so deep and absolute it seemed to pull one's eye inward. Abby shuddered.
"What the hell-"
Another crack joined the first. Then two, three more. They spiderwebbed across the surface, branching and intersecting, crawling with impossible geometric patterns - Abby's head hurt looking at them. It was too precise to be natural. Something on the inside was drawing them, etching a pattern only it could understand.
"No. No, no," Riley's dad muttered under his breath. "It's solid, it's dead rock, sealed since before the damn Pleistocene-"
"You woke it up" Jacob said. "This is what I've been seeing. The patterns."
"Evacuate the monument" Dr. Marlene Hutton commanded to one of the other geologists in the room. "Now!"
The temperature in the viewing gallery dropped. Not sharply, but steadily, a deepening chill that crept through boots, clothes, gloves and finally settled in the bones. The room shook again.
And then, it shattered.
With a sigh, a soft, dry exhale, the obsidian shell collapsed inwards, the fractures deepening until they folded into nothingness. The sphere imploded, like a dying star.
In its place was a hole.
Light didn't touch it. Sound bent away.
Abby took a step back without realising. Jacob grabbed her hand without asking.
"Is that... a black hole?" Marigold asked. "It's-"
"-beautiful." Vassos said. He stepped forward, eyes wide, grin even wider. He approached further, until his hand was on the glass.
"David." Dr. Truman's voice was firm, fatherly. "Step back."
Vassos didn't blink. "It's speaking to me." He stepped back, then down the staircase to the airlock the USGS had constructed in the nineties. It was powered now.
"Wh- Dave! Come back!"
"I have to speak to it" he said and stepped through the vault door onto the metal catwalk.
"God damn it, Dave, come back!" Dr. Truman yelled and ran down the stairs.
"I'm sorry, Allen" he said as he locked the door from the inside of the chamber. "I can't let you stop me."
"Dave!" He shouted, pounding on the enormous metal door. "Don't go near that thing!"
He was already too close. Within feet of the anomaly. The air around it rippled like oil on a stovetop. His hair floated upward. They all watched as his boots lost touch with the ground, and he was lifted off of the metal catwalk.
Then, the sphere pulled.
There was no dramatic wind. No flash of light, no loud bang. The world just stretched and twisted, and geologist Dr. David Vassos came apart.
First his coat, then his skin peeled into geometric fragments, disassembling like faulty origami into impossible shapes. Red splattered onto the catwalk. A sound like dry leaves crunching echoed through the chamber.
Then he was gone.
Riley's dad stumbled backwards, hitting the wall. Marlene choked on her breath. Abby couldn't even scream.
"What the- what the fuck was that?" Marigold finally said.
"It took him. It read him, and it... unraveled him." Jacob said, numb, quiet.
Nobody had anything to add, because in the centre of the Roosevelt chamber, the anomaly pulsed again. Once, twice.
And it started to grow.