"There," Hawk said, and thumped her finished creation down in front of Alex. He was sitting in Emile's delightfully tacky living room, studying the expression of a bedazzled garden gnome, hoping for more answers. He'd explained his own work on who Studdard was, and was waiting for his wife to find her own piece of the puzzle: tests for the Prism.

"Okay," Dyson said, as Hawk backed away from a glass and rubber contraption. "So how the fuck are rubber gloves supposed to be any kind of protection?" he said.

Em held up a heavy duty plastic bag half full of yellow powder. It was the precise shade of the rubber gloves. "This is glass frit. I have two coats of it on the gloves. We used rubber cement. I can't be sure of the coverage, but--"

"It'll work," Dyson said, after a moment of thought. "We've got a similar set up at HQ. But how do you have that much neon yellow powdered...know what? I'm not asking."

"My mother went through a glass blowing phase," Hawk said, miserably.

Alex remembered the glass blowing phase. Mostly through burn ointment and ER trips. Hawk's choice to give the excess glass supplies to Em had been made of desperation and the scent of burnt hair. "Cool," he said, referencing the makeshift case, and sat back to organize his notes.

They'd prized apart the pieces of the Prism they had, using a pair of tiny tweezers and an Xacto-knife. Apparently it had fused slightly when it tore a hole in Elizabeth Cumming's backyard. Now, carefully, Hawk put the thing back together, her hands sheathed in glass fragments and rubber and the enzymes of her ants' honey. At least, they hoped that was the case.

"Okay." She said, as the last fragment slid into place beneath the teeny tiny tweezers. She slammed the glove-hole covers into place, two sheets of glass that latched across the arm holes. "Let's—"

The first flash was the same terrible blue-white flare that Alex remembered from Mrs. Cummings' backyard. It issued from beneath the Prism, and lasted only a handful of seconds. Then there was a hum. There'd been a hum before, something that wound into teeth and bone, overshadowed by Hawk's voice as she slammed the port covers shut. Then another flash, hot and bright and beautiful as starlight. Two seconds of it, and then darkness and the hum for a few more seconds. It reminded Alex of an engine working desperately at its own activation, but without half the necessary parts. Pistons working air and accomplishing nothing. That's what this was. Flash, and hum, flash again.

"Holy fuck," Dyson said. Then, even softer. "We never got this to work at the Project. Not ever."

Flash, hum, flash. The light was lingering in long, strange strands, reaching like the tendrils of a deep-ocean anemone. It was beautiful, in a way that evoked dying things. Numinous, Alex thought. That was the word for it. This shit was numinous.

"Maybe you just never tried the thing that worked?" Em said, eyes on the hum and flash, hum, flash.

"We haven't tried anything. We took it apart, put it back together, and put it in an aquarium. This is the kind of science you give a twelve-year-old who isn't too bright. Like doing a diorama on monarch butterflies or something like that," Henry said.

"Y'all should have done this way before now," Alex said. It flashed. It hummed. "We gonna let that keep going or we gonna figure out what's building up in there?"

"The substance building up in there is something unknown to humanity and science in every sense of the word. It invokes a sense of awe and humility." Emile Yung said. "And awe and humility are the only things keeping me from poking it with a stick."

"Humility?" Hawk said.

"For all I know, that's what God's freaking tears look like. And now I'm willing to entertain the idea of God." This brought on several hasty nods from Emile as they examined their own words, measured against the building ethereal substance within that glass. "Yeah," They swallowed, their hair a multi-colored cloud accenting every warble of chin, shiver of spine, and the rhythm of their hand's trembling. "I could see God with this." Her voice dripped with loathing and terror. Gods were not good things to Emile.

"We aren't seeing God. We're seeing some kind of chemistry. A reaction between this world and...whatever is on the other side of it." Hawk said.

She met Alex's eyes, and he read the same stark white fear there. I could entertain the idea of God, because it meant there was a hand on the reins. Soon some Jovian blade would come crashing down and obliterate them for this violation of the natural order. Because that was the pomp and promise of Gods, what all the songs and all the mythologies and all the rites ever came down to: limits. Thou Shalt Not. In the core of every human, these were the words most longed for. And the most insulted, the most tested and branded and wormed through. Speak it, Thou Shalt Not, and suddenly every human mind sported a thousand wood-boring mouths, and found the will of water pouring into fissures. How firm the foundations, how mighty the will humanity casts itself against? Where are the limits of the ineffable? Where are the cracks? Where is the place where we must stop? Please let us find it soon, the prayer of every species that ever scrawled from dirt. Please, something make us stop.

But nature does not come with limits. There would be no god apparent here. Maybe there never was one. Maybe He, and His Angels and His Laws, praised the way fences and guardrails are praised, Hail Mary, and Hail, Guardian, and Hail, Gravity, maybe they had all chosen a time out. There was no one who would have stopped Studdard, or Kaiser, or that first young, bright spark with that first Prism. God had stepped out for a smoke the day Madame Curie found radium, and in Alex's opinion he had yet to return. I am become Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds, the whisper of every toddler who discovers their way out of the pram. Only a pram is a barrier, and nature is never that kind.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

They'd done what they should not do. They'd found their way into it, cleanly.

"I'm going to go turn it off," Hawk said, and walked towards the light show. She took the protective glass lids off the arm holes, and Alex held his breath a moment. Each flash seemed to light her through. He could nearly see the outline of her teeth as flash, a hole was torn in the universe, and hum, it came closed again. She moved with what he felt was unbelievable grace, something made not of line and form but of calm. Deliberate and slow, her hands in the box. She picked up the tiny tweezers, clicked them twice. It was something so human, so natural, those two clicks. Even with her hands in the gloves, Alex imagined the outline of her bones. How would they look in the unprotected air? Yellow hands, yellow gloves. She picked the lid off their main experiment area, where tools lay unused. Took the tiny tweezers and...

He'd expected her to slowly, gently, take the top off the Prism. Slowly, gently, lay the other pieces beside it. A glacial pulse was the sort of respect one should feel. She was almost there. Then a slight knot of frown appeared above one brow, just enough of a warning, the last waiver before something is pulled apart in centrifuge, and her hand flew. She didn't bother with the tweezers, but smashed the entirety of her hand into the space where the prism would be, moving as she did so that the tiny crystal bits would fly. Then she pulled her arms out, fast as she could. "Get off," she began muttering. "Get it off. Get off. Get off."

Alex intercepted her before she got to the sink. She shivered in his hands, as if fresh out of the cold. There was a helplessness, a biological treachery, behind those shakes. "I need to wash my hands," she said, her voice shaking as bad as her limbs. "I need to get it off."

"Hawk. You're safe," he said.

"It has to come off."

"You knocked the Prism flying. Henry has the wash in his hands. Hold out your own. We'll get you clean."

The substance of light in the box dissipated, but slowly, lingering slightly longer than incense smoke. Alex talked to Hawk as Dyson scrubbed her arms down. He told her about her ants, asking questions, getting answers back piece-meal. She kept looking at the soap cleaning her arms. The unspoken get it off, get it off, get it off echoed through her eyes. Her hands kept twitching. But Alex wasn't going to let her go. Her expression was what one used when one was about to scrub the skin off one's own limbs.

"You're alright," he whispered.

"We need to scrub. All of us need to scrub. There's no telling how much exposure we just got." She gestured, and Dyson recaptured her hand and kept cleaning it. Much longer than he needed to.

"You were under rubber and glass, and you ate honeypots. You're good." Alex said.

"Nothing says that!" She shouted. Dyson chose that moment to go after her other hand. She surrendered it, and held her other hand, dripping, out from her body. Water patted onto Emile's ancient brown shag carpet, making precisely that sound, pat, pat, pat, as the final echoes of the hum seemed to leave their bones. Pat, pat, pat. It could have been blood, and maybe it should have been. "Nothing says we're safe. We have guesses. We don't have facts." She took a deep breath, backing herself down from the eternal precipice. "Okay. Okay. Okay. What we need to do is eat more honeypots. Give Em and Henry a double dose, each of us will take one."

"Hawk, are you sure we have even that much?" Emile said. "You're going to kill those colonies if you don't stop."

"No. But you trump the colony. All of you do. I'm not willing to lose people because I want to keep my ants safe."

Alex went to the precious, precious boxes. The ants were unhappy with the world, in his opinion. One colony had piled everything, including themselves, into one of the mesh-screened things Hawk called hydration ports. The other had gone with the middle section. He popped the lid off the more populated, which caused an immediate panic. All the ants save for the honeypots scattered. There were four large bodied ants left in this one. Shaking his head, Alex pulled them all out with another pair of tiny tweezers, handed to him by Emile. He gave them the first two, Dyson the second. Then he started sweeping the ants back into the box.

"I've got a trick for that, Alex. Go on to the next box." Em said.

He did. There were six pots in this one. He took one each for himself and hawk. Ate his. Crossed the room to give his wife one. She was still standing there with her arms held awkwardly away from her body, dripping water that should have been thicker and redder onto the ugly, old carpet. Get it off. Get it off. He picked up one hand to put the honeypot into it.

"No," she said, and opened her mouth.

"Hawk. There's nothing wrong with your hands." Alex said.

"Are you sure?" She said, and there were tears in her eyes.

Fear sucks. "Yes, love. I'm sure." And he dropped his voice. "Look. You can't give into the fear. I understand it, and I'm fucking petrified too. But you cannot let the fear win. You give in now, and you will give in every time this shit comes up." A phone began to ring. "Please, Baby. You gotta fight for yourself right now."

She hesitated, then forced herself to use her hands to take the offered ant. "How many could you give Henry and Em?" she said, and then popped the thing into her mouth.

"Two each. And the colony is pissed."

"We ate more. Before we went to Mrs. Cummings, we ate—"

"We have what we have. We're doing the best we can with the information Kaiser gave us." A pause. "We have four honeypots left. That's enough for one more for each of us."

"Most of what Kaiser told us was obviously bullshit," Hawk said. "We got that thing working with ambient light on the first try. There's no way they failed to reproduce this in a lab."

"You do anything special to it?" Alex whispered.

"We took it apart, cleaned it and put it back together."

"So either Henry is lying, or Kaiser is playing games with his whole Project."

A nod. "I just don't understand why he's still playing with this shit. Him and Studdard both. This shit is lethal, Alex. The time to play games with it—"The phone ringing in the kitchen. "Whose is that?" Hawk said. It wasn't hers. Her ring-tone was still the factory default. This one was shouting Asshole Calling.

"Fuck. It's mine. Hold on," Dyson said, and ran for it.

"We don't need to know the reason yet," Alex said. "We just need to figure out where Kaiser's limits are." A pause. He dropped his voice lower. "And find out if Studdard is really involved at all. Kaiser gave up his name too fast, Hawk."

She nodded in response. "Okay. Well, I'm not—"

"Hey, Guys?" Henry Dyson walked back into the room. His voice sounded sick. He looked like he was about to faint. "The boss says it's time for us to go. He's got a helicopter coming to get us."

"How? Why?" Em said.

"You know the worst case scenario we haven't talked about?" Henry said.

Just walk into a population center and set it off until he gets money, Alex thought. "Yeah?"

"It's happened. There's been a Glass Event in the Bronx. And we're going to go investigate it." Henry said. Paused. Added, "That's not a request. Kaiser's sending guns to make sure we go."

And into this silence, a fear vibrating every chord in their bodies, Emile Yung said, "Well...fuck."

And the sound of an approaching helicopter left them no time to say anything else.