Alasdair West knew the single most important fact in the world: we are all born suckers. Barnum’s famous comment about the birth-rate of his target audience was aimed at us all. We are all fallible and human, and we can all be tricked into selling our soul for pocket lint if given the right presentation. For example, place a thousand dollars in a random drawer and charge people for a chance to find it. Sure, you'd have to pay someone a thousand bucks once in a while, but the right price, the right number of drawers, you could make a mint. Making money is all about math: how much, from how many, with as little from you as possible. That's how you make a fortune.

Alex walked into a room made of clear plastic medical tarps and knew by his metric, he'd just met a much better con-artist than he.

"Mr. West. Ms. West. I'm Kaiser Willheim," said the man in the middle of the room. "Please, sit."

Alex paid a lot of attention to the outsides of people. Largely because that told you the most important thing about them. Not who they are. Who someone is lies in the negative and liminal spaces. It's in the rubber bands on wrists, the doodles on legal pads, the things people do without thought. That's where you find who someone really is, and in Alex's line of work, it's the least useful thing you can know about a person. Who someone is. That's concrete and unchanging, and usually the last thing someone wants you to know.

No, outsides tell you who someone wants to be. This is how they want to be seen. Kaiser Willheim was the sixth richest man in the world. He was wearing off-the-rack Armani. Slight tailoring, Alex thought. Little tucks at elbows and knees and waist. Mostly for his comfort, but not so much that it screamed bespoke. Well groomed, as if his beard were a golf course and his hair a work of art, sculpted with comb and hair gel to greet people the way a courtyard fountain does guests. Very little jewelry. Cufflinks. He wore little metal lapel clips and a string tie. There was a white ten gallon hat sitting on his desk. Huh. Alex looked at the rest of the desk residents. Apple laptop, boring. iPhone, no surprise there. Android smart watch. Huh. Noted. A sculpture of a cowboy lassoing a horse, classical bronze style, the sort of sculpture celebrating the European features of the cowboy almost as much as it did the wild toss of the stallion's mane.

"My daddy always did love westerns," Alex said, because the first person to speak--"

"The first person to speak most often controls the room. And you are lying. Bartholomew Lawrence "Baylor" West hates westerns. Passionately enough to make scamming cowboys a career choice. The same way April Stardust Rayne, formerly April Katherine DeWitt, of the Boston DeWitts, never turned down a guru. By the way, Haven, you probably ought to pry your mother out of the grip of that Yogi in Idaho. I hear he's something of a lech."

Hawk did not respond. She clenched her jaw, clenched her hands, and kept her mouth shut. That's my Hawk, he thought. It was absolutely the best move she could make. This guy had come out swinging. Alex had expected something. He hadn't expected this.

He'd taught Hawk (because he'd thought that Hawk could get through to April where he could not) that if you want to avoid getting conned, you do not engage. Don't talk. Let them make all the noise, and you watch and listen. See if you can figure out if they actually care what you think, or if they just want to provoke you.

Alex had money on "provoke".

"Government contacts," he said. "That’d give you access to the basic shit. After that…What'd you do? Throw interns at our social media?"

"That worked for Ms. West. You were a lot harder." Kaiser said.

"I bet. So. You wanted to talk. We're listening."

"Your wife actually talk, or did you buy her for the looks?" Kaiser said.

Hawk smiled, walked to the nearest chair, and sat down. If you did not know her, you might even think she was only a bit miffed. There were solar furnaces that could take a lesson from the rage burning in Hawk's eyes.

This, he thought, was why he admired her. She was the weak link here, a situation created by culture and gender and human stupidity. Misogyny had given Kaiser Willheim a stick he could attack with, and he could dig at Hawk until she cracked...and the game's nature meant she could not respond. Any response would show Willheim the flank he was looking for. Was Hawk the sort of woman who protected her femininity? Did she feel like she had to keep up with the big boys? Where were her fears? Her vulnerabilities? How weak did cultural misogyny leave this ambitious Black doctor? Kaiser was probing at her with lemon-stained fingers, seeking wounds. He wanted her fire. Her spirit. He wanted her to say ow.

And she kept silent. She endured. In a game where movement meant loss, she did nothing. And that was hard. Ask someone like Hawk to move the world, she'll ask only where she's allowed to stand. Ask her to fight, she's loading bullets and studying anatomy to go for a jugular. But inaction left her reeling. And if Alex were playing her, that's how he'd do it. Inaction. Block off all her routes, save for the one you want her to go down. But be careful, because if you left a single route out, she'd find it. Hawk had her namesake's power, but she also had a rabbit's sense of survival and God knew she needed it. Now, she did nothing. She bit into it with clenched jaw and held on to nothing until her knuckles bleached and hands trembled. Nothing was her lifeline. Nothing was her salvation.

She did nothing, and she did it beautifully.

"And you don't rise to your wife's protection. Interesting." Kaiser said.

"What happened to Elizabeth Cummings' dog?" Alex said.

Kaiser sighed. "That's what I hate about you blue collar types. You stick to the point. Here you two should be falling all over yourself to impress me. You want to help. Admit it. If you didn't, you'd have left Elizabeth Cummings to her daughter. She won't survive, by the way."

This caught both the Wests off their guard. "What?" Hawk said. Alex almost echoed her. He felt shocked. The old woman had been in bad shape, but he'd seen older, weaker folk bounce back from worse.

"I pulled her file. I wanted to give you two the good news, personally. It's hard, saving someone. You know, the Chinese believe you are responsible for the lives you save. Forever."

"That's racist and apocryphal," Alex said.

"Ah, but it has a grain of truth, doesn't it? Ms. West, you're a scientist. You understand." He waited. Hawk had her "Be nice to the tax man" smile on, which probably meant she was ready to bathe naked in Kaiser Willheim's blood. "When we save a life, we demand that person live. It's probably the nearest a man like us can come to giving birth. I would be a terrible megalomaniac if I passed up such an easy chance to play God." He sat down behind his desk. "But sadly, I'm afraid Mrs. Cummings is no one's fair salvage."

"Is it radiation?" Hawk said.

Willheim shook his head. "We aren't sure. At first, that's what we thought it was—you saw the decontamination agents on your way in. If someone has heavy enough exposure we will use them, mostly because at that point...it won't make things worse. But no. It is not radiation. Or at least, it isn't radiation as science currently understands it. By every metric we understand, every device we have, nothing is wrong with this part of the world. Radioactivity is normal. Temperature is in the proper zone for life, forty to one hundred thirty-five Celsius. There's no microwaves agitating water molecules or sound waves vibrating...but all you need to do to know something is gone catastrophically wrong is look down at your feet. Within an hour, the only living things in a six block radius will be us. Twelve hours of unbroken exposure after that will be lethal."

"Given that you're here, and your people are here, you've got a way to break exposure," Alex said.

Kaiser nodded, tenting his hands over his chest. "We do. The plastic helps. We have it specially manufactured into a kind of faraday cage. Various wires are implanted in the plastic. You noticed how it looks clouded? Yes? That's the wire."

"What is it?" Hawk said. "If it's not radiation, what do you have?"

Lips pressed into a thin line.

"You...can't answer that question. Can you? You don't know." She dug a bit herself.

"It's an energy signature. We know that much. With a little effort, we can get it to translate into something we can actively measure and understand. Mostly using crystals, god help us."

"Crystals." Hawk said.

"Don't start, young lady. I heard it all already. I've said it all already. We argued and fought with minds greater than the entirety of this city put together. If you direct and focus a beam of this energy through certain crystalline formations, it will have an effect. Plug in a chunk of regular quartz, you'll get heat. Plug in obsidian, you can actually translate it to a fairly interesting chunk of the solar spectrum and make a fairly spectacular mess. Problem is...we don't get a whole lot of sense out of these reactions. We spent one afternoon turning bottled water into ice with a hunk of amethyst. And it is extra-terrestrial in origin."

Well, Alex thought into the silence that followed. If you're gonna have a mental breakdown, back it with a billion dollars. The fireworks are going to be spectacular. "Extra-terrestrial."

"Light is extra-terrestrial. The word merely indicates a point of origin. We are bathed, sir, in the winds of a thousand stellar fields every hour of every day. Most of them are so weak, we never notice. It's our proximity to the sun that gives it power, and gives us life.” Kaiser shifted in his chair, as if turning a mental page. “We know that space and time are not nearly as linear and predictable as we imagine them to be. We see our reality as a singular plane of existence. Current science suggests we resemble more a crumpled ball, folded in some direction we are not capable of perceiving. But if we could perceive it, West. If we could see the way through reality, all the way to the bottom of the millpond, do you know what I think we 'd see? We'd see China, sitting just over my shoulder, through a fold in space and time. Or maybe something further even than that. We could be footsteps away from Alpha Centauri...if we only knew what direction to move. If you can crumple one universe into a paper ball, it stands to reason you could fold more than one. Imagine reality, not one universe, but a billion billion of them, all together like the pages of a book. But what does the idea of many things invoke? Something so clear, so obvious, so profoundly real, that we never really see it."

We are trapped in the brainpan of someone who has drunk his own Kool-aid; Alex thought. And he is way high on his own opinion of himself.

But Hawk was looking at him with that slightly unfocused look he usually enjoyed. It meant she was thinking very hard about something he would struggle to understand. Willheim had certainly painted a picture; she was clearly mesmerized by it.

"Space," she said. "The space in between them. For you to have two objects, you have to have a space where those objects do not exist. You have to have boundaries. There has to be something that is not a part of the objects being compared." She paused. "But it doesn't stand to reason. You think that this energy signature is something coming from the space in between hypothetical universes."

"A year ago, I would agree whole-heartedly with that statement. Because you are correct, Ms. West. That was the working theory we had. Until recent events allowed us to make theory fact. There was, indeed, a small tear in reality."

"How small?" Hawk said.

"We're bringing in an electron microscope to get a better look at it. If it were the size of a whale, it’d be a spectacular show. It’s maybe the size of a dime by our best estimates. We won’t see much. Some very basic ionization, maybe some mist, a few sparks."

"And prolonged exposure to this energy is lethal," Alex said.

"Well, we aren't exactly sunning ourselves to measure endurance," Kaiser said. "We know that there appears to be a threshold of about twelve hours prolonged exposure before living things begin to undergo a kind of low grade spontaneous combustion."

"What?" Hawk said.

"For lack of a better term. Something seems to ignite within living flesh. Unfortunately, it burns through...well, whatever the hell it is consuming, far, far too quickly to measure, or even attempt to treat. Elizabeth Cummings will likely live another twenty four hours, but the cellular degradation has already begun." Kaiser's eyes shifted from Alex to Hawk. "You saw it starting, didn't you? Hair, maybe? Or nails?"

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"Her fingernails were starting to crumble. But that's already 'dead' tissue."

"Our understanding of human anatomy says that it's already 'dead' tissue and should not be affected. It is. 'Dead' tissue is affected first. Hair, nails. Then the outer layer of skin begins to lose flexibility, to flake and crumble. Then the 'living' tissue begins to...well, we don't really have a proper name for it. We're calling it crystallization, and areas of effect are called 'glassed', just because we have to call it something. Crystallization most closely resembles what is happening. It appears to be a chemical reaction transforming carbon-based compounds into something more silicone based."

"That can't happen," Hawk said.

"No. It can't." He leaned forward. "And it's happened six times in the last six months."

Alex wanted to move on from that, but Hawk made a sound. Goddamn it, this guy had both of them on his hook...and Alex couldn't look away. He kept thinking about the dead dog, the way its ear just...snapped off.

Hawk looked like she was about to faint. "Six," she breathed.

Kaiser nodded. "And that's what we know about. For all we know, it could be specific to these six sites. Maybe these sort of...breaches, these fissures in reality, happen all the time, like micro-quakes, and it's just this specific reality that is...particularly antithetical to our version of life. Which I have to hope isn't the only form of life because...well. Up until now, all six fissures have been microscopic. The largest so far was two incidents ago. A hole in reality the size of multiple grains of sand. It affected six acres of farmland in Idaho. That chlorine spill they're cleaning up? It was nothing of the sort. A most regrettable...but necessary lie. Because if the world finds out that at any time a lethal hole can open in reality and you won't know until you're dead...The government has given me something very close to carte blanche to resolve this. And while that's not as much power as some would like...it's enough to make people very careful about what they choose to do.

"You two were making very loud threats about calling certain public-facing organizations. You can, of course, attempt to call the CDC and FEMA, and they may even respond the way you would like to for the first few days. But trust me, you would have to be very quick to get that reaction. I would say be able to reach a phone within the next couple of hours. Which is something I can make difficult, or easy. It depends, children, on what you two would like to do next."

"We want to work for you," Hawk said, and Alex thought, yes, Love, but you aren't supposed to say that yet.

"That won't happen," Kaiser said, after a significant pause. Long enough to make one think he was actually considering it. "Not that I don't appreciate the sentiment, but I have the best of the best working for me. I vetted them extensively. I've started the same process on you, but having spoken with you...well, I'm pretty certain that we're done here. Your thesis on the honeypot ants of New Mexico was very interesting. The next time I need an alternative to bees, I'll make sure to give you a call. Unfortunately, Mr. West, I have no need for your expertise."

"What? No problems to solve? Or you like to do your cons on your own time?" He pitched his voice warm. It would hurt more that way.

"I don't appreciate the tone, Mr. West."

"I don't appreciate that you've insulted my wife non stop since we stepped in this room. Now, I'm not sure if it's because she's a woman and you're a misogynist, or if it's because you think she's weaker than me, but you're wrong on both counts. We've kept things polite, and I'm grateful that you've done the same. But you were starting to test a whole lot more than this situation warrants." He thought for a moment, and then decided no, he was going to let that statement rest. "So let's call that a nice reminder. You don't want us to make certain phone calls. I want to understand why my client died. That said, Mister Willheim, I can live with ignorance. How's your tolerance for exposure?"

"I can make sure you'll get a copy of that report."

Alex was about to bluster on, when Hawk leaned over and touched his arm. "It's alright. We can give him our email. Mutual exchange between scientists and all that." She smiled with lots of teeth. "Do you have Dyson on your team yet?"

"Dyson, Harrison, and Arlete Parker. Not in the field, of course." He said.

"There we go. We'll be fine. I know Dyson. Not personally. But he's good people. The way mom's good people, you know?" she raised an eyebrow at Alex.

Yes, he would absolutely agree. April Rayne was a very good person. The way baby ducks are very good animals. They make baby ducks in bulk because every predator for miles knows they taste good with ketchup. Duck nuggets. April Rayne was duck nuggets.

"It will be fine," she repeated. And if he didn't know his wife, he might even have believed her.

***

"So. Why did you step on my lines and end the meeting early?" Alex said.

"He was going to ask us to work for him eventually, right?" she said.

"That's where we were headed."

"But we were going to have to accept some really, really shitty terms to get there. Like being so compartmentalized we'd be the third blind guy feeling up the elephant."

"That is an incredibly ableist statement, I hate the joke, we need to find a better home for that idea." Alex sighed. "What's the play, Baby?"

"Henry Dawson is an expert on biology and soil creatures. He’s also an idiot and he’s got a living beef with a friend of mine. A couple years ago he published a pretty controversial paper on mites. It stomped all over some research a different group was doing. The lead on that project is Dr. Emile Yung. They're incredible, and if Dyson is talking to Willheim, that means that Yung is not."

Alex began to grin. "But they have enough of a research overlap to be able to cover whatever Dyson is looking at."

"Oh, it gets better than that. This is one of those really stupid academic beefs. It's like up there with the debates over the orangutan from Poe's Rue Morgue. Outsiders don’t know about it. Insiders bring popcorn to their peer reviews. So if Dyson is asking questions about something, Yung is going to know, and they'll already be researching it so they can swipe publication out from under him." She smiled, thinly. "Don't play with academia, love. We have our weird little passions...but they aren't little to us. And our arsenal can be pretty big." She frowned. "We'll also need a physicist. Preferably one who really likes theoretical stuff and quantum...molecular...whatever."

"You are inspiring confidence, bird-girl," Alex said.

"Ask me about the identification points between m. mimicus and m. depilis. I'll show you the two-thirds of a paper I'm currently working on, and the critiques one of my colleagues gave me."

Alex knew that the m species meant either the itty-bitty black ants Hawk kept in a set of tubs, tubes, and petri dishes, or her honeypots. "Mimicus are the garnet colored ones with the red heads, right?"

"As are m. depilis. But depilis has less hair. That's the depilis part."

"Garnet colored ants that swell up like grapes and taste amazing. I am eventually going to get to taste the damn things, right?"

Hawk sighed. She'd spent the last five years trying to get a stable colony of honeypots past their first year, so that she could harvest the repletes. These were the honeypot's namesakes, the ants turned to living balloons of sugars, fluids, and lipids. Humans only really liked the sugar ones. It wasn't exactly honey, because unlike bees, who stored nectar in wax evaporation combs, honeypots store their nectar in each other. They had some real neat antimicrobial properties, but the real star was the flavor. Sweet, like wild berries but with a sharp vinegar note. She'd had a chance to try them once, when a friendly rival in the field showed off a very impressive M. Mexicanus colony. Ten years old, the repletes hung from the ceiling and walls of their formicarium like rows of living jewels. Leslie Wynn was the guy's name. He'd built the formicarium himself, a custom job with dim lights set behind panels of frosted acrylic. He described the care with which he adapted his Queen to the light, lamenting (as most ant-keepers do) that he had no success with captive breeding. His Queen would live, and perpetuate her colony, for another twenty years if he was lucky, but multiple papers suggested an ants ability to tolerate light was set when they emerged from the cocoon. All of his worker ants had been raised in light, but the fragile and all-important Queen stayed hidden within the one covered formicarium. As if to compensate for her reclusive majesty, Dr. Wynn had fed his ants multiple vials of colored sugar water. His display of honeypots was, therefore , filled with color. Swollen gasters , easily ten times the rest of the ant, hanging in sapphire blues and emerald greens. And unlike Hawk's own burgundy m. depilis, these large ants were already a vibrant gold. He'd offered her three ants from an older portion of the nest. They'd been absolutely divine.

Unfortunately, everything in the world seemed to like honeypots. Mites. Other ants. The species had no stingers and a relatively weak bite. Their best defense was their location. Ants, like most insects, are very sensitive to changes in their environment, with the two biggest harbingers of doom being temperature and hydration. Honeypots had found a workaround that protected them from the rest of ant-kind: they lived in the desert. Very hot, at the upper limits of even an insect's heat tolerance, very little water, and nearly no sources of sugar. Ants that did not have a honeypot's ability to store food and water in their own bodies would not survive. Which was great, if you were an ant in New Mexico, trying to survive in the desert. Not so great, when you were an ant in your basic foundation test tube setup. Her honeypots died. A lot. And it wasn't because she wasn't a good keeper—that had been her doctoral thesis. It was just how honeypot ants were.

"We're almost at the one year mark on the current colony," her garnet colored m. depilis, far less jewel-toned and in a much less stressful setup, had almost made it to the ant-keeper's finish line. Barring a disaster—like mites—this colony was going to make it. "Maybe in another couple days."

Unlike bees, you couldn't harvest the honey without killing the ants. Most ants only live a few weeks, but honeypots' specialized repletes had a sedentary lifestyle; they could live up to a year. By choosing to wait until they'd hit that one year colony mark, she could in theory harvest only the ants nearest the end of their life. Ants are ruthlessly efficient; a dead replete would be consumed anyway, lest the precious sugar bleed into the desert soil. The colony would not suffer—they had an overabundance of food—and by the one year mark most ant-keepers stopped worrying about colony survival and started trying to keep the population in check.

"Anyway," she steered things back to the subject at hand. "We're planning on usurping an entire government investigation into something that is not my area of expertise. And if you don't have a degree in quantum physics in your back pocket..."

Alex had not graduated from college. He had the brain for it, and was better at thinking around corners than most. He just felt like he'd missed the window. "You're okay with this, right? Us just...wading in and fucking up somebody else's game?"

Hawk was quiet for a little bit.

"I'm gung-ho for it. Willheim reminds me of my dad, and something stinks like week old fish guts. I don't like this, Hawk. And I really don't like that we got the boot before we had a chance to say a word. But why are you out for blood?"

She was quiet for a little while. Then she said, "Tuskegee."

"Tuskegee." Alex said.

"The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male." Hawk sighed. "One of the very few things I know about my paternal family is that my something-great grandfather was involved in it."

Alex finched. "I really hope as a patient," he still said.

She shook her head. "I remember the day I learned that, too. That was when I stopped looking into the white side of my ancestry. Like...you know, I found what I needed to find: They were terrible people, they did awful things, and while I do need to learn about the things they did, I don't want to know a single thing about them."

Silence.

"And I do know something about him, that's the thing: I know he's the kind of man who could stand there and watch another man suffer and die for forty years and do nothing to help him. What else do we need to know? That he was smart? Smart enough to plan the slow murder of four hundred people?"

The Tuskegee experiment Hawk was referencing was sickening. Nearly four hundred men who tested positive for syphilis were followed by scientists for forty years. They were never told their own diagnosis, never told why they were ill, and never once treated, despite the cure for syphilis, penicillin, being well known and widely available.

"We can't justify it. Did we need the information we learned from that? Yes. Have we used it to further medicine? Yes. And we have to say that. Out loud. We have to start saying that good things did come out of the horror. Because as long as we pretend that we can't get good results by doing evil things, we'll be able to justify doing them. We must be doing good when we intend good things, don't we? That's how things like Tuskegee, and Henrietta Lacks, and Joseph Mengele happen. We tell ourselves we can justify it. There's an old woman in the hospital right now. That man in there said she was going to die. Did he look like he cared to you?"

Alex did not answer. He knew she'd read it in his eyes. It was almost uncanny how she could do that. She saw through him every time. Maybe that was part of why he loved her. He could lie to the world, to employers, to the whole human race. He had a lot of trouble lying to Hawk. Knowing someone would keep you honest? That did a lot towards keeping you straight. He was safe with Hawk, and not just because she'd keep from hurting him. He knew her, and her moral compass. She'd keep him from hurting anyone else.

And no. He didn't think Kaiser Willheim gave a damn about the dying old woman.

"I'm not saying he's dirty or anything," She said.

"He's a billionaire, Hawk. It doesn't matter if he's dirty—and he is, I guarantee it. You don't get that kind of money straight."

"He got most of it through investing, if I remember right."

"You call it the stock market. I call it a legal con game with a really great floor show. The difference between Bernie Madoff and Berkshire Hathaway is one of 'em did the con part a little bit too loud."

"That's nonsense," Hawk said. "SEC manages that sort of thing."

"SEC is a paper tiger. All you got to do to crash a stock is shake someone's confidence that it's gonna keep rising. Business on their level is all about what exists on paper. By the time the SEC starts caring, everybody but the last set of bag holders have already had their run and the legal proceedings are just about trying to make it sting a bit less. Whatever his goal is here, the only connection to Elizabeth Cummings' garden is that's the place it happened." He paused. "The question I have is...what is he doing here?"

"Radiation's a billion-dollar industry. You make power, you make a mess, you make a mint cleaning it up." She paused. "Ever wondered where Madame Curie would be if she'd known she ought to be wearing a lead vest around radium?"

"Probably still dead. It was the guys after her who made bank. And you're thinking wrong. You're thinking Kaiser Willheim is Madame Curie. Kaiser is the guy who put the stuff that killed her into bottles and told people it'd keep them alive longer if they drank it." He paused. "But we might be wrong."

"You want to sit this out?" She said. "You tell me your gut is okay with the idea of us walking away from this, Okay. We walk away."

He shook his head. "Babe, you can't depend on my gut. Yours is good. It's better than mine, half the time." He paused. "And maybe I'm just hoping yours is saying something different. Because mine is saying...Kaiser said that in an hour the people at his little study outpost are going to be the only living things for over a hundred yards. They're gonna go to sleep eventually. What do you say about midnight, we go take a look at Elizabeth Cummings' back yard."

"I'd say that sounds like a good plan." She said, and clenched her fists tighter on the wheel.