"You've got to be fucking kidding me, man," Brigg said. "It can't be you. No way. We're not losing an engineer on some stupid -"

"It's my idea. I'm not letting anyone else die for it," I said. "Besides, if this doesn't work, and I die, then I wasn't very smart anyway, was I? So it won't be too great of a loss."

Brigg looked defeated. "You are not going to zipline into London!"

We stood at the top of the Sears tower. Yesterday, after discovering the Russians and the Chinese had already connected their rocks via cable, we'd scrambled to replicate their achievement. Scavengers managed to find a long enough cable, and Moira had given us a small anti-aircraft gun her military unit had found. We'd retrofitted it into a sort of harpoon. Now, a cable stretched all the way from the top of the Sears tower to the base of London, which hung a few hundred feet above the ground level of Chicago. The plan was to zipline into London, and then set up a second zipline back down into Chicago. That would at least make us less dependent on radios for communication, in case either of our cities ran out of fuel for the generators.

The only thing standing in between us and London was half a mile of unknowable Void. Fucking fantastic.

Lee appeared on the roof, exiting a small elevator. Behind her, a few Scavengers wheeled a wooden crate a foot taller than I was.

"Did you find it?" I asked Lee.

She nodded. "Mint condition. You better hope this fucking works, King. I spent all my social energy on you and Briggs and I don't want to make any new friends. Got it?"

Lee joked, but I could tell she was actually scared. She gave me a meaningful look and then stepped aside as the Scavenger, a dashing, punk-rocker type with piercings and a Mohawk, took a crowbar and revealed the contents of the crate with flair.

Inside was a space suit.

"It's from one of the Apollo Missions," Lee said, "Pierce, here, found it at the museum of Science and Industry. Tech did their best to get it working, but it won't protect you for long if we're wrong about the atmospheres being connected. We had to gut a lot of it, otherwise it would be too heavy to wear with full gravity."

I whistled. Brigg gave me an exasperated look.

"Here goes nothing," I said.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

It took almost an hour to get situated in the space suit; once I was in, Brigg fastened me into the zipline harness. He patted me on the helmet. "It was nice knowing you, buddy."

"You too man," I said.

Next, Lee came up to me and started listing off all the things I would have to measure on the journey over: was there gravity? How far out from Chicago did the gravity change? Was there an atmosphere? What was the temperature?

She looked at me with huge brown eyes, full of apprehension, and threw her arms around me.

"Seriously," she said, "don't die."

I rolled my eyes. "It's nothing. It's a quick skip over the Pond, right? ‘Mind the Gap’ and all that."

Lee stepped away, and suddenly it was just me and the edge of the Sears tower. Our support crew was yelling orders, double and triple checking the fastenings and machinery. I swallowed. I had never liked heights. In fact I had always hated them. Even since I was a little kid. Perhaps I’d picked the wrong time to face that fear.

I was beginning to second guess my decision to be noble and not let some Scavenger make the journey when I heard Moira give the all clear behind me. It was time to go.

Moira counted down.

One.

Two.

Three.

The hands holding me released and I was moving. Slowly at first, but it was like the top of a roller coaster; my heart beat in the pit of my stomach and threatened to turn into a scream.

Then I dropped.

I raced forward, first over the smaller buildings of Chicago, then over the abyss; grayness stretched out beneath me as far as I could see, and Chicago raced away. I screamed; I thought I was going to wet myself. I was sliding down faster than I'd ever gone in my life. Chicago slipped away, and I was surrounded by the Void.

There was nothing, just gray, and then, in the corner of my eye...

Movement.

I whipped around, trying to turn in the space suit, searching for that movement. But it was gone. Whatever I'd seen moving in the Void vanished, if it had ever been there at all.

-

The yellow eye of Big Ben approached; slowly, I started to hit patches of friction, a series of stops designed to slow me down before I slammed into the surface of London. I slowed, slowed, and then slammed into what seemed like an enormous parachute.

In a moment, I was on the ground, on my back, the world spinning above me. I rolled over, seeing stars, and retched into the helmet of my space suit. So much for a priceless antique.

Hands pried me up from the ground, unscrewed my helmet, and I was hit by the sweet rush of fresh air and cool wind of an entirely different city.

A man stood above me, holding my helmet. He looked at the soupy liquid inside with disgust, handing it off to his assistant. All around him, engineers cheered like they'd just orchestrated the moon landing. They practically had.

"Mr. King," General Eastford said, "Welcome to London."