Excerpt

I'd transformed a ramshackle century-old wooden horse barn into the most advanced applied physics laboratory in the world.

Maybe the world would even survive it.

At least I hadn't needed to install a furnace. The dozens of computers generated endless waste heat. Industrial capacitor banks filled half the floor, each bank looming like a Costco four-pack of coffins and radiating its own warmth. The buzzing cyclotron shed more warmth. Even the phalanx of glowing electron guns surrounding the fifteen-foot copper pentagram laid over the only flat concrete in the place fought the chill. With the spray-foam insulation over the gaps in the walls, the barn remained above freezing even in Minnesota's unspeakable winter. Not too warm—I didn't want Jane Doe's corpse to thaw out too much.

All that electrical smell added a modern edge to the century of horse by-products saturating the walls and floor. A scent you wouldn't find in any other cutting-edge lab in the world.

Next month's credit card bills would be unspeakable.

Not to mention the power bill from weeks of charging all those capacitors. Batteries would have been cheaper, but capacitors are optimal for instantaneous discharge of precise amounts of stored energy.

The three-foot-wide digital countdown clock mounted above the barn's nearest stall showed eight minutes and forty-three seconds to temporal-spatial transcursion. Thirteen seconds ahead of schedule. Good.

Those massive bills would appear only if the universe still existed in eight minutes and forty-four seconds.

Despite my aches and bruises from all the physical labor and the way my skull throbbed from the continuous flood of computer noise and my burning sleep-starved eyes, I felt like a small boy on Christmas morning. No, not the tedious holiday of empty consumerism accreted around an empty religion dreamed up by primitive monkey brains. I mean the actual day of the birth of a Savior, except the only one it would save was Phoebe.

And, indirectly, me.

I'd scheduled nine hours of sleep last night. It was the rational decision. But the prospect of salvation or obliteration overwhelmed even my reason. After months of work, after ridicule and imposed psychotherapy and rejection and being fired from the think tank and scrounging resources from disused factories and third-hand dealers and the occasional outright theft, after busted bloody knuckles and torn muscles and living on instant ramen and bad oatmeal until three of my teeth imploded, my endless checklists were finally down to the last page.

Next item: pee.

Not even ten AM, but my flannel shirt already stank. Tired-sweat, excited-sweat, the reek of a man who'd chosen love over his friends, his teeth, his hair and health.

But Phoebe would be so thrilled to see me, she'd overlook it all.

Or the universe would unravel.

I'd judged the risk of a new Big Bang to be acceptable.

I spent three of those extra seconds staring at the framed photo standing next to my primary monitor.

Phoebe and I. Heads tipped together, smiling. On a Paris dinner cruise down the Seine.

Our last—our most recent photo.

After Paris, we'd returned home to Atlanta. I'd picked back up at the think tank with people who were sort of like me, only less smart, and Phoebe had sunk back into the destitute inner-city firetrap of Peachtree Hill Community Mental Health Center.

My Phoebe cared about people that nobody else cared about. The homeless. Mentally ill who wandered the streets losing arguments with invisible fairies. People whose families had given up on them, people whose brains didn't even reach monkey level, Phoebe cared for them all.

Not because she had interests in common with them, or they worked together, or were tied by the accidental bonds of unspeakable trauma or shared genes.

She cared because she thought people deserved it.

Even people like me.

She was the best person I'd ever known.

And she called me on my bullshit. She made me be a better person, because I wanted to be worthy of her. She gave me a reason to be human.

A tear blurred my vision.

I wiped the traitor away. Break down ugly crying didn't appear on my schedule for another two hours. My monkey brain would have its chance, but not now.

Now was about the logical brain. Half my colleagues pretended to understand my work and the others comprehended only slices of the whole. My logical brain worked better than anyone's.

And in the last three years, I'd invented whole new realms of physics. Realms I could never claim credit for, because some fool would attempt to implement them and unravel spacetime.

But I needed them.

No—Phoebe, the only person in the world who thought I was worth something just because I was me, needed them. Our marriage wasn't about equations I could solve, cosmological mysteries I could neuter, or shattering other theorists' malformed theories.

I loved her, because how could I not?

I had no idea why she loved me. I feared exploring that question. I might persuade her that she didn't.

I had no time for maudlin introspection. I willed my jackhammering heart to slow and kicked my shoes off. As they said in the movies: go time.

Phoebe needed an action hero, but only had me.

No.

Action heroes had failed her.

She needed me.

Some thirty feet away, in the shadows of the unsafe hay loft, the barn's man-sized door groaned.

I grimaced. That latch came unstuck every time a westerly wind exceeded eight and a half miles an hour—

A figure in a massive fur-hooded thigh-length parka trudged inside.

I froze.

I'd hung NO TRESSPASSING signs and the culturally-respected I will shoot you signs. The driveway onto this isolated chunk of land had a heavy gate and a heavier padlock.

But last night I'd opened the gate. Phoebe might need the ER in a real hurry. And some infernal neighbor had taken that as an invitation—

The intruder tugged his hood down.

The dark brown face paralyzed me.

I'd left Atlanta specifically to escape Aaron Smith.