Somewhere, Gillard is protesting the manhandling of his official file, but Jonas can’t hear him. His mind is racing too fast now. He checks his hand and confirms the absence of his ring. He fights off a swell of panic. His eyes ricochet between the swapped numbers on Gillard’s watch, the altered flag on his uniform, and the strange letters in the file. Together, they form a mosaic of possibility, circumstantial evidence of what, just a few minutes ago, Jonas thought was impossible.
He dives over the table. He moves fast, knowing that surprise is the only chance he has. His body skids across the table’s metallic surface, sending the file folder pinwheeling away. Inertia throws him into the inspector, and gravity sends both men crashing toward the concrete floor. Gillard is thrashing, trying to throw Jonas off him and yelling in French. Jonas doesn’t listen. He grasps at the holster around Gillard’s waist, fingers snatching forth to unsnap the leather thumb break. In response, Gillard’s struggling becomes twice as fierce. The butt of his hand rockets up, striking Jonas’s nose, aggravating the earlier injury and making him see stars. Jonas recoils, staggering to his feet. With one hand, he smears away the blood gushing from his nose into his mouth.
His other hand holds Gillard’s gun.
It feels solid in Jonas’s grip, like the Glock he trained with. Whatever the make, its operation is similar enough that Jonas can thumb its safety off. Gillard flashes surprise when he hears the click. If he’d hoped that Jonas wouldn’t know his way around a firearm, that consolation evaporates.
“Dr. Cullen,” he says with surprising calm, given the circumstances. “Don’t do this.”
Jonas ignores the directive, pulling Gillard to his feet. His rapid heartbeat counts the seconds, and he knows he’s running out of minutes. In fact, it’s astonishingly lucky that he’s not dead—or worse—yet.
“Get up,” Jonas orders. “I don’t have a lot of time.”
“Doctor, calm down—”
“I’m the picture of calm,” Jonas says. He manhandles Gillard to the door, digging the barrel of the gun into the man’s back. He tells Gillard to open the holding cell. The gun is very persuasive. As the door opens, Jonas wraps one arm in front of Gillard, pressing the gun to the inspector’s temple with the other. They fall out of the room, entwined like lovers caught in some perverse dance.
The police and support staff in the hallway react immediately to the sight of one of their own taken hostage. Guns are drawn. Commands are barked in English and French. But Jonas hisses in Gillard’s ear. “When I was brought in, I had a ring on my left hand. Where is it?”
“We can work this out,” Gillard says, using the magic phrase taught in hostage-negotiation courses. He evidently isn’t aware that this is not a negotiation.
“I need that ring.”
A Klaxon starts to wail in the distance.
“I can get it for you,” Gillard says, still trying to bargain. “But you need to be reasonable. You’re an intelligent man. You have to know that you’re suffering some kind of breakdown.”
“The ring has no sentimental value. The Large Hadron Collider untethered me from my reality, and I slipped into yours.”
“At least we can agree you’re untethered from reality,” Gillard observes.
But Gillard doesn’t understand. How could he?
Then, a miracle. A nearby door, with a placard identifying it as SÉQUESTRE DES PREUVES. Jonas again knows hope. He nudges Gillard toward the door, the surrounding cops parting in front of them.
“Open it,” Jonas instructs.
“You’re going to get yourself hurt, Doctor . . .”
“Get me in. Do it now.” His voice is starting to rise. He feels tingling in his extremities but can’t tell whether it’s adrenaline or a sign that he’s running out of time. He senses the police closing in, so he reminds Gillard of the gun by pushing it against his head. “Tell them to put their guns down and back away.”
With apparent reluctance, Gillard utters through gritted teeth, “Si vous avez un coup de feu, prenez-le.”
“Tell them to put their weapons down,” Jonas reiterates. He’s shouting now, partially out of stress and partially to compete with the bleat of the Klaxon.
“I just told them.”
“And I’d believe you,” Jonas retorts, “if I didn’t speak French.” With that, he pistol-whips Gillard, and the inspector collapses at Jonas’s feet, hopefully close enough that the other police won’t chance shooting their comrade. He’s bought himself seconds, but he wastes them on a futile attempt to open the door. It’s locked. Behind him, the police officers advance, guns poised. Doing his best to ignore them, he brings Gillard’s gun down and fires a quick shot, the first in his life with live ammunition, blowing the lock apart. He swings the door open and closes it quickly behind him.
Jonas scans the room, a warren of file cabinets and shelves and lockers. He drops the gun and, fueled by adrenaline, drags one of the larger cabinets in front of the door. The police throw their combined weight against this bulwark, but the file cabinet holds its ground, a silent sentinel.
He’s pulling drawers and knocking items off shelves, thrashing desperately like a drowning man grasping for a rope, when reality begins to change around him. At first, he could mistake the phenomenon as a trick of the light or the by-product of all the adrenaline singing in his veins. Like heat rippling off a stretch of asphalt, the world begins to blur, losing shape and form. Jonas strains to focus but only manages to trade his warped, diffused vision for a swiftly shifting one. The walls, painted a utilitarian gray, shift to an olive green, then off-white. File cabinets grow shorter, then taller. The shelving changes orientation. The pattern on the floor beneath him changes color, the linoleum tiles shifting and swapping and flipping. The file cabinet skids an inch deeper into the room. The police on the other side of the door are making progress.
Jonas feels the clock ticking down. Around him, the room flickers. He glimpses new universes—new interiors, new landscapes—flashing around him like images through a zoetrope. Night. Rain. Snow. A sunrise. A city. A forest. With each flash, the evidence room seems farther and farther away.
Jonas tells himself he should surrender, let the cosmic forces he unleashed sweep him away through an infinite number of parallel realities. He’s about to give up, to let go, praying that if there’s any justice in the universe—in the multiverse—then somehow, some way, he’ll be reunited with Amanda.
When he sees it, he thinks he’s hallucinating. It doesn’t seem real. Can’t be real. And yet . . . there it is. Black text on a white field.
His name.
CULLEN, JONAS
A sticker affixed to a bag of thick, milky plastic. Jonas surges toward it with violent urgency. The world around him shifts and slips and changes, like radio stations snapping in and out of frequency, giving him glimpses of other universes.
His fingers grasp the bag. It’s on top of a pile of similar evidence bags, right out in the open. Some distant part of him chastises himself for not realizing it sooner: the evidence was waiting to be filed, so of course it wouldn’t yet be in one of the cabinets. The bag is as light as air. His fingers fumble for its singular content, his ring, its white light still throbbing. He fishes it out of the bag. His hands tremble, pulsing with adrenaline. All around him, reality slips, compounding his disorientation. He wills himself to focus, to steady his hands.
Please God, just let me complete the simple act of slipping this ring onto my finger.
The Almighty, apparently, isn’t taking requests at this particular moment because the floor disappears out from beneath Jonas’s feet, and a furtive glance confirms that it’s not just the floor. The entire room, the entire building, blinks out of existence, and in an instant, Jonas is in free fall, alone, plunging through an oil-painting sunset.
The ring pinballs between his fingers. Every second that ticks past is another where he could lose his grip on it entirely.
Around him, the sunset shifts to an acrid gray sky. The horizon rises to meet him in a jagged apocalyptic vision. He plunges toward the upturned wing of a downed airplane, jutting up from the ground like a pike. He’s seconds away from being impaled upon it, when . . .
The wing is gone. Replaced by a city whose buildings are integrated with vines and other varieties of verdant growth. A perfect, seamless blend of cityscape and landscape. Breathtaking.
Another reality-slip, and the city winks away. The ground now speeding toward him is covered with an immaculate garden the size of a small town. It’s encased by a translucent dome several stories high. Explosions, blossoming like fireworks overhead, reflect in its glass surface.
Then a cluster of skyscrapers rises from the earth, clawing at the sky and blotting out the sun. They missile toward Jonas, the ring still fumbling in his hands, refusing to cooperate, as he asks for one more miracle . . .
The ring slips onto his finger with such simplicity that Jonas is given cause to ask himself why it had been such a chore in the first place. In an eyeblink, the buildings shooting up at him flash away. Gravity retains its hold on him, though, and he continues to fall.
Until a car smashes into him.
No, that’s not right, he tells himself. He considers his positioning and comes to the conclusion that he smashed into the car. From above. Its roof has crumpled beneath his weight, the windshield blown out in jagged pebbles.
He’s on his back, he realizes. Everything hurts. Every nerve sings in agony, but at least they confirm that he’s alive. He stares up and recognizes his surroundings. He’s in Pregnin, a small town near CERN, a little over a mile and a half from the Swiss border. He’s been here before, albeit in another reality, and knows the buildings, the architecture. He knows in his bones that he’s still in France, but the houses and structures are suffused with a Japanese aesthetic.
He feels warm. Astonishment wells in his gut. Elation.
He’s done it. He has become the first human to travel between universes, to traverse realities. The enormity of this achievement hits with the force of a blow. His Many Worlds Proof, a work so momentous that it garnered him a Nobel Prize, feels suddenly insignificant by comparison. Proving the existence of parallel worlds was the academic equivalent of summitting Everest. But to travel to one . . . that’s landing on the moon.
Questions and uncertainties stampede through his mind. Is Amanda here? Which reality has he ended up in? Is Amanda here? Is this the right universe? Is Amanda here?
Sounds begin to leak into his awareness. He hears urgent French, an overlapping of voices. People emerging from their homes to see what’s happened.
“Cet homme, il est tombé du ciel.”This man, he fell out of the sky.
