"Yeah, just surprised. And filthy." Eve held up her smudged palms. "Not quite there yet, right? Unless you wanted to pulverize people."
"Not exactly." Claire sighed. "Thanks. I'll keep working on it. Sorry about the dirt."
"Well, it's not like we don't have that on the floor. Michael was supposed to sweep; do you really think he's done it?" Eve grinned. "Nice try with the weird science, but for now, I think I'll stick with walking."
She blew Claire a kiss, and Claire waved and stepped back. The color faded out again, turning Eve and the room to black-and-white, and then to just a sea of liquid darkness.
Myrnin was standing by her elbow when she looked over. He was tapping a finger on his lips. "That," he said, "was very interesting. Also, you owe me a third-edition Johannes Magnus."
"You have six of them already. But the important thing is, it's almost working," Claire said. "The stabilization's off. But the connection's working. That's a huge step forward."
"Not much of one if it turns us to ashes upon arrival. I can do that all on my own by strolling long enough in the sunlight. Well, it's your problem now, Claire. I'm working on the other part."
"What other--Oh. Wiping people's memories when they leave Morganville."
"Exactly. I'm actually getting quite close, I believe." "But you're not going to use a brain. Other than your own, I mean."
"Since you insist, I am trying it the hard way. I am not optimistic at all that this will ever work," he said, and produced the box of doughnuts again, with a magician's flourish. "One more?"
She really couldn't resist, when he gave her that smile.
THREE
Over the next three days, Claire didn't go home for long. She was obsessive when she got into a problem, and she knew it, but this was so cool. She went to the store and bought cartloads of cheap plastic toys, which she spent hours tossing through the portal to an increasingly bored Eve, then Michael, then Shane. They had their own supply of toys, too, and pitched them through in the opposite direction.
All she got out of it, for two and a half days, was dust--so much of it that Shane told her she was on permanent vacuum duty at home, if she ever came home again. She knew that he was grumpy, both because it was boring pitching toys back and forth, but also because she'd barely seen him for days, except to come home, shovel in food, and fall into bed. She was grumpy about it, too, but there was something inside of her that was locked on target about this stupid problem, and she couldn't walk away from it. Not until something worked, or she broke.
She didn't break.
On the third day, Shane was still on catching duty. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the back of the sofa and wearing one of those white cotton breathing masks. He'd bought it in self-defense, he'd told her; he didn't want to be breathing in plastic toy dust and coughing up a lung.
She didn't blame him, but it did make a funny picture, at least until she'd realized the same thing on her end and gotten a mask out of Myrnin's jumbled stash of supplies. And goggles. Shane now envied her the goggles.
"Hang on," she said, after her last attempt at pitching a neon plastic ball through had turned it to dust on the other end. "I have an idea."
"So do I," Shane said. "Movies, hot dogs, and not doing this anymore. Like it?"
"Love it," she said, and meant it. "But let me do this one thing, okay?"
He sighed and let his head fall back against the sofa. "Sure, whatever."
She really was a terrible girlfriend, Claire thought, and raced across the lab, careful of all of Myrnin's various scattered trip hazards that she couldn't seem to convince him were dangerous. She arrived at the worktable, where her circuitry (with Myrnin's incomprehensible additions) quietly hummed away.
She shut the power off and checked the connections again. All of the voltage was steady; there was no reason why the other end would be unstable, unless . . .
Unless it was something Myrnin had done.
Claire began tracing the piping, which led to a spring, which led to a complicated series of gears and levers, which led to a bubbling ice-green liquid in a sealed chamber. . . .
Only it wasn't bubbling. It wasn't doing anything, even when she turned the power on. She distinctly remembered him explaining that it was supposed to bubble. She had no idea why that was important, but she supposed that maybe the bubbling created some kind of pressure, which . . . did what?
Exasperated, she thumped the thing with her finger.
It started to bubble. She blinked, watched the whole thing for a while, decided that it wasn't going to blow up or boil over, and went back to where Shane was pretending to snore on the other side of the portal.
"Heads up, slacker!" she said, and pitched another neon ball at him, hard.
Shane's reactions were really, really good, and he got his eyes open and hands up at the same time . . .
. . . and the ball smacked firmly into his grip.
Shane stared down at it for a second, then stripped off his mask as he turned it over in his fingers.
"Is it okay?" Claire asked breathlessly. "Is it--"
"Feels fine," he said. "Damn. Unbelievable." He pitched it back to her, and she caught it. It felt exactly the same--not even a little warm or a little cool. She threw it back, and he responded, and before long they were laughing and whooping and feeling incredibly giddy. She raised the ball over her head and jumped around in a circle, just like Eve would have, and made herself dizzy.
She whirled around to an unsteady stop, and Shane caught her.
Because he was here, in the lab with her, instead of on the other side of the portal. Her brain sent a message of Oh, he feels so good, just about a half second before the logical part kicked in.