In the field ahead of us, there’s no sign of our tracks. No sign of the box. Nothing but smooth, unbroken snow.
The field is huge and the box is tiny.
The chances of us stumbling upon it through blind luck are minuscule.
With the sun just creeping above the trees, the cold is unreal.
“What are we supposed to do, Jason? Take a guess? Start digging?”
I glance back at the half-buried house, wondering for a terrifying moment how long we could survive there. How long before the firewood ran out? Before our food ran out? Before we gave up and perished like all the others?
I can feel a dark pressure mounting in my chest—fear pushing in.
I draw a deep breath into my lungs, and the air is so cold it makes me cough.
Panic stalks me from all sides.
Finding the box is impossible.
It’s too cold out here.
There won’t be enough time, and when the next storm comes, and the next, the box is going to be buried so deep we’ll never have a chance of reaching it.
Unless…
I let the backpack slide off my shoulders into the snow and unzip it with trembling fingers.
“What are you doing?” Amanda asks.
“Throwing a Hail Mary.”
It takes me a moment to find what I’m looking for.
Grasping the compass, I leave Amanda and the pack and wade into the field.
She follows, shouting for me to wait up.
Fifty feet out, I stop to let her catch up to me.
“Look at this,” I say, touching the face of the compass. “We’re in South Chicago, right?” I point toward the distant skyline. “So magnetic north is that way. But this compass says otherwise. See how the needle is pointing east toward the lake?”
Her face lights up. “Of course. It’s the box’s magnetic field, pushing the compass needle away from it.”
We posthole through the deep powder.
In the middle of the field, the needle swings from east to west.
“We’re right on top of it.”
I begin to dig, my bare hands aching from the snow, but I don’t stop.
Four feet down, I hit the edge of the box, and I keep digging, faster now, my sleeves pulled forward to protect my hands, which are passing from a cold-driven agony into numbness.
When my half-frozen fingers finally graze the top of the open door, I let out a shout that echoes through the frozen world.
—
Ten minutes later, we’re back inside the box, drinking ampoule forty-six and ampoule forty-five.
Amanda starts the timer on her watch, kills the lantern to preserve the batteries, and as we sit beside each other in the frigid dark, waiting for the drug to hit, she says, “Never thought I’d be glad to see our shitty little lifeboat again.”
“Right?”
She leans her head against my shoulder.
“Thank you, Jason.”
“For what?”
“Not letting me freeze to death out there.”
“Does this mean we’re even?”
She laughs. “Not even close. I mean, let’s not forget, this is still all your fault.”
It’s a strange exercise in sensory deprivation to sit in the total darkness and silence of the box. The only physical sensations are the chill of the metal bleeding through my clothes and the pressure of Amanda’s head against my shoulder.
“You’re different than him,” she says.
“Who?”
“My Jason.”
“How so?”
“Softer. He had a real hard edge when you got down to it. The most driven human being I’ve ever met.”
“Were you his therapist?”
“Sometimes.”
“Was he happy?”
I sense her pondering my question in the dark.
“What?” I ask. “Am I putting you in a doctor-patient confidentiality quandary?”
“Technically, you two are the same person. It’s new territory for sure. But no. I wouldn’t say he was happy. He lived an intellectually stimulating but ultimately one-dimensional life. All he did was work. In the last five years, he didn’t have a life outside the lab. He practically lived there.”
“You know your Jason is the one who did this to me. I’m here right now because several nights ago, someone abducted me at gunpoint while I was walking home. He took me to an abandoned power plant, drugged me, asked me a bunch of questions about my life and the choices I’d made. If I was happy. If I would’ve done things differently. The memories are back now. Then I woke up in your lab. In your world. I think your Jason did this to me.”
“You’re suggesting that he went into the box, somehow found your world, your life, and switched places with you?”
“Do you think he was capable?”
“I don’t know. That’s crazy.”
“Who else would’ve done this to me?”
Amanda is quiet for a moment.
She says finally, “Jason was obsessed with the path not taken. He talked about it all the time.”
Now I feel the anger coming back.
I say, “There’s still a part of me that doesn’t want to believe it. I mean, if he wanted my life, he could’ve just killed me. But he went to the trouble of injecting me, not only with an ampoule, but ketamine, which rendered me unconscious and blurred my memories of the box and what he’d done. Then he actually brought me back to his world. Why?”
“It actually makes a lot of sense.”
“You think?”
“He wasn’t a monster. If he did this to you, he would have rationalized it somehow. That’s how decent people justify bad behavior. In your world, are you a renowned physicist?”
“No, I teach at a second-rate college.”
“Are you wealthy?”
“Professionally and financially speaking, I can’t hold a candle to your Jason.”
“There you go. He tells himself he’s giving you the chance of a lifetime. He wants a shot at the path not taken. Why wouldn’t you? I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying that’s how a good man works himself up to do a terrible thing. It’s Human Behavior 101.”
She must sense my rage building, because she says, “Jason, you don’t have the luxury of freaking out right now. In a minute, we’re going back into that corridor. We’re the controls. Your words. Right?”
“Yeah.”
“If that’s the truth, if it’s our emotional state that’s somehow selecting these worlds, to what kind of a place is your rage and jealousy going to take us? You can’t hold on to this energy as you open a new door. You have to find a way to let it go.”
I can feel the drug coming.
My muscles relax.
For a moment, the anger vanishes into a river of peace and calm I would give anything to make last, to have carry me through.
When Amanda turns on the lantern, the walls perpendicular to the door are gone.
I look down at the leather bag that holds the remaining ampoules, thinking, If the asshole who did this to me figured out how to navigate the box, then I will too.
In the blue light, Amanda watches me.
I say, “We have forty-four ampoules left. Twenty-two chances to get this right. How many did the other Jason take with him into the box?”
“A hundred.”