Heads were popping out of the tunnels. Insects dropped down from the structure to approach them, and their vanguard was creeping in. Jill knew she should move instead of standing there staring, but for once in her life she was completely at a loss.

“Uh, I don’t think there’s a phone in there,” Nate said. “Can we go? Not that I want to rush you.”

She blinked. The insects were getting close enough that she could see herself in their eyes.

She and Nate backed away. A thousand eyes watched every move. After they’d put some distance between themselves and the colony they turned and began walking away as fast as they could in the resistanceless air. On all sides there was nothing but open desert. The insects, in stealthy movements, followed.

Jill’s watch had stopped. Nate didn’t have one. They walked for what felt like hours, saying little. There was too much to absorb to try to box it up, make it tidy enough for conversation. Although walking was disturbingly easy, it had to be over a hundred degrees and there was no shade to speak of. Shock kept Jill going. Her neck began to ache from turning to look behind her so often. Their escort fell away, little by little, until the last determined survivor of the regiment stood and watched them go. Long after it had faded from view, Jill couldn’t resist turning to look, just to be sure.

It was on one of these insect-checking rounds that she saw it—a sun rising on the far side of the desert. She looked back in front of her, where the sun that had cooked them all day was just starting to set, looked behind her, looked ahead, stopped walking.

A sound escaped her lips then—not so much his name as a sigh.

Nate turned and saw it, too. The second sun looked as though it would be huge. It peeked over the horizon, ripe as a plum, its egg-yolk gold filmed by a shimmering, hazy red.

“For god’s sake, Jill. Where are we?”

She shook her head mutely. I don’t know.

For a long while they stood there, marveling at the sunrise until the sun was high enough, and bright enough, to hurt their eyes. And then, finally, she looked at him, at poor Nate, and saw what she should have seen earlier, had she not been so lost in her own head. He was holding his left arm and trembling with fatigue. His olive face was pale and drawn with pain.

“God, Nate, I didn’t think. Let’s take a break.”

He didn’t argue—a sure sign that he was hurting pretty bad. She pointed the way to a jumble of rocks and hovered, concerned, while he settled himself on a baked dry boulder.

“How is it? We’d better take a look.”

He attempted to roll up his sleeve, but it was too tight. He unbuttoned his blue shirt and took some time in removing it. Jill waited, trying not to show her discomfort at the sight and texture of his skin. She squatted at his side and actually missed the sensation of heavy weightedness that normally came with resting. She was hot and sweaty and a deep sense of lethargy was settling into her bones, as if she were coming down with the flu. She noted all of this in a detached way, then noted the detachment. It was dangerous. The shock could undo them even if the terrain didn’t. She had to stay alert.

Whatever was wrong with the arm, it wasn’t visible from the outside. Blue shirt draped over his knees, Nate held the limb out for examination.

“Can you bend it?”

“Yeah. It’s not broken.” He touched the muscles tenderly with his fingertips. “It’s more like I pulled it. The muscles are really stiff.”

She reached out her hand to touch him as well but hesitated. Stupid. She wouldn’t be able to tell if his muscles were stiff just by feeling them.

“Look at that.” Nate pointed to her hand.

On the back of her right hand, aligned in a row, were deep purple bruises. Nate put his injured hand—moving his arm very slowly—into hers. His fingers lined up exactly with the stains. He met her eyes.

“Wild. You don’t remember it, do you?”

She shook her head. The feeling of his hand in hers, hot and moist, increased her nauseous sense of heatstroke.

“I had your hand and you went after the manuscript. I tried to pull you back and then—jeez, I thought it was a bomb—I felt this incredible force yanking you away, so I held on as tight as I could. I thought my arm was gonna come out of its socket.”

“Why didn’t you just let go?”

He shrugged, his eyes not meeting hers. “Dunno. Instinct, I guess.”

She extracted her hand and rubbed his moisture from her palm. “We ought to be able to make a sling from your sweatshirt.”

He’d removed it miles back and tied it around his waist. She knotted the wrists of the sweatshirt together and it made an adequate support. She caused him some pain getting him into it—awkward as ever at touching him—but he looked relieved when it was done.

Then they both sat numbly.

“What happened, Jill?” Nate started the inevitable conversation with some reluctance.

She looked back the way they’d come, anxiety and excitement roiling in her belly. She’d been thinking about it for hours but wasn’t quite ready to share those thoughts.

Nate said, in a half-mocking tone, “Remember that section of Kobinski’s manuscript Aharon read to us on the plane? That whole thing about ‘microscopic black holes’? You don’t suppose…”

Jill nodded, completely serious. “What else can we think? What I don’t get is this: even if there are subatomic black holes, an idea which we obviously can’t completely dismiss since we don’t appear to be on Earth anymore, how could something like that transport the two of us and leave us whole and alive?”

Nate thought about it. “Quantum leap?”

Jill chewed on a fingernail. She didn’t like the answer but didn’t have a better one.

“Or,” Nate added, getting into it, “since matter is essentially energy waves in the fifth dimension, maybe our energy waves were what were transferred and we simply ‘reprojected’ here. Kind of like a Star Trek teleporter?”

They looked at each other doubtfully. There was no answer to that, nothing that wasn’t embarrassing to even speculate. Neither of them said anything for a while.

“I was thinking…” Jill cleared her throat self-consciously. “I wonder if the black hole—if that’s what it was—was discovered through Kobinski’s work on the one-minus-one?”

Nate didn’t comment.

“The manuscript might be able to tell us. If we had it.”

“The manuscript!” Nate looked around, as if they might find it lying on the ground. “You’re sure it’s not here? I mean back there, where we, um, came in?”

“No. It was the first thing I looked for.” She shook her head impatiently. “Did you hear what I said, Nate? Using one-minus-one technology, Kobinski figured out how to travel through space-time!”

“He was working on a lot of things, from the look of it.”

“Yeah, and it’s all one-minus-one technology, Nate! Think about it!”

Nate wasn’t nearly as excited as she expected him to be. He rubbed a hand through his close-cropped hair, his face unreadable. “What about the others—Rabbi Handalman, Anatoli?”

She shrugged. “Back on Earth probably.” She thought of her bruised hand, and it occurred to her: You’d probably be there, too, Nate, if you had let go. She gazed up at him in surprise, but he didn’t appear to be thinking anything of the sort. He yawned.

“I hate to be a wet blanket, but theorizing isn’t going to get us food, water, or shelter, and this place isn’t exactly a 7-Eleven. The only thing I’ve seen which looks remotely edible is those giant bugs, and frankly…”

Jill couldn’t imagine it, either, but looking at the desert landscape, she thought they were lucky to have the bugs. Water was an even bigger issue. She was already parched.

“Let’s go a little further,” she suggested. “Maybe we’ll find something. Can you walk?”