Forced Acceptance

[PREVIOUSLY ON...] In the gray square of the Mirror World, with the door to the way home hanging open a finger's width and closing, Archie Moran stood before the glass where his worst self waited. Venn lay behind him in Space Four, left with a wound in his chest. Zoe and Jin had made their peace with their reflections. Archie had an hour. He had a choice between lying down in the quiet and saying the words he did not mean. He chose to speak.

…

"This is also I."

It did not come out as a prayer. It came out as a curse.

He said it through his teeth, with his fists shut and his eyes screwed tight, in a voice he hardly knew. It scraped on the way up. It tasted of iron. He said it to the thin man in the gray suit, and the paper cup, and the pink scalp, and the mild blue eyes, and he did not say it kindly.

"Yes. Fine. I left him. I left Venn. I walked out. I'm the one who walks out." He was shaking. "I'm a coward and a bad friend and a worse man than I ever thought. All right? Is that what you want? There. That's me. Now open the door."

The man in the glass said nothing. He only tilted his head.

For a moment, nothing happened at all.

Then the mirror trembled. It did not break. It rang, once, low and flat, like a cracked bell, and the thin man in the gray suit lifted his paper cup in a small sad toast and stepped backward into the dark. The frame dimmed. The glass went blank.

Behind Archie, with a groan like a sheet of ice giving way, the seam in the air began to widen.

…

It did not open fully.

He saw that at once. The crack that had been a finger's breadth swelled to a hand's, then an arm's, then a little more, and then shuddered and stuck. A tall narrow gap of bright silver light hung in the gray. Wide enough for one person at a time, if they turned their shoulders. Not wide enough for anything else.

"It's not right," said Jin hoarsely.

"It's open."

"It's open partly. It's," he put his hand to the light and snatched it back as if burned, "it's not full. It's accepted the words, but not the. Not the thing under them."

"What thing?"

Jin looked at Archie. His glasses had slipped. He did not push them up.

"You said it," he said, "but you didn't mean it."

"I said what it wanted."

"It wanted more."

"Then it can want." Archie turned his back on the mirror. His face was white and his jaw was iron. "It's open. We're going through. Come on."

Zoe came to his side. She did not speak. She only looked at him, for a long moment, with something in her face that he could not name and did not want to. Then she took his arm.

Behind them, at the edge of the square, the people of the Mirror World watched in silence. The woman in the gray coat had her hands pressed to her mouth. The boy in the blue one had begun, uncertainly, to wave. Nobody cheered. Nobody called out. They only stood in the cold light with their new faces turned up, and as the four went toward the gap, an old man with a stick took off his hat.

"Good luck," he said.

"Thank you," said Jin.

"Look after each other."

"We will."

"No, I mean it." The old man looked past them, at the empty place by the fountain where a fifth person had once been. "You'll want to."

…

They went through one at a time.

Zoe first. She hesitated at the edge, with the silver light pouring over her face, and turned, and held out her hand. Archie did not take it. He nodded toward the gap. She went in sideways, the way one enters a crowded room, and the light closed round her like water.

Jin next. He looked back once at the dawn-gray square, his lips moving, as though committing it to memory. Then he was gone.

Then Archie.

He stood at the threshold. The light was warm on his face. It smelled of rain and ozone and, faintly, of something sterile, the clean cold smell of a place with filtered air. He thought of a girl with a bow, in a throne room. A tomato in an outstretched hand. A man laughing in a hospital gown, on a hill, with wind in his hair.

I'm sorry, Venn.

He stepped through.

…

"Pulse. Pulse is coming up. Come on, come on—"

The first thing was a voice, and the second was a light, and the third was a pain.

It was not the old pain. It was not the dry grinding ache in the chest that had followed him for a year. It was a different one, high and sharp and wrong, as if somebody had taken the same pain and put it in a new house. It came with a taste of copper. It came with a rushing in the ears, and a weight on the ribs, and the sense, awful in its familiarity, of a body that did not quite fit.

He opened his eyes.

The ceiling was white. It was the one he remembered. The panels, the long fluorescent tube, the little black dome of a camera in the corner. A mask lay across his mouth. A tube ran from the back of his hand. Somewhere to his left a machine was beeping, steadily, in a way that suggested it was pleased with itself.

The pod bay, he thought. I'm in the lab.

"Archie!"

A face swam into focus above him. It was long and anxious, with a red nose and a thicket of ginger hair and a pair of round spectacles. He had a stethoscope round his neck and a clipboard under one arm, and he was beaming and weeping at the same time.

"Otis," said Archie. It came out as a croak.

"Don't talk. Don't talk. Oh, God. Oh, thank God." Otis was patting at him, ineffectually, as though checking for leaks. "Seventy-one hours. We thought. When the pulses dropped, we thought. But you're here. You're all here. Dr. Ferrara! Doctor Ferrara! He's awake!"

…

They had come back in a heap.

He learned that gradually, in pieces, over the course of an afternoon. Zoe and Jin had surfaced six hours before him, groggy and sick and shaking, and had been put under blankets in the recovery ward. Zoe had woken screaming. Jin had woken silent. Both had asked the same question, in the same voice, within the same minute.

Where's Venn?

Luca told him in the corridor.

He did not sit him down, or lower his voice, or lead up to it by degrees. He met Archie at the door of the recovery ward with a clipboard in his hand and a face like old paper and said, simply, "Come and see."

They went along the white corridor together. Archie walked slowly, on legs that did not feel like his. They were thin and long and strange. His hands, when he held them in front of him, were the hands he remembered, pale and square-fingered with the little scar on the thumb. But they moved a half-second late. The nerves had not quite caught up.

The clone body, he thought. My new one. Luca grew it for this.

Luca stopped at a window. Behind it lay the main bay: a row of pods in the blue gloom. Three were empty and open. One was shut. Beside it, and the pods that stood empty, stood a row of monitors.

Three screens glowed, beside three empty pods, with the slow green waves of living brains.

The fourth was a flat line.

"We tried everything," said Luca, in a low, flat voice. "Everything we had. Otis was up for two days. We reran the link. We pushed the signal through every Gate we have. He is not there. He is," he stopped, "he is still in the Space. We can see him. The Dimension reads him as alive. But he cannot be reached."

"Where is he?"

"In the camp. Under the Tree."

"With Sera."

"With Sera. And something else." Luca's hand came up and covered his mouth. "She will keep him, as long as she can. But the door has closed, and he cannot come through it. He is held. He is, he is asleep. And his body here has gone cold."

Archie looked at the flat line.

It was only a green thread across a black screen. It was nothing. It was a drawing a child could do. He looked at it for a long time, and it did not change, and behind it, in the dark of the pod, a young man with a shock of dark hair and a bone-thin leg lay with his hands folded and his mouth a little open, as though he were about to say something.

I looked cool though, right?

Luca touched his arm.

"It isn't your fault," he said.

"It is."

"It isn't." The doctor's voice shook. "I sent you in. I gave you the plan. I told you there was only the one rule: the door. It was my arithmetic. It was my choice to put four people in a place I did not understand and tell them to be brave." He took off his glasses. His eyes were swimming. "If there is a fault, it is mine."

"You didn't leave him."

"No."

"I did."

Luca said nothing. After a moment he put the glasses back on, and straightened, and stood beside Archie at the window with his hands folded behind his back, two men in a white corridor keeping a long watch over a green line that did not move.

…

In an office on the floor above, William Cross put down a telephone.

He had been listening for some time. He had said nothing, at his end of the line, but I see, and Quite, and How unfortunate. He sat back and looked out the window at the wet New Hampshire pines, with a smooth, closed, thoughtful face. In front of him on the blotter lay a single typed page headed INTERIM RISK ASSESSMENT.

It listed four names.

Three of them were circled in green.

The fourth had a line through it, neatly ruled with a ruler.

Adebayo, V.

He turned the sheet over. On the back, in his own small hand, he wrote one word, and underlined it, and sat looking at it with his chin on his fist.

Leverage.

Down in the corridor, three people stood in the cold, without speaking, and watched a screen.