In Gathering Light by M. K. Dreysen

For this week's story, I give you a tale of youth. Misspent and troubled. Glory seeking.

And just trying to make it to the next semester. Three different paths. All of them meeting here In The Gathering Light...

In Gathering Light by M. K. Dreysen

"I knew Byron, you know," he told me.

Oh, Lord, here we go again. He'd gotten himself kicked completely off campus, expelled forever, after his last incident. He'd beaten the every loving hell out of his roommate with one of those big ancient wooden chairs in the dorm rooms.

When the campus cops caught up to him, probably about where we were sitting now I think of it, he'd told them he'd thought he was Julius Caesar, and his roommate was Brutus come for the final thrust.

That was after the cocktail of pills and dust had run their course. Until then, way I heard it, he'd actually managed to hide himself away up here. When the come down hit, he'd walked the balcony rail; the commotion from below brought the mounties.

"That's bull," I told him. I'd share the bottle, but that didn't mean I had to put up with his nonsense. "Byron's been a little busy lately, when would he have time for you?"

A look all a dream came over him then.

Probably just too much vodka. But the look came, all the same. His eyes rolled up, he sagged back against the lawn chair someone had dragged up to the roof. "I hear his call, the voice from beyond, he searches forever for the one that got away."

"I'm fairly sure I read this book."

He popped out of it; not that he sat straight up or anything, but his eyes did tilt down so the pupils could track, sort of, my way. "You poor bastard. You just mean you saw that silly movie."

Yeah, so? Cheap horror flicks, man, the best. Other than maybe the Next Generation and the Twilight Zone, b-grade movies were the best guarantee at three in the morning when the caffeine and class reading caught up to me. The quiet and the zen of cheap effects and cheaper screams and they were heaven, my well, my touchstone.

My way to fall asleep with the brain wound back down to quiet and stillness. Better than going to a frat party, like my soon-to-be ex-roommate.

Chan thought he was insulting me. Price of dissolution, I guess. "Shouldn't you be a little more worried the cops are going to find you here?"

He shrugged, then he fumbled a cigarette out and chased the drunken flame around with it. "What are they going to do, dear boy? Kick me out again?" He laughed now, for the first time since I'd found him, crossing the courtyard with his jug tucked under his arm, a serious look for finding nasty business on his face. His chest heaved. The laugh turned into a tearing cough, deep wet and phlegmy.

Like he'd found an extra decade or two and a couple packs a day habit along with it, in his personal timeline. It had only been three months on my calendar since I'd seen him escorted away.

Or like he'd caught tuberculosis. How far was he willing to take a gag? I wondered.

"They can throw you in jail for trespassing now," I pointed out.

He pulled a plastic card from his pocket. I knew what it was without having to look at it. School I.D., he'd probably spent five bucks, if that. The booth at the flea market down the road was happy to put together whatever you needed, college students most of all, those like me with another three years to legal. A school badge was nothing compared to a fake driver's license.

He leaned over, smoke coming from his nostrils. "You won't tell, will you?"

Of course not. I had my pride. He'd never done anything to me, least I could do was keep my mouth shut. At least until the next morning, when I'd be happy to spread the story. That was different. By the time the story passed through the rumor mill, on its way to authority, the serial numbers would have been quite well polished away and Chan would be long gone, naught but a ghost among the oak trees.

"Byron lives just over the hill and round the bend," he pointed out.

"Sure, and two lovely gents such as ourselves are as welcome there as turds on the porch. Probably less, given what Byron works on." It ain't hard, for someone a credit or three away from a doctorate in chemistry, to make money. Not when he'd left any sense of ethics and good hard sense behind, along with any hope of ever graduating. Byron even had a day gig, running lab tests for plants on the ship channel. The lab truck in the front driveway, and the carte blanche it granted him to order all the supplies an outlaw could want, made him, if not completely bulletproof...

Well, the rumors said that custom batches in a hurry were Byron's specialty. And they didn't come cheap.

He'd been my T.A. in chemistry lab, last semester. I'd run into him when he was starting up. "They supply the precursors, Drew. They take all the risks. Only thing I have to do is make it, and make it right."

Smart. He does the work, the only thing he had to supply was glassware, heat, and know-how.

"Chan," I started.

"I'm not running for them," he put in, before I could get to that. "Byron's made it clear he doesn't want anything to do with me, while I'm like this." He pointed at the bottle, the cigarette burnt down to the filter now. He pitched it over the side of the roof, with a mouthful of what I feared was blood chasing it out over the rail. "I'm going into business for myself."

He said it, and the words didn't surprise me at all. Chan didn't have money, people to fall back on. Like me, a scholarship kid and oh wasn't that free ride the only way either one of us had any chance at all, short of the long hard slog through community college three hours at a time?

Somehow, I just knew that dragging off to a gig at a music store, or making the laser beep at a grocery store, stocking shelves or even busking at the Ren Faire, there weren't no such thing as straight honest money for Chan.

I could feel the flame of the explosion to come washing over me. Maybe it would be literal, maybe it would just be the world and the people going up around him. Either way, my grandmother would have been proud. The sight of it came, true seeing free and clear, and I knew.

This wasn't going to end well.

Of course we piled into my old Corolla. Ground the gears getting out of the parking lot, clutch loose and worn and it would all have to wait until I saved up some summer money. Windows down for Chan's cigarette smoke, and the bottle sitting between his feet. I didn't ask and he didn't offer any more. "You're driving, Drew."

Why were we headed there? "Byron doesn't want anything to do with you, right?"

"As rain."

"And we're going over there why, precisely?"

"You're another story, Drew. I'm just a delivery boy."

And that's when I started to really worry. What was I being dragged into?

Byron hadn't changed. Pink Floyd streaming out the windows, Dark Side of the Moon t-shirt matching the ambiance of smoke and music. "I'm not sure I'd have bet on you, Chan."

"I don't bet on myself much at the moment," Chan replied. "But there's still time."

Byron held the door open for me. "You're welcome to enter, Drew," he told me. He held up a hand, stopped Chan at the threshold. "I shouldn't extend the same invitation to you. But tonight?" He laughed. "Tonight, any friend of Drew's is welcome in my home." And he followed us in. He left the door open behind himself. "So the cats can come and go for a while."

It was good weather for it. Spring, clean and clear and the kind of gentle east wind that kisses you in the morning. People complain about August, well the whole summer around here; we don't tell them about April.

I settled myself into the chair. Byron lived in what would have been a mansion, back in the twenties when the campus first opened. Now, it was two generations past its family and down in price enough a graduate student with precious little reportable income could make the nut. Rambling old barn, half the upstairs was off limits, and the back half downstairs not far away from that. The front room, from the couple times I'd been here, was about the only part of the house visitors ever saw.

No point showing off the working areas, I figured. I didn't necessarily want to know what he had set up back there.

But at this point, I kind of figured I was going to find out. Once I got past the cats and the cheap wine Byron passed around. "No, I think I'll pass."

Not after my first weekend on campus. The convenience store across the street carried the screw-top bottles at two for three bucks.

I still can't drink grape juice.

Byron shrugged and handed the bottle to Chan. "Fair enough. Tell me what you've been up to," he said to me.

School, tests, endless lab reports. "You've been gone five minutes, Byron. I don't think you've forgotten what a chemistry major does day to day."

He giggled. "That's for damned sure. No, what have you been up to outside of the world, Drew? What's keeping you up nights, making you dream the big dreams, reach for the brass ring?" He leaned over his knees; the chair I sat in and the sofa he and Chan shared were too far apart for him to loom over me. The effect was like he'd found an idea and wanted to know if I'd heard it yet.

I didn't have to guess where he was going with this. I'd made the mistake of running my mouth. Early in the semester, when I'd come in with stars in my eyes and a freshman's belief in the scholarly inquiry.

How was I to know that the chemistry department only went so far when it came to research? Things that were beyond the horizon, at the distant edges of the belief system the past century and a half of technological progress had built around them.

I'd run my mouth about it, in lab class where my loose comments had drawn Byron to me as inevitably as gravity. Both kinds, the chalkboard illusions the physics professors taught but never ever actually played with in their labs.

And the underlying reality. The forces that bubbled up from the crevices between.

"You look like you swallowed a bug," Byron told me. "Did you lose your ambitions, Drew? So young, to be ground so fine by the stones of the obedient."

He meant the professors and their students; Byron categorized them as those who followed along all unaware of the hints to things beyond their knowledge.

Me, from what I'd seen, I figured they were mostly just like me. Making it day to day and letting the bigshot philosophy fall to the wayside. Or at least to the bullshit sessions after midnight where the booze and the smoke could wipe the worst of it from their daylight memories.

I didn't want to talk to Byron about it. I didn't trust him; he stole work, habit as protection. Ten years a graduate student, and he'd built up all the bulwarks needed to keep anyone from kicking him out. "What finally made you walk, Byron?" It's not like he didn't know who he was dealing with, the profs and the admins and all the nonsense. Shit, why not finish the degree and then walk? I had my suspicions. That he'd reached the point where he couldn't play it straight anymore, couldn't even pretend to be a plain chemist, with no interest whatsoever in the things he'd been playing with in the lab over our heads and no honest ideas of his own.

"That's why you're here, Drew. I need to show you all the landscapes I've discovered."

Of course he did. "What about Chan?" I asked. "He's your favorite." The bright boy, the brilliant one; if I was mixed of earth and clay, Chan was pulled from starlight and the wind.

Admittedly, Chan wasn't showing his best light at the moment. That low point didn't obscure the greed showing through his eyes. He almost licked his lips as he sat there listening to Byron attempt to spread his spell.

Byron shocked me, then. He didn't insult Chan. Which had been his favorite habit, burn the golden boy whenever the chance came up. Instead, Byron looked at our fallen prince, shook his head gently, then looked back to me. "Chan's a little ways from clean, I need steadier hands at the moment. Are you still interested in the barriers, Drew?"

Yes, I was, am. Maybe the barriers hid paths to the universe, a little trick on Einstein, take a walk and get a free pass on the speed limit of poor matter going the mundane route. Maybe take a leap back in time and interview the Emperor of the Dinosaurs. Go to Barsoom, or Oz, who knows.

Byron's fervor, I didn't trust it. The first time I'd come here, he'd walked me over from the campus, from the lab after all the samples were handed in for the day. By the time we arrived I'd been caught up in his speech, hands waving and the excitement there almost enough to propel us block by block. It was only after I left that evening, back to the dorms and the books, that I'd been struck by the fever dream in his eyes.

If that bright burning circumscribed his influence, I'd walked away from Byron's circle and back to reality somewhere around the Subway shop on the corner; cleared my head completely somewhere around the football stadium. Up the stairs and into my room and I'd laughed it all off.

Even if Byron could actually deliver on what he, I, knew to be there, even if he did have the knowledge and the gear to open the barrier, he'd drag it all down into destruction. Obsessed, oh my yes he was determined, relentless. He'd kill himself doing it.

I hadn't wanted any part of that then. So why was I walking up the stairs to get a look at his lab, now? Chan eased up behind me, staying quiet but there was no quieting the hunger, Chan gave himself away in the white strips showing across his knuckles and the harsh breath on the back of my neck.

He almost giggled, standing there. How long had Byron dangled this promise in front of him?

The music from the living room didn't reach up the stairs. I climbed the stairs into, most of all, the hum of motors and power and electricity reined in to paths never imagined.

Think of all the old black and white creature features. The lab, waiting, Jacob's ladder sparking, van der Graaf generator pulsing, someone getting ready to cackle in the background. And then throw it all out of your head, because Byron knew his business.

All glass tubing and well-made vessels, stirring their substances over heat or cold; a vacuum chamber in the back, a furnace there to the left. Clamps and scales and everything just about a match to the labs down the street. Until I tried to focus on the lines.

They didn't go where they were supposed to. The big glass pot there to my left, bubbled something away to be captured and condensed. Only, when I tried to follow where the gas should have dripped into liquid form, there was only empty space. The tube didn't hang in the air.

It just disappeared into... into geometry. Every setup was like that, an M. C. Escher sketch of a lab, only instead of stairs climbing across the ceiling, here there were stills and stirring and spaces that shouldn't have been.

The place looked like a chemist's lab all right, as translated through a theoretical physicist's fevered imaginings. "You've been reading about Many-Worlds again, Byron."

"It's your fault, Drew. Shouldn't you be proud of what I've brought to life?" He moved through the space, careful to touch nothing, and Chan followed him. If Byron was careful, Chan was ecstatic.

In the old sense. He'd have fallen down and worshiped, I suspect, if there'd been room to do it without breaking anything important. And even removed from all constraints, broken down into his component self, Chan moved through the room as gently as and easily as a born chemist.

Me, I stayed at the door. There's a trail of broken glassware behind me; I know my limits, and the extra dimensions Byron called to this room would only make my clumsiness more catastrophic in demonstration. Besides, Chan's face, drifting and magnified and separated, almost, from his body, gave me plenty to watch. "Has he told you, Chan?"

"I don't need to be told," he responded. "I stand in the midst of the extraordinary."

We move through space and time; Schrodinger and Dirac's construction of Einstein's world. This is known. It forms the ladders of chemistry, from the tripling of quarks through the twisting braid of DNA.

There in the space between, of electrons and protons, neutrinos and muons, blink and you missed it worlds spin in and out of existence. That's what the madness of the particle physicists, their tao's and their ways, suggested. At least to those who couldn't quite let it go, just shut up and calculate. There are a lot of paths to follow, and none of them lead anywhere.

I thought. I'd dreamt up the idea because a teacher had handed me the Eightfold Way and turned me loose. And here I was looking at the oh so pretentious drawings and equations I'd drawn up.

The bastard had taken my scratchings, and made them manifest. I listened. Between the bubbling and the sigh of the vacuum pump, did I hear voices? Whispers?

Screams?

Where the glass disappeared into thin air, did I smell clean fresh snow, feel the bite of the winter on my cheeks? The spaces called to me; waves crashed somewhere in the back and cast salt my way, a little reminder of home. My feet betrayed me.

At least my hands stayed close to my side. No lab coat helped, I carried no extra material, just a t-shirt and jeans and precious little to catch on the grasping clamps and rods. I rolled my feet where I could, balanced on the balls or heels where I couldn't. I passed through the maze to find Byron and Chan at the center.

There was no way to walk straight to them. If I tried, I'd bring the whole place crashing down. Byron smiled at me; Chan ignored me completely, he stared instead into the space above his head. Something held his attention above all mundane considerations. What path had Byron laid for me here?

There wasn't room for a spiral, no true maze, except for the fact that there plainly was. The longer I stared the greater the space between us. I flipped Byron the bird and set to work.

The only resistance was that in my mind. Patience, that was all I had. I cast his face, their faces, out of my mind. Together with the sounds and the smells, constant in any lab and more immediate here, quiet though it was. All paths led to the left, counterclockwise. Of course, because he had to embrace sinister and all its meanings. Chirality, in our language. I chased my way into the world's mirror image.

The passage narrowed. All was now glass, here were the tubes and their proper paths. I trod the ways between, then, I chased myself and Byron down what Feynman had called all possible paths. If it took a minimum three meters of tubing to cool a standard gas back to its liquid state, Byron had turned that three meters into thirty, or thirty kilometers. Hurrying through this would just make it worse, thermodynamics would take its time no matter the geometry.

The sounds, the bubbling flasks, the vacuums, faded away, in favor of trickling liquids and the occasional vibration from the gas flowing through. Bumps. Knocks. Never when I looked directly, always when I caught the motion of the tubes from the corner of my eye. It was enough. I watched, moved only when I felt the rush of air or caught the knock motions in my peripheral vision.

Break something here, son, I told myself, and you might not make it back. To wherever there was, or anywhere else for that matter. Just put one foot in front of the other, where you can, and keep breathing. Which I'd sort of forgotten to do, and now I stayed in only place long enough to let the spots clear from my eyes, my pulse race down to normal, and my lungs ask only for just more than their normal ration.

When breath came back and time and space with it, I stepped through the rest of the pattern. A right turn, but no it only looked that way, a left turn hidden behind a stainless steel vessel, the only metal in the whole place I'd seen so far, and another left and there they were. Byron's face was grim now, the smile gone, and Chan stared at the ceiling, still lost in whatever grace had taken him.

"Have you ambition, Drew?"

Is that what drew me to you? I considered it, but no, I didn't burn to stand in his place and call the worlds.

They swirled around us, around them, the spot in the middle of the maze of lab equipment. He'd set the chemicals to their business, prodded them with the forces of nature, heat and electricity here, magnetism and gravity there. I'm certain, if there'd been a Geiger counter handy, that it would have pointed straight to the stainless steel vessel. It had to hold the last ingredient, the weak and the strong, radiation filched in microgram amounts from the hidden reactors around town. Universities and medical centers, and he'd had access to all of them. The grant money had its needs, hands to till the ground of research chief among them.

"I seem to have left it in my dorm room, Byron. Probably packed into last semester's notes somewhere." Ego goes out the window when less than ten percent of a class makes it through to the next semester. Even among the select, my reaction was relief, not triumph. "You're not going to give me a lecture about it, are you?"

"I already gave you the lesson, Drew, there's no need to repeat it." Go hard, but pay attention. Pedigree is everything, he'd said, and the ability to get money everything else. If you wanted to make it, not just get the ticket but the job that went with it, you had to keep your eye out for the right group, the right research, the right school to graduate from.

The correct position to kneel in, and the shibboleths to mouth on the way down.

So what happens if I just want to know how it all works, I'd made the mistake of asking. Innocent fool I'd been, I guess, and that simple question had lead us all here.

I still figure that question's the only one that matters.

"Ok, Byron, what's the point?" Other than the fact that the forces swirling around me were getting stronger. Call it wind, maybe it was space warping in response to the intrusion of the planes, the gradients were getting steeper where I stood. I felt them tug at the back of my scalp, where the hair stood up in response. I had to find a stable place, or a switch to turn it all off.

And I doubted there'd be a big red switch anywhere handy.

He stood there, calm and cool in the center of it all. The light wasn't bent yet, but the moving of shadows told me it wouldn't be long before photons got dragged into the chaos. "How long do you think you can just stand there and admire my work?" he asked.

The question wasn't far from my mind. "As long as it takes, I guess. How are you going to stop me from jumping into the node?" The place they stood on, the calm middle where nothing yet changed. He'd chosen his functions well, descriptive runes in older language, had Byron. Mapped them oh so carefully, and now he'd placed himself in the one place the changes he'd wrought couldn't reach.

So long as the power stayed on, come on Drew figure it out, where'd he plug the fool thing in? He'd stayed away from metal, but power had its demands, if nothing else Byron would have had to take the wires in the walls into account. Here were electrons aplenty, moving along in their dance. Was I fool enough to think I could play in between the strokes of lightning?

Well, it was either that or fall down the gap behind me, and come out somewhere, somewhen I know not. There's an awful lot of space in our own world, and precious little firmament. What did I place my odds at in some universe forbidden?

Not high at all. And they didn't call us quantum mechanics for nothing. The steel vessel wouldn't do at all, the radioactives could keep themselves company without my help. But the wires running to it would do just fine. Well, except for the part where I had to jump past the gap.

Did it whisper now? It did, there were voices but I couldn't stop to listen, that way lay something worse than madness. But worse, as I pressed my leg across the gap of voice-full nothing, it grabbed me. Tried to hold me in place, to keep me there and make me heed the words of void. I didn't want this, nothing that lived at the bottom there was for me, I forced all of my self and more than that into pushing across.

Somewhere in between the pain of my leg being torn twisted down away and the scream it tore from my lips, the force relented and I stepped across. Whole, still. Just, only an echo of the pain in my right hip to remind me of the cost. The whispers died with every step to the steel pot. A pressure cooker, more or less, eight feet tall with legs to brace the round bottom in place, valves and pipes and wires leading away from the threaded, welded, and bolted top. Whatever he'd placed in there, for damned sure Byron didn't want it coming back out again.

If it had been me, I'd have built a double-wall pot, for kicks and grins and as many layers of protection as I could get. Would I have powered it, self? Answer, of course, because here the weak and the electron and the magnet became one, and their response was necessary, he had to capture those fluctuations and more. Light speed and gone in less than the briefest instant measurable and there would be only the effect of their passage.

The power line ran straight from the top of the lid to the ceiling above. The minimal path, the least exposure to the forces behind me. The only thing it would take is a good yank.

Which was harder than it appeared, what with the yelling and screaming that started behind me as soon as I started climbing up the vessel. Fine, Byron could yell all he wanted to, just so long as he wasn't climbing out of the node to come stop me.

"Drew, stop, you don't know..." he started. Except I did.

"Hazard of stealing someone else's work, Byron." When I pulled myself as far up as I dared, I grabbed hold of the line and started pulling. Then pushing, twisting, the conduit was seated and bolted in to its collar, proper setup, so I had to fight it.

And ignore the sounds behind me. Byron's voiced faded, still calling out his threats and promises, now the sounds that dominated were those from the void. Whispers had been replaced by shouts, a chorus now in full voice. Forces arose in response, winds and gravity gripped me, ripped me, this way and that, but I held against them I had no choice. Committed. There was no way back now, from the corner of my eye I watched the void swirl into the space below my feet, and just outside of my reach. Byron's node was protected, he and Chan were safe as long as I didn't pull the plug.

I had no such clarity, except for my purpose. The void called me and I paid no attention to it. The only thing that mattered now was that the threads of the conduit, where it screwed into the tank lid, were parting, the softer aluminum tearing free under my exertions, and the wires now showed through. Just about had it, just one more push and pull, and one more and one more and the thing was tearing free in my hand. For the longest instant I'd known I held a fistful of the power of the universe, a stream of lightning connecting the wire bundle in my fist and the steel vessel I stood upon.

The light of it threw the world around me into relief. Shadows and the infinite darkness below and around me, the steel pressure pot stood on nothing except good wishes and faith. The glass lab lines twisted themselves in and through the void, swallowed and generated by it, feeding it and now it would consume all. I would fall to it, as all things would be consumed by it, the void was not called it broke through wherever the seams were weakened, by fools and geniuses alike. The steel fell away from me, first taste of this world and the only thing holding me above the entropic maw was my grip on the wires, still live and sparking.

We held that way for the next infinite instant. And then Chan entered the fray. I saw only the madhouse reflection of it, Byron and Chan's faces stretched across round-bottom flasks, Chan pulling himself away from the contemplation to push Byron out of the node. I heard the scream, screams, Byron's of rage and surprise and betrayal.

And the void's, of triumph at the sacrifice, whatever it was they claimed now a soul. And, then, realization.

That the world they sought was yanked away from them. Even as Byron bridged the gap, any human would do to fill the need, the power that held the gate open drained away; the void closed around Byron, shrank itself back to the minute space between spaces, down somewhere less than the width of an electron where none of us could guess at its presence. Where it would wait until the power and the pretense converged again, and the fool and the genius turned once again to manipulation.

I swung, pendulum of idiot, over a floor scarred by memory, but otherwise showing only the bolts that should have held a steel tank in place. When the tingle in my hand finally broke through the shock, I let go of the conduit and dropped, twisting as best I could to avoid landing on the bolts. I didn't do all that good a job of it, if the pain in my ankle and the way I smacked my face and shoulder into the floor were any indication. But at least I didn't put the bolts through my cheek.

Chan mumbled behind me, and sobbed. I turned, and he knelt in the space in the middle, hands over his face and then he pressed his face to the floor, at the spot where Byron had disappeared beyond our poor kenning.

The lab resolved now into something like normal. The glass vessels were still there, the shelves and clamps and the layout all as they were, I stood yet in a maze of twisted vapors, restrained. The light came in through only the doorway; now though, the geometry came back to the three dimensions my eyes could make out. No more random gaps, only coils and twists that would have made an old lab chemist scratch their heads in bafflement.

I'd have been the one to feed the thing, that was clear. And if I'd taken the secrets of the thing's making with me, so much the better. What did that make Chan, then, in Byron's purpose? Dupe, of course but then I was king of that particular country and I'd wear my fool's crown for life.

Chan's sobbing changed tone, now he giggled, soft and low. At a joke he'd played on himself. Did he know, remember, of his audience? "Well now," he whispered into the floor, "Ain't it a funny thing how the world works out?" And now he picked himself up to his knees and faced me. No question at all that he knew I was there.

Something intruded on us. Sickly sweet, a smell. Toluene and kerosene, the devil's own separation mixture. Behind Chan, a glass line had come back into normal everyday existence, except for a half-meter's length that hadn't made the trip back. The vapor condensed now with no heat to drive it, and dripped to a puddle. The sound, drip drip, came along now to join the tableau.

Chan smiled, reached into one pocket for a cigarette. Into the other, for the Zippo. Old brass, polished under his fingers, waiting for the flick and the roll of his thumb. "Will anyone know of us, when we've passed?" he asked me.

"Chan..."

"Here and gone, just a couple freshmen to add to the tally, right?" he continued.

"Chan..."

He opened the lighter. Click, and the sound too soft to echo except through my mind. Pushed his thumb over the wheel, and now I had time enough only to decide. Could I stop him?

"Run, Drew." And he flicked the wheel over the flint.

The flame danced alight, and the choice, if it was ever mine, was done. Maybe I could have stopped him before that, but now even if I'd reversed Byron's fall and jumped the gap between us, Chan had time and more than time to toss the lighter behind him. The pool of fuel waited only for the flame to come. He threw it, and I ran for the door.

The flame, arcing over his head and to the floor, lit my mad dash, arms over my face and head down to protect myself from the glass. The puddle lit somewhere in the middle of my crashing passage, climbed the dripping source to the glass above when I made the door. I turned, to Chan lit from behind by a halo of racing flame fronts, hell released now and chasing through the network. I stood there in the last and briefest of the day's eternities.

Chan flipped me the bird. "Bring a bottle," he yelled, just before the flame turned from infant light to roaring adulthood.

I turned and ran, down the stairs and out to the Corolla. If cell phones had been anything more than the toys of the ultra-wealthy at that particular time, I'd have used one. As it was...

As it was, did I go and knock on a door?

The houses on either side were empty, windows shattered to show their fate. I settled for the convenience store down the street.

The firefighters showed up first, the station was just down and over the bayou. The cops were a little farther away.

We all sat and watched the place burn. The fire department captain knew the place, "Only thing we can do is make sure it doesn't spread. What's your story, son?"

The cops hung on the question, three of them standing behind me and listening close for my answer. "Byron was my lab instructor, last semester. And Chan's. Byron put Chan up after he got expelled, tried to help him find a job and get his world back together again."

To me, the fire seemed alive, the last remnant of the chaos that had visited the place. There's no way it should have spread as fast as it did. Between my 911 call and us all standing here, the second story was lost and the first floor began its collapse to oblivion. The pump truck was just now getting hooked up and streaming.

"I came by on a whim. It's spring break week next week, it's the first time I've had a chance to check in with the guys in a while."

"What happened?" the captain asked.

"I saw smoke from the window, upstairs. I banged on the door, but it was already hot. So I went for a phone."

He watched the flames, the sparks reaching for the sky. "Good thing you had enough sense to not try and run into that. We'd have been pulling the three of you out of there."

"My professors would kill me," I pointed out. "First thing they teach us, for a lab fire once it's to that point, is get the hell out and call in the professionals."

The cops nodded along. They asked me about Byron's extracurricular activities, but I didn't know anything about that. "Rumors, we'd all wondered what he was up to," I told them. "But look," and I pointed at the lab truck parked next to where we stood. "He had to be making twenty, thirty dollars an hour at least," and the minimum wage then was just less than five. Enough and more than enough to pay for an abandoned house in this neighborhood.

"Someone sets up like this," the cop pointed out, "And we think a drug dealer moved in."

They'd find the lab, when the fire department dug into it. "I don't blame you. Every one of us at school thought the same thing."

In the end, Byron's driving lab tech job was as real as anything else; sure, he'd been taking work home for years, so the cops were desperate to find some drug dealer's involvement in this. But there was nothing to add to it, even their reliable informants couldn't tell them anything. I was told to make sure I was available.

The only place I had to go was back to the dorm.

We went through it again, when they found Chan's body, but no sign of Byron's. The fire captain called me first, and I told them the same story as I'd done at the house. The cops called too, and I made my way to the station to go through it all over.

"You'll tell us if you hear from Byron?" he asked me. And I promised I would.

I stood at the grave when Chan's time came. I had to wait out his family for it; I didn't know if they'd understand the bottle under my jacket or not. I figured one way or another I'd wait for the diggers, the ones who'd done their own waiting. I stayed there in my only jacket, the one I'd worn for the interview sessions just about a year ago, watched Chan's little family, mother and father and three younger kids, and him the one who'd made the first steps into a world none of them had ever had contact with.

The graveyard was south of town, a brand new place, far enough out I'd sweated the Corolla's making it. The radiator lived on borrowed time, I wasn't feeding it the leak-stop it needed.

Sundown found us, me and the diggers, and they weren't surprised at all when I pulled the pint of brandy out and laid it on top of the casket. I figured, new ground or no, the pair were old enough, practiced enough, to have spotted my purpose from the beginning.

When I drove away then, outside of the occasional nightmare I didn't dwell on the thing. They'd made their play, I'd survived it, and I had the heavy business of getting on with my life. There wasn't room for reviews and recriminations. Finals, summer job, the next semester and then the next, on to grad school and that cycle forever and ever amen.

I didn't follow Byron's advice for that one, it didn't even occur to me 'til I was sitting in my adviser's office the day after I'd defended my dissertation. I'd made damned sure they all signed after they'd admitted me to the club.

When my boss wanted to know what I planned to do with my life, and I told him post-doc and faculty job somewhere, just like I was supposed to, well. That's when I remembered what Byron had told me. "Pedigree and money, the only things that matter, Drew." And here I was with the lady'd spent the better part of six years putting up with my sometime random approach to science, and she was telling me "You're not going to make it up that path, Andrew. We're a small school, I don't have those connections, and you're not interested enough in where the chemistry world's going to chase the grant money."

"Three strikes and I'm out?" I said.

"You'll be better off finding a job now, with the ink yet to dry, than waiting two or ten years and getting the questions about what you've been doing with your time. Right now at least you're new and shiny."

And so I went out and found a company that loved the fact they could add a doctor to the stable, and for the hometown discount. I married, we have kids, it's a good life and I don't think about the secrets of the universe anymore.

Well. I didn't. Until the other day, flying home from a trip on the company's dime. We live just a little south of the airport; just down the road, as it happens, from the cemetery where Chan's buried. I've passed that ground two or three times a week for the past ten years, touched my head with my fingers when I did, salute to Chan and the past.

On the plane, for the first time in I don't know how long I'd sat down on the right side of the plane to catch our house in the window. The pilots bank and turn, when the wind's right, and pass right over our neighborhood. This pass, I spotted the water tower, and then the graves, the polished granite of the headstones shining in the afternoon sun.

I looked for our little subdivision; my attention didn't get that far.

The cemetery, the headstones, the pattern dragged my eyes back to it, I couldn't look away.

The place has grown, the hundred acres on one side, that's where Chan was buried, and now there were a hundred acres more on the other side of the road, all of it cleared and ready, for the oak trees newly planted to grow into service, and for the customers to come.

They should all have been laid out in rows, like Arlington, all facing the north wind and the Angel of Death to come, that's the story. These weren't, aren't. There are subtle changes, shifts. Functional changes, where the light of day doesn't pass in rays, it flows along the curves laid out by the stones.

Geometric paths, rows that disappear. If I walked them, I wonder, if I passed between those stones...

Where would I come out?

And who would await me, between the stones where the light gathers?