They Sold Me For Rice

Chapter 7: A Room Bigger Than the World

Lucas did not answer the message.

He stood under the streetlight for a full minute, thumb resting on the screen, and then he turned the phone off completely. It went dark in his palm, a small black stone. Whatever Vanessa wanted to say next, she could say it to nobody.

Two men. Dad's friends. He could picture them standing in his old hallway, polite and heavy, looking at the shoes by the door. Richard had made one phone call and the whole machine had started turning. That told him something useful. The loan was not a favour Richard was asking for. It was a debt with a deadline, and the deadline was close.

Which meant Lucas had less time than he thought, and so did the Fords.

He did not go back to the hotel. He had paid cash and given a false surname, but the room had a window facing the car park, and he did not like the idea of lying in it and waiting. Instead he took a bus north, then a second one, then walked the last two miles along a road with no pavement while trucks thundered past and shook the dust off the verge.

By the time the warehouse rose out of the dark, his feet were blistered and his shirt was stuck to his back.

The padlock on the main gate was new and stiff. It took him three tries to turn the key. The chain rattled loose, the gate groaned inward, and he pulled it shut behind him and wound the chain through again from the inside.

Then he stood in the yard and listened.

Wind in the weeds. A distant dog. Nothing else. No headlights, no footsteps, no voices.

He let out a breath he had been holding for about nine miles.

Inside, the cold hit him like a wall. He found the office at the top of the iron staircase, a square room with a cracked window, a metal desk, and a single stained mattress someone had left behind years ago. He kicked the mattress flat, dropped his duffel on it, and sat down on the floor with his back against the wall.

For the first time since waking up in the Fords' living room, nobody could see him.

He held out his hand and thought of the pen.

It came into his palm at once. He put it away. Took it out. Then, because the moment felt right, he closed his eyes and did something he had been afraid to do all day.

He went in.

It was not like opening a door. It was more like falling asleep standing up. His body stayed where it was, but his mind slipped sideways through the dark behind his eyelids and landed softly in a place that was not a place.

A room. White light, soft and even, coming from nowhere. A floor he could feel but not quite see. And floating in the middle of it, exactly where he had left it, a single black pen.

He looked at the walls. And then he looked again, because he could not find them.

At first he thought it was a trick of the light. The room had seemed small when he first glimpsed it, about the size of a closet. But now he turned and saw white stretching away in every direction, smooth and silent, without edges. He took a step, then another. The pen drifted behind him like a patient dog.

Ten steps. Twenty. Thirty.

No walls. No ceiling. He looked up, and the white went up forever.

It could be a hundred feet across. A thousand. It could be larger than the warehouse, larger than the city. He felt something cold and exhilarated move through his chest, because in his first life, at the very end, the survivors had whispered about people with spatial abilities. A cupboard's worth, they said. A trunk's worth. The strongest of them could carry a small car.

He had not heard of anyone who could not find the walls.

He pulled himself out slowly and opened his eyes in the dim office, heart pounding. His fingers had gone numb. When he checked his watch, forty minutes had passed.

He needed to test it properly.

The warehouse floor was littered with rubbish left by old tenants. Broken pallets, a rusted steel drum, coils of frayed rope. He went down the iron stairs, picked a pallet, and laid his hand against the splintered wood.

Take it.

The pallet vanished. No sound, no flash, just a clean absence where there had been a bulky object a heartbeat before. A bead of sweat ran down his temple. He pointed at the steel drum next. It weighed perhaps eighty pounds, and he felt it leave the way you feel a tooth leave, a small, sharp tug and then nothing.

Gone.

He took the rope. A broken chair. A rusted toolbox. A mop bucket. Each one went in with the same little tug, and the tugs began to add up. By the tenth item his head had started to ache, a thin pressure behind the eyes. By the fifteenth, his nose was bleeding.

He stopped. Wiped his lip with the back of his hand. Stared at the red smear.

It cost something, then. Not the space itself, but the act of using it. Like a muscle. He would need to train it slowly, build it up, or one day he would try to pull in a truck and drop on the spot.

He sat down on the cold concrete and waited for the ache to fade.

An hour later, with a clearer head, he tried the reverse. He closed his eyes, reached into the white room, found the steel drum floating where it had landed, and thought: out.

The drum reappeared three feet in front of him with a deep, ringing thud that shook dust off the rafters.

He laughed. It came out cracked and breathless and slightly wild, bouncing off the concrete walls, and he did not care. A man had been killed for forty pounds of rice, and now he sat in an empty warehouse with a room that had no walls.

He took a bruised apple from his duffel, a leftover from the hotel breakfast, and placed it carefully in the white space. He would check it in the morning. If the room kept time still, if nothing rotted in there, then he would be able to stock fresh food for months. Years.

He stretched out on the old mattress and pulled his jacket over him. The warehouse creaked and settled around him. Somewhere far away a truck horn sounded, long and low.

He was nearly asleep when he felt it.

A change in the room behind his eyes, small and soft, like a shift in the air when someone walks in behind you.

He did not open his eyes. He did not move. He simply lay there and listened with some part of himself that had no ears, and in the endless white he sensed, very faintly, a sound like a slow breath being drawn.

Then it stopped.

His eyes flew open. The office was dark and empty. Nothing moved but the dust.

He told himself he had imagined it. He told himself that for a long time.

The apple, when he checked it in the morning, was exactly as he had left it.

But the pen was no longer floating where he had set it. It had drifted, very slightly, toward the center of the room.

Toward whatever was waiting there.