Across the Boundary

Ken panted like a dog without water. The air in the stairwell was somehow both dry, and stuck in the throat. For a few disparate moments on his journey back up the flights of steps, he was certain he would be sick. But in each moment, just before repainting the stonework with his lunch, Alice clenched his hand, sensing his immense discomfort, and he found some saliva in some untapped corner of his mouth, driving away the bout of dry-mouthed nausea.

He’d reacted out of surprise and emotion when May had pushed past him. Out of desperation. He hadn’t intended to be so… callous. But they were in a skyscraper a hundred stories high. It was somewhat dubious on its own, and with the added uncertainty of the effect an extirpation would have on its structural integrity—even if it was only the top ten percent—was disconcerting to him, to say the least.

He’d noticed the phenomenon’s appearance shortly after arriving at the observatory with Alice. His mind was now acutely attuned to the unique, indescribable feeling of being in the presence of an extirpation—for that, at least, he was thankful to Irina.

That meant that this had persisted for well over ten minutes already. Far longer than any he’d taken notice of—though, without the tactile sensation to judge the one on the street by, it was hard to tell how long that had been there.

The difference here was its size: considering it spanned seven floors, it was about 70 feet in diameter. With that size, it was nearly double the one on the ground. And, if the activation interval scaled cubically with radius, as he’d postulated to Irina…

He shook his head. His calculations gave them maybe fifteen minutes before the space would be wiped clean, but… that was still just theory, anyway—untrustworthy without verification. And he was not about to risk his children’s or his own life on a mental calculation based on a flawed theory.

As he passed floor after endless floor, he shook his head to clear it. There was no room for that kind of doubt: May was above him. He had to get to her.

Alice ran effortlessly up the stairs behind him, mocking his tired, aged pace wordlessly through her sheer youth. She bounded ahead, looked back, and said, “I’m gonna go faster!”

Normally he would have protested, but for two reasons, he didn’t: first, he was simply too out of breath to muster words in response before she had taken off after her older sister. But, more importantly, this was May—she would let no harm come to Alice, even if she herself had something extreme in mind.

In that way, she was distinctly, critically unlike her mother.

At last, after one final, grueling staircase, he reached the stairs to floor 93. And as he crested them, he saw something eerily, unsettlingly, familiar: May, stance confident and poised, reaching up her hand. It brushed against the boundary, warping very slightly as though barely submerged in turbulent water.

The exhaustion was instantly gone from Ken’s body. He noted Alice standing perhaps a foot behind her, tugging on the back of her shirt, glancing back and forth between the two of them. He stomped over behind her, yanking her hand from the extirpation’s boundary and throwing it down to her hip.

“What the hell are you doing?” he yelled at her. He wasn’t even sure where the anger came from. It was as though a pressurized pocket of unresolved rage had burst within him at the sight, and she was unfortunate enough to be in the line of fire. “Do you want to lose your hand?”

May scoffed, pulling her hand from his grip. “Yeah, I’m sure you care a whole lot about that.” She walked toward the staircase to go up, and into the bubble of death. “You didn’t care before, so don’t act like you do now.”

“May! Come back here!” Ken shouted after her, starting up the stairs in pursuit. She didn’t seem to register his words or the existential danger she faced, opting to continue up even faster to avoid him. But she quickly reached the boundary, reaching to touch it where it intersected the wall to her side. She had to bend down to fit beneath it, pressed to the staircase now to avoid passing through.

That, at least, Ken was glad to see, and it gave him a chance to catch her. He reached out to grab her again. But she managed to evade him.

But there was only one place left to go.

With an ethereal pop, May forced her way beyond the turbulent wall of air that composed the extirpation’s boundary. Ken just watched in horror for a moment as she pulled her leg through, now completely enveloped in it. The light between them distorted her appearance, her form making grotesque swirls and bends. The sight sickened him—his daughter mangled and disfigured in that way. It gave him pause, stopping just before his head reached the boundary.

But he couldn’t afford to stop. So he too pushed through the boundary, leaving Alice behind him, to pursue May further upward.

She walked more slowly now, more judiciously, as if her steps might fail her in this environment. And they very well might—Ken’s internal clock was screaming at him that they were moments from being annihilated. But there she was, walking deeper in; further up. She waved her hands back and forth, feeling the power and energy the atmosphere itself possessed.

“May!” he called into the swirling, shaking space between them. “Stop!” He reached out and grabbed her wrist. “We have to go back!” he yelled. The warbling air resounded in his ear like a rushing river, garbling his words and making him doubt they even projected to her.

“But…” She looked down at her hand. And that was the only word she said. She took another step.

“May, I love you!” he called to her. “I need you, and Alice! But you need to stop, or we’ll die!”

He saw her body tense up at his words. But she kept going, ascending another pair of steps.

He breathed in. "May! I'm sorry! I'm sorry you feel this way!" He rubbed his skin, a crawling itchiness spreading over it. “I never wanted this! May, I’m sorry! I love you!”

She stopped moving. She turned to him on the steps, meeting his gaze. And on her face was an expression Ken did not expect.

It was pained. And mourning. And combative. But most of all: afraid. And, even through the trembling air around them, he saw her lip quiver.

No other words were needed.

Ken felt adrenaline surge in his chest, heart racing. He sprang up the steps to her, wrapping her in an embrace.

The air grew more agitated with each passing moment. That signaled an impending collapse, according to his and Irina’s theories. So he grabbed May, scooping her off the ground.

He turned on his heel, and ran down the steps two at a time. All the while, his skin was subjected to more and more of the harrowing vibration.

The shaking air that heralded their deaths.

He spun around the final bend. The boundary moved into view. Light spilled from it, revealing Alice’s waiting face. It looked covered in tears, though he couldn’t tell through the boundary.

But as he crashed onto the landing, barely keeping his footing, he felt, and saw, and heard, and tasted that same synesthesia: that same horrible, fascinating feeling he’d felt when Irina had created one of these abominations.

The feeling that signaled the end. Annihilation.

With one desperate final heave, he threw himself down the final staircase, body first, bending his head down next to May’s and pressing his eyes closed, bracing for the blow. He clutched her tight to his body.

His back struck the stairs, pulling his head from its craned position, and slamming it hard on the concrete beneath.