A Rift in Space and Crime
Multiverse Investigations Unit Book 2
R E McLean
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Contents
1. Llama
2. Marshmallow
3. Big Mac
4. Bampot
5. Hydrangea
6. Glue
7. Wine
8. Unicorn
9. Rhino
10. Superhero
11. Pompeii
12. Trolley
13. Shoulder
14. Lycra
15. Brick
16. Puppets
17. Banana
18. Peanut Butter
19. Elastic Band
20. Rabbit
21. Eggplant
22. Castle
23. Cube
24. Unicorn
25. Big Dipper
26. Cotton Candy
27. Snorkel
28. Boat
29. Vacuum Cleaner
30. Selfie
31. Roasting
32. Sweater
33. Leotard
34. Pigeon
35. Catsuit
36. Ringmaster
37. Wardrobe
38. Clown
39. Engagement
40. Reno
42. Pigtails
43. Eels
44. Chonk
45. Sick
46. Albatross
47. Flame
48. Twinkie
49. Banana
50. Squeaky
51. Soot
52. Cowgirl
53. Shakespeare
54. Volcano
55. Cotton Wool
56. Jodphurs
57. Argentina
58. Potty
59. Hansom
60. Lipstick
61. Stick
62. Pop Star
63. Stamp
64. Milky Way
65. Butterfly
66. Meteor
67. Lion
68. Penn and Teller
69. Moon
70. Star Trek
Read about Schrödinger’s Exploits - free and exclusive
1
Llama
Alex Strand looked up at the man standing beside her. His mustache was so thick and bushy she was wondering if it hid an extra dimension.
She reached a hand up, longing to tug it.
“Stop that,” came Madonna’s voice from the bunch of flowers in Alex’s other hand. It was concealing a bitbox, a device used to communicate between worlds.
“Sorry,” hissed Alex. “This isn’t him. There’s just too much facial hair going on here. It’ll take years to work my way through them.”
The richly bearded man gave her a sniffy look and backed off. She felt the crowd around her shift and sway. Everywhere she looked there were men with unusual facial hair.
Beards the size of llamas. Mustaches you could use to clean a toilet. Sideburns so bushy she wondered if she’d landed in a shrubbery.
But none of them, as far as she could tell, was worn by Mike Long, her missing colleague from the Multiverse Investigations Unit.
Mike had failed to return with them when they’d jumped back to San Francisco from Silicon City, vanishing in the Spinner. He’d been gone for a week now and the team was worried.
They’d searched Silicon City high and low, which in a city whose vehicles glide through the air can take a while. Madonna and the Prof, leaders of the Multiverse Operations Organization in Silicon City, had put out feelers across the Hive. Everyone was on alert for signs of a man with bizarre facial hair.
When they’d discovered that there was a World’s Best Mustache competition planned in Greater Castro, it had been decided that Alex would risk traveling there to look for him. Greater Castro was a vibrant, colorful world in which the whole of San Francisco had been swallowed up by the gay village. Alex would have loved to stay here, knowing that there was a vast community of lesbians over the Bay in her home city of Oakland.
But there wasn’t time.
“He’s not here,” she muttered. “All these beards are too normal. Sure, there’s one that looks like my cat on a bad day, and another that looks a lot like the dead bird he brought in last week, but I’m not getting the scent.”
The scent: the smell of PVA glue that shrouded anyone who’d hopped between universes. Except for the guy with the stick-on handlebar mustache she’d deeply offended five minutes ago, she hadn’t caught a whiff of it.
“OK,” said Madonna. “I’m bringing you back.”
Alex sighed and pushed through the crowd, making her way to the Spinner. It had materialized in front of Greater Castro’s version of the Hall of Justice, which was a wig shop. Luckily the residents were too busy buying wigs and grooming their mustaches to notice the shimmering cylindrical object that had landed on the sidewalk.
She approached it, watching for signs that it had been noticed. Two men were gazing at it and discussing its merits as a piece of modern artwork. Across the street, a cop sporting an ornate mustache in the shape of a goose and wearing a tie-dyed rainbow uniform eyed it, but didn’t seem too bothered.
Still. There was a chance he had called it in, and was guarding it until his colleagues arrived.
Alex put her hand to her ear. “There’s a cop here. What should I do?”
“Don’t worry, darling,” Madonna purred. Madonna, tech genius and inventor of the Hive, was never fazed by anything, as far as Alex could tell. “Just walk toward it like you’re going to pass it by. When you get close, you’ll see a glowing spot on the side nearest you. Stroke it with your thumb.”
“My thumb?”
“Your thumb.”
“It won’t work if I use my finger?”
“Just do as I say, please.” Madonna’s voice had lost its sultriness and gained a sharp edge.
Alex walked up to the Spinner, holding it steady in her peripheral vision. Sure enough, a small patch shimmered at hip level. She slowed her pace and touched it with her thumb. She stroked it, still walking.
“Now!” snapped Madonna. The side of the Spinner swished open and Alex slid inside. As it closed behind her, she spotted the cop running across the street, blowing a whistle.
“Get me home,” she breathed. The world began to turn.
2
Marshmallow
Mike peered from the doorway of the building he’d been using as shelter for the last two nights. It was a ruined shell, littered with rubble, a roof so flimsy it barely kept the rain off last night. But it was the only structure in the vicinity that had any kind of roof.
He looked up and down what must have once been a street. To the east, the horizon was brightening. Strange lights came from across the Bay, illuminating the sky. He’d walked to the shoreline three days ago to investigate them but had been chased away by a pack of dogs baring teeth the size of bananas.
He needed food. He’d managed to find a warehouse with some old cans the day after he arrived, and he’d bashed them against a rock until they’d burst open, spilling their contents over the ground where he’d knelt to scoop them up. Mac and cheese, tomato soup, and a small tin of what he could only describe as marshmallow goop. He still felt nauseous.
He kept to the shadows, head bent and feet scuttling across the rough ground. The street was littered with rocks, cables and soft lumps of something he preferred not to examine. He kept his gaze ahead, making sure he didn’t trip. Occasionally he would
stop in a patch of shade to look around and make sure he wasn’t being watched.
He’d seen no sign of human life since arriving here, but had a prickle on the back of his neck that made him think he was being observed. He wondered if the lights across the Bay were of human origin, or something else. The geography here was familiar, more like his own San Francisco than Silicon City. But that was all the two worlds had in common.
He wondered why he’d never been told about this world, or why he’d never been here before. He’d travelled to a total of eleven worlds in his time as a multiverse investigator, none of them like this.
He heard a sound behind him, as if someone had disturbed some rubble. He held his breath and waited. After a minute or so the street remained silent and his lungs felt like they might burst. He let out his breath in an explosion of sound that would make him as obvious as a firecracker in a library.
The warehouse was up ahead. He knew it was risky going in there. He could get trapped, or contract food poisoning. But his stomach was growling at him in a way that made him think of his mom’s dog when she spotted the neighbors’ cat through the window. He had to eat.
He took one last look behind him and climbed in through a smashed-out window, hoping he didn’t get the marshmallow this time.
3
Big Mac
“I can’t do this alone,” Alex said. “It’s too risky.”
“You’ll be fine.” Lieutenant Monique Williams slid round Alex to close the blinds on the partition that separated her office from the rest of the SFPD Homicide department. “You showed that you can handle yourself when you decided to go to Silicon City alone and track down Claire Pope’s killer.”
“That was different. I had Madonna, and the Prof. Now you’re sending me to worlds I know nothing of, and where there isn’t a soul who can bail me out. I came close to getting arrested in Greater Castro this morning.”
“I saw the feed. You did exactly as Madonna told you and you were never at risk.”
“I need a partner.”
“Well we aren’t exactly crawling with officers right now. With Mike missing, and Sally Pierce sadly deceased…”
Dr Sally Pierce was Alex’s predecessor. The first time Alex had seen Mike had been at her funeral.
“Don’t mention Dr Pierce. It doesn’t exactly reassure me.”
“Those were very unusual circumstances. We’re not putting you at anything like that level of risk.”
“Where was she, when she died? What aren’t you telling me?”
“It’s classified. Now, I need you to get back down to the MIU and find out if there’s any more intel. We can’t afford to have Mike missing if another case comes in.”
“Yeah, I know. Because I’ve only worked one case and don’t have the experience to do this alone. Which is exactly why I’m here.”
Alex sensed her neck heating up. One of the perils of being Scottish was that when she got angry, her normally bright white skin turned fluorescent red. She put a hand to her cheek, willing her skin to calm down.
“What about Rik?” she said.
Monique honked out a laugh that would be better used alerting the Bay Ferry to rocks on a stormy night. “Your old lab partner?”
“Yup. He knows the physics too. He’s bright, and keen. We work well together.”
“He eats seventeen Big Macs a day and has a brood of kids so big I could start a new drug squad with them.”
“He’s fitter than he looks.”
“He’s not. There’s a reason we chose you. Now get down to the parking lot and find out what Madge and Nemesis have for you. We can’t be wasting time.”
Alex sighed. Monique was right; she had proved herself capable of acting alone when she’d gone to Silicon City and found Claire’s killer. Even if that had meant traveling between universes in a cardboard fortress with her quantum cat Schrödinger.
“OK,” she said. “But I’ll need a bitbox everywhere I go.”
“You got it. Now go. Find our guy.”
4
Bampot
Alex clattered into her apartment and fell onto the couch. She was tired. She’d spent an entire night searching Fogtown for Mike after the MOO had a tipoff from a mist creature, whatever those were. Now it was dawn, and the light outside her apartment was as gray as the fog she’d waded through all night. She felt as if the fog had clung to her and come back with her. She wanted a shower.
She eyed the bedroom where her dad was staying while he was over from Scotland. He was probably still asleep; best not to disturb him. She reached beneath the couch for the blanket she’d been keeping there since he’d arrived.
She heard movement behind her; her cat, Schrödinger. She turned.
“Hey, boy.”
He ignored her. He was running at the kitchen wall, screwing his eyes up and slamming his body into the paintwork again and again.
“Whoah, Shrew. What you doing? You’ll hurt yourself, ya wee bampot.”
She scooped him up and stroked under his chin. He hissed at her and struggled in her arms. She dropped him.
“That’s not like you, boy.”
He paced to the opposite side of the kitchen then turned and eyed the wall as if it was his mortal enemy. Then he reared up and wiggled his ample ginger butt a few times. He hurled himself toward the wall as if he’d been shot out of a cannon.
There was a flash of light and the world swayed just slightly. Alex stared at the wall. Schrödinger was nowhere to be seen.
She looked under the kitchen table. “Shrew? Where are you?”
She frowned and headed into the living room. He wasn’t on the couch, or the windowsill. He couldn’t be in her bedroom, the door was still closed.
She felt her pulse quicken. There wasn’t a box in sight. Schrödinger was a quantum cat; he died when he fell asleep in his box. Alex had a policy of putting any form of cardboard down the recycling chute very quickly.
“Shrew! Where are you?”
“Meow.”
She turned back to the kitchen. “Shrew?”
“Meow.”
His voice was coming from the wall. But he wasn’t standing in front of it. She threw open cupboards, calling his name.
“Meow.”
She span back round. It was still coming from the wall that separated her kitchen from the corridor outside.
Feeling dumb, she crept to her apartment door and opened it.
“Meow.”
Schrödinger was standing on her doormat.
“Ya eejit! How did you get out there?”
She pulled the door open further and he slunk between her legs, purring.
“Shrew,” she said, cocking her head. “You’ve not discovered quantum tunneling, have you?”
She was about to grab him to could check if he smelled of glue when her cellphone rang. She patted her jeans pocket but it wasn’t there. She followed the sound into the living room where it had slid between the cushions of the couch.
“Monique?”
“Get to Fisherman’s Wharf. Now.”
“Huh?”
“There’s been an incident.”
“What kind of incident?” She looked at her watch. “But it’s seven am. I just worked all night.”
“I know. Sorry. But I need you down there before the press arrives. Get a cab. We’ve had reports of an anomaly.”
5
Hydrangea
Trade was picking up at Fisherman’s Wharf; early bird tourists wanting to beat the rush and coming very close to failing. Alex stopped at the walkway that led to the seafront, wondering where this anomaly had occurred and whether Monique was here yet.
She paced forward, eyeing the storefronts either side of her as she walked, her guard up. She didn’t know if this anomaly was still here and how big it was.
“Alex!”
She turned to see her dad rushing out of a cafe. Rik was hot on his heels, panting.
“Dad? Rik? What you doing here?”
“We could
ask the same of you,” said Rik.
“I thought you were sleeping.”
“Ah, no rest for the wicked,” said Duncan. “I’ve only got a few more days here, best to make the most of them. I told young Rik here I’d buy him breakfast if he showed me the sites while you were working.”
Alex gave Rik a look of recognition. He would do anything in exchange for a free feed.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” she said.
“Sorry for what, hen?”
“I’ve been so busy with work. We’ve barely seen each other since we got here.”
“Rubbish, lass. You took me to that beauty parlor, didn’t you? And the wig factory. Not to mention the trip to see your lab.”
All of these had been thinly disguised attempts to track Mike down, dragging Duncan along for good measure. She was a bad daughter, and she knew it.