Jennifer crouched in a large bush in a small suburban park surrounded by busy roads, apartment buildings, and tasteful iron fences, her apprentice by her side. They were trying to determine whether the little girl sitting on the grass was playing with an imaginary friend. Or someone else.
“Mister Humphries, you haven’t eaten your sandwiches!”
The black-haired girl was wearing a bright yellow woollen jumper to ward off the park’s afternoon chill. She sat behind her inattentive parents surrounded by concentric circles of a plastic tea set. Opposite her, a teacup and plate bearing plastic delicacies were laid for an invisible guest.
“You can’t have cake or biscuits until after savouries. It’s the rules,” the girl said, picking up the fake food and offering it to the thin air in front of her.
“What do you think?” Jennifer whispered to Hannah, her apprentice, who had pressed her brown face through the leaves to watch.
“I’m not sure…”
“Come on! This is textbook,” Jennifer said, pointing at the tea party.
“Aw, Mister Humphries, we’ll get real cake after dinner, mum said so!” The girl paused, head tilted, listening. “What do you mean you’re not coming home with me?”
Jennifer nudged Hannah in the ribs. “That’s immobility. Something make-believe wouldn’t have that problem.” Jennifer straightened to her full height, her pixie cut bringing a burst of twigs with it. To Hannah, she said, “Come on, you’re doing this one.”
“I don’t want--”
“Hannah,” Jennifer said with forced patience. “You’ve got the techniques down, it’s only practice now and it’s my job to make sure you get it. This one’s straightforward and it’s yours. Aha! The parents are going to pack the car. Now’s our chance - let’s go!”
They burst from the bush just as a truck honked loudly, causing the kid to turn and see them approaching. Her teacup full of juice tipped to almost spill on the grass. Her eyes widened.
“Mumm--”
“Shhh, don’t worry, honey. We’re here to help Mister Humphries.” Jennifer crouched next to the plastic picnic. “What’s your name?”
“Katie,” she said, with a frown of suspicion.
“Hi Katie, I’m Jennifer.”
Hannah stepped up to where Mister Humphries seemed to sit, reaching out in front of her with one cautious hand.
“What’re you doing to Mister Humphries?” Katie shrieked, reaching across as if to shield her companion.
“Hannah, get in there,” Jennifer growled.
Hannah shook her head, retreating and dancing her hands back towards her face.
“I can’t find the edge. Jennifer, I can’t do this, it’s too--”
Katie screeched and swatted in front of her face. “What’re you doing? The air feels funny.”
“Shit – Hannah, she’s about to fall in!”
Jennifer grabbed Katie by the collar of her yellow jumper and pulled her backwards. Katie, startled, began to cry but Jennifer ignored her, racing around to Hannah instead. She placed her left hand on Hannah’s and pushed both forward, striking for where Mister Humphries’ chest would have been – flat and fast, feeling for the tear.
“Ok, Mister Humphries,” she muttered. “Ready or not, here you come.”
She missed – too high, too much to the left – and her knuckles hit firm resistance. She pushed into the sensation, a tingly hum, and followed the crackly barrier along until she broke through a gap.
It was as if her hand had been lopped off at the wrist, but somehow still sufficiently connected to her brain and blood that she could control it.
Hannah stiffened, resisting.
“Easy, we’re not going to fall in.”
“It feels like we are!”
“It’s harder to put your whole body in than you’d think; our sense of reality is too fixed to push on our side of the barrier and thin it out like children’s do. Now, just like we practiced.”
Their fingers swam through the oblivion on the other side, moving squid-like. Searching. They landed on a thick woollen weave, pinched, and gripped hard. The object squirmed and tried to escape, but Jennifer had fought larger and more belligerent beings than this and she would not be deterred. Hannah had no choice but to follow her lead.
Jennifer recalled her loose hand, Hannah did the same with her own – like calling like – and they raced out of the void with a zap, dragging what they had grabbed along with it.
Something landed, gasping, with a thump at their feet.
“Happy reappearance, Mister Humphries,” Jennifer said to the confused man sprawled on the ground.
“Mister Humphries!” Katie cried, delighted.
He was middle-aged, wearing a tweed blazer and only one shoe. Jennifer gave him a once-over, noting his clothes: he’d only been gone decade or two at most. His disorientation would be minimal.
His lips moved like a goldfish. Open and closed. Open and closed.
“You fell through a rift in reality, sir.” Jennifer explained as she fished in her pockets. “My name is Jennifer and I’m a fourteenth generation cross-dimensional retriever. This is Hannah, my apprentice.”
Mister Humphries stared up at her, dazed. Jennifer presented him with her business card: shiny white lettering on a matte ground visible only when you held it just so.
“If you see another child playing with an imaginary friend, or even someone who appears to be raving at a fixed point? Give us a call and--”
There was a shout from the carpark. Katie’s parents were running towards them across the grass. The mother’s purse flapped in sync with her strides and the father’s face deformed as he bellowed.
“That’s our cue, Hannah. Places to go, interdimensionally lost people to retrieve…”
The pair hurried away, cutting across the lawn and among the trees to break line of sight.
#
Children clustered around the fountain, up to their armpits in water and splashing. The day smelled of wet concrete, sunlight and frying oil wafting in from an exhaust fan somewhere beyond the park.
The retrievers sat on a painted wooden bench. Hannah drew a beaten-up, folded newspaper from her bag and unfurled it into a perfect, nondescript disguise.
“This is four months old,” Jennifer said after a moment.
“And works just as well as a screen to hide behind as it did four months ago.”
“You should use a current issue. It’s suspicious otherwise.”
“Be glad I didn’t cut eyeholes in it.”
Jennifer peered around the newspaper and watched the children. Hannah leaned out to the other side.
“Could be stealing pennies?” Hannah suggested.
“Maybe?”
It didn’t seem right though.
The group’s gestures and splashing traced through mid-air above the basin, as if following something invisible as it moved. Chasing it about, herding it back and forth between them. There was no communication about which way to go, not like if what they were playing with was imagined.
They could see it.
Jennifer looked to Hannah. “Ok, this one’s yours. No flaking out this time.”
“Uh, it looks super active. There might even be two? Maybe you should do this one?” Hannah’s voice wavered and Jennifer scowled. Her apprentice grimaced. “Please? I’ll do the next one, promise!”
Jennifer sighed. “Fine. But be ready to help me if I need it.”
“Got it.”
Jennifer moved in, tracking the turned gazes and directed splashes. Hannah followed suit, tucking their camouflage back into her bag.
Jennifer stopped when her thighs pressed against the rim of the basin. The spray splattered her sleeve. She pretended to focus on the sculpture in the middle - a series of abstract figures fighting through lengths of carved waves. Jennifer couldn’t tell if the shapes were meant to be playing or drowning. The wind scattered thatched patterns across the pool.
In her periphery, Jennifer saw the imaginary figure feint left in a stutter of aborted reaching and confused head flicks. Sensing the moment, Jennifer darted her left hand into a different reality. No misses this time.
She detached quickly and paddled into the insubstantial world beyond her sight. Lacking tangible signs to navigate by, she groped in it, finding only emptiness. Whatever the children had been watching had been moving quickly and erratically. Jennifer wasn’t sure it wouldn’t simply disappear sooner than she could find it.
Some things required two hands.
Jennifer slid her right hand in, severing it as easily. She waggled them both experimentally and then sent them off in opposite directions.
She alighted on something almost instantly to her right.
“Got them,” Jennifer said to Hannah.
At first, she thought what she’d grasped was hair, but the strands were too thick … and they clung to her. Jennifer flicked the strange tendrils off and searched deeper for something more substantial to grip. The lengths extended and twined up her skin, as if she’d plunged into a sea anemone. Except for the pressure they exerted there was nothing notable – no change in temperature, no pain, no tingling, no electric shocks or burning.
Still.
“Hannah! Get in here, I’m having trouble.”
Jennifer crawled her fingers side to side to avoid tangling in the strings.
Hannah was silent. No part of her appeared beside Jennifer, either.
“Goddammit, Hannah. I need hel--”
A spongy, round shape socked into Jennifer’s palm as she navigated the jelly ropes.
That’d do.
Jennifer’s hands returned simultaneously, sailing through the vacuum to reappear connected to her wrists.
Jennifer looked down at what was still attached to her and flinched.
“Uh, that is not a person,” Hannah said from nearby.
Jennifer inspected it carefully. Its centre was the size of a softball, semi-translucent and pale grey, with narrow feelers spreading in all directions to triple its size. No organs or blood vessels or teeth. The strands waved about on their own, seeming not to have noticed the change in surroundings.
Jennifer wheeled to face Hannah. “Where the hell were you? I needed help!”
Hannah wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, I’m glad I stayed out to be honest. That thing is weird.”
Jennifer gritted her teeth, frustrated, and tried to find the teachable moment.
“Ok, standard practice when this happens is to return it.”
Jennifer flexed her fingers, attempting to free some room to move. She ended up with a marionette claw; bent knuckles tied together with translucent ropes.
She realised that all the children had gone, leaving behind only sunlight, drying concrete, running water and the strange modern design fountain rising above her. There was no-one picnicking or walking nearby either, only the drone of traffic encircling the park, and a couple having a fight on a balcony off to her left.
But the main thing Jennifer noticed, was that there was no longer any sign of the interdimensional hole she had just been in.
“Shit,” she spat. “There’s no entity pressing on the underside to create the rift anymore.” She tried to hide it, but her words came quick and flustered.
The creature moved, twining up her elbow. The soft spines multiplied and flattened over her like a cast.
Jennifer grabbed at it with her nails to pinch and peel it off. Her nails sank in and slid across the rounded form in the middle like the surface of a well-inflated balloon. She clutched harder and it swelled under the pressure. As she watched new legs nubbed into being and grew all over it trying to incorporate the new fingers.
Jennifer shook her arm wildly, expecting whatever it was to fling off and stick to the ground like putty. It stayed where it was.
“God! It stuck to me. I can’t--”
Hysteria rose, fizzing in her veins. She choked it down, swamping it with steady breathing.
“Why the hell didn’t you help me?” The words burst out of her, unusually accusing and vicious. Hannah’s expression was shocked. But, for a moment, Jennifer didn’t care. Why couldn’t Hannah help just once? “We’ve got a responsibility, Hannah. The population of this city need our help and five minutes ago I needed your help but you were too selfish to--”
“Jennifer!”
For a second, she thought Hannah was telling her she’d gone too far, but then she saw the problem, too.
The air next to her had split open in a small, horizontal slash. The cut was frayed like unhemmed cloth, and beyond it Jennifer could see…emptiness. No concrete, no grass, no sky, no picnics, no kids playing, no…anything.
Hannah scrambled away from the problem, gesturing and yelling, “Quick! Put it back.”
Good idea. Jennifer pushed as deep as she could into the fissure, taking the critter with her. She tried to detach, but her joints clung to their positions, helplessly bound.
Jennifer grunted and leaned further in, tried to disconnect higher up at her elbow or shoulder – it wasn’t great, but better than letting this blob cover her until she couldn’t move at all. She flexed, willing it to release.
The void burned her forehead and Jennifer retreated, gasping.
“I can’t. I might fall in if I try to go further.”
The form twitched, bulging from her forearm like a tumour. It had grown two new spurs and was stroking them across the surface of the world around it.
And everywhere they trailed the air split apart.
“Shit!”
Jennifer hurried to avoid the holes. The legs grew longer and leaner as she manoeuvred. Extending to half the length again of the rest, double, almost triple--
They kept multiplying and distending. One of the tips held on to the wet pavement and dragged it sideways like a zipper, exposing the unreality underneath. The main body in Jennifer’s palm didn’t grow any smaller, but it had to be getting the extra mass to spool out the never-ending new offshoots from somewhere.
As she thought it, the tips lifted off and rejoined the body. The remaining parts waved in all directions like kelp in a rushing tide, alighting on benches and skittering leaves and a chip packet, popping open round windows between dimensions wherever they touched.
Jennifer zig-zagged onto the lawn and towards the trees, pinching and flicking the openings shut with her free hand, and chasing her own tail as new ones appeared behind her. It was more than she could manage on her own. If it continued it could destabilise all of this dimension beyond what she could repair.
“Hannah, seal them up!”
“What? Me?” Hannah glanced at the ruptures and flinched, her eyes watering at the blinding nothing she glimpsed inside them.
“Yes!” Jennifer waved mad circles to keep the spindly ball from staying too long in one place. “I can’t keep up. If I stay still too long this whatsit’ll make them bigger or start ripping bits up somewhere else.”
As if to prove her point additional tentacles grew, unspooling new jelly-strings that kept attempting to latch on to its surrounds.
Hannah hesitated.
“Please, Hannah. It’s like I showed you. Flick the corners up and our universe matter should roll up like a blind. Work quick so you don’t snap pieces of yourself off.”
Hannah trembled and stared at the impossible slashes in the air.
“There’s too many. I’m not fast enough. What if I--?” her voice raised in pitch with each phrase.
Jennifer reached over with her free hand and touched Hannah’s face, looking her in the eye.
“You’ve got this.”
“Ugh,” Hannah groaned. But she shuffled forward, her chin tucked down to avoid looking into nothingness through the portals..
Jennifer danced over to stand in the exact place at the fountain where she’d begun and thrust the leggy mass towards the central sculpture like an offering.
The creature unravelled and raced up to the odd structure. Its ends socketed into the ridges and crevices of the stone, homing in as if familiar with the bends and folds of this place.
The outstretched limbs drew together. The stone tore along the huge lines it traced, releasing bright limbo-space. Jennifer squinted, barely able to discern the interplay of shadows and light. She tipped forward over the lip of the bowl, straining in the direction of the seam. The hem of her t-shirt got wet as she lifted her hips, trying for a little extra height and distance.
The blobby form loosened as it approached the opening it was making. It knew where it belonged, even if it was unwilling to let her go to get there.
“How’re you doing?” Hannah asked.
Jennifer squinted and saw her apprentice flicking the micro-voids shut with precise movements. The corners lifted up, rolled in on themselves and disappeared, drawing solid normalcy after them. Pride heated the insides of her ribs. Perfect.
“I think I have to take it in,” Jennifer said to Hannah. “It wasn’t as grippy in there.”
Hannah blinked. “What? No!”
“Well, it can’t stay here.”
As if in response the substance wrenched the tear wider. Sensing home.
“Maybe we can scrape it off, or maybe other retrievers have seen something like it before, or--” Hannah said, still going through the motions of closing the rifts as if she did it every day. She’d stopped stressing about it, stopped thinking so hard that she couldn’t do it. Steady and natural.
“We don’t have time. It’ll have half the city shredded before anyone can get here.”
“No,” Hannah insisted, “There has to be a way.”
Jennifer could only see her apprentice’s silhouette limned in the light of the blankness beside her. She could hear the fear, the uncertainty, the lack of faith in her own skills, even as she closed the reality tears faster and cleaner than most retrievers Jennifer had ever met.
“This is the risk we take, Hannah. There are so few of us who can do this; our responsibility is to the community. It’s hard, but there’s no-one else. It’s why apprentices are so very important – we need every one we can get. I’m proud that you’re mine.”
The entity hauled hard with its limbs, further widening the gap. Jennifer’s shoulder creaked in its socket.
“How will you get back?” Hannah’s voice was watery.
Jennifer took a shallow breath through her nose. Her lungs didn’t seem to want to allow her more. Her lips were shaking.
This wasn’t ideal, but it was what they did. At some point they all had to go about the work on their own.
It always felt too early.
Jennifer grinned despite herself. “I’ll have to wait for someone to bring me home.”
She spun, eyes burning, climbed onto the lip of the basin, and leapt, punching forward with her defiled fist. The boundary frayed and shredded in her wake.
#
“Is that one?”
Hannah followed Diana’s gaze up into the tree above them. A young boy straddled a branch, his feet hanging two feet above their heads. He was talking animatedly to nothing.
Somewhere to their right, Hannah could hear the trickling of a fountain that had not stopped running in all the years she’d been coming to this park.
“Maybe,” Hannah said.
The purse in her lap squashed against her belly as she bent forward to get a better angle. Her eyes had started to go, slackening with time like everything else. The doctor had given her glasses but they were only good for fine details; no use in helping her notice what wasn’t normally visible in this plane. “Grab the disguise and let’s listen.”
Diana flipped open the newspaper, covering their faces. It was ratty and forty years out of date. Diana had suggested Hannah update it – go crazy, buy a new one every day! – but Hannah had told her that this one had sentimental value. Diana had the good sense not to insist.
Both women observed the boy from behind the safety of the broadsheet.
“… you should come to school with me. It’s really boring usually, but we could play at lunchtime--”
“Sounding good,” Hannah muttered, nodded at her apprentice with approval. The young woman had a knack for the work; just the enough weirdness in her to spot the right wrongnesses. Even if her mostly-shaved scalp meant she sometimes startled their targets.
“Why this park, anyway? You’re always here when I come,” the boy said overhead.
Hannah stilled, then whispered, “I’m going in, hold my bag.”
Diana blinked and took the tote on reflex as it was thrust at her.
“Do you need me to help?” Diana asked, brows crinkled.
Hannah stood up and ducked the oblivious boy’s dangling sneaker to stand directly below what – or who - he was talking to.
“I should be fine.” She rarely required more than one hand for fixed positions. But then she recalled another time when help had been needed but not forthcoming, and she smiled at Diana, grateful for the offer. “But we can’t be too careful.”
Diana grinned and took Hannah’s hand, bracing her weight against their joined grip, providing a reassuring resisting pressure. An anchor to guide her return.
“Do you think we’ll find her today?” Diana asked.
The leaves moved and shifted the dappled shadows over their upturned faces.
“Maybe. It’s our responsibility to go in there regardless of who it is, though.” Hannah replied as she eyed the mid-point of the boy’s focus where his ‘friend’ was sitting.
In the intervening years she searched the void thousands of times. Found and saved hundreds of lost people. But none of them had been Jennifer.
Hope battled, prickly and hard against reason and experience. Warring thoughts of ‘maybe’ versus ‘I haven’t yet’ inside her heart.
“It’s damn big in there. But, maybe.”
It wasn’t impossible.
Hannah reached up – flat and fast, feeling for the tear - and sliced through to bring whoever was there home.