Hector didn’t move other than his eyes narrowing. There was rage there, searing and hot, but pain, too. The kick-in-the-gut kind, an agony that sucked the oxygen from your lungs and the hope from your soul. Then he blinked, and it faded. “I know.” It was my turn to blink. “You know?” “I helped Charlie build the transplanar interface.” At my blank look, he elaborated. “That machine that looks like a giant CAT scanner. It, linked to the cuff, is what initiates the OOB. Bottom line, I’m not the engineer Charlie was, but I was still there every step of the way. I couldn’t make the leaps of intuition a brilliant engineer like him could, but I could follow the basics, and I know the machine didn’t malfunction. It wasn’t Charlie’s mistake. Charlie didn’t make mistakes, not when it came to science.” His hand balled into a fist—unconsciously, I thought. “Someone killed him, either to stop the project or to steal it.” In his mind, that could be the only reason.
