What I felt. You’ll see what I saw. It’s an experiential record.”She nodded. She’d go through his crossing as if she was inside his skin. She shivered, remembered how her own had been like a lot like getting tossed into a tree shredder. A tingle numbed her fingers, spread to her hand. The memory of her hand caught in the Rift snagged in her chest, caught a heartbeat for that imprinted sear of pain. Pushing it away, she flashed a smile at Gideon—she wasn’t sure about any of this, but he didn’t have to know that.“Hell of a way to get to know someone,” she said.The joke fell flat. He didn’t smile but he put the ring onto her forefinger. It slipped over her knuckle, cool and smooth. He twisted it and the material warmed, closed around her skin. Not metal—a semi-solid liquid similar to glass? A flexible crystal?She stopped being able to think.The ring spread itself, thinned and wrapped around her finger like a living thing. She looked up—and stared at a desert sky and dirt road.She bounced along in an SUV, steering wheel hard under her fingers, a map spread out to her right, paper crackling, a woman—my wife, came the thought, echoing in her mind like Gideon’s voice—in the next seat, two undergrads in the back with Max who came on all of these research trips, and Joe, a local sheep farmer they’d hired last week to act as guide and help smooth access with the Navajo nation.They’d been to Hopewell back East, but there was so much development around the Chillicothe earthworks, too much interference to gather accurate data.
