“I’d rather not.”
“Thank you,” Kahurangi said.
“But I might if we don’t eat soon.”
“I’ll be quick.” Niamh pulled up a silent night vision video of a forest; a drone or helicopter was slowly circling a portion of it. There was nothing particularly remarkable about it, and then there was a tiny glitch. “There!”
“That’s it?” I asked.
“What do you mean, ‘that’s it’？”
“It’s trees.”
“It’s not the trees, you dense argumentative spoon.” Niamh scrubbed the video back. “It’s the flash.”
“What flash?” Aparna asked.
“This one!” Niamh pointed when the tiny glitch happened again.
“That’s it?”
Niamh narrowed their eyes at Aparna.
“I know we’re supposed to be torturing Niamh right now, but I would actually like to know, what’s so fascinating about that flash?” Kahurangi asked.
“Thank you,” Niamh said. “This video was taken by a Canadian drone back home. What it’s flying over is our world’s counterpart to where Bella has her enormous kaiju ass. And this flash”—Niamh paused the video at the glitch—“is us.”
Kahurangi nodded. “Excellent likeness.”
Niamh smacked him, lightly. “Not us us, ‘us’ as in this planet us.”
I looked over at Aparna. “I thought you said Bella wasn’t going through.”
“She’s not,” Aparna said, then looked at Niamh. “Is she?”
Niamh grinned in triumph. “See, I told you I could beat egg goo. And no, she’s not going through. But”—they pointed at the flash again—“that doesn’t mean a connection between our worlds isn’t open. The kaiju going up thinned the barrier between our worlds. That started healing up immediately since the barrier thinning correlates with active nuclear energy generation. But then Bella took a seat right where the barrier thinned—”
“And she has her own nuclear reactor on her,” I said.
“Right.” Niamh nodded. “Normally, the kaiju are moving around too much to thin out the barrier by themselves. To thin it, you either need to have a big burst, like a bomb, or a gradual residual buildup in one place, like Camp Century. They can get through if it’s already thin, but once the barrier closes up, they’re stuck. That’s what happened to the ones who came through. They couldn’t get back, and they’re not adapted to our world, and they died.”
“But Bella’s not coming through,” Aparna said. “She’s just sitting there.”
“Because she has no reason to come through, like you said,” Niamh agreed. “She’s got everything she needs here. She’s just sitting there, radiating nuclear energy into the barrier, so it’s staying thin. And every once in a while”—they pointed to the glitch—“we see this.”
“What causes the flash?” Kahurangi asked.
“I have no idea,” Niamh said. “It’s something we’ve never seen before, because we’ve never had this happen before—a nuclear explosion followed by a reactor showing up and keeping the barrier thin. At least, we haven’t seen it happen before. I suppose the chances of one kaiju getting knocked up and another kaiju exploding on the same day, both in proximity to each other, are pretty low.”
“Are they as low as us actually getting to the dining hall before they finish serving dinner?” I asked.
Niamh looked at me and then smiled at Kahurangi, sweetly. “And you? What amazing science did you do today, Dr. Lautagata?”
Kahurangi grinned at this new attempt to make me starve further. “Alas, nothing as groundbreaking as the two of you,” he said. “All I’ve been doing is making smelly things for us to use to make kaiju do things, or not do them, depending. I do it enough that I’m beginning to be able to identify kaiju pheromones by scent. This is both useful and appalling.”
“Useful and Appalling is my next band name,” Aparna said.
We all looked at her.
“What? I can’t get in on the band name thing?”
“Can we go now?” I asked. “I really am going to die of not eating soon.”
“Poor Jamie,” Niamh mocked. “Tromping around the jungle floor really takes it out of you.”
“It’ll happen to you, too,” I promised. “It’ll happen to all of you. The good news is that tomorrow I get weapons training. No more tromping, just shooting.”