"You know the guy who built the first parabolic radio telescope spent a whole summer building it by himself in his backyard?" Pidge says out into the desert. "I think about that guy a lot."
After a moment, Keith replies from where he's slouched in the sun. "If you want to build a parabolic reflector out here, no one's stopping you." The words are flat, but she can feel the dry humor lurking underneath them.
"It would probably help," she gripes.
There's a quiet rustle of fabric from his side of the porch. "Do you-"
"No. Not really," she sighs. A dish probably would help, but she doesn't actually want to personally build one.
So far, the day is not going well. Pidge is already tired thanks to procrastination and another set of weird dreams, and now that she's out here, the receiver - which should be working - isn't. The tracking routine that worked just fine for the Mars orbiters drifts, slowly but measurably, from the trajectory of the Europa research station she's trying to shadow.
"I don't get it. It should be getting something," she mutters, watching the empty spectrogram display.
Keith blinks over to where she's sprawled in front of her computer. "Bad-" he starts to suggest.
"Ugh." He's probably right - ninety percent of problems with the receiver are alignment problems - but she doesn't want to have to run the calibration again. She flops back on the porch, arm flung over her face, and groans. It's way too hot for this. She can feel the flush in her cheeks and her shirt is a gross, sweaty mess clinging damply to her back.
There's a scraping sound as Keith slides the jug of water towards her. He doesn't bother to open his eyes to do it, lazily draped against the porch beam. "You'd be less hot if you hydrated better."
"Easy for you to say." Keith tolerates the heat better than she does, somehow still apparently comfortable in his stupid bike gloves and black clothing. She sits up and pours into her cup anyways. She considers the receiver some more. It could be that she screwed up the trajectory calculations. Or it could be a bad calibration. Or it could be something mechanical. Or it could be something subtly off with the alignment routine itself. None of those are attractive troubleshooting options. She makes a face. "I don't want to think about this right now. Break?"
After a moment, she hears Keith pry himself upright. "Yeah, all right."
She reaches into her bag for the lunchbox. From Keith's end of the porch, there's a quiet creak of floorboards. Something twinges at her - a sudden, muted sense of uncertainty - and she looks over to see him standing stiffly at the door.
He jerks his head towards the shack. "You want to go inside?"
She blinks. She's assumed the shack's interior is strictly off-limits. "Sure. If you're offering," she says cautiously.
He nods sharply and pries open the door. "It's, uh. It's not much. Sit wherever you want."
It's still blisteringly hot inside, but it's at least consistently shaded, and there's a crossbreeze from the open windows. It's just as tiny and cramped as it looks from what she's spied through the open door, but it feels familiar by now. She gets another whiff of that déjà vu she had the first time she saw the interior, and shakes her head to dispel it. She drops the lunchbox on the table and makes a beeline for the far side of the futon (the good side of the futon, that déjà vu whispers). With a groan, she plops herself down. The springs make an ominous creaking noise, but it's comfortable enough.
Keith eyes her and sighs before leaning over to reach into the gap between the back of the futon and the wall. He comes up with a decrepit box fan, plastic casing stained yellow with age.
She stares. "You ass. You've had a fan all this time?"
He narrows his eyes and lifts the fan into the air. "It's-"
"I don't care if it's battery-powered. I will bring my own batteries and swap them in every single time if you want."
He snorts. "Just as long as I don't have to keep buying them to support your ventilation habit."
"Ventilation habit," she marvels.
He stoically ignores her and sets the fan down on the table. Pidge sighs as he flicks it on and the breeze blows her sticky bangs off her forehead. "I can't believe you don't use this thing."
"I use it sometimes," he says defensively. "When I'm trying to sleep." Which is as good as a confession that he's living here. He seems to realize that a second afterwards, and stiffens.
It's not any kind of surprise to her at this point. "Just let me enjoy my ventilation habit in peace," she tells him, and hands him his sandwich.
After a second, he exhales a low, drawn-out haah noise and sinks down onto the other side of the couch. Things are briefly quiet while they eat (turkey club for her, the world's most boring roast beef for him). From where they're sitting, they've got a front-and-center view of the corkboard where it leans against the opposite wall.
The webbing of twine crisscrossing it has grown over the last several weeks. Keith's headings mark out a lopsided pentagram on the map, their intersection enclosing a tract that lies mostly in a shallow canyon cutting through higher, flatter land. According to Keith, it's about a half-square mile of ground. That doesn't sound like a lot, but they're not having much luck narrowing the Knell's location down any further.
She's made a few trips out there with him. It's a weird part of the desert, rocks all jumbled together in uneven, imposing formations concealing a thousand hidden crevices and byways. Whatever sense Keith's following can't seem to hone in on anything more specific and they're stuck aimlessly wandering, looking for something out of place.
"It's not that it's gone," he'd explained, hands opening and closing at his sides. "It's too close now. Like we're right in the middle of it."
She still doesn't get the constant sense of the Knell that he does, but she does catch echoes of it when they make the trip, and sort of gets what he means. In that part of the desert, it feels less like a pull in her chest and more like a beating, omnidirectional pressure. They have to be right on top of it. Whatever it is. Their slow progress frustrates her, but she can tell it eats at Keith more. He makes trips out there during the week, and the corkboard is dotted with index cards annotated in his spiky handwriting. Once or twice, he's sent her photos during the early morning or late evening - surreal, twilit parts of the landscape that seem to make the Knell ring louder. None of them have lead anywhere so far.
Keith's thoughts must be running along the same lines as hers. He puts down his sandwich and digs in his pocket for his phone. He opens something up on it before setting it down on the table. "Here, look at this."
She leans forward to inspect it. The screen shows a photo of a rock face in dim lighting, washed out in the camera's flash. At first, it looks nondescript, but she peers closer and after a moment, can make out faint marks in the surface. People, she realizes after a second. People, lined up in a row in front of a large animal figure. It looks like a lion, but that doesn't make any sense. Behind the lion is something she can't quite make out, a stylized circular shape, its edges carved in painstaking detail.
"Whoa," she breathes. "Where…?"
"That gully we saw last time. If you follow it further in, there's a bunch of them."
"Can I…?" she gestures at the phone.
He hesitates a second and then shrugs. "Go ahead. It was getting dark so I didn't wind up getting a lot."
She picks up the phone and scrolls through the next few images, lingering on one which shows the circular design close up. She squints, but still can't make anything of the marks on its edges. "These are incredible."
Keith crosses his arms and leans back on the couch. "I went into town and looked it up. There aren't supposed to be any petroglyphs around here. At least…" he hesitates.
At least not any that are public knowledge, she completes the thought. She looks up, suddenly uneasy that they're trespassing. "You think-"
He frowns, fingers tapping restlessly at his elbows. She gets a sudden memory of the Knell's territory, the way it feels lost and empty, like the Knell's saturated it so deeply that it's driven everything else out. "I don't think so," he says slowly. "I don't think any other people have been down there in a long time."
She glances over to him, but he shrugs and shifts in the way he does when he's uncomfortable, and she lets it lie. Instead she scrolls back to the first picture, tilting the phone out of the glare of the window to see it better. "If that's really a lion, it must be from before they went extinct in North America."
"Ten-thousand years ago, give or take," he murmurs.
"Nerd." He raises an eyebrow at her, but doesn't rise to the bait. She turns her attention back to the photos and frowns. "They must have been important to someone once. Wonder what they mean."
Keith is quiet for a disconcertingly long time and a prickle of unease runs up her spine. "There's something…" He shakes his head. She looks over sharply. "I followed them in a little further. They get weird."
She frowns and lays the phone down the on table. "'Weird?'"
"The lion shows up a lot more. There's a-" He pauses, and she's blindsided by a shockingly vivid mental image of a towering, bulky figure. It comes out of nowhere, and she freezes in place, halfway stunned. It's so clear she can count the lines making it up. Under her fingertips, there's a faint, incongruous texture of smooth rock. "-another person, I guess," Keith's voice continues distantly. "Bigger than the others, wearing some kind of armor-"
"-Holding a sword?" she blurts out dazedly, the sharp lines of the image hanging behind her eyes.
Something jolts in the back of her brain and Keith goes absolutely still. "I didn't take a photo of that," he says after a long moment.
"I know." She swallows. Somehow she does know. She'd scrolled through four pictures on his phone and stopped, disappointed that there weren't more. But how had she known that? A chill goes through her. It's just a coincidence. Just a weird confluence of brain jank and circumstance.
But there's a low, static-y buzz in some back corner of her mind, a crawling, prickling tension running through her upper back. Next to her, Keith crosses his arms tight over his chest. His collar pulls taut against his neck and shoulders and the feeling lessens. The hair goes up on the back of her neck.
She finds her thoughts racing back to all the times she's finished one of Keith's sentences or he's finished one of hers. The habit they've fallen into of not finishing sentences at all. All the times they've both abruptly jumped to some new topic without the need for a segue or explanation, all the weird little flashes of misplaced feeling. The strange, out of place moments during the week where she feels like Keith is sitting right next to her and the way her dreams keep wandering out to the desert.
They're just picking up on subliminal cues, that's all. It's just a shared obsession with Kerberos and the Knell.
That back corner of her mind is tight as a bowstring, spiky with tension. Keith is still, his lips pressed into a thin line, fingers gripping the points of his elbows. Her finger joints ache a little.
What if it's not just subliminal awareness?
She bites her lip and thinks of a memory, doesn't let herself second-guess it. A screwdriver in her hand, popping the frames of Matt's glasses open, the new plastic lenses in a box at her elbow. "If I told you my glasses prescription is-"
"-You'd be lying," Keith says, his face sheet-white. "You don't need glasses." He takes a breath. "I keep the spare key-"
There's a brief impression of the porch from the side, and the ghostly feeling of wooden slats under her fingers. She points numbly. "-Under the porch floorboards somewhere over there."
A choking silence descends on them. The nausea and the too-fast feeling in her brain are familiar. She's pretty sure the ratcheting tension in her spine and the overwhelming urge to open and close her fists are coming from Keith.
"Fuck," Keith says heavily.
"Yeah," she echoes dazedly. "I thought we were just. I don't know. Picking up on things subconsciously," she finishes lamely.
"I thought I was back to hearing things," Keith mutters, and they both wince. A hot burst of shame blooms in the back of her head. It mutes itself abruptly, and Keith pushes himself stiffly into the couch's furthest corner, avoiding her eyes.
She breathes out. "So what now? Are we… psychic or something?"
"Dunno," he says. A minute goes by, and he shifts in place, still looking at the corner of the room. "I've had hunches before. Weird feelings. Nothing like this."
"Me neither," she says. And she's never even had the hunches and weird feelings. She tries to clamp down on that thought as soon as it forms, isn't sure whether she succeeds. She feels like she's walking on glass, hyperaware of her own thoughts and that bright, foreign spot at the back of her mind.
Something twists through it, lightning-quick and indistinct. If she hadn't been paying such close attention, if she hadn't already been watching, she might have dismissed it as just the edge of an unfinished thought, some half-remembered dream trying to surface. "What if it's the Knell?" Keith says slowly. She looks over to him and he shrugs stiffly. "We know it's not really a sound. Neither one of us had this happen before we heard it."
She grimaces. She's been trying to avoid thinking of the Knell in supernatural terms, but it's not a stretch to think that where there are two psychic phenomena, they're probably connected. Still. "You were hearing it for a long time before I was, though. And you weren't, uh, having this problem back then." She hesitates. "Right?"
He gives a hard shake of his head. "No. But maybe it only works with people who can hear it."
She frowns. "Should we stop trying to find it?" she says reluctantly.
There's a violent ripple through whatever it is stretching between them. "No," Keith says decisively. "It just gets louder if you ignore it." She shoots him an alarmed look, and he grimaces. "It did for me, anyway."
She purses her lips. "It didn't start out like this, right? It's definitely gotten stronger over time?"
"Yeah."
Silence falls over them. That back corner of her brain feels full of sharp angles turning restlessly over themselves. Like the prick and jab of holding a handful of thumbtacks. Now that she consciously knows it's there, she can't help but prod at it, like tonguing a loose tooth. She wonders what Keith's getting from her on his end, and a shudder goes through her. If they're so casually picking this stuff up now, how much are they going to pick up if it keeps getting stronger? What if they start to sense concrete thoughts too, and not just vague feelings and impressions? Will they wind up as unwilling audiences to each other's inner lives, without any privacy of their own? She swallows. "No offense, but-"
"We should probably stop meeting up," Keith interjects in a rush.
"Yeah," she breathes out heavily, relieved. "If it didn't start until we started meeting, maybe if we just stay apart and don't touch it, it'll go away."
Keith shakes his head. "Worth a try. It's uh. It's not that I don't want to help, I just-" he stutters to a halt, and she gets a sense of wariness, mixed with an awful, crawling feeling of invasion. "I can't-"
She surprises herself with a humorless bark of laughter, shoulders up around her ears. "Yeah, I don't want you hearing all my innermost thoughts either."
Keith snorts, and a little of the tension leaves his spine. They're both quiet for a few minutes. "Are you going to keep looking for the Knell?" she asks.
"Yeah." He leans forward, elbows resting on his knees. "If we can find it, maybe we can figure out what this-" he gestures between them "-is."
Maybe we can figure out how to put a stop to it, goes unsaid. She nods slowly. "You'll message me, right? If you find it?"
There's a flicker of something, there and gone again, and he blinks. "Yeah. Of course." He looks over sideways at her and frowns. "What about you? Are you going to be able to keep working on the receiver?"
She considers it, and nods. "Yeah. The filtering works and the rest of it's mostly stable. I just have to find a place to set up."
"You'll tell me if you find something?"
"Of course," she echoes.
They sit there awkwardly for a few seconds, and then she gets to her feet. "I guess I'd better pack up."
Keith gets up as well and they stow the equipment in silence. She does her best to keep her thoughts focused away from that awareness in the back of her mind. When they're done, Keith hovers next to her in front of the bike, both of them at a loss. At last, she takes a slow breath and frowns up at him. "Hey. Be careful, okay?"
He blinks and something in his expression loosens. "You too."
She snorts. "I'm just going to be writing code and spending a lot of time waiting for data. You're the one chasing after psychic noises." She eyes him for a second, and then screws up her courage and pulls him into a hug. Keith goes stiff and the background noise of his thoughts freezes. After a second, very carefully, he hugs her back. For an instant, she's a different person, hugging Matt the day before the launch. Keith's breath hitches, but it's gone as quickly as it came. "I'm going to miss you," she mumbles.
"Same," he says quietly after a moment, somewhere over her shoulder.
They separate and she gets on the bike. The engine turns over and she makes for the highway. Keith is a thin, lonely figure in her mirror, silhouetted against the desert glare, getting smaller and smaller until he's indistinguishable from the landscape.