Professor Hawkins had a voice built for sleeping.
It wasn't loud, and it wasn't boring, exactly. It was steady. Every word landed at the same weight and the same speed, like a metronome someone had taught physics, and at eight in the morning it did something to the brain that coffee couldn't undo.
Jason Keller tapped his pen against his notebook and tried to follow the equations crawling across the whiteboard. Somewhere around the second line the notation stopped meaning anything, and by the time he had worked out where he'd lost the thread, Hawkins had already moved on.
"—which is why entanglement doesn't let you send information faster than light, no matter how tempting it looks on paper—"
The clock above the door said 8:14. He was fairly sure it had said 8:12 about an hour ago.
His page held a date, a title, and a small drawing of a cube he had been shading for the last ten minutes. Engineering students were supposed to take this course to broaden their theoretical foundations. Jason had taken it because it fit between two labs and nobody had warned him.
"Hey." Sarah leaned in from the seat beside him, keeping her voice under the professor's. "Did you get what he said about the measurement thing?"
"Yes," Jason said. "Absolutely. Every word."
She looked at his cube. He looked at his cube.
"No," he admitted.
"Typical." She slid her own notebook an inch toward him so he could copy the last line, which was the kind of thing Sarah did while pretending she wasn't doing it.
He caught his reflection in the metal spiral of the binding as he bent to write. His dark hair was a mess he hadn't bothered to fight with that morning, and his blue eyes had the dull look of someone running on five hours of sleep. He was tall enough that the fold-down desks bruised his knees, and otherwise about as unremarkable as a person could reasonably get. That was the plan, anyway: pass the year, land the internship, and keep things simple.
"Mr. Keller."
Jason looked up. So did about eighty other people.
Professor Hawkins had stopped writing. "Since you're taking such careful notes, perhaps you'd summarize the last point for the class."
There was a particular silence that only existed in lecture halls, the silence of eighty people being quietly grateful they weren't you.
"It's..." Jason looked at the board, which did not help. "About the particles. Being connected."
"Go on."
"In a quantum way."
A few people laughed. Hawkins let the moment breathe for one second longer than was kind, then turned back to the board. "Thank you, Mr. Keller. Illuminating as always."
Jason sank lower in his seat. Sarah didn't look at him, but her shoulders were shaking.
"I hate you," he whispered.
"You're welcome," she whispered back.
He copied her line, and then the next one, and for almost a full minute he was a model student.
Then the pen stopped moving in his hand, and he wasn't the one who had stopped it.
Everything had stopped. The scratch of pens and the hum of the projector fan were gone. Hawkins's voice had cut off in the middle of a word, his hand raised toward the board with the marker an inch from its surface. A girl two rows down had been yawning, and her mouth stayed open and her eyes stayed half-closed, frozen at the least flattering possible moment.
Jason stared.
The second hand of the clock hung between two ticks. It trembled slightly, as if it were straining against something.
"Sarah?"
She didn't answer. She was bent over her notebook with her pen touching the paper, a strand of hair suspended in the air where it had been falling across her face. He reached for her and stopped just short of her shoulder, because some instinct told him that touching anything right now would be a very bad idea.
His own breathing was the only sound in the room, and it was very loud.
"Okay," he said, to nobody. "Okay. I'm having a stroke. That's what this is."
Jason Keller.
The voice didn't come from the room. It came from inside his head, calm and clear, as if someone had set it down there carefully and stepped back.
You have been chosen.
His heart slammed against his ribs. "Chosen for what? Who is this?"
I am the Enigma. The voice had no echo and no accent, nothing in it to hold on to. Your world has been selected. Each of its people will face a series of trials, according to the difficulty they choose. There are four settings.
The words kept coming, measured and even, as if they were being read off a list.
Easy. Eighty percent of those who choose it survive.
Normal. Forty-five percent.
Hard. Fifteen percent.
Unreal. Two percent.
It paused. The greater the difficulty, the greater the reward.
"Survive," Jason repeated. "You said survive."
Yes.
"So the other fifty-five percent on normal—"
Do not.
Jason's stomach turned over. "And you're asking me to pick one," he said. "For my life."
For your trials.
"That's the same thing, apparently."
The voice waited. It didn't seem impatient, or really anything at all.
Jason looked around the frozen hall, at Hawkins and the yawning girl and Sarah's floating strand of hair, and felt his thoughts go thin and fast the way they did the night before an exam. He tried a prank, a dream, a gas leak, but none of the explanations held. He could feel the seat under him, the pen between his fingers, and the air conditioning cold on the back of his neck, and dreams were never this specific.
Easy, said the part of him that had gotten through twenty years of life without a single broken bone. Eighty percent was four chances in five, and he had passed exams on worse odds.
He opened his mouth to say it, and stopped.
Nobody handed out four chances in five for free. And underneath the fear, a smaller and more stubborn voice pointed out that he had picked the safe option every single time for as long as he could remember, and that it had gotten him exactly here: half-asleep in a lecture he didn't understand, drawing cubes in the margin. The greater the reward, the Enigma had said.
"Normal," he said. His voice cracked on the word. "I'll take normal."
Forty-five percent, less than a coin flip. He regretted it the moment the word left his mouth.
There was a short silence. Then, for the first time, something in the voice shifted, so slightly that he might have imagined it. It sounded like regret, or maybe amusement.
That setting is not available to you.
"What? You just said—"
For you, there is only one setting. The words came slower now, and heavier. Calamity.
Jason's mouth went dry. "That wasn't one of the options."
No.
"What are the odds?" he asked. "For that one?"
The Enigma didn't answer, and somehow that was worse than any number it could have given him.
"Then why me?"
You must endure the calamity, the Enigma said, to become the calamity.
"That doesn't mean anything. That's a fortune cookie."
In time, it will mean something.
"No, wait—" Jason half rose, his knees knocking the desk. "You can't just— I have a lab on Thursday. I have a life. I'm nobody, you've got the wrong—"
Your trial begins soon. Prepare yourself, Jason Keller.
Then it was gone. It didn't fade so much as stop, the way a light stops when someone flips the switch, and the silence it left behind felt bigger than before.
Jason stood half out of his seat, breathing hard, in a room full of statues.
The clock ticked.
Sound crashed back all at once: pens, the fan, and the scrape of eighty chairs as eighty people flinched at the same instant. Hawkins's marker hit the whiteboard and skidded, dragging a long ragged line through the equation. The yawning girl shut her mouth so fast her teeth clicked.
For a heartbeat, nobody said anything. Then everybody did.
"Did you—"
"What was that—"
"Did anyone else hear—"
A guy near the front stood up so fast his notebook fell off the desk. "It asked me to pick," he said, much too loud, to no one in particular. "It asked me to pick."
Jason sat back down slowly. Around him the hall was coming apart in whispers. A girl with thick glasses was crying without seeming to notice, someone was laughing in a high, wrong way, and someone else had their phone out and kept shaking it, as if it might explain.
So everyone had heard it, and everyone had been asked.
He wondered, with a cold drop in his stomach, how many of them had been told no.
"Jason." Sarah had turned toward him, pale, her pen still clenched in her fist. "Jason, what did you pick? What did it—"
At the front of the hall, Professor Hawkins made a small, puzzled sound and fell over.
He didn't stumble or reach for the desk. He simply folded, the way a coat slides off a hook, and hit the floor with a thud that cut through every whisper in the room. The marker rolled out of his hand and across the tiles.
"Oh my God," someone said.
Jason was already getting up. "Is he— somebody call—"
The girl with the glasses slumped sideways into her neighbor.
The guy at the front dropped in the middle of a sentence, and his head struck the edge of the desk on the way down. Two more fell in the third row, then a whole cluster near the aisle, one after another, like dominoes somebody had nudged at one end.
"Sarah," Jason said. "Sarah, we need to get out of—"
She was looking at him with wide, confused eyes. "I feel—" she began.
Her head hit the desk with a crack he would hear again, later, in a thousand quiet moments.
"Sarah!"
He grabbed her shoulder. She was warm, and maybe still breathing, but his hands were shaking too hard to tell. All around him the sound of the lecture hall was changing. The voices thinned out and were replaced by something much worse, the soft, heavy sound of bodies settling into seats and onto floors, until even that stopped.
For the second time that morning, Jason stood alone in the silence.
"Hey," he said. His voice came out very small. "Hey, come on. This isn't—"
The darkness didn't come from the room. It came from behind his eyes, pouring in from the edges and swallowing the rows of slumped shoulders, the fallen marker, and Sarah's hair spread across her notebook. He felt his knees go, but he never felt the floor.
"What the hell is happening?" he screamed, or tried to, before even the scream was gone.
* * *
Light hit him, too much of it, white and total, like opening his eyes straight into the sun. Jason threw an arm over his face and staggered, and the ground beneath him moved in a way ground was not supposed to move: a slow, sickening lift, a pause, and a drop.
When he lowered his arm, everything was blue. A pale, cloudless sky stretched overhead, and beneath it deep, glittering water ran away in every direction until it met the sky in one clean, merciless line. There was no land, no boat, not even a bird.
He was standing on a raft, or something that barely deserved the name: a square of weathered boards lashed over a pair of battered floats, small enough that he could have crossed it in two steps. It rose on a gentle swell, hung there for a moment, and sank again.
Jason's legs gave out, and he sat down hard.
"No," he said. "No, no, no."
The voice returned, as calm as it had been in the lecture hall.
Pass away peacefully in your sleep, alone, on a deserted island.
Jason stared at the empty horizon.
Good luck, Jason.
For a long time, the only sound was the water slapping against the boards.
"That," Jason said finally, "is a horrible way to phrase a mission."