Quinn gets lost in voidspace while I’m headed home from work.

I’m on the train when I receive the ping from the Institute for Dimensional Exploration. The communication line with Quinn Valentine has been disconnected in the subdimensional bridge. This is a courtesy notice, and if contact cannot be restored before the bridge shuts down, I will receive a secondary letter of condolence for my loss.

It’s so coldly polite. People have been lost in the subdimensional bridge before; all the researchers sign more than a hundred digital pages just in waivers. 

Quinn showed me some of the paperwork when they first accepted a position in the Institute, laughing: “Everyone wants their asses covered so badly. Look at this clause...”

I’m not laughing now. I will not panic either.

I have to get Quinn back.

/Quinn,

I’ve locked these messages to your geneprint. But when I heard what happened—all I can think about is our last conversation. That can’t be our last. It can’t end here. 

I care for you so deeply that when I think about it, I ache all through my body. But I don’t know how to express that.

I don’t know the right words./

When I contact the Institute, I’m rebuffed by professionally warm and empty PR staff. 

“I’m terribly sorry, Mx. Seabrooke,” says one of the PR people. “There’s really nothing we can tell you at the moment, but I assure you that we are doing everything possible to bring Mx. Valentine back—”

I cut off the feed with a flick of my thumb. I minimize the visor into the node behind my ear and grip my tablet as the train nears my stop.

I get a notification from my mother.

UPDATE: Isabella Seabrooke has updated pronouns to: he/him/his. Titles: sir/mister/mom. Names: Isabella/Iz/Mom.

Mom’s gender switches fairly often, and I keep signed into notifications on the network so I don’t miss a change. I ping Mom back that I got his update, then message directly:

/Are you home? Need to talk with you./

/Hi Trinity! Yeah, I’m here with your dad. What’s up?/

/Personal./ I keep emotive subtext turned on with messages so the words are clearer. /Can I come over?/

/Sure!/ Mom replies with his usual cheer. /See you soon!/

/Quinn,

Was it my fault? I think it must have been. I don’t always know how to be available emotionally. I worry this makes me a bad partner.

Can we love other people even while we struggle?/

I’ve only seen my mom upset a few times in my life. She was a woman when her mother died, and a couple weeks later, as a man, Mom said goodbye to his father in a hospice. 

My jaw hurts from tension as I tell Mom about Quinn. He runs a hand through his curly hair and paces the kitchen. “This is awful, Trin.”

My dad is in the basement, working on his fractal art. He suffered a severe stroke early in life that resulted in difficulty adapting to the software implants, so he has only limited access to the neural networks. Once I told him Quinn was missing, he excused himself.

His first husband was one of the pioneers in the Institute and was lost when the first bridge destabilized. Dad never openly disapproved, but I saw the worry in his face when Quinn and I visited—he’s always feared this would happen.

 “You’re still dating that person in engineering at the Institute, aren’t you?” I ask Mom.

He manages a smile. “Sebastian? Yeah. It’s eir shift tonight and tomorrow.”

I fold my hands on my lap, resisting the urge to pick at my cuticles. “Could you ask em to get me in? Admin won’t do it even though I’m Quinn’s partner.”

“What good would that do?”

I swallow. “I need to get Quinn back.”

“Trinity,” Mom starts, but I press on.

“No, listen. Quinn told me about the reports on bridge disappearances. The reason a researcher gets lost is because they fall off the bridge and can’t get a clear signal to get back on. The bots the Institute sends might broadcast all the right frequencies, but there’s something about the radiation that garbles electronics.”

No one is quite sure why this happens. Quinn’s co-workers theorize that what the bots transmit and humans hear inside the bridge are incompatible. Most of the researchers log their findings in analog and upload the reports once they return to the Institute.

“I didn’t think the bridge was a physical construct,” Mom says.

“It’s not, precisely.” I don’t have time to explain. Every minute Quinn is missing increases the statistical possibility they won’t return. “Please, Mom. I know I’m asking a lot from you and Sebastian. But if I can get on the bridge, I think I can bring Quinn back. All they need is an anchor point.”

Mom bites his lower lip. “And what if you get lost too?”

I don’t have a good answer for that. Rescues were attempted early on, but none has ever been successful. Bots sent in don’t return with the lost person. It’s too high a risk to send more than one person onto the bridge at a time. 

I hear Mom’s unasked question: Do you know what it would do to your father if you went missing?

So instead, I ask, “Will you help me?”

Mom lets out a breath. “Okay. I’ll leave a note for your dad. I don’t want another fight right now. We don’t have time.”

I grab my coat. “Thank you.”

Mom raises a finger, a gesture that stops me just the same as it did when I was a kid. “You aren’t doing this alone, Trinity—I’m coming with you.”

I know better than to argue with my mother.

/Quinn,

I panic sometimes that I’m too wrong-wired to support my side of our relationship. You’ve seen how well I fake things. I don’t want to be fake with you. I don’t want you to be hurt, trying to fit into my life, when I’m so disjointed and so often feel oddly shaped. You shouldn’t have to distort yourself, either. I want us to mesh, however differently we’re built.

I’ve heard that pain is part of life. I don’t see why it has to be./ 

Quinn and I had been in a relationship for three years, but in the last few months, we started drifting apart.

Work was draining me—market analysis for financial brokers. I’d come home exhausted and shut myself in the office where I’d just curl up on the futon and watch K-dramas. I knew how stressed Quinn was at their job too, how close they were to their first bridge-walk. I didn’t know what to say, or how to explain the way Quinn’s emotional state scratched against mine.

It’s not that either of us didn’t want to talk. When Quinn did, I didn’t. When I was ready, they weren’t. We couldn’t align our needs.

Quinn once told me I was the first person they trusted enough to have a romantic relationship with. I was flattered, flustered, delighted. But somewhere in the passage of time, I just felt increasingly tired.

I don’t know when I crossed the point of wishing I didn’t have to see my partner so I wouldn’t feel guilty that I wanted to be alone. 

I started staying late at work, and after my shift, I would hide in an unused cubicle and nap before taking the late train back. Quinn stopped greeting me when I came into the apartment.

Finally, a week ago, I arrived home and found them packing a small carry-on in our bedroom.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

/You’re never here./ Quinn’s comment was icy. The switch to texting told me they were too overstimulated for more verbal communication. /I’m shocked you noticed./

/I’ve been working./ I refused to add any emotive tags.

Quinn shrugged. /I’m prepping for my bridge-walk in a week. I’ll be staying at the residency rooms at the Institute./

I folded my arms, irritated. /Convenient./ 

/You won’t miss me,/ Quinn sent, snapping their suitcase shut. 

I bristled. /So you just move out and assume I won’t notice?/

/No, Trin. I don’t have to assume. You haven’t talked to me in days. I know when I’m not wanted./

/That’s bullshit!/ I replied in frustration.

A MESSAGE UNDELIVERED error popped into my feed. Quinn had blocked me. I watched in silence as they slammed the front door behind them.

Sebastian is as worried about Quinn as I am. Ey meets us in the back employee lounge. Eir uniform is mussed and ey keeps tugging eir dreadlocks in a nervous tic.

“Okay, look,” Sebastian says. Text-net communications are logged while in the Institute building. “Everything’s pretty much on lock-down until this is sorted out. If someone goes missing, basically everyone sits back and bites their nails and tries not to hope too hard.” Ey grimaces. “All my supervisors will be in a meeting with PR and HR; this is the second lost researcher in a month. The press is going to be so bad.”

I nod. The news about Tatiana Burkowski going missing had sparked a fight between Quinn and me before they stormed out. I wanted them to pull out of their scheduled bridge-walk. They accused me of never risking anything, never feeling anything. I wished that hadn’t hurt as much as it did.

I trim down the urge to push past Sebastian. “How long until the bridge closes?”

“An hour,” Sebastian says. The connection has a limited output; attempts to stabilize and extend it have all failed. “I can get you suited and inside in fifteen minutes, and after that...” Ey glances at my mom. “Are you sure about this, Iz?”

It’s not my mom’s choice. It’s mine. And I’m terrified. 

“Get me in there,” I say. 

Quinn explained the subdimensional bridges this way:

“It’s like an elongated soap bubble with a wire stretched through the middle. You know how you can grow smaller bubbles from the surface of others? It’s like that.”

We sat on the futon in our tiny living room, the windows dimmed and the lights set to a soothing ambient peach hue.

“We’re looking for nodes and connections to other dimensions through the bridge. But you have to balance on the wire while you do it because it’s not like the bubbles will just be up or to the sides. They could be anywhere in space. The wire is your safety anchor. It connects back to the Institute, to this dimensional reality, however far out you go.”

“And you never leave the containment chamber?” I asked. “Your body, I mean?”

Quinn grabbed a brown paper napkin to sketch on. “It’s the Schrödinger principle. You’re in the containment chamber, and you’re not—or rather, it’s like there’s a placeholder for your physical and cognitive self in the chamber, and an extension of that goes onto the bridge.”  

I considered the tea leaves at the bottom of my cup. “What are you hoping to find?”

Quinn tossed their empty pad thai container in the trash. “Personally? Or do you mean the mission statement?”

“You personally,” I said.

Quinn smiled that open, genuine smile that lit up their face. “I want to know if we can travel beyond our reality. Can you imagine what we might find? How wondrous it might be? Worlds never dreamed about—galaxies and horizons we can’t even conceptualize.”

I shook my head, smiling, but I couldn’t share their glee. If we couldn’t imagine it, how would we know it’s safe? How could anything so distant be accessible to human survival?

“Would you come with me, if we could do it?” Quinn asked, eyes bright as if lit from within by their excitement.

“Yes,” I lied. “Of course.”

Quinn made a high-pitched squeak and hugged me.

I shut my eyes even as I returned their embrace. I could never risk traveling beyond the limits of our planet Earth, where anything was possible but so was catastrophe, and I hated that Quinn was so eager to try.

I’m standing in the bridge chamber, the heavy radiation suit pressing against my shoulders. The biometric reader in my helmet keeps reminding me of my pulse and blood pressure. I turn off the stats.

Sebastian and Mom stand at the control booth behind thick, transparent walls. “Ready?” Sebsiastian asks.

When Mom said he was coming with me, I almost panicked about how to dissuade him, but Sebastian said there was no way in hell ey would let two people onto the bridge. Mom grudgingly agreed.

So it has to be me and me alone.

Does Quinn want me to come find them? They might think it too much of a risk. It’s such a sickening, awful thought. Even lost, does Quinn want to hear from me?

“Trin…” Mom starts, but the red klaxon lights in the chamber whir and I’m out of time.

I’m terrified beyond words.

The bridge opens around me and I send all the texts I’ve been writing.

/Quinn,

I don’t know how to be more honest than this.

I’ve always struggled to be—feel—real. I have emotions; sometimes they don’t quite work the way I’m told they should. I have aspirations, but I’m always so scared to reach for them, so I don’t.

I’m afraid I’ve pushed you too far, been too scared to tell you what I need and to listen to what you need in turn.

I’m sorry, Quinn. I don’t want our last argument to be what defines us.

I want you back. Even if we need to follow different paths in our lives. But I want you to have that life, with me or not./

I stand on the edge of a kaleidoscope of inverted colors and inside-out sounds and backwards tastes. Baked cinnamon cornbread coughed onto a plate, fried pistachio green lullaby, baby shrinking from childhood into a crib lined with felt dinosaurs and milk-scented bibs.

Everything has a sense of echo. Not a sound, but the feeling that afterimages of myself, my existence, are spreading out like ripples through the cosmos. I’m balanced on a wire of straight gray light, and the expansive presence of the bridge is blooming around me.

Quinn is somewhere out here.

I want to run, pull myself back—this is too much, too much—

It’s hard to focus. I squeeze my eyes shut and disengage the alarms and tactile feedback loops in my suit, leaving only the auditory comm channel online. “Quinn?” My voice cracks. “Quinn, are you here?”

Nothing.

Back in the control room—it must be billions of miles and only a few feet simultaneously—my mother and Sebastian are waiting. They will pull me back if I ask.

I’ve tried to save Quinn, haven’t I? I came this far. I’m on the bridge. What good will getting lost do for them? I can’t possibly hurt my parents like that… surely, Quinn would understand?

And yet if I retreat like I always do, Quinn will never come home. And I will never forgive myself for failing them.

So no. I must stay. I must find them.

“Quinn, it’s Trinity.” I don’t know if my voice carries past the suit’s visor. I stand perfectly still, space and time pulsing around me like a great saltless ocean.

When I was younger, Mom took me to the beach she’d gone to as a teenager. I didn’t like the water, but I waded out when Mom told me I might see cool fish. I slipped on smooth rocks underfoot and fell, briny waves closing over my head. I panicked and got lost, not knowing which way was up, which way was air. Bubbles exploded from my nose and my eyes burned from the salt. I thought I was going to die, swept away in the sea, and I’d never see my family or friends or my cat again… but Mom pulled me up. I coughed and gasped and she held me as I cried. “It’s okay, Trin, you’re safe with me.” She said it over and over, but it took the rest of the day before I felt it was true. I didn’t go swimming again after that.

Is that what it’s like out here? Drowning in space, floundering with nothing to hold onto? With no one to pull you back onto shore and tell you that you’re safe?

“Quinn!” I shout. “I came to find you. Can you hear me?”

What if they are too far to hear, sucked into another bubble, another dimension? I picture Quinn trying to analyze and find a way back, always the scientist, and my chest hurts.  

I spread my hands to either side, a useless gesture. Some part of my brain hopes Quinn can reach out and take hold of my glove.

“Trinity?”

I gasp. “Quinn?”

“Is this real?” Their voice is weak, wavery, like a bad audio signal.

“It’s me!” I cry.

I want to fling myself towards them, but I don’t know where that is. What if there is no direction? Like when I was a child, trapped under the waves—

Focus, Trinity. This isn’t the ocean. I’m not drowning. I can breathe with the suit. I’m surrounded by incomprehensible space and yet I am not lost. I am not.

I turn as slowly as I can without overbalancing. I can’t see Quinn.

Breathe. “I’m here to find you.” I struggle to keep my words even and assured. “Can you signal where you are? It’s hard to see…”

The space around me remains a surreal blur of light and hues, as if I’m floating in a watercolor sea. I curl my toes against my boots.

“No!” Quinn’s voice burrs with panic. “Trin, you need to get out before they trap you!”

“I’m not leaving without you!”

Mom messages me: /Hurry. Sebastian says we’ve got nine minutes./ The suit auto-reads aloud to me, making me jump.

Why can’t I see Quinn?

“Please,” I whisper. “Tell me how to reach you.”

“Can you see the ribbons?”

Quinn sounds closer, but nothing here has perspective, and I’m getting dizzy trying to peer through the indescribable blur of this quantum reality.

I take slow breaths, concentrating, trying to see what Quinn does. The space around me oscillates in a riot of visual noise.

The creatures are everywhere. They shimmer in and out of my perception, each an elongated band like silk dancing ribbons twirled in summer air. They have multifaceted eyes glinting from numerous stalks along their masses, and the colors are so bright and so wrong, like my brain can’t translate the data it’s receiving. Each creature pulses at a different frame rate, so disorienting that it makes me dizzy.

Quinn often shared popular science articles with me when we were first dating. A study about shrimp photoreceptors turned into a long discussion about how we saw colors since Quinn is color blind.

I lock my knees, wishing I had a railing or something objectively solid to hold onto. The ribbons drift around me, bouncing off the suit and floating into each other. Each collision sends a trill of auditory feedback through my helmet, and I gasp. It’s almost music, as if each ribbon is a note, out of sync from the whole. I strain to piece together the blips of sound, desperate to make sense of the chaos before it overwhelms me.

“I see them,” I whisper, terrified and awed. “What are they?”

“I don’t know,” Quin says, “but they’ve shorted out part of my HUD. They’ve warped the tether, and I can’t find my way back to the bridge. Trin, I’m lost—"

The pings from the ribbons grow louder, sounds I can’t interpret jarring against each other as my brain tries and fails to process what I’m hearing. The ribbons are in my head, broadcasting noise—

I almost mute the helmet’s feed on reflex but stop myself. I need to hear Quinn.

So I start talking, hoping my voice can be a beacon.

“Remember that trip we took to the mountains last summer? I didn’t want to hike the trail but you insisted and when we reached the viewing platform, just in time for the sunrise, it was so beautiful I almost shut down from sheer awe. And you said ‘I told you so’ and we started laughing and I was so filled with joy, being there with you, witnessing that moment.” Words tumble out, a tsunami on my tongue. I don’t hold back, focusing on the memory that I haven’t replayed in so long. “And I knew I loved you more than anyone else but I was too scared to say it and you were lit up by the sun and you were perfect in every way.”

/One minute!/ Mom’s signal crackles and deteriorates before I catch any more.

I keep my hands outstretched, trembling. Ethereal beings slide through my gloved fingers and around my palms, filling my skin with static. “I’m here. I’m here, Quinn. I came for you and I won’t leave without you.”

“Trinity!”

Quinn’s voice is right here—

I squint, willing my brain to quiet the noise, to let me focus—

And Quinn is suddenly there, floating just a meter off the bridge’s theoretical structure. They waver into cohesion, threatening to become a mirage.

“Quinn!” I reach out, hoping I can keep my footing on the bridge. Their hand finds mine. I gasp, pulling them close. We collide and I wrap my arms around their suit, holding them fast. “I’ve got you.”

Quinn and I return from voidspace with seconds to spare as the bridge collapses with a crackle behind us. We stand in the same room we left, now with dozens more people watching in stunned relief from behind transparent walls.

Quinn wrenches off their helmet and drops to their knees, shaking. 

“How long was I gone?” Quinn says.

“A few hours,” I say as medical techs and security rush through the airlocks. 

“It felt like years,” Quinn whispers. “I thought I was going to die out there.”

Then the med techs are pulling Quinn and me onto separate gurneys, and people—supervisors, board members—are yelling, and I want to block it out, all the anger, so I close my eyes against the bright fluorescent lights that look like ribbons in my peripheral vision.

Mom is a woman when I’m released from decontamination and assessment an hour later. She hugs me tight; I lean into her, shaking, but I can still smile. I’m sure there will be lawyers and PR and paperwork beyond comprehension over this, and I’m so scared Quinn will want nothing to do with me.

I’m pronounced “just fine” physiologically and allowed to wait with Mom and Sebastian outside the employee lounge until Quinn is ready.

/I just have to finish the release forms,/ Quinn messages me. /Be out in a few minutes./

Quinn still hasn’t said if they got the texts I sent. If anything has changed between us.

Sebastian reassures me that ey won’t lose eir job.

“Maybe a reprimand,” ey says with a wry smile when Mom asks what will happen, “but damn, this is the first successful rescue on record, and I oversaw it!” Ey hesitates a moment, then asks, “You didn’t...happen to see anyone else in there?”

I shake my head. We may never know what happens to people once the bridge collapses with them on the other side. I’ve told no one about the ribbons yet, and I don’t think Quinn has either. Once we write up reports for the scientists, the other researchers can perhaps discover what the “ribbon” phenomena are. I’m happy not to think about them any more right now. The music still bounces in staticky loops in the back of my head, but it’s fading into echoes.

“I’m glad you and Quinn are okay,” Sebastian says, giving me a tired smile. “I’m headed home, then.” Sebastian kisses Mom goodbye. “Haven’t worked this hard since grad school!”

Mom stands and gives my hand a squeeze. She’s going home to fill Dad in on what happened. I’ve told her I can get home on my own. “When you’re both settled, message me. We need to celebrate properly.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

Quinn shuffles out of the examination lab. My heart flutters again.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi,” Quinn replies. 

I want to hold them tight, because part of my brain is still panicked that this isn’t real yet. Even out of our suits, I fear that part of them is still out there, a shadow in the ribbons and the light.

Quinn looks down. “Can you take me home?”

On the train back, Quinn swivels in their seat to face me.

Cautious, they put a hand on my arm. “I got your messages.”

I focus on the unmoving opaque window screen, tinted neutral blue-green so I don’t have to watch the landscape scroll by.

Quinn breathes in deep, slow. “What you did...”

I tense.

“Thank you,” Quinn whispers. “I didn’t think anyone would come for me after the portal closed…”

I swallow. I don’t know what to say. I have so many things I want to ask and I don’t know where to start.

Quinn smiles, tentative. “I’m sorry we argued. I’d like to find a way for us to make this relationship work.”

It’s my turn to catch my breath. “You do?”

They nod. “I was stressed and angry at you. I’ve spent so much of my life trying to believe I deserve to be treated well that I forgot how much you do too. We both deserve it.”

Quinn takes another breath and resumes with texts. /We both made mistakes and I’m sorry./

/So am I./ I take their hand in mine. /We can start fresh, right? Maybe figure out a code for when we need to talk and when we need space./

They lean forward, questioning, and I nod, so they kiss me.

 /You’re the most real person I know,/ Quinn says, and lays their head on my shoulder. /I’d like you to stay with me./

I smile against their hair, relief unwinding in my chest at last. I feel safe, I feel seen, and I think we’ll be okay.  /I’d like that too./

© 2026 Merc Fenn Wolfmoor