Chapter 5: Sunrise in the Hollow of a Palm
Renae woke into a warmth that was deep and complete. It wasn't the open plain of the chest from yesterday morning. This was different. Enclosed. He was curled not on Mattius, but against him, his back pressed firmly into the concave cradle of a sleeping palm. The whole giant hand was wrapped around him, a living shelter. He could feel the steady, slow thump of Mattius’s heart through layers of cotton and muscle, a bass drum in a quiet world.
He didn’t move. He let the feeling saturate him. The safety was absolute, a physiological truth. He tilted his head back, looking up the vast slope of Mattius’s torso, past the rumpled shirt, to the jaw above. It was shadowed with stubble. Mattius’s lips were slightly parted, his breathing even and deep. In sleep, the usual focused intensity was gone, replaced by a vulnerable softness. His dark lashes were impossibly long against his cheeks.
A wave of tenderness hit Renae so hard it felt like a physical ache. It was a sweet, piercing thing, lodged right behind his ribs. Without thinking, he pressed his own small palm flat against the shirt, right over the source of the heartbeat.
The rhythm stuttered.
Above him, Mattius stirred. A low, sleep-thick sound rumbled through the chest cavity surrounding Renae. The fingers encircling him tightened instinctively, not in fear, but in a possessive, sleepy clutch. They pulled Renae in closer, snugger, until he was fully enveloped in warm, gentle pressure. Mattius’s thumb came up and brushed, once, over the top of Renae’s head.
Renae laughed, the sound a tiny puff of air lost in the fabric. “Morning, sleepyhead.” His voice was raspy. “You’re gonna have to let me go if you want coffee.”
The rhythm changed. The heartbeat picked up, thumping against Renae’s palm. Mattius’s eyes fluttered open. They were unfocused, bleary with sleep, staring at the ceiling without seeing it. Then awareness filtered in. Renae felt the exact moment Mattius registered the weight in his hand, the shape against his stomach. Mattius’s head tilted down, his dark blue eyes finding Renae’s.
A slow, utterly devastating smile spread across his face. It was unguarded, full of a sleepy, fond wonder. His voice was a gravelly morning rumble. “Or I could just bring you with me.”
The sentence hung in the air, simple and electric.
Mattius didn’t wait for an answer. He simply moved, shifting the universe around Renae. He sat up, bringing his cupped hand with him, keeping Renae securely nestled against his middle. He swung his legs out of bed and stood, and the room yawned into its terrifying, familiar scale. But Renae wasn’t afraid. He was anchored.
The journey to the kitchen was a ride through a living canyon. From his vantage point, Renae saw the world as a series of intimate, colossal close-ups: the weave of Mattius’s grey sleep pants, the dust motes dancing in spectacular sunbeams slicing through the hall window, the stark, clean lines of the bathroom doorframe as they passed.
In the kitchen, Mattius set his human cup down gently on the cool quartz countertop before releasing him. “Don’t move,” he murmured, his voice still rough. “Counter’s a death trap.”
“I’m familiar with the concept,” Renae said, sitting down with his legs dangling over the edge. He watched Mattius move through the morning ritual. The filling of the kettle, the scooping of grounds, the click of the igniter on the stove. The domestic normalcy of it was surreal, a staged play performed on a titanic set just for him.
Mattius worked one-handed, his other hand resting protectively on the counter near Renae, a silent barricade. When the coffee began to perk, its rich, bitter scent filling the air, he turned and leaned his hips against the counter, looking down.
“Sleep okay?” he asked.
“Best in days,” Renae answered truthfully. “You?”
Mattius shrugged, a massive rise and fall of shoulders. “Same. No dreams about dissolving cake.” He reached into a cabinet, his movements careful. He returned with a small, shallow porcelain dish—a soy sauce dish from the back of a drawer. He rinsed it, dried it with meticulous care, and placed it next to Renae. Into it, he poured a thin pool of cream from the fridge, then added a single, precise drop of coffee from the tip of a spoon. He placed a solitary granule of brown sugar beside it.
“Your majesty’s espresso,” he said, the corner of his mouth quirking.
Renae dipped a finger into the mixture and tasted it. Perfect. “You’re getting good at this.”
“Practice.” Mattius poured his own full mug, black, and took a long, savoring sip. He eyed Renae, his expression shifting from soft to serious. “We need to talk about the plan. The real one.”
“The soufflé plan.”
“Right.” Mattius ran a hand through his shaggy hair. “The German parts are… a problem. Customs is slower than I budgeted for. They could be three weeks out. Maybe more.”
Renae felt a cold knot form in his stomach, but he kept his face neutral. “Okay. So we wait.”
“We can’t.” Mattius shook his head. “The power core from the device is almost depleted. I used most of its charge just creating the stable fold around you. The reversal… it’ll need a fresh core, plus a significant energy draw to ‘pop’ the fold back to baseline. We can’t wait three weeks. Every day that fold exists, it… it settles. Integrates. Makes it harder to reverse.”
The cold knot tightened. “How hard?”
“Potentially irreversible.” Mattius said the words softly, but they hit the quiet kitchen like stones. He wouldn’t meet Renae’s eyes. “The theory was always that reversal had to happen quickly. I didn’t plan for a sustained state. It was an accident. I’m flying blind.”
Renae looked at his tiny dish of coffee, the world shrinking even further. He took a breath. “So what’s the move?”
“I need to build a new core. From scratch.” Mattius finally looked at him, his eyes haunted. “The materials… they’re not easy to get. Some are controlled. One of them is… well, let’s just say it’s tracked. Heavily.”
“Tracked by who?”
“The kind of people my boss at the institute drinks scotch with.” Mattius pushed off the counter, pacing a short, tense path. “It’s a crystalline substrate used in high-frequency military radar arrays. I need about twenty grams of it.”
“Can you… order it?” Renae asked, already knowing the answer.
Mattius barked a short, humorless laugh. “With what credentials? ‘Mattius Gregor, freelance shadow physicist, needs some unstable quantum-lattice crystal to un-shrink his roommate, please?’ They’d have the police and a mental health team here before the shipping was calculated.”
The reality of their isolation closed in. The house, which had felt like a sanctuary, now felt like a very small, fragile glass bowl. Renae watched Mattius’s frustration, the way his knuckles were white where he gripped his mug. The genius who could build a spacetime fold in his garage was stymied by procurement.
“So we steal it,” Renae said, his voice calm.
Mattius froze. He stared. “What?”
“You heard me. If you can’t buy it, we take it. You know where it is, right? The institute’s secure materials lab. You’ve been there with your boss.”
“It’s a Grade-3 secure facility, Renae. Biometric locks. Logs. Cameras everywhere.”
“And you’re the quiet, intelligent shadow prodigy who knows how all of it works,” Renae countered, standing up on the counter. He felt a strange, fierce energy coursing through him. The helplessness was evaporating, replaced by a focus he knew from diagnosing a tricky engine. A problem to solve. “You know the routines. The blind spots. You built a shrink ray in your garage. You can bypass a lock.”
“It’s not a lock, it’s a system! And even if I could, ‘we’?” Mattius’s gaze swept over Renae’s two-inch form. “How? You’d be a… a liability. No. Absolutely not. It’s insane.”
The word ‘liability’ stung, sharp and clean. Renae flinched. He saw Mattius immediately regret it.
“That’s not what I meant,” Mattius said quickly, his voice dropping. “I just meant… you’re vulnerable. I can’t take you into that.”
“And I can’t stay here while you go to prison!” Renae’s small voice snapped, echoing strangely off the cabinets. “Don’t you get it? You’re all I have. If you walk into that place and get caught, what happens to me? I die of thirst on this counter in a week. This isn’t just your problem to solve alone anymore. It’s ours.”
The silence that followed was thick, charged. Mattius looked utterly wrecked. The truth of Renae’s words was undeniable.
“I’d need you,” Mattius whispered, the admission torn from him. “For the physical parts. Places I can’t reach. Conduits too small for my hands.”
A slow, grim smile touched Renae’s lips. “Now you’re thinking. I’m good with small spaces. And with wires.” He pointed a tiny finger at Mattius. “But we do it smart. We plan. We scout. Like a heist movie, but with worse odds and significantly shorter personnel.”
Mattius let out a shaky breath, a laugh mixed with sheer terror. He came back to the counter, looking down at Renae with a new, terrifying resolve. “Okay. Okay. We plan.”
He pulled his laptop from the living room and set it up on the kitchen table, then lifted Renae and the coffee dish to join him. For the next few hours, they worked. Mattius pulled up archived floor plans from the institute’s server—plans he wasn’t supposed to have. He outlined the security layers. The motion sensors in the hallways. The pressure-sensitive floors in the materials vault itself.
Renae, from his vantage point climbing over the digital blueprints on the screen, pointed out ventilation ducts. Service conduits. “Here,” he said, tapping a tiny foot on a line representing a cable chase. “It runs from the custodial closet on floor B to the wall behind the vault’s climate control unit. It’s tight, but it’s not monitored. Big enough for me.”
“It’s a sixty-foot run, Ren. In the dark.”
“I’m not claustrophobic. I am, however, very motivated.”
They sketched a sequence. A late-night entry using Mattius’s old keycard, which might still grant after-hours access to the outer labs. Mattius would create a diversion, tripping a minor fire alarm on the far side of the floor to draw security. During the chaos, he would place Renae, equipped with a simple fiber-thin line for communication and a tiny, dark cloth bag, into the cable chase opening.
Renae would navigate the duct, drop into the vault, locate the storage canister for the crystal substrate, and somehow collect twenty grams of it. That was the part that remained a shaky question mark.
“The storage is inert gas pressurized,” Mattius muttered, zooming in on a schematic. “You can’t just open it. There’s a manual release valve, but it’s…”
“It’s what?”
“It’s about the size of a dime. A reinforced, threaded valve.” Mattius looked sick. “You’d need leverage. A lot of it.”
Renae stared at the schematic, at the tiny, crucial circle. His mind, a mechanic’s mind, began to work. He saw not a barrier, but a puzzle. “You’ll get me a tool. A small, strong rod. Something I can use as a cheater bar. I’ll rig a pulley from the shelving. I can generate enough force.” He said it with more confidence than he felt.
Mattius just watched him, a storm of admiration and terror in his eyes. “This is impossible.”
“It’s already impossible,” Renae said softly, looking not at the plans, but at Mattius. “We’re just picking which impossible thing we do next.”
The afternoon light faded. The plan, fragile and riddled with holes, was the only plan they had. The birdhouse penthouse sat unused on the nightstand. The reversal equations sat unsolved on the screen. Everything narrowed to this one, desperate act.
That night, as Mattius lay in bed pretending to sleep, Renae stood in the archway of his wooden house. He watched the tense line of Mattius’s back.
“Hey, Matt.”
“Yeah?”
“After this… after I’m back. We should talk. About something else.”
Mattius was silent for a long time. The house creaked. “Yeah,” he finally breathed, the word heavy with promise and dread. “We should.”
Renae nodded to himself. A tomorrow to fight for. He turned and walked back to his memory foam bed, not to sleep, but to mentally trace the path through the dark duct, his hands already aching for the feel of a cool metal valve, for the weight of a future held in a tiny, stolen bag.