Wick shook his head. “I don’t have a strong grasp of it, myself. To put it simply, space and gravity behave strangely in that area—in the Fold. Holt had some theories about a concentration of dark matter or gravity wells forming, but I lost the thread of it fairly quickly—and now he’s frozen. But we’ve been trying to study the thing.”

“What do you mean, space and gravity behave strangely?”

Wick scratched the back of his neck. “It’s hard to explain it if you haven’t seen it yourself. Essentially, in the Fold, space curves back on itself. It’s as if something folds our four-dimensional space into shapes that intersect with a fifth dimension.”

She gave him a blank stare.

Wick sighed. “Here’s how Fulbreech explained it to me. Imagine you were a two-dimensional being—flat—living on a piece of paper. If something were to fold that piece of paper into, say, a three-dimensional triangle, a pyramid, the shape would be far too complex for you to comprehend. But only because you couldn’t see the true simplicity of the shape from a higher dimension. And then if something were to fold that piece of paper into an origami crane—”

“My entire dimension would be turned topsy-turvy,” Park finished. “Instead of the surface I knew, the whole thing would be bent into something utterly incomprehensible. So this anomaly is like an origami crane?”

“A fifth-dimensional origami crane, yes,” Wick affirmed. “There, space curves around a fifth dimension; gravity and light make a U-turn on themselves. Does that make sense?”

“Not really, to be honest.”

Wick kneaded the skin between his eyes. “I’m making a botched job of this,” he muttered. “Let me speak without theory, then, and tell you my experience with the Fold. From afar and at certain times of day, it looks obvious to the naked eye: it’s a mass of light and reflection, like shards of glass the size of skyscrapers. But as you get close to it, the whole thing seems to vanish, like a mirage—because you’ve entered the dimensional fold itself. And when you’re there, in the midst of it, you realize these fractal structures and shards aren’t solid surfaces, as they seem from a distance—they’re holes or creases in space itself, usually reflecting themselves back onto each other. The dimensions collapse together there, and then reform again into something different. For example, I put my hand through one crease and saw it emerge from another, fifty yards away. I was waving at myself. Very uncanny.”

“And it—doesn’t harm humans? Being in this mass of dimensional folds?”