Unbreakable
Elizabeth Norris
24 meets the X Files in the amazing follow up to Unravelling.Four months after Ben disappeared through the portal to his home universe, Janelle believes she’ll never see him again. Her world is still devastated, but civilisation is slowly rebuilding, and life is finally starting to resume some kind of normality. Until Interverse agent Taylor Barclay shows up. He’s got a problem, and he needs Janelle’s help. Somebody from an alternate universe is running a human trafficking ring – kidnapping people and selling them on different Earths. And Ben, with his unique abilities, is the prime suspect. To make things worse, Janelle learns that someone she cares about – someone from her own world – has become one of the missing.Now Janelle has five days to track down the real culprit. Five days to locate the missing people before they’re lost forever. Five days to reunite with the boy who stole her heart. Can she uncover the truth before everyone she cares about is killed?In this heart-pounding sequel to UNRAVELLING, author Elizabeth Norris explores the sacrifices we make to save the people we love and the worlds we’ll travel to find them.
For Dan, it was worth the wait ♥
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u610174ca-a527-58ac-8eeb-eb5ab63b62c1)
Dedication (#uc0d3bce2-9b69-503b-a5e3-0ecf8918dde1)
Part One (#ude20153d-711f-5877-9fa8-4ac69d7ea0a9)
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Part Three (#litres_trial_promo)
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Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Janelle Tenner’s adventures continue summer 2014! (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Elizabeth Norris (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Labor with what zeal we will, Something still remains undone, Something uncompleted still Waits the rising of the sun.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
ome days are so perfect, they just don’t seem real.
They’re the days when you wake up and aren’t tired, when the sun is shining and the breeze kicks up from the ocean, keeping you from getting too hot or too cold, and everything you do goes right. Like you’re inside of a movie with your own soundtrack, where you’re so happy that you can’t help just spontaneously breaking into a smile. Some days are like magic.
But I haven’t had one of those days in a long time.
So long, it feels like maybe I never did. In fact, when I’ve been up for eighteen hours, letting Cecily boss me around in an old snack bar that she converted into a kitchen—one that might be a hundred degrees—it feels like maybe perfect days are a lie.
“What are you doing?” Cecily says, scolding me. “That’s never going to work.”
“My idea, not work? That’s shocking.” I make a big show of rolling my eyes. “Come up with a better idea and we’ll try it.” I almost add that we don’t need popcorn, but I keep my mouth shut. I can only push her so far. The wrath of Cecily when plans go awry is something I’m trying to avoid.
It’s movie night at Qualcomm.
About a month ago, Cecily decided that a movie night was just the thing Qualcomm needed. It would give people something to look forward to, and with the right equipment it was something we could actually get done. She made Kevin Collins and me spend a weekend going through the wreckage of every movie theater in San Diego, looking for the right projection equipment and an assortment of movies we could show.
So now we have a little more than thirteen hundred people seated on what used to be the Chargers football field—with more watching from the seats. Blankets are laid out, people are huddled together, and Cecily has It’s a Wonderful Life cued up on the projector. I had argued with her choice of that one—it’s not like much going on around here could be called wonderful—but my arguments had gone down in flames, and Kevin didn’t help matters since he had backed her up, hoping to win her over.
The only snag in her plan right now is the popcorn.
The generator let us use the microwave to pop over half of the bags we found when we scrounged around the city, but it started taking its toll on our power. Even Cee wasn’t going to argue that popcorn was more important than lights. So now I’m using a couple of old pans and a wood-burning stove.
Because I’m thinking of him, Kevin pushes through the door with a wide smile for Cecily. In a surprising and I’ll admit impressive move on his part, he got his GED and enlisted in the Marines a couple of months ago. “Lady J!” he shouts as a few of the guys in his unit come in behind him. “We’ve come for you to feed us.”
I’d like to say the whole enlisting thing made him grow up, but he’s the same as ever.
I ignore Kevin. I’m good at it.
Cecily, who has only her own agenda on her mind, beams at him. “Oh, you’re here, perfect,” she says, piling bags of popcorn into the guys’ arms before they have a chance to speak. “Start with the people in the back since they’re farthest from the screen. And make sure everyone takes a small handful and passes it down. We have about one bag for every fifteen or so people; no one gets their own.”
One of the guys rolls his eyes—he’s obviously here as a favor because poor Kevin has it bad for Cecily.
Kevin bows with a flourish. “Your wish shall be done.”
I have to force myself to keep from snorting at the ridiculousness that is happening right in front of me.
Before he leaves, Kevin looks at me. “Hurry up, woman. If we have to wait for you we’ll never get to see the movie.”
Unable to control her laughter, Cecily pushes Kevin out the door, and the universe finally rewards me, because the popcorn finally starts to pop.
“So this thing with Kevin …” I say once he’s gone. Every guy has a thing for Cee—even Alex had a huge crush on her. Alex, my best friend, the one who told me he wasn’t going to date anyone until college because he didn’t want to have to introduce a girl that he liked to his mother unless he knew she could handle it. Alex, who will never date anyone. Alex, who’s gone because of me.
I swallow those thoughts down, despite the tightness in my throat, and focus on Cecily. I want her to be happy.
She blushes but doesn’t say anything.
“He is pretty cute,” I add. He’s also immature and drives me a little out of my mind, but I can’t deny that he’s nice to look at.
Cecily laughs and shakes her head. “He is.” Then she pauses and adds, “And he’s funny, too, you know? Like super funny. Every time I see him, he makes me crack up about something. Plus, I can’t help being surprised at how thoughtful he is. He always does really nice little things for me.”
She says it like there’s a “but” coming.
“So, what’s the problem?” I laugh a little, but Cecily doesn’t join in.
“This is terrible. I mean, I kind of want to like him.” She sighs. “I just can’t. I don’t know. I guess he’s just not really my type.”
I know what she means. About wanting to like someone and just not being able to. Kevin’s tried to hook me up with half the guys in his unit, and then of course, there’s Nick. A date or even a little romance would be such a welcome distraction from everything going on, but all I see when I look at another guy is someone who’s not Ben Michaels.
Since the day he left, I’ve been looking everywhere for Ben. Remembering his dark brown eyes; the way his hair falls in his face; the way he reached out, touched my cheek, and pulled me into one last kiss; the way he took slow steps backward toward the portal, as if he didn’t really want to leave; the way he said my name and told me he loved me.
The way the portal swallowed him up and he disappeared.
But mostly I think about how he said, I’ll come back for you.
“Okay, don’t laugh,” Cecily says suddenly, doing me a favor and pulling me from thoughts I should be able to let go. “But I kind of have a thing for the bad boys, like from afar, but still. Give me a leather jacket, a devilish smile, a guy my parents wouldn’t approve of, and you know, someone who needs to be saved.”
Ben didn’t have the leather jacket or a devilish smile. But he was definitely the kind of guy my dad would’ve been wary of. And he did need to be saved.
Only I’d saved him, and now he was gone.
“It wouldn’t hurt either if he had nice eyes,” Cecily adds.
I smile, thinking of Ben’s dark, deep-set eyes and the intensity in them when he looked at me.
Every five or ten minutes, Cecily carts an armload of popcorn bags out to the field. When we finally have them all passed out, we pick through the crowd to find my brother, Jared, and Kevin and his friends. There’s one extra bag of popcorn, and because we’re feeling gluttonous, we keep it.
I barely watch the movie because I’m more interested in watching Jared, who can’t take his eyes off the screen.
It doesn’t matter that I’ve missed more than half of the movie. Or that it’s black-and-white and from 1946. It doesn’t matter that the popcorn is too buttery, that the wool blanket itches my skin every chance it gets, or even that I’m tired and sweaty from the stove.
With about fifteen minutes of the movie left, Struz finds us and sits next to Jared, whose eyes are a little watery.
And then Struz winks at me.
I glance at Cecily, who just smiles. It’s a smile I know well. The one that says, So there, or I was right, or any other I told you so type of phrase. I give her the finger, because there’s not much else to do.
She was right.
Popcorn and movie night were exactly what we needed.
Maybe this day was a little magical after all.
he next morning, the magic has worn off. That tends to happen to me when I have to get out of bed before the sun is up, especially on my day off. The reason I’m up is that Struz is sending Cee and me on a supply run up to Camp Pendleton. He chose us because we’re charming—or, more accurately, Cecily is charming.
And it works. She manages to sweet talk everyone we run into. I’m just there to help with the heavy lifting.
We spend the drive home, with Cecily at the wheel, in silence. It’s not because we’re sad or even tired—despite the fact that this day has already been exhausting and it’s not quite noon. This silence weighs down on us because when you do this drive, you can’t deny that the world has changed.
The coast is the worst. Buildings are collapsed, homes demolished or just gone. The roof on my favorite restaurant, Roberto’s, caved in, and the patio cracked and split open, putting an end to my burritos-after-the-beach tradition. Trees have been uprooted, and they lie on their sides as if they’ve been discarded like weeds. In my old neighborhood, the trees took out any houses that hadn’t already collapsed from the quake itself. Debris is everywhere, littered across the grass and piled up on the side of the road.
But what’s worst is how it feels. Before the quakes, San Diego was the kind of place that felt alive. The sun, the ocean waves, the crowds of tourists—it had personality. Now it feels empty, destroyed. Dead.
This silence is one of respect, the kind that you observe.
Because it’s been a hundred and forty days since an old pickup truck hit me, and the warmth of the engine, the smell of locking brakes, and someone shouting my name were the last things I remembered. A hundred and forty days since I died.
Since my whole world changed.
Because I didn’t stay dead. Ben Michaels healed me and brought me back. Because of him, I had a second chance. I don’t know how it happened, but Ben changed my class schedule, argued with me in English, took me to Sunset Cliffs, and made me love him.
And then he left.
Now the whole world has changed—for everyone.
My dad died because he didn’t know what kind of case he stumbled on. I solved his murder, saved the world, lost my best friend, and watched Ben walk through a portal and leave this universe.
I stopped Wave Function Collapse, but the damage was already done.
All of the natural disasters hit at the same time—and no corner of the globe was spared. Tornadoes took out the Midwest. Earthquakes leveled cities close to fault lines and also ones that weren’t, like Dallas and Vegas. Tsunamis blanketed and sank low-level areas like Coronado Island, New Orleans, Manhattan, and parts of the California coast. Wildfires swept the nation in all different directions, reducing land, trees, houses—even people—to ashes.
And we weren’t alone. Other countries had been hit just as hard. Some of them were just gone.
Millions of people died.
Millions more went missing.
Modern life took the biggest hit. Satellites were knocked out of position, telephone lines went dead, electricity flickered out, and running water went dry. Aftershocks took out most of the buildings that were still standing. Hospitals overflowed with people injured and dying. Medicine and medical supplies were used up. We started running out of food and water. Almost nothing survived the looting.
As Cecily drives, I lean my forehead against the window and feel the warmth of the sun against the glass. I almost close my eyes to block out the reminders, but it’s pointless. I can’t forget what’s happened here.
“Don’t do that!” Cecily says, snapping her fingers at me as we go over a bump on the uneven road. “And by that, I mean that weird sad thing where you go all quiet and depressed.”
“I thought you knew I was lame like that,” I say, but I pull my head back and sit up straight. She’s bossy, but right.
Cecily smiles. “I know you better than you think, J.”
“Didn’t you know cheerleading is sort of a dead sport?” I ask. “I’m not sure you need to stay so peppy.”
She gasps and pretends to be offended, but I know she’s not. We both had a first-class ticket to seeing the world change. Well, maybe that was just me, but Cecily has seen the aftereffects up close and personal even if she doesn’t know the actual cause.
I’m about to say something else when I see it.
Ahead there’s a house, half standing with a sunken roof, and in front of it a few people are milling around, looking at an assortment of stuff laid out on the dead grass.
Cecily sees it too. “Oh, a yard sale! We have to check it out.”
It’s not that they’re likely to have anything we want. These yard sales are for trades. People need supplies—usually medicine or food—and they’re willing to give up other material possessions in order to get it.
Of course, not many people have medicine or food to spare. But we do. Between my connection to the FBI and Cecily’s family running one of the largest evacuation shelters in the area, we have access that normal people don’t. There’s a case of water and an economy-size bottle of aspirin in the back of the truck. I can’t give it all away, but I can give these people something.
“It looks like they have books,” Cecily adds as we crawl to a stop. “Maybe they’ll have something for Jared.”
He needs a new book. We can only reread Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix so many times. As he’s pointed out, it’s the middle of the story.
I get out of the truck. A man wearing broken glasses approaches us, but I let Cecily talk to him. She’s the friendly one, after all.
There are some old clothes and blankets off to the side, and then a row of DVDs. I look at them just in case there’s something X-Files. We lost our collector’s edition box set when our house collapsed. Electricity is too spotty still to play DVDs, but once it comes back, my brother will miss them.
The collection is mostly indie movies, so I head for the books. It’s a lot of literary stuff, a lot of classics, and not necessarily the good stuff, in my opinion. I know I should want to preserve Moby Dick or Great Expectations, but I just can’t make myself do it. Then I see a flash of a red-and-black book cover.
I reach for it, excitement making me feel giddy and light-headed. I turn, ready to call out to Cee to tell her what I’ve found, but I’m not looking, so I walk straight into some random guy.
He’s taller than me, and my face plows into his shoulder. The soft cotton of his shirt rubs against my cheek as I stumble against him. He grunts and drops all of the books in his hands. I pause, taking a minute to make sure I have my balance before I look up. Even though it wasn’t really my fault, I’m about to apologize.
Only the words get stuck in my throat.
“Sorry about that. The danger of picking up too many mass-markets,” he says with a tentative smile, a smile that says he’s a little embarrassed.
And suddenly everything around me stops. The sounds of the other people, the wind in the trees—it fades away, and all I see is the guy in front of me. Everything about him is the same. The wavy hair, the dark eyes, the self-conscious half smile.
I close my eyes, sure that I’m imagining this, that too much sun and not enough sleep have finally gotten to me, but when I open them again, he’s still there.
It’s like I’ve conjured him out of thin air.
“Ben?” I whisper, because my whole body feels like it’s frozen, like I’m worried he’ll disappear.
en blushes, and that’s all I need.
It’s like he never left, like he’s been by my side the whole time, like we’ve been sharing half smiles, stealing glances at each other, and blushing because we remember too well what it feels like to melt into each other, press our lips together, and forget how messed up the world is.
I let out a yelp and throw my arms around him. I don’t ask what he’s doing here or how long he’s been back or even why he hasn’t come to find me. I just pull him close and hold on to him with everything I’ve got. I revel in how real he is. The feel of him under my hands, the warmth of his skin, the muscles in his arms, the breath in his chest. He’s real.
Only he’s not right.
It’s after I’ve thrown my arms around him that I realize what’s different.
And it’s not just the awkward way that he’s standing limply in my arms, like someone who’s been tackled by a crazy chick he’s never seen before. It’s that he doesn’t feel right in my arms. It doesn’t feel like we fit, and he even smells different—like spices and wet grass.
I know what that must mean.
Flustered, I pull back from him and start rambling. I don’t even know what I’m saying, but it has to be some sort of awkward apology, because he shrugs and runs a hand through his hair, then opens his mouth to say something before shutting it again.
My heart is pounding in my ears and my throat feels thick. A wave of desperation rolls through me, stinging my eyes and carving a hole in my chest. This isn’t fair.
I look at him again, and suddenly all I see are the differences. His hair is a little too short; his eyes are a little too light and maybe not sad enough; his chest is a little too broad; and he’s wearing khaki shorts and an NFL sweatshirt. I fight to suck down enough air to keep from hurling all over his Adidas sneakers.
This guy isn’t my Ben at all. He’s a stranger wearing the same face.
Because there isn’t just one universe, but rather many. A multiverse. There are thousands of different universes, and one theory is that they all started parallel, but when different people in the different universes made different choices, things grew outward differently.
Everyone in this world could have a doppelgänger out there—more than one. There could even be other versions of me living different lives in different worlds.
Just like there could be other versions of Ben.
Like this one.
thought about my Ben Michaels every day.
All one hundred and forty of them.
I try to keep myself busy, and most days I can push thoughts of him to the back of my mind, but I can’t forget him. I’ll be doing something mundane, like teasing Jared and ruffling his hair or helping Cecily at the evac shelter, and a memory of Ben or something he said will just strike me.
Like the time Cee and I were fueling the last of the gas tanks and I told her, “I’ve always loved the smell of gasoline.”
And suddenly I was overcome with a moment and I was somewhere else—Ben and I standing outside Kon-Tiki Motorcycles in Pacific Beach, a breeze coming off the ocean, my skin feeling strangely empty and open. My fingers intertwined with his, I moved into his space and laid my forehead on his chest. His whole body relaxed, as if tension was rolling off his body in waves. His free hand came up and his fingers slipped through my hair before his hand settled between my shoulder blades, and I whispered his name.
There’s always a second where I’m lost in the memory and I feel light and happy. A giddy smile will overtake my face, and it will almost feel like he was just here.
Almost.
Then the heaviness of reality sets in, and I remember that I’m alone. That Ben is gone.
And it’s like my heart breaks all over again.
Nights are worse. I lie awake and think of the way Ben’s lips tasted against mine, or the strength in his long fingers and the way they felt against my skin. Sometimes missing him is visceral—I remember what it was like to have his arms around me, and I can feel their absence.
What I miss most is the way he smiled against my cheek.
But this isn’t my Ben Michaels.
e stand there—me and this stranger—for a minute, unsure of what to say next. I still can’t believe he’s real. Ben told me he’d never run into a double in this world. I guess I’d assumed one didn’t exist.
The guy must know I mistook him for someone else, because he says, “I just moved down here from San Clemente.” He gestures to another guy behind him who is a little thinner with dark hair that’s cut a little shorter but has the same curl at the ends, and he has the same deep-set eyes. He looks almost identical. “My brother and I came after the quakes took out our house. We heard there was more food down here.”
His brother—Derek.
“It’s the military presence,” I mumble. Hopefully that’s enough of an explanation. I can’t force myself to say anything else. I’m too busy looking over his shoulder. His brother looks so much like him, just an older version. I don’t ask what happened to their parents or what kind of lives they used to have. I just stare.
Finally the guy who’s not Ben says something that’s half grunt, half mumble, then bends down and starts picking up the books he dropped.
I almost help him. I ran into him, which is why he dropped the books, but for some reason, I can’t make myself help. I don’t want to get sucked into a conversation with him. I don’t want to know who he is or why he’s here or what he’s like. It doesn’t matter. His similarities and his differences will both feel the same. They’ll hurt.
I look over my shoulder. Cecily is handing two bottles of water to the guy with the broken glasses, but she’s looking at me. I have an overwhelming need to get out of here.
So I do.
I head back to the car, grabbing Cecily and pulling her with me.
“Hey, wait, is that Ben Michaels?” she says. “Oh my God, I thought—”
“It’s not him.” I don’t want to explain what little I know of the multiverse and doppelgängers. Not now.
“But—”
“Cee, I said it’s not him. Do they have anything you want?”
Cecily shakes her head.
“Can we get out of here?”
She must see it on my face, whatever it is that I’m feeling. Or maybe it’s just her good-friend instincts that let her know this is a dead topic. Either way, she nods and moves around to the driver’s side. “Out of here it is.”
I get into the car, my door slamming shut behind me.
Cecily starts the car and we pull away, leaving Ben’s lookalike behind. I curl my hands into fists to keep them from shaking, and lean my head back against the seat.
A few times, I catch her glancing at me, and I know she wants to ask what my deal is. But she doesn’t. Because that’s what makes our friendship work. We tease each other—she’s too high-spirited and I’m too bitchy—but we’re there for each other when it matters.
Which means she knows when I need to be left alone.
I think about Ben Michaels all the time.
Sometimes I wonder if I chose wrong—if I should have asked my Ben to stay. If I had that day to do over, I wonder if I would still make the same choices.
Mostly I just wonder if I’ll ever see him again.
welve hours later, I arrive at Qualcomm and see Cecily again. Her uncle ran the stadium before the quakes. Now it’s the largest evacuation shelter in San Diego, and running it is a family affair.
Normally I like being here. Something about the way Cee has adopted the shelter and all its inhabitants as her personal responsibility makes things feel a little less bleak. Hanging out and being bossed around makes it seem like we’re all in this together.
But not right now. This isn’t that kind of visit.
When she sees me, she doesn’t sugarcoat it. “There’s another missing person,” she says, her white-blond hair hanging disheveled from something that might have been a ponytail. Her gray T-shirt is dirty, and her jeans are ripped in a few places. If I’d ever wondered what it looked like to carry the weight of part of the city—the homeless part—on your shoulders, now I know.
Our missing person this time is Renee Adams. She’s twenty-two years old, and according to the description, she’s five-four and thin, with wavy, shoulder-length brown hair, and brown eyes. The only possessions she has to her name are a white long-sleeved sweater, a pair of 7 jeans, flip-flops, a last-season Coach purse, and a gold ring. She worked downtown, and before the quakes, she lived with her boyfriend in Pacific Beach. He’s presumed dead now, and she arrived at Qualcomm after seeing that her apartment building had collapsed in on itself.
Assigned to a cot in Club Level section 47, one of the areas reserved for single women, Renee kept to herself, spent more time sleeping than awake, and cried a lot. She was even assigned to the suicide watch list for one of the grief counselors.
But she wasn’t in her group therapy session this afternoon. And at this moment, a little past nine thirty on Monday evening—more than three hours past city curfew—she isn’t anywhere in section 47. The all-call announcements in the stadium have gone unanswered. Her cot is empty.
Except for the ripped sheet and a tiny, yellowed fragment that unmistakably used to be part of a fingernail.
I hold a ruler between gloved fingers and take a picture of the measurement. The rip is four and three quarters inches long, half an inch at its widest point, and the nail looks like it might be from her thumb.
I imagine a girl pulled off the cot, reaching out to grab on to something—anything—and catching hold of the sheet. Only sheets aren’t very strong, so it rips easily, and she leaves a tiny piece of herself behind.
“When did she go missing?” Deirdre asks, her voice quiet but weighed down with a sense of gravity.
I don’t look at Cecily when she says she doesn’t know. She’s trying to look calm and in charge, trying to hold it together, but her eyes are red-rimmed, and her face has that splotchy look it gets when she’s cried too much.
Deirdre has been an FBI agent for a little more than ten years. She worked with my dad for eight of them. She doesn’t know Cecily like I do, but she can recognize undeserved guilt when she sees it. “Cecily, none of this is on you. The best thing you can do right now is give us information.” Rephrasing, she says, “When was she last seen?”
Cecily swallows forcibly. “She missed the group meetings yesterday, too, which was why someone wanted to check on her after she missed again today. I’ve talked to everyone, and by everyone I mean everyone I could find, but she didn’t know many people, or I guess not many people knew her. So as far as I can tell, the last time anyone saw her was the group therapy meeting on Friday at four p.m.”
Three days.
Even though I’m in jeans and a hoodie, I shiver. My dad used to say that, in an endangered circumstance, like an abduction, if you didn’t find the person within twenty-four hours of their disappearance, the chances you’d find them alive were less than 10 percent. And those chances diminished every hour.
“I’m going to talk to the counselor,” Deirdre says, and I can tell by her tone that she’s talking more for Cecily’s benefit than mine. We’ve been opening enough of these files lately; we have a routine. “Finish up and meet by the ramp. Cecily, if you remember anything—”
“Of course,” Cecily says, her eyes wide and eager to please. Her blond hair bounces with each nod of her head. “I’ll tell you right away.”
As soon as Deirdre’s out of sight, Cecily’s shoulders droop and she slumps into a seated position on the floor.
After I snap a few more pictures and write down the remaining details—Renee’s purse is still here, overturned with a broken cell phone on the floor next to what looks like a drop of blood on the concrete—I turn and look at Cee. “I didn’t know her,” she says.
“There are a lot of people here.” We both realize it’s unrealistic to expect her to know everyone. Even someone with the social-butterfly gene like Cee can’t possibly get acquainted with everyone in a stadium full of displaced people.
“But I don’t know anything about her. Not really,” she says, folding her arms across her chest. “Just her name and what people have said about her.”
I want to say something comforting—that’s what Cecily needs from me right now—but everything I think of sounds too cold. Reducing a person to a paragraph of hearsay is depressing no matter what words you use.
“Oh!” Cecily sits up straighter. “I forgot. Someone told me they thought Renee did something with computers. You know, like, for work. They weren’t sure what, but something pretty badass. She’d said something about it one night, about missing her job, and how without computers she was practically obsolete.”
“I’ll put it in the file,” I say.
Cecily laughs. The bitterness doesn’t sound right coming from her. “She thought she was obsolete then. I wonder what she’s thinking now.”
Even though I know it won’t help, I say it anyway. “This isn’t your fault.”
“How could she have disappeared like that?” she asks, picking at her fingernails. “How could any of them? Jennifer Joyce or Clinton Nelson or David Bonnell or—”
I interrupt her before she names all of them. The truth is that she’s right. We shouldn’t be losing more people now. But I don’t say that. Instead I say, “I don’t know, but these are teenagers and grown adults. You can’t be responsible for them.”
She looks up at me, and our eyes meet for the first time tonight.
Her blue eyes are glassy, and I want her to feel better, so I reach for something—anything—that might do it.
“Who knows, maybe they’re not even missing,” I say. “Maybe Renee Adams walked off.” The words stick in my throat. The lie is awkward and forced on my tongue. Someone who loses half a fingernail doesn’t walk off without the last few belongings to her name.
Cecily just shakes her head and looks away.
She knows what I do: that most of the people who are here have nowhere else to go.
“We haven’t found any of them,” she says, her voice hitching near the end of the sentence.
I press my lips and try to think of something useful to say, something to make her feel better. But she’s always been far better at that than I have.
“Where are they all going?” she asks.
I don’t answer, because for the life of me, I don’t know.
ecily and two of the evac center’s armed guards escort Deirdre and me back to the car.
“Don’t worry, it’ll get better,” I lie as I hug her.
Then Deirdre and I are in the car and driving through the maze that is the parking lot. We suffer in silence for a few minutes, Deirdre with her lips pressed together, her frown lines etching themselves more permanently into her face. I briefly wonder if she’ll ever laugh or smile like she used to, and then she says what I’ve been thinking this whole time. “Another one.”
I don’t answer, because I don’t have to.
My dad worked in Missing Persons—it was his first job as an analyst with the Bureau—back in the nineties. His first year, there were 67,806 active missing-person cases in the US. I remember thinking then how unfathomably huge that number seemed.
But that was when he was alive.
It doesn’t seem huge anymore.
Because as of this morning, there are 113,801 missing persons—the ones not presumed dead. And that’s just in San Diego County.
Renee Adams is number 113,802.
he interstates are cracked, collapsed, half fallen, and unstable, so we take back roads. They’ve been cleared, but they’re not in good shape. I hold on to the “oh shit” handle as we drive to keep my body from slamming into the door. We don’t talk, because the headlights only allow Deirdre to see about ten feet of road in front of her. The ride is bumpy, slow, and dark.
We pass through the first military checkpoint at Aero Drive and then the one at Balboa Avenue without incident.
Each time, Deirdre stops the car and it’s the same routine. A Marine with a machine gun strapped over his shoulder shines a flashlight into the car. Deirdre holds up both our IDs, and when we’re recognized, the Marine nods and waves us through.
While we drive, I avoid looking out the window. It’s dark, so it’s not like I could really see anything. But I know what’s there. I know the Walmart on Aero Drive survived the quakes with minimal damage, only to be destroyed by the looting. It’s too easy to remember the last time I was there. The crunch of broken glass under my feet, the thick smoke, the smell of fire and burning plastic, and the body of the dead pregnant woman, killed by blunt-force trauma to the back of the head.
It’s much too easy to remember. Every time I close my eyes, I wish I could forget.
Around Balboa, there are some houses still standing and some that are at least inhabitable—but for the most part, everything is different. It doesn’t hurt any less to drive by neighborhoods that are flattened, to see debris where there used to be structures.
It hurts to think that I can hardly remember what it looked like before.
I keep my eyes closed and try to think about nothing—absolutely nothing. I will my mind to keep itself blank. But it’s black, like a black hole, like a portal, and suddenly I can see Ben, his dark eyes and his soft brown hair. I can see the look on his face when he said, “I’ll come back for you.” When he took one more step back and promised. When he stopped, said my name, told me he loved me, and then the portal swallowed him into the blackness.
Aching and a little breathless, I press the heels of my hands into my eyes hard, as if that will somehow get rid of the memory.
he third checkpoint is at Clairemont Mesa Boulevard. We pass two flares and a Marine with a machine gun to signal the upcoming stop. Deirdre slows the car until it jerks to a standstill, then rolls down her window and holds out our IDs.
But instead of waving us through, he holds on to them, examining their every corner with the flashlight.
My first reaction is to be annoyed. I’m so exhausted my whole body aches with a heaviness that makes me feel sluggish and irritable. We’re supposed to be on the same team—the good guys—and here we are being detained by some overeager hero wannabe.
But when he still doesn’t give the IDs back, a trickle of fear moves through me like a chill. I shiver a little and sit up straighter.
Something’s not right.
He looks up and says, “What’s your business on the road?” His voice is deep, and I don’t recognize it. He’s either new to this checkpoint or new to the night shift.
My heart speeds up, pumping a little too fast.
Deirdre has the patience of a saint, so she doesn’t snap at this guy. Instead she quietly explains, “We’ve just come from Qualcomm. Another missing-person case, endangered, class two.”
Endangered means it looks like an abduction scenario, rather than someone who’s run away or someone who hasn’t been found and is presumed dead from one of the disasters. Class two means it’s someone between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four.
“Can you step out of the car, please?” he says, and my breath feels shallow.
Deirdre must be feeling like me because she says, “Seriously?”
He waits for us to get out. I force my breath to stay even and my hands to relax. Clenched fists don’t exactly say cooperation.
Deirdre opens her door and glances at me. I’d have to be blind to miss the pointed look she gives me. It says, Don’t cause trouble. I don’t need the reminder. Before anyone declared martial law, people sometimes fought the military—there were even a few cases of leftover entitlement after it was official, people who didn’t want to believe the world had changed, people who refused to give up their liberties.
Those people ended up dead.
I bite back the spike of fear that shoots through my chest and open my door.
Getting out of the car, I immediately raise my hands and intertwine my fingers, locking them behind my head. I exhale evenly and tell myself that I know this drill. That I will cooperate and that this is routine.
In a few minutes we’ll be back on our way.
Two Marines in full camouflage step out of the darkness. One trains his gun on me.
he other Marine adjusts his gun so it’s behind his back as he says, “Do you have any weapons on your person?”
“No, sir,” I say.
He nods and begins patting me down.
I almost tell him my gun is in the glove compartment, but then I don’t.
For one, he didn’t ask. And I’d rather he not know it’s there in case I need it.
My whole body is tensed, poised for something—fight or flight, I’m not sure. Maybe I’m also just inherently resistant to some guy with a gun feeling me up. I see two Marines search the car, and I hear the muffled sounds of Deirdre’s voice, though I can’t make out the words.
I force myself to let go of my breath and relax a little.
The Marine feeling me up straightens. He’s young and makes me think of Alex—not because they look anything alike, but because four months ago, this guy could have been in high school.
“You can put your hands down,” he says to me, adding louder, “we’re clear.”
Not for the first time, I wonder if Alex would have enlisted if he hadn’t died out behind Park Village. The wave of guilt and sorrow at that thought roils through my body, leaving an ache in my chest and a bitter taste in my mouth. I made so many mistakes, and Alex paid for the worst of them.
I hear Deirdre open her car door. “Janelle, get in.”
I don’t hesitate. I jump in and shut my door in one movement.
My leg bounces a little while I wait for Deirdre to start the car. Her movements are slow and purposeful, so it doesn’t look like we’re running away. Even though I understand the psychology of it, I feel a panicked urge to reach over and do it for her.
I keep my face blank while the engine roars to life. As we start to drive away, slowly leaving the flares and guns behind, I realize I’ve been holding my breath.
“We’re fine,” Deirdre says, her shaking voice the only thing that tells me she’s trying to convince herself as much as me.
“I know,” I say, so she doesn’t worry, but then I lean my forehead against the cool glass of the window, feeling my pulse ring through my ears.
Either she’s unconvinced, or talking it out will help her calm down, because she continues, “They stopped a driver, alone, fifteen minutes before us. He had no explanation for being out after curfew, and when they asked him to get out of the car, he abandoned the vehicle, disarmed one of the Marines, and gave the guy a bloody nose. They lost him in the dark.”
“He got away?” I ask, because I’m surprised. The checkpoint Marines are well trained and heavily armed. Probability would suggest running from them would mean injury or death.
Deirdre nods. “The suspect was male, approximately six feet in height, and in his twenties with shaggy dark hair, blue eyes, and light facial hair. He was dressed completely in black with boots that looked military.”
She stops, and I wait for her to keep going. There’s obviously more.
But she doesn’t say anything else, so I look over. Her face is a mask as she stares out the windshield, but then she presses her lips together, slows the car to a stop, and looks over at me.
She repeats the description, though she doesn’t need to. “Sound like anyone you know?”
I look away. Of course it does.
It’s exactly how I would have described a certain agent with the Interverse Agency, the agency that polices the multiverse. An agent who infiltrated the FBI when he was trying to stop Wave Function Collapse. An agent that I don’t have a stellar relationship with.
Taylor Barclay.
don’t say Barclay’s name out loud, as if speaking the words could somehow make them more likely to come true.
Deirdre adds, “They sent out a search team, but it’s like he disappeared.”
Chills move over my arms and down my neck. These days, disappeared has a new meaning to me—for several reasons. First, because we have so many people just dropping off the face of the earth. But also because I’ve seen people vanish right in front of me.
I’ve seen black holes that open out of nothingness, circular portals to other worlds, seven feet or taller, like some kind of big vertical pool of tar. I’ve felt the temperature drop as the air around me suddenly took on a different quality and smell—wet, never-ending, open. I’ve had to watch people get swallowed up by portals and leave this earth.
And it’s not the first time I’ve wondered if the disappearances in my world and the portals are somehow connected.
People disappearing into thin air shouldn’t be this common.
e don’t have any answers—just too much speculation—when we finally pass through security at Miramar and pull into the on-base housing.
“Do you want to tell him, or should I?” Deirdre says before we get out of the car. I know she’s still mad that I never told her anything this past fall until it was too late. I know it was careless to keep everything to myself. As soon as we uncovered what was happening with the portals, Alex wanted me to tell Struz what was really going on, and I didn’t.
And I know that’s probably the main reason Alex is dead.
I have to live with that.
“I’ll tell him,” I say.
Deirdre nods, and we get out of the car. She heads to her apartment and I head to the one I share with Jared and Struz. It’s a two-bedroom and military furnished, which means everything is taupe and gently used, but it’s dry and sturdy and we have cases of bottled water stacked up in every closet, which is more than a lot of other people have. For the past hundred and fifteen days, we’ve been calling it home.
“Dude, I’m starting to feel like a neglected housewife,” Jared says with a smile when I get inside. The room is dark, but he’s got a paperback in his lap and a candle lit on the corner table next to the La-Z-Boy that he’s started to refer to as his chair. Electricity is scarce; brown-outs are common, and as a result everyone is only supposed to use it when they have to—luckily the base has a wood-burning stove.
“Did you make me dinner, at least?” I say, joking right back, even though the irony of the situation twists a little like a rusty knife in my gut. After I tried so hard to keep him from having to grow up too fast, the past few months have forced it beyond my control.
“There are cold SpaghettiOs on the counter.”
Food is rationed and handed out once a week, one of my many jobs. Right now we’re dealing with nonperishables, because that’s all we’ve got. Things like fruit, vegetables, dairy, and meat are already all gone. Anyone on a farm is working to rebuild, but I don’t know how long that will take. And I’m not sure we have a plan for when the nonperishables run out.
Water is the worst. Anyone with a well can boil water to purify the effects of the wildfires, but tap water in most of Southern California is undrinkable. The military has been doing supply runs, bringing in cases of bottled water that had been stockpiled by FEMA. Struz keeps saying things will get better, but they’ll get worse before they do—the rest of the winter will be hard, harder for people in colder climates, harder for people in poorer communities. It’s a different kind of aftershock.
“Gotta love SpaghettiOs,” I say with a sigh. I’m hungry, but I go to Jared first and ruffle his hair. “Did you get enough to eat?”
He picks up his book and rolls his eyes. “Don’t even try to give me your dinner again.”
I don’t respond, because that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. Instead I say, “How was school?”
“Lame,” he answers. “I don’t know who decided it was okay to have school on Sunday, but they should be abducted by aliens.”
Schools shut down when the quakes happened, but they’ve opened up again—large, auditorium-style, and organized by accessibility instead of grade, and they’re open every day. Jared walks to the old Mira Mesa High School each morning with the other kids who live on the base. Grades seven and up have classes in the gym, and everyone else is in the cafeteria. I went the first few weeks, but Jared’s right, it was lame.
The truth is, organized school keeps kids out of trouble. It’s a mild sense of normalcy to hold the hysteria at bay. That’s why there’s school on Sundays. Instead of that, I say, “Got to make up for that lost time.”
Jared frowns, but he doesn’t bother voicing his opinion about my absence at school. It’s a discussion that was considered closed a long time ago.
I put in to take my GED and effectively graduate early. So did most of the people I knew from Eastview. A lot of them got involved with the Red Cross to help the reconstruction effort. That’s what Kate and Nick are doing. Anyone a little more hard-core took the ASVAB, the military entrance exam, and joined the military.
I got where I am now because of Struz. After I “graduated,” I went one step further with the tests and firearms qualifications. Then Struz signed off on my employment with the FBI—so I’m essentially a cross between an apprentice and a temp. He paired me with Deirdre because of her experience and told me he expects me to pick up and go to college once things get back to normal.
We have no idea when that will happen, though, and I don’t know what else I would want to do with my life, anyway. I didn’t really ever have concrete plans, but I wanted to go to college, travel, and study abroad. I wanted the chance to figure out what my dreams were. Alex wanted to follow in my dad’s footsteps. With both of them gone, I feel like I owe it to them to do what they can’t—to fight the bad guys and all that.
Jared’s stomach growls but I ignore it. “How’s the leg?” I ask.
“Fine,” he says, but his face scrunches up a little and I know it’s not. He broke it during the quakes, and even though it’s healed now, it’s not as strong as it was before.
I lean into him and remind myself it could be worse. Deirdre’s son lost his arm, and her daughter hasn’t spoken since the world changed.
“What are you reading?” I ask, but focusing on the book makes me think of Ben’s lookalike and how maybe I should have helped him pick up the books I made him drop—maybe I should have talked to him—and I have to shake him from my head.
Jared’s eyes light up. “It’s super cool. Struz found it somewhere. Some of the pages are water-damaged, but it’s all still readable. It’s about this guy who just got out of prison and goes hiking up in Alaska and he finds this downed airplane that had the president’s wife on it, and she’s dead.”
“Because of the crash?”
“No way, people totally murdered her,” he says, standing up. “I’m only like fifty pages or so in. It’s pretty awesome. You’d like it.” Then his face gets serious. “You’re really not hungry? Because if you are, you should eat, but if you’re not …”
I shake my head. “Go for it. Struz out back?”
“Yeah, he’s doing the whole walkie thing.”
I nod and head out through the sliding glass doors to the porch and the five square feet of lawn that we call a yard. Struz is sitting in one of the two folding chairs and his legs make him look like he’s too big for the chair, like it’s a kiddie chair or something. He doesn’t pay me much attention as I shut the sliding door behind me. He’s got a walkie-talkie to his ear and a high-powered flashlight trained on a map of San Diego on the patio table.
“President’s new orders,” a voice crackles through the walkie, followed by a bitter chuckle, and I wonder what orders these are. And what part of the conversation I’ve missed.
Struz sighs and says, “I’ll see what we can do.”
The real president, the one who was elected and in office when the world changed, is in a coma, and the vice president is dead. The speaker of the house is now the president, and apparently he’s sort of a joke. It’s supposed to be an election year, which means that in less than a year we could elect a new president, but that would require getting voting methods under control before then, and I doubt that’s going to happen.
It doesn’t matter, though. The government we had doesn’t work for this kind of large-scale crisis. If San Diego had been the only city affected, or even if it had just been California, the rest of the country would be sending us aid and going on with life as usual.
But everyone was affected. No one—no matter who they were or where they lived or what they believed in—was spared.
The first thing the acting president did was suspend habeas corpus and declare martial law. Since then he’s passed temporary acts to give the military the power to absorb every able-bodied member of local law-enforcement agencies in order to keep peace and maintain some sort of structure.
Struz looks at me and says, “False alarm?” There’s hope on his face, like every time he’s asked, but I don’t think it’s as real as it used to be. He’s still hoping but he doesn’t believe in it anymore.
I shake my head.
“You should go to bed. Early day tomorrow. I’ll check out your report in the morning.”
“What about you?” I ask, because now he’s as bad as my dad was. He hardly ever sleeps, and when he does, it’s sitting up with his walkie next to him in case something happens.
“It’s going to be a long night,” he says with a shake of his head.
I know better than to argue so I turn to go back inside. As I open the door, I hear a grainy voice over the walkie-talkie say, “Hey, Struz, we’ve got reports of another one out in Poway. I’ve got a team en route.”
Another one. I don’t need anyone to spell out what that means. It’s always the same thing—more abductions.
More people missing.
head upstairs and slip into my bedroom. The room smells like evergreen trees. We didn’t have a tree for Christmas this year—obviously, since there aren’t exactly trees to go around—so Jared and Struz dug up some old evergreen-scented candles and lit them all over the house.
I light the candle on the nightstand and peel off my jeans and change my T-shirt, then reach under the bed for a manila folder before crawling under the covers. The file is worn and a little frayed from overhandling, but that doesn’t stop me. It was already overhandled before it was passed to me.
Lying back on my pillow, I look at her name—Emily Bauer. The blue ink is faded, as if time is trying to erase her existence completely. For a minute, I imagine what Emily was like, if she was anything like I am now. I wonder where she’d be and what she’d be like if she hadn’t gone missing seventeen years ago.
Then I open it up—the one case file of my father’s that I refused to throw away.
I don’t even need to read it—every word has been burned in my memory at this point.
The file is an unsolved case from 1995, from one of my dad’s first years on the job, back when he worked missing persons—ironically, the same job I’m working right now.
A seventeen-year-old girl—captain of the swim team, with an academic scholarship to USC, a boyfriend, friends, the perfect family with a dog and a white picket fence—went missing from her bedroom. All her possessions were untouched and in their rightful place. No forced entry, no signs of a break-in, no one who heard or saw anything unusual—it was like she just disappeared.
Except for a bloody partial handprint on her wall.
I know the case is cold now; it’s been cold for the past seventeen years while it sat on my dad’s desk, and now that the world is changed, I know there isn’t any hope of solving it. But this case isn’t that different from the ones we have now. Maybe something will help me solve them. Besides, if my dad were still here, he would still be looking over the file every night, still looking for something he missed.
Once, when we were twelve, Alex asked my dad why he held on to the case. He said, “Why haven’t you given up?”
It was a Saturday in the summer. We’d just played in one of those coed Little League softball games, and we were sweaty and starving, and my dad was pulling pizza leftovers from the fridge. But when Alex asked that, he stopped and turned around. His face was so serious that, even then, I knew whatever he said would be something I never forgot.
And I haven’t.
He said, “Giving up on something is like admitting you never wanted it in the first place. I won’t ever give up on that girl. I’ll always be looking for her. Even if everyone else in her life has moved on, I won’t rest until I figure out what we missed and we’ve gotten her back. Until she’s safe.”
He’s not here to look for her anymore, but I am, and I’m not going to give up on her either.
Who knows—maybe something will help me with the people going missing right now.
Or that’s what I tell myself. The other reason I reread this file every night is because I need something to focus on right before I go to sleep—something to think about—because that’s the moment when my mind is at its worst, when if left to its own devices, it won’t stop remembering.
The gunshot, Reid’s and Alex’s hands on the gun, blood pouring from the hole in Alex’s neck, his eyes glassy, my hands covered in blood.
I can’t shake these images. I see them every time I close my eyes. I dream about that night almost every time I fall asleep. In the dreams, I try to make different choices, but the end result is always the same.
My dad is still dead. There won’t be any more X-Files marathons or bad Syfy movies. Alex is still dead—his blood still staining the ground just outside Park Village—and he’s never going to drag me to another terrible action movie with no plot. He’ll never have the chance to defy his mother and go to West Point instead of Stanford. He’s never going to follow his dreams.
And Ben is still gone.
he next morning I’m up early and then gone all day, delivering rations from the base to different neighborhoods. When I get home, Struz is out. Jared launches into a story about his Monday before I even get inside, something about a guy diving out of a skyscraper or something. I know I’m not hearing him right, but all day this terrible feeling has been welling up inside me, the kind that reaches through your veins and down into your bones. My whole body is practically vibrating with it.
Like my body knows something bad is about to happen.
“Dude, if you’re not going to listen to me …”
“Jared, I’m sorry, I spaced out.”
I look at my brother—he’s got Monopoly set up, and he’s playing against himself. He sees me looking and says, “I set it up so you could play with me when you got back, and then I got bored. But we can set it up again.”
“Sure, that works,” I say. I suddenly feel like I’m too old. Not physically, but just that I’m too tired, too stressed, and too anxious. Even though there isn’t any danger of Wave Function Collapse and there’s no Oppenheimer counting down to the end of the world, it’s like I’m waiting for something else to go wrong.
I sit on the floor with him, and he launches into a story about his class field trip to the movie theater down the street from the school. “It was so cool. Mr. Hubley totally broke into the theater and we went in the biggest one, and he had the other teachers all sit with us while he set up a projector and we watched Mission Impossible 4.”
I’m not sure if it’s considered breaking in now that the theater has been abandoned, although I guess it’s still private property. “How was the movie?” I ask, even though I’m sure it was just as bad as the first three.
My eyes burn with that thought, because it’s something I would have said to Alex.
“It was so awesome. There’s this really cool part where Tom Cruise flies down the side of this building. Maybe Cecily can get that for the next movie night?”
“I’ll ask her,” I say truthfully, as we clear the houses off the board.
“What’s for dinner tonight?” Jared asks. “No spaghetti, right?”
We try to have something special on Mondays. I’m not sure if it was Struz’s idea or mine, but we all eat together then too. It’s nice. “I was thinking a feast of macaroni and cheese, and canned peas and chicken.”
“Canned chicken?” Jared makes a face.
“I imagine the canned sardines are worse,” I tell him.
“Why can’t you just lift something better from the commissary?” Jared asks.
I don’t tell him there is nothing better. Instead, I say, “Wow, Jared, I don’t know, maybe because that’s stealing?”
“Whatever, plenty of people steal stuff.” Jared begins listing all of his friends and the amazing things they’ve gotten to eat recently.
There’s a knock at the door.
“I bet Struz forgot his keys,” Jared says, bouncing up from the floor.
“I can assure you if Victor Le says he had filet mignon last night, he either has cattle in his backyard or he’s lying,” I call after him.
I hear my brother say something muffled, and then there’s a slam as someone kicks open the front door.
I have a split second to consider a strategy, but I don’t know what I’m up against, so I jump up and step into the hall.
In my doorway is the outline of a man, standing behind my brother. Based on his height and build, I know it’s not Struz.
It feels like all the air has been sucked out of the room. I have absolutely nothing to defend myself with, and this guy has my brother.
But when he uses his foot to kick the door shut and the light adjusts in the room, I realize it’s Taylor Barclay.
“What’s the matter, Tenner? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he says with a smile.
relax for a second. My whole body feels a little like Jell-O, and I reach out and put my hand on the wall. Though I’m sure Barclay in my world is a bad sign.
He’s got one hand on Jared’s shoulder. I don’t like that.
Barclay must see the shift in my position. “Why don’t you head upstairs, kid?”
Jared looks at me, and I nod. The last thing I want is him getting dragged into whatever has Barclay showing up at my door. We both watch him as he leaves the room.
“Tenner, relax.” He raises his empty hands and smiles. “Just here to talk. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
His smile is disarming. It’s light and casual, like we’re long-lost friends and he’s happy to see me.
“So you come to my home and scare my brother?”
Barclay shrugs. “I knocked.”
“What do you want?” I ask, because let’s face it, he wants something.
His smile disappears and his eyebrows draw together, a flicker of annoyance on his face. “I need your help. I need you to come with me.”
He pulls a quantum charger from his pocket—I’d recognize one of those anywhere—and I shake my head. I remember how much it burned the last time he dragged me through a portal, and that thought sparks one that’s worse—all our missing people. What if that’s why Barclay is here? What if I’m next?
“I’m not going anywhere.” I bite my bottom lip and debate what to do next.
“We don’t have time to argue right now,” he says. “I’ll explain everything once we’re out of here.”
In hand-to-hand combat, I don’t stand a chance with Barclay unless I can take him by complete surprise and knock him out. I’m sure he has a gun on him, and I don’t. He also has a quantum charger and as a result he has access to anywhere—any universe. I can’t possibly keep him away from us.
Which means I need to hear him out.
“If you want me to go somewhere with you, you can explain it right now,” I say, pulling back. “I’m not about to just blindly follow you through a portal.”
“Fine, you want to have a chat, Tenner? Why don’t you have a seat,” he says as he sits down on our taupe couch with that stupid, arrogant smirk on his face.
I move into the living room and sit down on the couch as far as I can physically get from him. “So what is it?”
“We have a problem.”
“We?” I ask. Because there’s Barclay, and then there’s me. There’s no we at all.
He turns his blue eyes to me and stares for a second. Then he says, “It’s Ben.”
y heart might actually stop. “What about Ben?” My voice is too breathy, too quiet. It doesn’t sound like my own.
Barclay sits up straighter. “Have you seen him?”
I swallow. Hard. “No, he’s back in his home world.”
Barclay nods. “If you have—”
“I haven’t,” I insist, and I hate the fact that I’ve had to say it again.
He nods. “A couple months ago, I stumbled on a case. It’s big, Tenner,” he says, rubbing his hands together. “People from different universes are disappearing. They’re being kidnapped.”
Kidnapped. As in abducted.
He has my full attention now. I can feel my pulse all over my body, even in the tips of my fingers.
“Everything I’ve uncovered points to a complex organization, one that’s avoided getting caught for a long time,” Barclay continues. “Someone has set up the ultimate human-trafficking ring. They’re going into different universes, kidnapping people, and then selling them into slavery on other earths.”
“Human trafficking? Like sex slaves?”
“It’s bigger than that,” Barclay says with a grimace. “Think about the overall picture. Stealing people from other universes, especially universes that don’t have interverse travel capabilities. No one’s going to come looking for them, and they don’t have anywhere to go. No escape.
“And if there’s no fear of getting caught, someone could turn a huge profit by selling house slaves to the wealthy in every different world. Slaves for cheap labor, slaves that could be soldiers in a war you’re waging, and yes, slaves for sex, too.”
No one’s going to come looking for them, and they don’t have anywhere to go.
I can’t help be stuck on that. I see what he’s saying—that makes it the perfect crime—but there’s something in my brain that’s having trouble computing. How selfish and depraved does a person have to be to put something like this together? I wonder if they watch people and pick them out with a purpose, or if they just grab them at random and figure it out later.
I think of Renee Adams, and I wonder what kind of slave she is right now. The thought makes me want to throw up.
“So that’s what’s happening here—why we have so many missing people?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.
“What?” Barclay asks, before he nods and says, “Oh. Yeah. Any world that has low technology capabilities would be a huge target. A world that’s just gone through a disaster or a war, or any kind of devastating event, of course would become a likely target. More people can be abducted in a shorter period of time before authorities catch on.”
Something in the matter-of-fact way that he says this makes me realize that’s not why he’s here. He doesn’t care about Renee Adams or any of the other hundred thousand missing people we have in San Diego.
“So why are you here?” I ask.
“I need to find Ben,” he says. “And you’re the only one who can help me.”
“I haven’t seen him, Barclay,” I repeat, and I feel my throat tightening and my eyes burning as I have to admit again that he hasn’t come back.
“I know,” he says. “But you can still help me.”
“I’m not going to talk him into doing anything dangerous, if that’s what this is about,” I say, although from the look on Barclay’s face, I can tell that’s not it. “Besides, what does Ben have to do with a human-trafficking ring, unless …”
Unless he’s missing.
can’t bring myself to even voice the possibility.
Barclay shakes his head. “It’s complicated. Like I said. This is a big case. Missing persons was never even really on my radar—until a few months ago.”
“And what happened then?”
“The details aren’t important, but I started looking into a standard missing-persons case as a favor to a friend, only it turned out not to be very standard. It’s big, Tenner. A major interverse trafficking ring.”
This all makes sense, but … “I still don’t understand what this has to do with Ben.”
Barclay hesitates. He looks at his hands for a second, and I notice he’s biting the inside of his cheek. I’ve never seen him agitated quite like this.
“Tell me,” I say, even though I’m afraid to hear it.
Then he looks up with pity in his face. “Someone with unique abilities—like the ability to open portals and travel universes at will—would have an easier time getting around the strict interverse travel regulations the IA has in place.”
My mind jumps to the logical conclusion, but it takes my heart a minute to catch up. Because I don’t want to believe that it’s a possibility. “Ben can’t be a suspect. He—”
“You know what Ben can do,” Barclay says. “He’s the prime suspect.”
“But he’s home—”
Barclay shakes his head. “Tenner, Ben hasn’t been in his home world for almost three months.”
can’t breathe. For a minute, I’m not sure what I’m more upset about—the fact that the IA suspects Ben of human trafficking or that he isn’t at home and he hasn’t come back to me. Where else would he be? The whole reason he didn’t stay here was because I told him to go home—to his family.
“Look, I know Ben isn’t responsible. That’s why I need your help,” Barclay adds.
That makes me remember what I know of the IA and I realize that if Ben is the prime suspect, they probably have a shoot-on-sight command, and I focus on that.
“Ben would never do this,” I say. “You know him enough to know that.”
Barclay nods. “I’ve said as much, but none of my higher-ups will listen.”
“What do you need from me? To testify or something?” I ask. Character witnesses don’t count for much, but I know Ben. I know him better than anyone else. I know what kind of person he is, the mistakes he’s made, and the things he’s done to make up for them.
Barclay shakes his head, and something about the look on his face tells me whatever his plan is, it’s bigger, more dangerous, and maybe even less legal than something like testifying. “I need you to help me find him.”
I almost laugh. “If he’s not at home and he’s not here, I’ve got no other ideas. You have resources I can’t even imagine. How can I possibly help you? Besides, did you look around on your way in? My world is trying to rebuild. I need to be here.”
He shakes his head. “I’m not on the case anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said.” Barclay sighs. “I’ve been taken off the case because I have too many ties to it. They think that I’m personally invested since I know all the main players involved.”
He doesn’t have to say that he thinks it’s bullshit. I know he does, and he’s right. Sure, he worked a case that ended up involving Ben, but Ben was a target in that case, and if he were a suspect now, any agency would want an agent who knew the suspect to help out.
Agents are taken off cases for one reason: when they’ve become a liability.
Barclay didn’t seem to dislike Ben—once he decided not to shoot him, at least—but he didn’t have any real personal ties to him, either. If Ben did something wrong, Barclay wouldn’t hesitate to do what was needed. It’s the one quality he has that I actually respect.
Which begs the question: Who thinks he would be a liability, and why?
“What about Eric?” I say. Eric Brandt is another IA agent and Barclay’s partner. “You said he was your mentor. He could talk to someone.”
Barclay shakes his head, and when he speaks again his voice is thick. “Eric is dead.”
hat?” My voice is breathless. “How?”
“Officially, it was an accident,” Barclay says. “He was home alone, taking a shower. He slipped and fell, pulling the shower curtain down with him, and knocked himself out. The shower curtain clogged the drain and he drowned.”
And in case I hadn’t heard the skepticism in his voice or seen it on his face, he adds, “But it wasn’t an accident. Someone murdered him.”
I don’t disagree. It sounds like a scene from one of those bad Final Destination movies—too many coincidences lining up to equal an accidental death. Instead, I get to the point. “Who would do that?”
“I don’t know,” Barclay admits.
I open my mouth to offer my opinion, but then I stop and look at Barclay. He’s looking at me, waiting—expectant even. He obviously has a theory, and he wants to know if I’m going to come up with the same one.
I take a deep breath because I know that if I’m right, I might be about to dive into something huge. “When did it happen?”
“Both Eric and I wrote up our reports as soon as we realized this was human trafficking, not just one missing person,” Barclay answers. “Then we were excused from the case. I fought it. This case was huge for me, a career maker, but Eric told me to lay off the information, that he’d talk to the higher-ups.”
“And he did,” I say. I don’t like where I think this is going.
Barclay nods. “Two days later, Eric was dead and a report he supposedly signed with ‘proof’ against Ben was on the server. The order to find Ben and bring him in was issued.”
“That means …” My heart hammers in my chest, and I can’t say what I think out loud.
But Barclay knows what I mean. “Someone in IA is involved.”
Which would also explain the liability issue—Barclay was taken off the case because someone above him doesn’t actually want it solved.
Because Ben is a convenient scapegoat.
listen to everything Barclay says while I fight to keep my breathing even and my hands still.
I’m tempted to run upstairs, change my clothes, give Jared a hug and tell him I’ll be back, and bolt through a portal with Barclay—charge off and rescue Ben from these false charges. This is Ben. He saved my life, and I would do anything for him.
This is Ben—and I love him.
Even though I don’t trust Barclay himself, I trust his motives. This is Barclay wanting to do the right thing—get the right guy—and it’s him wanting to do the right thing for his career. Plus he and Eric were partners, and there’s an unwritten rule in law enforcement that says when your partner is killed, you do whatever it takes to nail the guy responsible.
But for me there’s still one very important thing to consider.
“How can I possibly help you?” I ask.
Barclay purses his lips, and I know he must have a well-thought-out reason. He strikes me as a guy who hardly ever asks for help, and I doubt I’m his go-to person. But whatever it is, he’s hesitant to tell me.
“I’m serious,” I add. “Even without IA resources, you’re still way more equipped to handle this alone. At best, I’ll slow you down. At worst, I’ll get in your way.”
He doesn’t say anything—he looks like he’s trying to weigh his words before speaking. Given his ability to offend me pretty easily, I can’t say I blame him.
“Don’t underestimate yourself,” he says finally. “I did that, and you almost shot me.”
“That’s different. We were here.” I shake my head. “How is me traipsing through different worlds with you going to be helpful? Plus, I have my brother to think about and a world to help rebuild.”
He rolls his eyes. “My plan is a little more sophisticated than that, Tenner.”
“So what is it?”
He doesn’t say anything, and that’s when I have my answer. I’m not going to blindly leave my world and put my life in Barclay’s hands, when I can’t think of anything that would actually help me find Ben or prove him innocent. “My answer is no.”
“You can’t say no. I—”
“This isn’t about you,” I say over him.
Barclay stands up and begins pacing around the room in front of me. “This is important. You need to come with me—I can’t find Ben without you.”
“Tell me your plan, and maybe I’ll reconsider.”
He shakes his head.
Stupid prick. “Then get out of my house,” I say as I stand up. I’ve had enough.
I’m halfway to the stairs when Barclay says, “You’re in danger, Tenner.”
I stop and turn to him. His expression is blank, his blue eyes just staring at me, without betraying whatever it is he’s thinking.
I don’t get a chance to ask him why. Because right then, as I’m halfway up the stairs, the front door flies open and Deirdre is there, gun drawn, with about a dozen Marines at her back, screaming at Barclay, telling him to put his hands on his head and get down on the ground.
can’t fucking believe this shit,” Barclay says as he raises his hands.
From the stairs, I yell that it’s okay, that it’s just Barclay, but no one listens.
The Marines move into the apartment, sweeping into position to cover any possible escape and to make sure no one else is here. Their guns are pointed at Barclay, their eyes only on him.
Deirdre shouts at Barclay and advances on him swiftly but cautiously. The look on her face is absolutely feral—this is Deirdre Rice, FBI agent, and Deirdre Rice, widow and mother of two kids, all in one. Deirdre, who’s not about to lose anyone else. If I was Barclay, I’d be scared.
As she moves in, Barclay keeps his hands raised. He’s relaxed, but with a clear look of annoyance on his face, as if this is inconvenient for him.
He doesn’t even flinch as Deirdre moves in and disarms him, taking a gun from the base of his spine.
“Do you have any other concealed weapons on you?” she says, her voice thick with venom.
“Gun at my left ankle,” he says.
Without taking her eyes off him, she bends down to retrieve the backup gun, and once she has it, orders a Marine to move in and frisk him.
I can’t help holding my breath. I’m worried Barclay has another weapon. He’s the kind of guy who would have a backup for the backup and the kind who would keep something to use to escape. Plus, with the technology he has access to, he could have something innocent looking like a pen that’s actually a lightsaber.
The last thing I want is for anyone to get hurt—Deirdre, the Marines, even Barclay.
“Can we put some of the guns away and maybe sit down and have a rational conversation?” I say.
Deirdre doesn’t turn to look at me, but I can see the anger sweep across her face. I know how much she blames Barclay for everything that’s happened—because he betrayed the Bureau, because he lied, because he was, in a lot of ways, too late.
“Taylor Barclay is wanted for questioning,” she says. “And I plan on doing just that.”
I nod because I know it’s true, and if Struz were here, I’m sure he’d be going through the same precautions.
“Cuff him,” Deirdre says to the Marine who’s just frisked Barclay and come up empty.
I hear a creak from the hallway upstairs and look up to see Jared. “You okay?” I whisper.
He nods. “Are you?”
I couldn’t be more proud of him. Deirdre and the Marines are here because Jared used the walkie-talkie in Struz’s bedroom to get in touch with them. Jared reacted, even though no one told him to, and now he’s watching me with fierce protectiveness.
It’s a little like looking in a mirror.
“I’m good, I’ll be up in a minute.” Again he nods, and he goes without having to be asked twice. He’s going to be a great man someday—he’s going to be a lot like our dad.
When I look at Barclay, Deirdre is maneuvering him to the couch. His hands are behind his back, and he’s not actively working against her, but he’s a pretty solid guy, and he’s not exactly helping her either.
“Where have you been, Taylor?” Deirdre asks.
He snorts. “Not anywhere you’d be familiar with.”
“So you just went home to your own universe and left us to clean up the mess you left behind?” she asks.
Barclay’s eyes shoot to mine, and I see the flicker of surprise, like he’d assumed I’d kept the multiverse and everything that went with it to myself, before he covers it with a shrug of feigned indifference. “Wasn’t exactly my mess.”
“And whose was it?” she asks, even though I told her—several times—the same story I told Struz. She knows it was Reid.
Barclay smiles. “That’s classified.”
I’m not sure why he’s trying to piss her off, but when she backhands him across the face, he must know it’s working.
he rest of the interrogation is painful to watch. It’s not like on television. There’s no soundtrack to manipulate your emotions, no music to muffle the shouted questions and answers, the sound of skin hitting skin, and the anxious breathing of everyone stuffed into too small a room. The air is tight and smothering, with fear, anger, and egos threatening to strangle us all. It’s too hot, and the sweat beading on my skin only seems to emphasize the way my pulse is pounding underneath.
Deirdre’s questions are focused and specific. She asks Barclay about everything from his life in his universe to the recent disappearances here in ours. She’s unyielding and determined—even I feel a little off guard at the way she fires questions at him.
But Barclay doesn’t once seem fazed. A few times he lets out little quips or snide remarks. Once he answers her question with, “That’s a little above your pay grade.” But mostly he’s just silent, wearing a heavy-lidded expression of smugness with his lips curved in an arrogant smile.
He doesn’t flinch the couple of times she slaps him, but his lip is bleeding when Struz finally comes home. He opens the door slowly and scans the room without a single expression coming over his face. His eyes meet Deirdre’s, and after whatever silent communication passes between them, she nods and steps aside.
“Take him to a secure location and confiscate everything he has on his person,” he says to the Marine in charge. “Keep three people on him at all times. Someone has to take a piss, they radio for someone to cover for them first.”
“Yes, sir,” the Marine says.
Two of them haul Barclay up, as Deirdre whispers something to Struz. He nods.
As they’re pulling him out the door, Barclay turns back and looks at me. “You’re smart, Tenner. Just like your father. You know you should come with me.”
My face feels hot at the mention of my dad. I wonder what he would think of all this.
But Barclay has no right to bring up my dad. If Barclay had just come clean with him, maybe my dad would still be here. Which means I’m not about to feel bad for Barclay.
I take a deep breath and remind myself that he didn’t want to tell me his plan, and I wasn’t going to blindly follow him. I remind myself I can’t do anything to help.
“You should come with me,” Barclay repeats. “We don’t have a lot of time.”
What he means, though, is Ben.
Ben doesn’t have a lot of time.
hen the door shuts, Deirdre slumps onto the couch, and Struz watches her, then turns to look at me. “Someone want to tell me what the hell is going on here?”
“That asshole has come back to tear more shit apart,” Deirdre says, and I’m a little surprised. She isn’t the kind of person who swears. “What more do we need to know?”
“Where the missing people are going,” I say without thinking. Because it’s true. If nothing else comes out of this night, now we know why people are being abducted.
For a minute it feels like the air has been sucked out of the room. Both Deirdre and Struz freeze with their eyes on me. My heartbeat throbs in my chest.
“Barclay is investigating a human-trafficking ring,” I say. Then I tell them about Barclay following me today, surprising me before I got home, and about Jared opening the door for him.
Struz turns to Deirdre. “Get everyone here in the next fifteen minutes. I don’t care what else is going on.” She nods and grabs the walkie-talkie, and Struz puts a hand on my shoulder. He squeezes lightly, and the look on his face is my undoing. His eyes are soft and the lines on his face express concern and worry—they say, Are you okay? I struggle to keep my emotions under control, keep the sting in my eyes from turning into tears. The truth is, sometimes it all feels like it’s too much, like I can’t take it anymore, like I don’t know how to keep living like this.
Struz can either tell how close I am to losing it, or he just gets it, because he pulls me into a hug. “It’ll be okay, J-baby.”
I know that’s not true, but it still makes me feel better.
When everyone is here—everyone being fifteen other FBI agents, most of whom I know from when they were part of my dad’s team—I start over. They all seem to be aware of what happened four months ago, so I start with the missing-persons cases, the ones Deirdre and I have been working on over the past couple of months. I tell them what Barclay told me.
The only thing I don’t tell them is that Ben is a suspect.
I don’t care where he is or what he’s doing. I won’t let myself think about why he didn’t stay at home with his family or why he hasn’t come back. No matter how much it’s eating at my insides, the facts are that he’s not there and he’s not here. But I know he has nothing to do with a human-trafficking ring, and I’m not about to make him a suspect here.
I tell them what Barclay told me about the human trafficking and that the missing people—our missing people—are being abducted for who knows what and pulled into some other universe where they can’t get back, and we can’t go rescue them because we don’t have the technology.
When I finish, no one says anything. A few people exchange looks, but Struz is clearly thinking something through, and no one else is about to jump in. I start to count the seconds as they pass, and it’s a full minute before anyone speaks.
Then Struz says, “Well, fuck me.”
“So we need to figure out how people can combat that,” Deirdre says. “The first priority has to be that we can’t lose more people. Then we can figure out how to get back the ones we lost.”
Several agents jump in and start talking over one another. There’s mention of the Multiverse Project, something Struz has started. The goal is to prove that the multiverse exists and to figure out interverse travel. Struz recruited a few renowned scientists in Southern California and gave them the necklace Barclay told me I could wear to portal safely as well as a few other things he left behind.
A couple of agents are intent on brainstorming ways to fight against the portals. Someone says they need to tell the public. Make some kind of announcement. Explain to people.
At that, Struz shakes his head. “I’ve already violated a presidential order by telling you what Janelle went through in September. And I’ve just violated it again, by having her share this new information.”
One of the agents I don’t know laughs bitterly. “Who cares? That guy’s not our real president, anyway.”
“Wait, we still have a government?” another guy says.
“Let’s save the jokes for later. We can’t make an announcement until we know how people should keep themselves safe,” Deirdre says.
Struz nods. “We’ll only create more panic.”
“We should change curfew,” I say. The side chatter stops. I feel everyone’s eyes on me and even though I don’t know what I’m doing either, I’m bolstered by the respect most of these people have for me. “All of the abduction cases so far have been people grabbed when they were alone. The night curfew could still be in effect, but we could push it up an hour or two to make people feel better, while at the same time saying that no one should be alone. Institute a buddy system.”
A couple of people nod. The guy who doesn’t care about our president shrugs. “We could work with something like that.”
They continue talking about it, but I’ve had enough. I excuse myself and head up to my bedroom. No one minds since we’re beyond my realm of usefulness anyway. I can’t stop thinking about Ben. Not just because of what Barclay said. But because he’s out there and maybe in trouble. What if he’s stuck somewhere—or what if he needs me?
I think of the way my skin tingled when his fingers touched mine, the way I felt warm from the inside out when he wrapped his arms around me, the sense of calm that was impossible to ignore when my head was against his chest, the soft thump of his heartbeat under my cheek.
The intensity of missing him is so strong, it’s physical. It starts as an emptiness in my chest and radiates outward until my hands are shaking and I feel like I’m gasping for air. I have to put a hand on the wall to keep my balance.
I wonder if I’ve made the right decision.
Barclay wanted me to go with him. I haven’t changed my mind—I still don’t understand what I can do to help. And I still don’t think that following Barclay blindly without knowing his plan is a smart thing for me to do. I’m not Ben. I can’t portal around on my own. He wouldn’t want me lost in some other world.
But even knowing all that, even repeating it to myself, I can’t silence the thoughts that say: Maybe Ben needs me.
Maybe I should go.
wake with a start, drenched in sweat, my heart racing. A shadow is looming over me, a hand heavy on my shoulder. For a second it reminds me of the first time I really noticed Ben—when I came back from the dead to see his silhouette leaning over me. I open my mouth to say his name.
But the fog of sleep disappears, and I recognize Deirdre’s blond hair.
“What happened?” I ask. “Is Jared okay?”
“He’s fine,” Deirdre says. “But there’s been a distress call. We need to go to Qualcomm.”
I nod and roll out of bed automatically. My jeans are in a pile on the floor. I put them on and grab my hoodie and my gun and am out the door just seconds after her. Deirdre hasn’t said what the distress call is for, but she doesn’t need to.
Qualcomm, the middle of the night. Another missing person.
When we’re in the car, I pull my hair back into a ponytail. My watch says it’s 3:38 a.m. We’re the only people on the road except for the Marines at the checkpoints. They check our IDs and wave us through, their faces pulled into tight expressions.
I think about Qualcomm, about Cecily and how she’s going to take this. I never told her about the multiverse, not because it sounds crazy—between her obsession with all things science and her love for anything new and different, Cecily is probably the one person who would believe me without a doubt—but when I was with her, I was trying to hold on to the aspects of my life that were almost still normal. Telling her about the multiverse, about the portals, about Ben leaving me for his world—it would mean thinking about it. Hanging out with Cee is one of the only times I’m distracted enough to relax.
But now she’s getting dragged into it anyway. I’m going to have to tell her so she can do something to help protect people at Qualcomm.
I wonder who will be missing now—and what kind of slaves they’re going to become—and it makes me feel sick. Other than a buddy system, I can’t even begin to think of a way to combat more abductions.
I need to see Barclay.
I almost say it aloud, to Deirdre, before I stop myself. She might not go for my plan. She might not see the logic in it because it will mean letting Barclay go. I’ll talk to Struz when we get back and ask him to make some kind of deal. If Barclay can give Struz something concrete that people can do to arm themselves against traffickers, or some way for us to track them when they disappear, or something, I’m sure Struz will let him go back to Prima.
We need to be working with Prima—with IA—not against them.
Because I know who would win, and it wouldn’t be us.
When we get to Qualcomm, Cecily’s aunt is awake to meet us, her eyes bloodshot and her face red and splotchy. The stress is obviously getting to her, too. “Thank God you’re here,” she says, and as soon as we’re close enough, she pulls me into a hug.
I cover my surprise by getting down to business. “Two people are missing?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says, as she pulls back. “Jack Wright. He’s eleven.”
I can feel the bile moving around in my stomach.
“Where did this happen? Was he alone?” Deirdre asks.
Cecily’s aunt nods. “Both his parents were killed in the quakes, so we’ve housed him with the other kids who are alone now. Cecily and some of the girls have been taking care of them.”
No wonder she’s so upset. This is going to be hell on Cee.
“He’d gotten up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night,” she adds. “He was gone a little too long, so Cecily and Kate got up to check on him.”
I glance off to the side and see Kate, a blanket wrapped around her. She’s shaking a little with her head down, as if she’s crying into the blanket. I’ve finally gotten over the way she turned on me and traded our friendship for popularity. We’re not exactly friends again, but I’ve let go of the hate.
I look around for Cecily, since she is usually quick to comfort anyone who’s crying, and a shiver moves through my body. I don’t see her anywhere, and when I look back at her aunt, the question almost freezes in my throat.
“And the second?” I ask.
Her eyes water and Deirdre says, “Please tell us it’s not another kid.”
It’s not, but for me, this answer is worse.
“It’s Cecily.”
first met Cecily my sophomore year. She was the only freshman in AP Chem, and when it came to answering questions and playing teacher’s pet, she gave Alex a run for his money. She sat up front with a crisp notebook and eight different-colored pens, and she practically fell out of her seat with enthusiasm every time Mr. Easterly asked a question.
She was blond, bubbly, and far too excited to be at school. She was perkiness personified.
Alex had a huge crush on her, and I hated her a little on principle.
Then I got stuck with her for a lab partner.
Alex was at some special “best students in California” weekend up at Stanford, and Easterly was trying to discourage Mason Rickman from coasting through class by letting Cecily do all the work, so he stuck me in a threesome with the two of them, knowing I’d badger Mason into doing his fair share. The lab itself was essentially analyzing a few different chemicals in commercial bleach. My plan was to just get it done—even with Mason slowing us down, it would be an easy one.
But then Mason spilled some of the bleach and Cecily said, “God, Mason, just because Janelle is here doesn’t mean you have to get all weird. Stop letting her make you nervous. It’s like you have a crush on her or something.”
Mason snorted. “Well, I certainly don’t have a crush on you.”
“Thank goodness. I don’t need another stalker. I mean, it’s hard enough to leave my house as it is.”
Mason looked at me and rolled his eyes, but the smile never left his face.
“Don’t worry, Janelle,” Cecily said to me. “He’s a little funny looking, but I promise you he’s pretty harmless. In fact, if we let him, he’d probably just go to sleep.” Then she handed me a beaker. “Here, fill this before he manages to spill it and get it all over our clothes.”
I realized Cecily was funny. She made fun of Mason—and me—constantly. And she loved it when we managed to think of something witty enough to make fun of her right back.
She was smart and hard-working—like me, if I was less serious and more friendly. When Alex came back, she and I stuck him with Mason on most of the labs and worked together. Though he hated working with Mason, he loved the attention he got from Cecily as a result.
I’ve already lost Alex. Cecily is the only friend I have left. I can’t lose her, too.
I try to listen to Cecily’s aunt as she describes what happened. Kate and some others heard Cecily shout, “Fire!”—it’s the one thing you can shout and guarantee that people will come running—and got up and ran to the hallway in time to see her disappear through some kind of black hole. But there’s something wrong with either my ears or my focus—or both. I feel like I’m caught in some kind of air tunnel and the wind is roaring in my ears.
We’re on the first floor of Qualcomm, where the small children and families with young ones are staying, where the crime took place. Despite the time, handfuls of people are standing around watching Deirdre and me.
And I can’t stop staring at them, memorizing each one.
Their faces all ask variations of the same question: What are you going to do about this?
A young boy is missing, which is tragic enough as it is. But Cecily is missing too—the girl who kept this place together, the girl who gave people hope. Underneath the lines of anger on their faces is a desperation—you can see it in their eyes. Because without Cecily, how will they keep going?
The faint singed line of a burn on concrete—what I now know is the mark of a portal flaring to life and disappearing quickly—draws my eye, and I squat down to touch the end of it with the tips of my fingers. It doesn’t feel any different. There’s nothing about this soft mark to suggest that two people were just ripped from this world.
I look a hundred feet south, toward the bathroom. In my mind I see Cecily in pink sweatpants and her I ONLY DATE NINJAS Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt coming out of the room where she sleeps and heading toward the bathroom. Her white-blond hair is mussed, probably from tossing and turning, and she has circles under her eyes from not actually sleeping.
I see her stop and her head swivel at a sound—maybe a shout or a yell, maybe just something unusual and therefore alarming—and then I see her take off running toward us, toward an eleven-year-old boy with sandy-brown hair struggling against one or both of his captors. She shouts for them to stop, and one of them turns to her, grabbing her when she gets close, deciding that taking her is far better than leaving a witness. A girl who just turned sixteen, a girl who’s petite, and thin, with blond hair and innocent doe eyes—she’ll be easily placed as a slave.
She shouts, “Fire!” as one of the abductors covers her mouth and jabs her with a syringe. Then they’re vanishing through the portal.
truz is awake but still home when I get there. He’s drinking coffee, black and probably drowned in sugar, one of the few luxuries he’s made sure we still have.
He opens his mouth, probably to ask about our newest case, but I don’t let him get that far.
“Don’t leave yet,” I say, walking past the kitchen and toward the stairs. “You and I are going to see Barclay.”
Deirdre calls after me as I run upstairs, but I don’t stop. My plan has changed slightly, but the dynamic here is still the same. I need Barclay, and I don’t need Deirdre trying to step in and stop me.
When I get to my room, I move straight for the closet and reach toward the back, grabbing my backpack from the floor. The clothes I’m wearing—jeans, T-shirt, hoodie, and sneakers—are going to have to be good enough, but I can’t walk blindly into whatever Barclay’s planning. I grab my dad’s old hunting knife, his backup gun, and all the ammo we have for it and stuff them into the backpack. And I take my leather jacket because who knows how cold it will be where I’m going.
With everything in the backpack, I put it on.
I get up and leave the room without looking back, because it would be easier to stay here and just be upset than try to do something about it. I need to hold on to my anger—I need to wrap myself up in it, in the injustice of everything that’s just happened, and keep it close. I can’t lose my resolve.
I peek into Struz and Jared’s room before I head downstairs. My brother is still asleep, tangled up in his covers like he fought them into submission, his brown hair sticking out in odd places. I think about before the quakes, when we went to Disneyland and I knew it might be our last time together if the world ended. I remember how much he smiled then—how much he still manages to smile now, despite everything.
This is my brother, the only member of my family I have left. I have to stop these abductions before they get worse, before these guys start grabbing people out of houses instead of just shelters. I have to do this to get Cecily back and to keep my brother safe, so that I don’t have to worry if he’ll be next.
I move into the room and touch his shoulder, his skin warm from the blankets. I sit carefully on the edge of the bed. His eyes flutter open and he groans a little, pulling himself tighter into a ball.
Brushing my fingers through his hair, I whisper, “I love you, Jared,” and then, because I know it’s an X-Files quote he’ll understand, I add, “‘Even when the world was falling apart, you were my constant. My touchstone.’”
A muffled, “‘And you were mine’” comes out from under the covers. From the sound of his voice, I can tell he’s smiling.
He’ll be mad when he fully wakes up and finds out that I’m gone, but if this is the last conversation we’re ever going to have, it’s a good one. One that’s true—and worth remembering.
After kissing his forehead, I get up and head downstairs.
Both tense and red-faced, Struz and Deirdre pause what is clearly an argument and turn toward me. Again, I don’t give them a chance. I just look right into Struz’s blue eyes.
“I need you to let Barclay go,” I say. “Because I need to go with him.”
eirdre reacts first. “He can’t let Barclay go.” Her face flushes a shade slightly darker, and her voice, stern and loud, escalates as she keeps talking. “And you certainly can’t go with him. Go where? In the middle of all this?”
Struz doesn’t say anything yet, so I don’t either. I stand still and straight, with my lips pressed together in a hard line. I let my body language and facial expression tell the complete truth. I let them say that I’ve thought this through, that I can do this, that it’s the only way.
Struz takes a slow sip from his coffee mug. Then he looks at me. “You’re not going anywhere. And I can’t just let Barclay go. We need to know more about what happened this fall. And if what he’s said is true, we need to know what we can do right now. After we’ve gotten information, we could let Barclay take a team of trained agents with him if he needs help and can’t trust his own people.”
“You think we can really afford to wait that long?” I ask.
“Struz,” Deirdre says. “You can’t possibly … Where the hell is she going to go? We can’t trust him!”
He doesn’t answer her. “It doesn’t have to be you,” he says to me.
But he’s wrong. It does have to be me. I think of Ben and Cecily and know that it does.
It has to be me.
I don’t say a word because my face says that I am my father’s daughter. That I’ll do this with or without his help.
Because I will.
Even if Struz doesn’t want me to. I can’t sit around and wait for someone to figure out how to get Cecily back. And I can’t sit around wondering if Ben is dead because of my inaction. Doing that last night was enough.
And Barclay isn’t going to take a team of FBI agents or Marines and go through a portal into Prima and shake things up with the IA. He isn’t even going to hang out and let himself be detained very long. If they’ve still got him, it’s only temporary—maybe even because he’s waiting for me.
When Struz pours the rest of his coffee down the sink, I know I have him.
“J, come with me. Let’s talk to Barclay,” Struz says. To Deirdre he adds, “Call another meeting for an hour from now. We need people to be prepared and not panicking. We need a way to fight this.”
“Struz—”
“D, we’ve got enough shit to deal with without people disappearing right and left.” He looks at me. “Let’s go.”
hen we first come in, Barclay is silent. The holding cell is cleaner and whiter than I expected. The floors, walls, ceiling, even the bars are white. There’s a small metal sink and toilet on one side and a small cot on the other. The bed is untouched, the blanket and sheets unwrinkled as if Barclay hasn’t slept. He’s sitting on the floor, his head against the wall, his eyes closed, his hands now tied together.
He doesn’t even look up when the door opens and he doesn’t acknowledge it when Struz says he’s come to talk.
When he adds, “And I brought someone with me,” that makes Barclay react. He smiles.
“I knew you’d change your mind, Tenner,” he says.
I sort of want to smack the smugness right off his face.
Struz frowns. “We need information.”
Barclay doesn’t answer.
“We need to know everything about Prima, the portals, this human-trafficking ring, and exactly what part you played in the events that happened a few months ago,” Struz says.
Again, Barclay doesn’t answer, but he looks at me like he’s a combination of annoyed and surprised that I gave up information about what happened.
“Don’t be an asshole,” I say. “We don’t care about your problems as much as we care about ours.” It’s not necessarily true, since I care a lot about Ben and Cecily, and someone dirty in the IA has the potential to be a huge problem, but I have to say something.
“It’s against IA regulations to discuss the multiverse to persons in a world that isn’t part of the Interverse Alliance,” he says.
“Seriously, you’re going to spout that at me?” I fold my arms across my chest. “I seem to recall you’ve already broken that one.”
He knows I’m referring to the information he told me before the quakes—and what he told me yesterday.
“Look, the sad fact is that you need me,” I say, even though I’m not a hundred percent sure why yet. “I’m not going to help you for nothing. So you need to talk to us and give us answers.”
Barclay’s eyebrows draw together and I’m pretty sure he’s clenching his teeth, but he gives a quick nod and then says, “What are your terms?”
I take a deep breath. “My friend Cecily has been taken. So I’ll go with you—”
Struz clears his throat. “Actually, I’ll go with you. Janelle will stay here.”
My mouth falls open, though I’m not sure what I’m about to say. I can’t tell myself that it’s surprising that Struz would go in my place. But I just hadn’t seen it coming.
Barclay shakes his head. “No deal. I don’t need you. I need her. She knows about the IA and they know about her. I can bring her in under the guise of questioning her and no one will think it’s off. If I brought you in, it would draw attention to us.”
Struz looks like he’s about to argue, so I put a hand on his arm. I don’t know why Barclay needs me, but I believe him. And I also know I need Struz to take care of Jared while I’m gone. To make sure he’s safe.
“I’ll go with you,” I repeat. “On two conditions.”
“That we get your friend back?” he asks.
“Yes. And that you tell Struz how to fight this stuff.”
“What about Ben?” Barclay asks.
My stomach drops and I feel short of breath, like he just punched me. “What about him?” I’m not about to tell Barclay that I’ve been lying awake at night waiting for Ben Michaels to walk back into my universe while he’s been running around and getting himself in trouble with IA and who knows what else. I need to make sure he’s safe, but the most important thing is to get Cecily back. That’s what I need from Barclay right now.
“Fair enough,” he says with a shrug. The corners of his lips turn up, though. Like he doesn’t quite believe me.
The truth is there’s actually not a lot Barclay can tell us that will block the portals. If we had hydrochloradneum, we could use it. Apparently in New Prima, the capital city where Barclay lives and IA is headquartered, there are buildings with the chemical compound in their foundations, and it acts as a shield to prevent portals from opening inside those buildings.
We don’t have that, though. And even though Struz has given information to scientists, there hasn’t been much advancement in the Multiverse Project, not that anyone can blame them, given the state of the country right now.
“Can’t IA track these guys through their quantum chargers or something?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “No, that’s the problem. They’re either using black-market chargers or they’ve dismantled the tracking chips.” Barclay sighs. “If it was that easy to track them, Tenner, we’d have shut them down.”
“Well, can’t you track the activity or something?” Struz asks.
“Not likely. Every universe has soft spots. They’re spots where travel between universes is easy—or easier, at least. Those spots don’t register activity unless the portals are unstable, unless they’re creating some kind of bigger disturbances between universes.” Barclay shifts on the floor and looks directly at me. Ben’s portals were unstable. That’s why we ended up with so many problems.
“Where are the soft spots?” Struz asks.
Barclay chuckles. “We’re in a big soft spot. It’s called San Diego.”
arclay looks at me. “You think it’s a coincidence that your boyfriend and his friends got dumped here? They opened a portal with no direction, so it chose the closest soft spot, and here they were.”
“Why the ocean, then?”
“Because that’s the thinnest part,” Barclay says. “This whole area is a soft spot, but some areas are thinner than others—some more conducive to portals.”
“So we’re looking for the thinnest soft spots where someone could portal in and do some reconnaissance, and areas that are highly populated,” Struz says. “Dammit.”
I look at him. I’m not sure what he’s on to.
“We need to break up the evac shelters. Think of how many disappearances there have been from Qualcomm alone.”
“Oh, God,” I breathe. “Even all the people in the beginning that we thought might have abandoned the shelter because it was too crowded …”
Struz nods. “I’ll get our people on it while you’re gone.” He looks at Barclay. “Are there any spots that are … whatever you’d call it, thick?”
“Downtown,” Barclay says. It’s a mess downtown, not exactly habitable. “It would be the last place I’d want to portal in if people were looking for me. The veil between the universes is thickest there, and portaling in would register a certain level of activity.”
I look at Struz. He certainly has his work cut out for him.
fter Struz gives the order for the soldiers to release Barclay, he drives the two of us to where La Jolla Village Drive turned into North Torrey Pines Road. It’s what used to be the south-western tip of UCSD’s campus. Now it’s just uneven land, downed buildings, and cliffs that drop straight down into the ocean.
Between the quakes and the tsunami, the California coastline retreated anywhere between two hundred feet and a couple of miles. Here in northern La Jolla, the ocean starts about two thousand feet inland of where it used to.
According to Barclay, this is a good place for us to disappear.
When he parks and turns the engine off, Struz says, “Barclay, a word.”
The two of them get out of the car and head about ten yards away. I’m not sure what exactly Struz has to tell him, but I imagine it’s something along the lines of, Make sure she doesn’t get hurt. Not that Barclay could guarantee that—not that he would, either.
When I get out of the car, my shoes hit the dry, scorched earth and kick up some dust. The wind doesn’t help, and I have to close my eyes for a second to keep them from burning. It’s not quite sunrise yet. If I look back toward the way we came from, there are orange and pink streaks in the sky, and I imagine the sun will be up soon. But in front of me the sky is still dark, and even though I can’t see the ocean, I can hear the waves sliding out to sea, curling and cresting, then crashing against the side of the cliffs.
Apparently done with threats, Struz walks back over to me. He puts one of his giant hands on my shoulder and squeezes—almost too hard. His eyes are closed and the lines on his face are deeply etched—stress leaving its mark. When his voice comes out, it’s strained, and I appreciate how much restraint he’s capable of. I wouldn’t be able to just close my eyes and let him leave me.
And I know it’s not easy for him.
It doesn’t matter that it’s the right thing to do or that he can’t be the one to leave. It doesn’t even matter that I’m technically an adult and he’s not really related to me. We’ve been tied together by our love for my dad for a long time, and now the ever-present ache that stems from my dad’s absence and our love for each other makes us family.
It’s the two of us against the rest of the world—I can see that in the way he bites his cheek and in the tension of his body. I can feel it in the rising lump in my throat and the way my eyes burn.
There are no words of advice. He doesn’t tell me to be safe or to be careful. There are no words of encouragement—serious or comical. He doesn’t tell me to bring Cecily back, to save the day, or to stick it to the bad guys.
He just says, “Come back.”
I nod first because I can’t answer. Something’s blocking my throat. I lift my eyes to the black, cloudless sky to keep from crying, and I memorize how this feels—the cool desert breeze, the middle-of-the-night silences, the hard earth of my universe underneath my feet, the burned smell of smoke lingering everywhere, the taste of sweat on my skin. And Struz—the warmth of his fingers digging into my shoulder, and the deep breath he takes to keep his shit together.
I resolve to keep from losing this. It might be filled with problems, and it might take us years to solve them, but this is my world—my universe. I belong here.
No matter what, I promise myself I’ll come back to my family.
touch Struz’s hand on my shoulder. I squeeze it with my own and whisper, “I will.”
I almost add something snarky—I almost tell him I’m not that easy to get rid of. But I don’t. Because I’m about to follow someone I don’t trust through a portal and into another universe. I’ll be in a different world, facing a human-trafficking ring, a potentially corrupt international agency, and technology I can’t fathom.
Nothing about this is going to be easy.
“Here,” Barclay says, handing me a necklace identical to the one he’s wearing, identical to the one I wore the last time I moved through a portal, when Ben and I were coming back here. “Put this on.”
It’s a metal necklace, the one all Interverse Agents wear. It looks like it’s just braided wire, but it has an electronic charge that allows it to travel through the activated portals without being affected by the radiation.
Barclay watches me, our eyes meet, and he holds my gaze.
I think about how it felt when he pulled me through my first portal a few months ago, when one of the quakes was about to bring Ben’s house down on us—the way it felt like fire was moving through my veins, liquefying me from the inside out, like my skin was melting off my bones. Barclay injected me with something then, to keep me from dying from the radiation.
I crack a couple of knuckles to keep my hands from shaking.
“Do I need another injection?” I ask. I’d rather take the shot first and avoid feeling like that than wait until afterward.
Barclay shakes his head. “You only need those about once every six months.”
I nod, take a deep breath, ignore the pounding of my heart, and tell myself that I’m ready.
From his pocket, Barclay pulls out what looks like a complicated cell phone—some kind of cross between an iPhone and an old Palm Pilot. It’s his quantum charger, another thing all IA agents have. They activate and open portals, like a navigation system that uses coordinates to pinpoint the exact spot in any given universe, so an agent knows where he’s going. And it stabilizes the portal when it opens.
Struz steps back and I want to turn around and say good-bye one more time. Because what if I don’t make it back? What if this is the last time that I see him? I want the moment to matter.
But I don’t look because I don’t want him to be able to see how scared I am. Instead, I just watch Barclay as he presses a few buttons on the charger. He points it at the ground in front of him.
I hear that electrical sound—the sound of something powering up.
And then the portal springs open.
It’s a perfect circle, pure black like oil, with a diameter of a little more than seven feet, and it’s in front of Barclay, backlighting him, giving his silhouette some kind of otherworldly glow.
The temperature drops, the wind picks up and moves through my hair, goose bumps spring up on my neck, and the air smells like we’re in that moment right before a storm sets in.
I shiver.
Not just because it’s cold.
Barclay turns around. His eyes look impossibly blue in this light, and I have the urge to back out. I can’t help but feel like I’m about to violate every law of the natural world.
He must know I’m struggling, because he says, “This is the right thing to do, Tenner.”
Our eyes don’t break contact as he takes a step back into the black hole that is the portal. I watch as the blackness seems to grab hold of him and pull him deeper—until it swallows him, and he’s gone.
I could leave him. I could let the portal just fade out of existence and I could stay here.
But I can’t, and Barclay knows that—he knows I’ll follow him. For Cecily.
And for Ben.
The sky is red and orange. The clouds look almost gray, with glowing white outlines. The sun is rising, a golden globe peeking over the eastern horizon, lighting up a world that almost ended.
I take one last look around my universe at the cliffs under my feet, not so different from the cliffs where Ben and I watched the sun set, where we shared burritos and our first kiss. I listen to the ocean waves beneath me and think of the cold sting of the salt water, of the way my arms and legs burned every time I swam. I memorize the feel of the sun, the way my skin warms as the light touches me and chases back the shadows.
Then I glance back at Struz, too tall and lanky, blond hair and grayish blue eyes, the lines on his face clearly giving away how helpless he feels. “Keep Jared safe,” I say.
And I follow Barclay through.
When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.
—Lord Byron
eat courses through my veins, my body flooding with fire, my fingertips and toes tingling with the sensation. But as soon as it starts, it’s already over, and I’m lying on my side, cold and wincing at the way my left arm and hip throb from how hard I just hit the ground.
The earth underneath me is cold, and I can smell the wet grass as if it rained recently. The air is still and unmoving, and all I can hear above me is the sound of Barclay’s breathing. The grass I’m lying in is long and overgrown; huge trees shoot up to the sky and block out the sunlight; and everything I see is green and brown.
This doesn’t look like the Prima I remember. We’re more likely in a jungle than we are in a capital city. “Where are we?”
“This is Earth 06382,” Barclay says. “It’s been uninhabited for the past two hundred years or so. Don’t worry, we’re not staying here.” He looks down at his quantum charger and begins typing things in.
I can’t help but groan a little when I stand up. If I’m going to make portaling into different worlds a habit, I really need to figure out how to land. Barclay is standing casually next to me, quantum charger in hand, so there must be a less traumatic way to do this.
I take a deep breath, and it’s like I can smell the earth. It’s that deep, woodsy smell sweetened with pollen. But there’s something not right about this place. In the distance there’s a cabin. The overgrowth has sprung up around it, and it’s slumped on its foundation. I can’t picture anyone ever living here. Not even two hundred years ago.
Because even though it’s green everywhere and I can hear the rustling of the leaves as the wind moves, there’s a creepy stillness around us.
I can’t hear anything. No birds, no animals, nothing. That’s what’s wrong with this place.
“What happened?” I ask.
Barclay looks at me, his eyebrows raised, his lips pursed together. It’s an expression that says, You don’t really want to know.
“No explanation, that’s shocking.” He should know by now how much I hate secrets.
He sighs. “They were actually the first world, we think, to discover interverse travel. We’re not exactly sure what happened, but the scientists who’ve studied this world think no one controlled the portals. People opened them and started going in and out, without any kind of regulation. Maybe they had too many portals opening and closing. Maybe they didn’t have the technology to keep the portals stable. Whatever it was, a radiation virus swept through this world and killed everyone.”
Everyone. If IA doesn’t know what caused this, there’s nothing to say it couldn’t happen again.
“So why are we here?”
“We can’t just portal into New Prima directly because I don’t want anyone in IA to know we’re there. So we certainly can’t just portal into my apartment, like we did last time. We need to muddy our trail a little just to make sure there’s no energy signature that will trace us back to your world. Then we need to enter Prima through a soft spot in a remote location.”
I know he’s trying to keep things under wraps, but I didn’t expect all this secrecy.
“Tenner, the situation is a little worse than I let on,” he says. He looks guilty, which is a bad sign. “What we’re doing is directly against IA orders. I was actually sent on a completely different mission, and I’m ignoring those orders.”
“What mission?”
He shrugs it off. “It’s stupid and I’m not doing it, so it doesn’t matter.”
“Couldn’t you, I don’t know, get fired or something for ignoring orders?” If he loves anything, it’s his job. I’m surprised he’d be careless like that.
“Worse,” he says. “This is why we’re running low on time. I could be tried and thrown in jail, even executed for treason, if they find out, which means we have to do everything under the radar.”
I let that sink in. For a second, I’m glad the stakes are high for him, too. Not only are we on the same team, but this is about more than just glory for him. It’s personal. Then reality sets in. What am I doing on some unnamed, unoccupied world just now finding out about this? “What else is worse than you’ve let on?”
His jaw clenches, and I know there’s something. So I wait.
Barclay’s voice is quiet but firm. “Government officials in Prima have put out bulletins to all the worlds that are part of the Interverse Alliance. If Ben doesn’t turn himself in by nine a.m. on the thirty-first, they’re going to execute people he cares about.”
The air comes rushing out of my lungs like I’ve been hit, as I think of his parents—of his brother—and of Ben, of how much his family means to him. He just got them back, after being gone for seven years. He can’t lose them now. Not again.
“By the thirty-first?” I say, trying to do the math in my head. I count the days several times, hoping that I’ve made a mistake somehow. But I haven’t. “That’s in five days.”
Barclay nods and glances at his watch. “Five days, one hour, thirty-seven minutes, ten seconds.”
“Shit.” What else is there to say, really?
“They’ve already got all the remaining members of his family in custody,” Barclay adds.
Ben’s family. He told me about them after the first earthquake, when we sat under our table in Poblete’s English class. His mom the scientist, and his dad the traveling salesman. His older brother Derek.
We had these miniature car kits. They were like toys, but you built a car that was about two feet long from scratch and it was real, like with an engine and everything. But they were really expensive, so when my mom bought Derek a new kit, she used make him let me work on it with him. Then we’ d take turns with the remote, racing the car down our street. We chased the dog a lot.
I take a deep breath. I can’t let anything happen to them. When we were in New Prima, Ben could have gone home to his world, but he came back with me to mine, to help me find my brother and stop Wave Function Collapse.
But this isn’t going to be easy. And now there’s a deadline—one that doesn’t leave us much time. We only have five days. Less than a week. “What’s the plan?”
Barclay grunts. “We need to find Ben, prove him innocent, and figure out exactly who’s behind this.”
And we need to find Cecily.
It’s a tall order for only five days.
I take a deep breath. “How do we find Ben?” That’s the first step, and we don’t have time to waste.
“We have to talk to the one person who knows Ben better than you,” he says.
I don’t have to ask who that is, I already know.
Elijah.
half hour and four portals later, we’re finally in Prima, and I’m flat on my back and aching. I try not to think about how badly bruised I’m going to be from all the falling down. Instead, I focus on New Prima and how it doesn’t exactly remind me of the brief memory I have of looking down on the city from Barclay’s window.
For one thing, the stench is awful. It’s some dreadful combination of burning rubber, week-old garbage, and warm sewage. I wrinkle my nose at Barclay and look up.
The sky is the same iridescent gray that I remember, something that would be beautiful with all the different shimmering colors if it wasn’t crowded by thick, stormlike smog clouds hanging heavy in the air.
We’re in some kind of alley in what must be New Prima’s red-light district. Instead of the crystal skyscrapers, there are dark, graffiti-covered buildings with neon signs for alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex toys, and hotel rooms by the hour. The skyscrapers must be up there somewhere, since the sun is completely blocked out. It might as well be dusk or early evening.
But it’s morning, and no one seems to be around—probably because they’re still asleep from whatever they did last night.
“Did anyone see us portal in?” I ask anyway, since that could potentially blow our cover.
Barclay shakes his head. “I don’t think so. But if they did, it wouldn’t matter. No one down here would give a shit.”
I push myself to my feet and hug my jacket a little closer around me as I realize the building across from us has a number of floor-to-ceiling windows that only make sense if they’re lit up and showcasing someone stripping.
“Pull your hood up,” Barclay says. “We’re safe from being recognized for the moment, but we need to get to my apartment without being seen.”
He pulls a beanie from his coat pocket and puts it on his head. “Stick close to me; keep your head down. Don’t talk to anyone, and whatever you do, don’t look up.”
I follow his orders and stay close to his left shoulder as we walk through the alley. Underneath the neon lighting and the flashy signs, the filth matches the smell. There’s trash piled up next to the sidewalks and blocking the gutters, and old rainwater and possibly human waste sits puddled around the trash since it has nowhere to go.
We turn the corner and head down another alley, through a layer of foul-smelling steam that’s rising up from under the street. Barclay walks fast and keeps his head down, and I find myself almost running to keep up with him.
Whatever part of Prima this is, it’s not one I want to be hanging out in by myself.
After a couple more turns, we pass a stand in the street with a sign that says open-air bodega, but really it’s just a guy grilling some kind of meat that looks burned and smells unclean. My stomach shifts uncomfortably as I try not to wonder what kind of meat it actually is. There’s a bulky guy next to the grill, watching a couple of people nearby approach. He’s clearly some kind of guard to make sure no one steals the mystery meat. He catches me looking at him, and his eyes rake over my body while his lips curl into a smile. A shiver moves up my back.
“Walk faster,” Barclay says without turning around.
For once, I listen without question.
We make another turn and pass a homeless guy sleeping on a pile of trash. Next to him, an old metal trash can is smoking from a fire about to die out.
He lifts his head as we pass him. “How much for your girl, man?”
I almost expect Barclay to make a joke about selling me to the homeless guy if I don’t follow his orders and cooperate with him, but he doesn’t. And I’m glad.
Finally we get to a metal building that at least seems well kept. Two guys who look like some kind of cross between military and police are standing guard next to the door. They’re wearing dark fatigues, bulletproof vests, and black boots, and carrying machine guns. As we approach them, their bodies visibly tense, and they adjust their grip on their weapons.
“I’ll do the talking,” Barclay whispers. I’ve got no problem with that. “And remember to keep your head down.”
When we’re a little less than five feet away, with guns trained on us, one of the cops shouts, “Hold it right there. Let’s see your tags.”
e stop, and Barclay says in his most polite voice, “I’m going to reach in my back pocket and grab my face tag.” But he doesn’t make a move yet. He waits for the approaching cop to nod, then reaches in his pocket and pulls out a black wallet. From it he hands over something that looks like the most glamorous driver’s license I’ve ever seen.
I shift on my feet. I can’t help it. My body feels tense and a little too warm, and I’m not sure how this is going to work.
The cop examines Barclay’s ID, tilting it to see a hologram, and then runs it through a scanner. While he does so, we don’t say anything. I’m not exactly sure what the card says. A face tag sounds like some kind of ID, only any form of identification announces, “Hey, this is Taylor Barclay, the guy who’s supposed to be on some kind of IA mission, and guess what, he isn’t,” which, as far as I know, wasn’t the plan.
This is worse than the checkpoints I go through with Deirdre. For one thing, I know I’m on the right side of the law at home. Feeling guilty means we’re more likely to look it too. For another, I know Deirdre will fight for me. Barclay, on the other hand, will serve his own ends. He might need me right now, but if it looks like we’re in trouble and it’s him or me, I know I’ll be on my own. Plus I don’t have any kind of identification on me, at least not any that would make sense to these guys.
I shift my glance to Barclay to see if he’s giving me any kind of sign. If we want to get past them, and he can’t get us through by talking, we’re going to have to storm the entrance by force. The two of us might be able to take out the guy in front of us with the element of surprise, but we’d be dead before we got to the door.
It doesn’t matter, though, because Barclay is relaxed and patient, waiting for the cop to give him his ID back.
“Tomas Barclay, sir,” the cop says as his stance shifts a little. “I apologize for the delay, but I’ll need to report what you were doing down here.”
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