Read BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller Online
Authors: Dan Rix
Chapter 13
“
Hold it right
there, Blaire,” said Joe Paretti, his hand jerking to his holster. “What are you doing here?” He wore a black, creased uniform, no longer the plainclothes of a detective
—
thanks to me.
I groaned and let the police station’s front door close behind me. Was he the only cop
ever
on duty? “This time it really was unlocked. I swear.”
“Not a valid answer,” he warned, his fingers edging toward his firearm.
I set down the mirror, now giftwrapped in butcher paper and marked with a big black ‘X’ on the mirrored side. “I’m Damian’s lawyer.”
“Bullshit you are,” he said, but he eased his hand off his holster. “He your boyfriend or something?”
“Don’t be jealous.”
“You’re really sick, you know that?” he said. “This kid’s a freaking psychopath. Never seen anything like it. Figures you two’d be mixing saliva.”
“We’re
not
mixing saliva,” I said, curling my lip.
“If you try to pull anything,” Joe said, pulling out his gun and beckoned me down a brightly lit hallway with it. “You’re going right in that cell with him . . .
leave
the package, Blaire.”
Foiled
. I gripped the mirror tighter and kept walking toward him. “What?”
“The package. Drop it.”
“Why?” I kept walking.
“Blaire, I’m warning you
—
”
“Okay, I’ll just set it over here.” I sidestepped Joe and oriented the mirror to lay it flat on the ground, my back to him. Because my hands were hidden, Joe didn’t see me tighten my fists along the edges near the bottom; he thought I was just being careful.
In one sudden movement, I torqued my body and swung the mirror like a baseball bat. It sliced through the air, and the edge gouged into Joe’s shin.
He roared with pain and crumpled to the ground, grimacing and clutching his wound. I was already sprinting down the hall. Blood stained the butcher paper under my fingers, where the glass had cut through the paper and sliced my skin.
“Damian,” I screamed. “Where are you?”
His muffled voice came from a hallway branching to the left. “Blaire?”
I veered down the hallway, following his voice past the evidence room, and burst through a door into a musty chamber. Rows upon rows of steel bars divided the room into two holding cells, and black patches of mold oozed from the damp, urine-stained plaster.
In one of the cells, Damian was leaning back on a wall-mounted, steel bunk, the chewed off butt of a cigarette dangling from his lips and his black boots propped between the bars. At the sight of me, he jumped up.
One look at his cell, and I knew my plan had failed. Horizontal bars crossed the vertical bars every two feet. The mirror was three feet wide. It wouldn’t fit through.
The whole crossover was for nothing.
The one cop in the room, the rookie I had met earlier
—
probably Joe’s partner, now
—
jerked his gun back and forth between me and Damian, clearly unsure who posed the greater threat.
“Don’t worry,” said Damian, stepping up to the bars. “He won’t shoot.”
“I will,” the cop stammered.
Damian spit out his cigarette in the direction of the rookie. “I’m already in jail. She’s innocent. I
dare
you to shoot.” He faced me and said calmly, “what’s your plan, Blaire?”
Behind me, the noise of Joe’s grunts approached. “Arrest her!” Joe yelled.
The rookie fumbled with the handcuffs on his belt.
I blocked everything out and scanned the room. There had to be another solution.
“Blaire, you
do
have a plan?”
“Shut up,” I said. “Just shut up . . .”
My eyes fell to the floor, and then I saw it.
Only the corners of the cells were anchored to the concrete. The bottom bars cut off a half inch above the floor, leaving a gap.
I rushed forward and lay the mirror on the floor beside Damian’s cell, the ‘X’ facing up, and started pushing it under.
Damian glanced between me and the package, and his eyes flashed with understanding. “No,” he said, pushing it back out. “You first. I’ll pull it in afterwards.”
“Stop! Both of you.” The rookie raised his gun and fired a warning shot at the ceiling. The explosion made me freeze. “Get back!”
“Go, Blaire,” Damian urged.
I stared at the butcher paper at my feet. “I don’t know how
—
”
He squeezed my hand through the bars that separated us. “Just jump,” he said. “
Believe
.”
The door to the chamber banged open, and Joe stood in the doorway. “Holster your weapon, moron,” he ordered his partner. Then he snapped open a pair of handcuffs and charged at me.
I plugged my nose and jumped. My feet ripped through the butcher paper, and I fell right through the floor. Joe’s arms closed on empty air above me. I landed on my stomach in room A.
A moment later, Damian landed on top of me, knocking the wind out of me. He jumped up and slammed the red button.
The scream of ultrasound cut off Joe’s voice. “What in God’s name
—
”
The mirror shattered, showering me with broken glass. Then we were alone in room A, back in the source. And all was quiet.
“Thanks,” said Damian, crouching down next to me, his shin brushing my shoulder. “Good idea to cover it with paper.”
I wheezed, still barely able to get air. “You’re . . . welcome.”
***
After school on Friday, I stole Damian’s couch at ISDI and kicked off my sandals, shut my eyes, and blasted indie rock for the rest of the afternoon. Charles knew better than to ask me to work. Not after those first two crossovers. A sixteen-year-old girl could only take so many conflicting emotions, shots of adrenaline, and near death experiences, after all.
Though somewhere in the low eighties outside, the leather cushions stayed cool under the length of my bare legs exposed by my shorts.
My reverie was broken when hands gripped my ankles and dragged my legs off the cushion, depositing them on the floor. I opened my eyes to see Damian propping open his laptop at the end of the couch.
Um,
no
. I kicked him hard on the knee and forcefully repositioned my legs on his lap, making sure to obstruct his keyboard. His eyebrows knotted, and I could see his lips moving, chastising me. I cranked up my music to drown him out.
He slid the computer out from under my calves and balanced it on top of me instead. The laptop’s weight pressed my legs into his thighs. My eyes sprang open.
I was suddenly very aware that only a thin layer of denim separated my skin from his skin. Heat spread in my cheeks.
I had expected him to throw me off again . . . he hadn’t. I
liked
that he hadn’t.
I extended my leg fully, making myself comfortable and letting my skin rub against him. And I couldn’t stop my gaze from exploring the shadow under his cheek bones, the contour of his lips.
He caught me staring at him.
“You’re in my way,” I said, playing it off.
“Find another couch,” he said.
“No.”
He held my gaze, and a hint of daring crept into his eyes. “Want to see something cool?”
I nodded.
“Come here.” He tilted his laptop so I could view the screen; his web browser displayed a live broadcast of a game show airing in the Midwest.
I untangled myself from Damian and sat up next to him. We were alone in the office, since Charles had gone to run errands and Amy took Fridays off. At the thought, my heart rate elevated.
“Have you ever heard of the butterfly effect?” he said.
“The movie?”
“If that helps you,” he said. “It has to do with predicting the future.” On his screen, the broadcast zoomed in on a lottery ball machine. “In a few minutes, they’re going to broadcast the winning lottery numbers.”
“Don’t tell me you can predict them.”
“No,” he said, a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “But I can change them.”
“But that’s halfway around the world,” I said. “Even if you crossed over, you’d never get there in time.”
“I don’t need to get there,” he said. “All I need to do is change something . . .
anything
.” He set his laptop on the coffee table and propped up a makeup mirror next to it, so we could see the broadcast on his laptop and its reflection in the mirror.
“I thought you said to only crossover using the mirrors upstairs,” I said. “Weren’t those the rules?”
“I said those were tips.”
“But you can’t even fit through that mirror
—
”
“Shh.” He pulled his headphones out of the laptop, and the sound came on. I heard, “. . . mega million jackpot is a world-record six-hundred and forty million dollars . . . .
phew.
Let’s see that first number.”
The first ball rolled out of the machine. “Thirty-six. And the next lucky number is . . .” The next ball revealed a fourteen. On the laptop, the numbers appeared next to each other, and in the makeup mirror propped next to the laptop, their reflections appeared too. A forty-three followed the fourteen.
“Are you touching me?” said Damian.
“What?” I jerked away from him. “No!”
“Touch my arm. We have to break symmetry together.”
“Oh.” I touched the tip of my pinky to his sculpted forearm.
In a swift movement, he dipped his finger into the mirror, breaking its symmetry.
Although the mirror still appeared to show a perfect reflection of the game show on the laptop, it was now showing a parallel world no longer connected to our own. And something strange began to happen.
The muted announcers’ voices coming out of the reflection lagged behind the voices from the source. They were diverging.
The fourth ball rolled out of the machine, and I waited, breath held, as it revealed its number in the source. A two.
I checked for the two’s reflection in the makeup mirror, but didn’t find it. Instead, a forty-nine had filled the fourth slot.
After all six balls came out of the machine, the numbers read on the laptop:
36-14-43-2-4-16
And in the reflection:
36-14-43-49-27-5
“But all you did was stick your finger through,” I said. “You didn’t change anything. How can they be different?”
“Isn’t it obvious Blaire?” He gave me his infuriating, all-knowing look. “I did change something. When I stuck my finger through the mirror, I changed
everything.
”
“Damian, what does you fingering the reflection have anything to do with a lottery drawing taking place in Milwaukee?”
“I don’t know how it works,” he said. “I just know it works. Maybe my finger created a tiny shift in the light levels for a fraction of a second. Maybe in the reflection, a stray photon went out the window that didn’t in the source. Somehow, those tiny changes propagated across the country and affected which ball came out. The key is things were just
different
. I don’t know how it gets there so fast, but it does.”
“But how could it change so much?” I said, still astonished.
“That’s why it’s called the butterfly effect,” he said. “A butterfly flapping its wings can make the difference between whether or not a hurricane forms halfway around the world. Things compound on each other. Maybe that number two ball got hit by an extra photon, which jogged its course ever so slightly. It bounced off another ball differently, and once it was off course, everything deviated faster and faster, until it wasn’t the number two ball that came out but the forty-nine ball. That’s what happens when we break the symmetry. Things deviate. It’s slow at first, but it speeds up. Crossover for a day, and the news stories you bring back won’t match the ones in the source.”
“That’s spooky,” I said.
Damian grabbed the mirror off the side table and tossed it onto the floor, where it landed and cracked.
“You think that’s spooky?” he said. “You haven’t seen anything.”
***
After Damian’s demonstration of the butterfly effect, I didn’t move away from him right away, but continued to sit next to him on the couch searching for something to say.
“What happened to your parents?” I said.
“Never knew them.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“So sue me.”
“I’m not trying to irritate you,” I said. “I just want to know more about you.”
His jaw tightened. “My father had an affair with my mother and abandoned her when she was pregnant with me. I don’t know who he is and I never want to know.”
I studied the side of his tense face. “Which one was the carrier?”
“My mom. She discovered her ability to crossover while high on LSD. The drug made her believe she could walk through a mirror, and all of a sudden she just did it, crossed over right in front of me
—
that’s when I learned, too. I followed her through, not knowing any better. It hurt so much, I came right back.”
“How old were you?”
“Five.”
His answer made my heart ache. I couldn’t imagine how destructive crossing over would be for a still developing five-year-old.
He went on, and I listened, mesmerized by this scarred side of him I had never seen.
“At first she used crossover to steal jewelry for more drugs, nothing very clever. She would just rob her friends over and over again in different reflections. Then she just vanished all of a sudden. I found the mirror she used to crossover, but I knew better than to follow her down. I took it with me in and out of foster care, kept it open for a whole year before I broke it; I can only guess what happened. She got lost, accidentally nested a crossover, and went into a
deeper
reflection when she was trying to get back to the source. It’s what eventually happens to all of us. At least the ones who learn how to crossover.”
“So how’d you end up here?”
He shrugged. “Eventually, a doctor told me I had forty-seven chromosomes and I was able to track down Charles
—
kind of like you did.”
I was about to drop the subject, but his story reminded me of a question that had been nagging me. “You said you carried the mirror with you?”
“For a whole year.”
“Like I did last night?”
“It was a medicine cabinet mirror, not as big as ours. I bought a suitcase that would fit it and just kept it there.” He chuckled to himself. “I kept hoping she would climb out.”
“Why don’t you guys do that now?” I asked.
Damian glanced over at me, and I could see the wounds in his eyes he had tried so hard to keep buried. “Do what?”
“Carry the mirrors with you? That way you wouldn’t have to make the trip back.”
He shook his head. “Way too dangerous. You risk breaking the mirror. They’re mounted on the wall for our own protection.”