BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller (15 page)

“Don’t you already crave it?” he said, a disturbed glint in his eyes.  “Haven’t you always?”

“Stop talking in riddles and just tell me.”

Damian raised an eyebrow and smirked, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “The
true
source, Blaire. Open your eyes. We’ve been looking for it this whole time.”

Chapter 14

My first solo
crossover came the following Tuesday. Once in the reflection, I was to enter the quarantine zone posing as Jennifer Cupertino, a 26-year-old genomics postdoc who, according to the schedules Damian and I had stolen on my first crossover, was scheduled to arrive at the south checkpoint today at eight PM.

Damian had stolen the relevant ID cards, access codes, and biographical information for dozens of visitors scheduled for the next month. Had the military known of the security breach, they would have reprogrammed the access cards and enforced extra screening for the dozens of visiting doctors and scientists whose identities had been compromised, making my mission utterly impossible.

Of course, they didn’t know of the security breach. There
hadn’t
been a security breach.

Charles chose me for the mission instead of Damian because the guards were male, and in case of failure, he assured me I could flirt my way past them.

I knew from experience this was not so, but I held my tongue.

For Damian.

The idea that we might be in a reflection hadn’t left me since he mentioned it in the hospital. In fact, I had caught it like a virus. But now I pushed it from my mind because I had to do this mission right.

The doctor’s words still rang in my mind.
Hemorrhaging
. Crossover was tearing him apart just like my father.

I had to convince Charles I was so good that he never needed to send Damian on another crossover. Because Damian might not survive another crossover.

I could.

Even if it hurt like hell.

***

At 7:15, I drove Charles’s Prius
—
Damian had forbidden me from using his Mustang, even in reflections
—
down the left-hand side of Ocean Bluff Avenue and pulled into the parking lot of The Hilton Garden Inn, where Jennifer Cupertino was staying.

I was amazed at how quickly I had adjusted to life in a reflection, almost like it was second nature to me.

I grabbed the ziplock bag, containing two Rohypnol pills, also known as “roofies,” off the passenger seat and pocketed them.

Given that I was already in character as Jennifer Cupertino
—
lab coat over a baby blue button up, thick glasses, hair pulled into a tight bun
—
it wasn’t difficult to wheedle an electronic key from the receptionist for her room on the third floor.

Amazing how ruthless I could be knowing I’d never face the consequences of my actions. I was like a different person. Like a sociopath.

I listened at the postdoc’s door until five minutes lapsed after her last shuffling, then let myself in. Steam billowed from the open door of the bathroom, immediately on my left.

I bit my lip and hopped across the doorway, praying she didn’t spot me from the shower. Beyond the bathroom, I froze on tiptoes, my heart rate spiking. Had she seen me?

The shower cut off.

Ice crystallized in my veins. I scanned her room, frantic, noting the details as fast as I could. Her purse hung off a chair. A plastic cup, half full, sat on the bedside table. An open can of Pepsi One perched on the TV.

I shook it. Mostly full.

Less than six feet away, blocked from view by only a thin wall, the girl was drying off. Miraculously, she hadn’t heard or seen me.

I plopped one of the roofies in the open can of soda, hurriedly tiptoed across the room and dumped the other in the water. On my way back I grabbed her purse, and ran. But she was just coming out of the bathroom. We collided in the narrow entryway and she screamed.

Failure.

Before she could fully react, I hustled past her and flew out the door, muttering an apology. By the time she gathered her towel around her and emerged into the hallway, I was already tugging open the door to the stairwell.

“Hey
—
” she shouted.

The massive steel door slammed shut behind me, cutting her off.

Whatever. She wouldn’t drink the water or the soda, but without her car, the keys to which I now carried in her stolen purse, she wouldn’t make it to the south checkpoint by eight.

I would.

***

“Jennifer Cupertino.” I spoke the words evenly and handed my ID to the soldier who’d stopped me at the checkpoint
—
the same guy, I recognized with a twinge in my stomach, that Damian killed on my first crossover.

His eyes flicked between me and the picture on the card. “Do you have clearance?”

“I’m supposed to meet Doctor Anderson in the genomics lab,” I said. “You should have me on file.”

The soldier handed the card back to me and leisurely clicked his radio. “Miss Cupertino here for Doctor Anderson. Please confirm.”

After a pause, the radio crackled. “Have her park outside. We’re sending someone to get her.”

“Ten-four.” The soldier stood up straight and pointed to a steel gray Mercedes and a black Ford Excursion parked alongside the empty street. “Over there.”

In the rearview, I saw him lean over the car behind me and repeat the process. I let out my breath. Not a flicker of recognition from five nights ago. Nothing. 

I parked Jennifer’s car, itself a rented Chrysler 300, behind the Mercedes and walked back to the checkpoint, my heart contracting in my throat. According to our preliminaries, this Dr. Anderson was scheduled to give Jennifer Cupertino
—
me
—
a tour of the genomics lab, after which Charles wanted me to steal one thing . . . the strain of Aneuploidy-47 DNA they were sequencing.

Without looking up at me, the soldier waved me through the gate. “Go ahead. Armed escort’s waiting inside.”

Too easy.

***

“Bet you’re wondering why we called you in,” said Dr. Anderson, sliding a magnetic card to unlock the door to the Joint Center for Structural Genomics building on the northern end of the campus, which I noted he wore around his neck. “What’s genomics got to do with USAMRIID, right?”

The drive from south checkpoint to the JCSG building had been like entering Area 51
—
floodlights scorched the pavement, infantry patrolled the rooftops, and Humvees mounted with missile launchers idled hungrily.

Dr. Anderson, a lanky scientist with a goatee, thick glasses, and a bird’s nest of curly hair tumbling down to his shoulders, pushed through the door and strode into the building on the verge of a run, me in tow. I liked him immediately.

“You-sam-rid?” I said, doing my best to pronounce the acronym as he had just used. Keep the questions short. Keep him talking.

“U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Since Doctor Benjamin’s incident, they’ve really turned up the heat in this place. They want to be absolutely sure.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Don’t worry, this isn’t a hot zone anymore. They’re keeping the perimeter, though. Makes our job easier, right?”

“Our job?”

“Figuring out what the hell that thing is down there.”

Down there
. I thought back to the blueprints I had seen of the Immunology building.

The artifact.

I tailed Dr. Anderson down a dim, fluorescent-lit hallway. Cameras tracked us at every intersection. They would notice anything suspicious.

“So why me?” I said carefully, through a dry mouth. Okay, Blaire. Calm yourself. I had studied every square inch of the JCSG building in the blueprints. If
—
and when
—
things went south, I could escape fast.

“They’re calling in everyone who’s got a chance at cracking this thing,” said Dr. Anderson. “Professor Yager claims you’re something of a genomics savant.”

“Yeah, it comes naturally,” I said. Uh-oh. “Something I’ve always been good at.”
Just shut up, Blaire, stop talking.
“Ever since an early age, my parents said I had a gift.”
Please, please stop talking.
“It’s like I can just see things
—
”

“Well, let’s hope so,” said Dr. Anderson, rescuing me from the hole I’d dug myself. “Because the rest of us are stumped.” He unlocked another door and admitted us into a lab flanked with computers and freezer sized gene sequencers. “Here we are.”

Behind a glass partition, robotic arms swiveled and slotted trays into neon blue stacks. Bunches of cables dangled from the ceiling like so many vines and snaked out to the different humming machines, giving the lab the messy feel of a technology startup, not a laboratory.

Dr. Anderson yanked a pair of latex gloves out of a steel box mounted on the wall. “Let me preface: these are cultures taken directly from the artifact. USAMRIID did their tests, and found nothing pathogenic. They sent it to us to get this thing sequenced. That’s where you come in.”

“Where I come in?” I copied him, donning my own pair of gloves.

“We weren’t sure of anything, but we did manage to isolate DNA.”

“From the artifact?”

“Swabbed it right off,” he said. “And we ruled out contamination.”

“How so?” I said.

“For one thing, the cells have been dead for over a decade, twelve years actually. We think that’s how long it’s been buried.” He gave me a knowing look over the rims of his glasses, clearly implying something. “So maybe we weren’t the ones who discovered it, right?”

I didn’t catch his drift. “You mean the artifact?”

“The Army thought it was human DNA. Bioterrorists, maybe. They wanted a name.”

“Oh?” I still didn’t get it.

“That’s why you’re here, Jennifer. We sequenced the DNA ourselves . . . and I want you to look at it, try to figure out what it codes for.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“You see, whatever DNA it was that came off that artifact,” he said, “it’s not human like we originally thought. Not quite. It’s something else . . . a life form we’ve never seen.”

***

Prickles raced down the back of my neck, and I had to force myself to swallow.

The clues were beginning to piece together. The military had discovered something in the ground, some kind of artifact. Now they were taking every precaution while investigating it.

But there was no time to properly digest the news. Charles wanted a piece of it, and that was my mission.

“I’m going to need privacy,” I said, acting magnitudes more confident than I felt. I gestured to the other scientists in the room. “Can you clear these guys out?”

“Ooh.” Dr. Anderson blew air through his lips. “I’d rather not.”

“Didn’t Professor Yager tell you?” I said, grasping for anything, my heart slamming against my ribs. “I have this condition where I can’t focus around people.” I bit my lip, waiting for his reaction.

“Well, they’re pretty important.” Dr. Anderson pulled back the sleeves of his lab coat to check his watch. “I’ll tell you what. Most of these guys head out at nine. You should get some privacy then.”

I nodded. Forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes I had to wait here and risk acting like an idiot.
Just keep your fat mouth shut and you’ll be fine.

“Can you work an Illumina HiSeq two-thousand?” said Dr. Anderson.

“In my sleep,” I said. I scanned the room for the machine he was referring to. My eyes settled on a likely candidate
—
a floor to ceiling sloped black box stuffed with racks of whirring electronics. Ah . . . the Illumina HiSeq 2000.

He watched me closely. “Over there,” he said, nodding to the opposite side of the room, to a simple white contraption I had pegged as a refrigerator. My heart fell.

First test failed.

“So what sort of work does Yager have you doing?” Dr. Anderson asked, his eyes more probing now.

“Oh, you know, this and that,” I mumbled. “Pretty much what you guys are doing here.”

“Really? He tells me you’ve made some breakthroughs in predicting the quaternary structure of proteins.”

“That’s right.”

“Or was it gene expression,” he said. “I might have confused you with someone else.”

I swallowed hard. “It’s complicated.”

“Enlighten me,” he said. “We do have forty-five minutes to kill.”

Damnit. “Could I use your bathroom?”

“Just up the hall,” he said, and winked.

Second test failed.

***

I spent the next fifteen minutes splashing cold water on my face and staring, horrified, at my own reflection. The lab coat Charles had given me looked like a Halloween costume.

This was suicide.

I took a slow breath, and again. Gradually, the tingling eased out of my fingertips, and I formulated a plan.

The HiSeq 2000.

The DNA would be inside that machine. But could I open it, given the chance?

I had to. I splashed my face one last time, took a final deep breath, and headed back to the lab.

“Show me the two-thousand,” I said, stepping back into the lab.

“Pardon?” Dr. Anderson scrunched his eyes at me.

“The HiSeq two-thousand. Let’s have a look at it,” I said, rubbing my gloved hands together. “See if you guys are doing this right.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Don’t you want to start with the PCR amplification?”

“Whatever,” I said. “Just show me something.”

Dr. Anderson peered at me over the rims of his glasses, lowering his gaze to take in my figure, then studying my face. “You have a . . .
close
relationship with Professor Yager?”

In other words, he thought I got this assignment by sleeping with the professor.
Ew.
“I told you. It’s my condition.”

“Which condition is that?”

“It’s psychological.”

“Clearly,” he said, pushing up the rims of his glasses. “Well, better start with the PCR amplification. Follow me.”