BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller (31 page)

I could have saved him.

***

I had dreams. Good dreams.

No, not dreams. Overlap. Fleeting images of me and Josh, even though I was now
deeper
than they were.

Then bad dreams.

Drowning in a sea of faceless people, blind and deaf, swimming for miles in search of Damian’s soul, knowing I would never find it. When I died, my afterlife wouldn’t even be in the same universe as his. I would suffer forever in a black hole.

I woke up gasping for air, my chest convulsing and pulling at the vacuum around me. I couldn’t breathe, and the ache in my heart and lungs brought tears to my eyes.

I scrambled for another tin of cod and downed it.

It didn’t help.

Lightheaded, I scanned the black hallway, frantic for anything that would help me breathe
—
and that’s when I saw it. Something out there
moved
.

I peered into the dark, heart thudding, but the shape didn’t resolve itself. No matter how I tilted my head and squinted my eyes, holding the thing in the center of my vision, it stayed in some kind of blind spot. It was only when I
didn’t
look right at it but instead stared a few degrees to its left that I recognized its form through my peripherals, silhouetted in the bathroom doorway.

An elongated humanoid figure.

About time. I was getting kind of lonely without that thing haunting me. I closed my eyes and lay back down
—

My eyelids snapped open. Wait . . . I had actually
seen
something. Vision required light, some kind of light. Yet the only two sources were stuffed in my backpack, their bulbs burnt out.

I jerked upright and once again centered my vision on a point to the left of the bathroom door.

The figure had vanished, but in its place, delineated against the blacker hallway, the rectangle of the doorway glowed dimly in my peripherals.

Light.

It seeped from the bathroom mirror, seeped up from a lower level. From
deeper
.

***

I ditched the backpack and dragged Damian toward the bathroom, halting every few steps to gasp for air; I couldn’t leave him out in the hallway with that . . .
thing
.

Somehow, I managed to hoist his body onto the sink and through mirror C. I crossed over after him, and keeled over in the hallway on the other side, fighting another wave of nausea. Though I could see hints of the walls, the source of the light remained hidden.

I checked the usual suspects. Room A . . . sealed shut. Room B
—
its door gaped like a black throat, swallowing light, not emitting it. My eyes descended the stairs into the main work area: an abyss, also too dark. Which left Charles’s office . . . a faint glow escaped around the edges of the door.

Bingo.

I tugged the tarp with Damian’s body up the hall and peered into the office. A bluish predawn hue lit the walls.

Its source: mirror T. 

We crossed over through the mirror, and I stepped out of Charles’s office into hallways alive with light, everywhere a pinkish-blue
—
the tint of dawn in full swing. Could this be the way out the bottom?

I followed the brightness into room B, its walls rosy with the colors of daybreak, and crossed over into sunrise. The radiance blinded me, forced me to shield my eyes. I squinted while my eyes adjusted, and lowered my hand.

Sunlight blazed in the hallway . . .
real
sunlight. Daytime. I peered into the hallway and glimpsed a corner of the wall lit by direct sun, blazing like filament. After days in pitch black, the brightness made my eyes throb, but I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t blink. I stared at it through a film of tears, my heart aching . . .

Sunshine.

I stepped out of room B into the bright hallway
—
and tripped over a body.

***

Charles’s body.

Or what was left of it.

The sight of his remains drove bile into my throat. He lay in a pool of black, flaking blood. His arm was missing. No, more than that. A diagonal slice of his torso from his shoulder to his hips was just . . . gone.

White ribs jutted out from under the pulpy mass of a lung, itself missing a chunk. The pool of dried blood snaked behind him, indicating he had dragged himself a distance across the floor. I followed the trail to its origin a few feet up the hall, confirming my suspicions.

Shards of a broken mirror
—
pinched from the stack in his office, no doubt
—
lay scattered on the carpet, drizzled with red.

Severed.

His body had been severed.

I pictured the grisly scene on the other side of the mirror, a shoulder and an arm, the beginnings of a rib cage, part of a lung and half a kidney . . . orphaned.

The end of a tape measure, also severed, was pinned under his foot. I tugged it out. The length of ribbon remaining had been severed perfectly through one of the inch markings. I leaned closer to see which number was cut in half
—
and my scalp tingled. Eighteen inches.

That’s where the tape stopped. The rest had been sliced off with his body. Exactly eighteen inches remained.

And now I understood. Charles had done it to himself on purpose. He had held a tape measure across his chest and arranged himself halfway in, halfway out
—
then shattered the mirror. He had deliberately severed his own body down to eighteen inches.

But why?

The inside of his mouth hung ajar, and I peered inside. Like Amy, his tongue and throat appeared to have been burned to ash.

***

Charles’s remaining arm sprawled toward the door to his office, the destination he never reached
—
and the source of the sunlight spilling into the hall.

I tiptoed closer.

The yellow equipment case lay open on the floor. Foam lined the inside of the case, imprinted with a shallow depression roughly the size of a laptop. A slot fitted to the artifact.

Empty.

Sunlight streamed past me, and where it struck the walls, the deeply decayed acoustic paneling bubbled, the matter sizzling away. All at once, the light seemed ominous, otherworldly. I had crawled down a hundred levels, and so far everything had gotten dimmer, darker.

Sunlight was out of place down here.

Wrong.

I peeked around the door frame into the office, and the glare forced me to shade my eyes. Sunlight poured into the room through a hole right in the floor.

A rectangular hole, roughly a foot by a foot and a half, radiating like white-hot magnesium. So there was a way out the bottom of the maze . . . a trapdoor straight to the fires of hell.

The rectangle dimmed as a blurry figure passed in front of it
—
humanoid, made out of shadow. The creature jerked around the light, drawn to it like a moth, reaching into the glare then flinching back as if burned.

No, it didn’t lead to hell.

Nor did it lead to the source from which Damian and I had been orphaned. That world was truly gone, just as we had originally thought.

No, this was something else.

In a dizzying flash, the clues slotted into place. Every one of them. The story in my father’s diary, his inexplicable reappearance from a lower level after being orphaned, my DNA found on the artifact itself. It made perfect sense.

Blaire, you are the one thing that doesn’t belong.

Charles, of course, had been right all along. Reflections were joined to their source by a single mirror. There was no other way between them
—
no backdoors, no exits out the bottom, no transdimensional artifacts that could crossover through thin air.

There didn’t need to be.

There was one solution to the maze that was still possible. Somehow, we had overlooked it.

Chap
ter 28

In the hands
of the military, it had been called the artifact. But what lay on the floor spewing light into Charles’s office wasn’t anything nearly so baffling.

It was a simple mirror, of the type found under benches in shoe departments for trying on shoes . . . except with broken symmetry.

I could guess the measurement of the long side: eighteen inches.

Eighteen inches through which Charles Donovan, with his broad shoulders, had been unable to squeeze. Eighteen inches through which I, Blaire Adams, had easily crossed over at age four
—
before I was even old enough to believe it was impossible, before I was even old enough to remember.

I had broken the symmetry.

Me.

I had crossed over through a shoe mirror and unknowingly created a parallel universe. A reflection. And I had lived out the rest of my life in that reflection, oblivious.

In the reflection, my father had probably taken me home, none the wiser. In the source, my father had no doubt searched the store. But those angled shoe mirrors . . . you can never tell what they’re supposed to reflect. Most likely nobody even noticed the broken symmetry.

Not until later.

In one version
—
the version I knew
—
the U.S. Military got hold of the mirror, buried it under Scripps, and bombarded it with radiation and gamma rays. That was understandable, considering a mirror with broken symmetry looked an awful lot like a portal between parallel universes. In the other version . . . well, I guessed I would soon find out.

I picked up the glass, and the sun’s beam danced across the ceiling.

When Charles built his fractal maze, he hadn’t just nested crossovers. He had done something else.

It was called
recursion.

Since he carried the mirror down with him, it didn’t matter how many levels above him got cut off; he had the mirror that led to the true source. It had also been his source of oxygen and light.

I held the mirror above me and glimpsed blue sky. Bluer than anything I had ever seen.

My home. The place where I was born . . . in which I hadn’t existed for twelve years.

I had often wondered if I came from below, if I originated in a reflection; never had I considered the possibility that I came from above.

I took a deep breath, scrunched my shoulders together, and let the mirror fall around me like the hem of a shirt, wiggling a bit to get it past my hips.

I opened my eyes and found myself standing in blinding daylight.

***

Euphoria filled my lungs. The warmth spread to every cell in my body, replenishing each one with oxygen. The sun dazzled in a cloudless blue sky, forcing me to squint. Head spinning, I ripped off my dress and sprawled out on a dry, cracked lake bed and let the sun’s warm rays soak my bare skin. I rolled over and dug my fingers into the earth, kissed the ground, savored the taste of dust . . .
real
dust on my lips. I was crying.

The true source.

I sat up and scanned the horizon, licking my parched lips and thinking about thirst for the first time in days. The dry, blistering lake bed extended horizon to horizon, shimmering with heat waves
—
broken only by a pickup truck a dozen yards away.

I grabbed the scraps of my dress and attempted to cover myself, but no one lingered. The truck was abandoned. Next to me, the mirror lay flat. A square, black pit in the ground.

Clearly this mirror had a very different previous twelve years than its reflection.

How the hell had it gotten here?

I imagined a store clerk stumbling across the mirror after hours, detaching it and taking it home with him, selling it online to a UFO fanatic . . . some guy who brought it to the middle of nowhere in an attempt to signal extraterrestrials, then left it behind as a “beacon.” And at any time, it could have broken.

Where the hell was this, anyway? Not a single mountain shimmered beyond the haze.

I could figure that out later.

I held my breath and crossed over back into the reflection to get Damian. Back in the hazy office a hundred levels deep, I folded his hands in front of him and pushed him into the true source legs first. But I only managed to wedge him up to his elbows before he got stuck. Like Charles, he didn’t fit.

And I had sealed off my only supply of air. Out of breath, I sipped at the air still in Charles’s office. Big mistake. The poison stung my lungs and activated my gag reflex.

I freaked and shoved Damian with all my weight. To my amazement, his shoulders squished together, and he slid through the mirror. I climbed out after him, gasping for breath.

And I had breathed that stuff for days.

All those nested crossovers had left Damian’s flesh and bones squishy. No wonder Charles had gone so deep; he had hoped to degrade his body enough he could just ooze through the mirror rather than having to sever himself. Yet he was simply too large.

Only my father and I, with our narrow frames, had been able to squeeze through the mirror intact.

It turned out the pickup truck was his.

In the cabin, I found my dad’s wallet and newsletter clippings from a local amateur sky watchers group that had recently detected a nearby source of gamma rays
—
and maps of Nevada with the mirror’s location triangulated in the desert.

So that was how he located the mirror; the U.S. Army had started probing it with gamma rays.

Seven weeks ago, he’d found the mirror, crossed over into the artifact chamber
—
where it had originally been
—
and emerged into my world. He had been searching for me since the day I vanished.

In case he had to dig, he had piled shovels and pick axes into the bed, along with a cooler full of warm beers floating in water
—
ice, long since melted. I cupped my hands and drank the water.

Then I dug Damian’s grave.

I wiped sweat off my forehead and gazed at him, letting my eyes wander over the contours of his face. I loved him more than ever.

For the past few days
—
or however long I had been down there
—
I had focused solely on escaping the maze, not on his death. Now, staring at the boy I loved, my mind numbed. The maze had zapped the emotion out of my body, dried me up. There was nothing left to grieve for him. Not that I could feel that part of me, anyway. A cage had sealed around my heart, and I didn’t even have the key.

I just wished he could have tasted the air up here.

He still wore the tuxedo, as if he had known he was dressing for his funeral the night of prom. My eyes fell to an unsightly bulge in his front pocket: the bullet clip from when he had taken apart his gun after I threatened to shoot the mirror. The memory brought a lump to my throat.

I knelt to remove the bulky object, and a slip of paper fluttered to dirt. I picked it up and unfolded a note he had written, which had been in his pocket the whole time.

A note to me.

Blaire, go home.

I crumpled the note in my fist and flung it into his grave. My lungs heaved, and I fought back an angry sob. “I am home, Damian . . . I’m here, like you wanted . . .” My voice tumbled across the dry lakebed. “Where the hell are you?”

***

Charles Donovan’s sprawling house crested a hill in San Diego. Beyond a fence draped with bougainvillea, a shiny blue Prius reflected the waves of a swimming pool. I was here for one reason: to figure out how much the reflection I created as a four-year-old
—
in other words, my entire world
—
had diverged from the true source.

Amy answered the door.

The sight of her made me flinch. She tilted her head
—
her blonde hair glistening with a healthy sheen
—
and regarded me with an icy stare. “Yes?”

I searched her eyes for signs of crossover sickness, but aside from narrowing under my scrutiny, they revealed no malaise.

“Is Charles home?”

“Daddy,” she called over her shoulder. “There’s someone here to see you.”

Charles came down a moment later. When he saw me, he pushed his glasses up his nose. Not a flicker of recognition, though. “How can I help you?” he said.

I swallowed. “I need to talk to you.”

“About what?” he said.

“Broken symmetry.”

He froze on the bottom step, and his skin paled. Once again, his gaze travelled up and down me, and this time his eyes widened. Amy glanced between us, apparently confused by the reference.

“Daddy, who is she?”

“Come up to my study,” he said, motioning me upstairs. “Amy, this is Blaire. She’s the daughter of an old friend.”

***

“So you never started ISDI?”

“I needed your father’s help,” said Charles, seating himself behind his desk in his study. “He had already lost your mother, and when he lost you too, he lost his will to live. We went separate ways; I think he was trying to track down that mirror. In either case, we shelved that project a long time ago”

“So you don’t crossover anymore?”

“Haven’t for years,” he said. “I prefer the academic exploration of symmetry breaking rather than the . . . ah, practical application. I do my work from my study.”

“Do you know where I could find Damian Silva?” In the few days since my return, I had scoured every single phone book and internet listing site I could find and come up short.

“Never heard of him.”

Of course he hadn’t heard of him. Damian would have been six. “He’s not listed anywhere,” I said. “I’m wondering if he’s listed under a different name.”
Or dead.
“He can crossover too.”

“Blaire, if he’s someone you knew, he won’t remember you. Even if you could find him, he’s a different person. In twelve years, a person’s life diverges completely . . . and I mean
completely
.”

I nodded. “I think I’ve bothered you enough. I’ll go now.”

“Do you have a place to stay?”

His question surprised me. “I was . . . I was just going to go home, why?”

He shook his head. “It won’t be there. Your father moved.”

“Then I’ll stay with friends,” I said.

“Not an option. They don’t know you.”

“But
—
Josh. He’ll put me up. He’s my . . . my ex-boyfriend.”

“Not up here, Blaire.”

“He’ll put me up,” I repeated.

“Will he? A girl he’s never met?”

I stared at him, and the realization finally hit me. Every person I knew, every
thing
I knew, as I knew it, had ceased to exist. My entire life had ceased to exist. A shiver crept down my spine, leaving nothing but cold.

“Then where do I go?” I said.

“You can stay here as long as you like.”

No. It occurred to me right then, as I gaped at Charles. There was someplace I needed to be. Damian’s note. The three words he had left for me: his final instructions.

Blaire, go home.

***

The taxi dropped me off in front of my house. Under the glaring May sun, heat waves boiled off the hood of the yellow Ford Mustang GT parked in the driveway.

And there he was, shirtless, a pair of jeans slung low off a gleaming, bronze torso. He polished the car’s frame, his back muscles flexing, his eyebrows knotted in their typical brooding fashion. If anything, he looked to be having a bad day. But there he was . . . untouched. Flawless.

Alive.

At the sight of him, my breath choked off in a gasp, and my hand shot to my mouth.

He heard me, and his hand froze on the rag, his jaw tensed. He swung around, and for an agonizing second his coal black eyes locked on mine.

My heart gave a final nervous throb and shrank back, quivering in its cage, as if he had reached all the way inside me to hold it still.

He dropped the rag and started toward me. I couldn’t move, couldn’t run . . . couldn’t resist the force of his gaze anchoring me to the sidewalk as he approached. Then all at once, he was upon me.

Without a word, he gathered me in his arms, hugged me. The heat of his skin burned me through my T-shirt, and suddenly I wanted it off. I wanted skin on skin. I looped my arms over his shoulders, around the back of his neck, and dug my fingernails through his hair. Cheek pressed against his chest, I drank in his scent. The smell of his hot skin made me dizzy, euphoric. My eyes lulled shut.

“I worried you hadn’t made it,” he whispered, his breath setting fire to the sensitive skin inside my ear. “Welcome back.”

I tilted my head back so I could look him in the eye, and I kissed him once, quickly. To see if he was real. He tasted real.

Mesmerized by the perfect, cupid’s bow shape of his lips, which I desperately wanted to kiss again, all I could say was, “How?”

“I overlap. I was with you the whole time.”

Overlap.
Of course. “You remember everything?”

“Right up until that last crossover.”

I pushed him away. “But you’re not him,” I said. “You can’t be. It’s impossible”

“Then why do I remember every single thing we did together, Blaire? Isn’t that impossible? I’ve never met you.”

His words made my heart race, but I couldn’t believe it. Not yet. “Your lives diverged, Damian. You’re different people now . . . I mean, you have an entire life up here I know nothing about.” I already felt myself giving in to him, felt his presence filling the void in my heart.

His pitch black eyes held me captive. “You have no idea how hard it was to dream about you every night,” he said. “Dreams so vivid, I could smell your hair, taste your lips, feel every inch of you. And then to wake up every morning and have no way to get to you. No idea where to even search.”

I stared at him, suppressing a shiver. “But I buried his body,” I whispered.

He smirked. “That’s what kept you going, wasn’t it? I knew it would.”

“You selfish bastard
—
”

“I did it to save you, Blaire. I couldn’t let you give up.”

“So you . . . I mean,
he
 . . . knew you existed?”

“That’s why I didn’t let myself fall in love with you down there. I knew I wasn’t the source, and I already knew I was going to die. All I wanted to do was get you back to the source so you could find me.”

“And you couldn’t do better than ‘Blaire,
go home?
’”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“How?” I asked again. “I thought overlap only worked one way. How’d you get a message to your reflection?”

“I didn’t. My reflection sent that message to me. When I wrote it, I knew my source would overlap and be able to meet you here. Your house was a safe place you would remember.”

I glanced past him at my former house. “And what . . . you bought the place?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “Actually, I think the woman who lives here is pretty fed up with me tuning up my Mustang in her driveway. We should probably go. Come on.” He released me and waved me over to his car, where he packed his rags and wax into the trunk.