Dissonance (4 page)

“No pivot points,” Addie said. “That's the only way in or out.”

She was right. The ooze had overtaken the far end of the playground and the parking lot, where the strongest concentration of pivots was. It was impossible to cross. Iggy and Simon had been replaced by a sea of grayish light; so had the swingset and the spot where I'd bumped into the jogger. The Echoes never noticed. They'd fade before they realized what was happening, reabsorbed into the fabric of the universe.

We wouldn't be reabsorbed. We'd be dead.

Addie dropped onto the bench and started to cry. I tried not to throw up. A few feet away the little girl with the balloon twirled, the balloon's color bleeding away.

The balloon.

The balloon should have been tangled in the tree overhead.

I'd fixed it, and the kid had gone back to playing, instead of crying at the base of the tree.

And she was still here. Only . . . not for much longer.

“Move!” I hauled Addie up.

“It's too small, Del. We'll never get through.”

“You have a better option? Move your ass, or we're dead!” I skidded to a halt inches from the girl. I listened as hard as I could for a frequency—any frequency—not obscured by the white noise of the cleaving.

“Hurry,” Addie said.

“Shut up!”

The balloon flickered as I heard one—E minor, haunting and sweet. Light filtered through the pivot, pale as dust and barely visible. I lunged for it, clutching my sister's hand.

The last thing I saw was the little girl disappearing in a burst of static.

The term “accident” is a misnomer. Every consequence, no matter how unexpected, is rooted in a choice.

—Chapter Ten, “Ethics and Governance,”

Principles and Practices of Cleaving, Year Five

I
LANDED HARD.
My palms and knees stung from the impact, and my ears rang in the sudden silence. Less than a foot away, the edges of the portal fluttered like the wings of a monarch and sealed themselves. Slowly, I sat up and brushed wood chips from my hair.

Addie lay nearby, flat on her back, panting and staring at the sky. The blue, blue sky. Azure. Lapis. Cornflower. Glorious, rich, head-spinning color. After the relentless gray of the world we'd escaped, I was practically drunk on it. I hauled myself up, using the jungle gym to keep my balance.

The scene before me was identical to the cleaved world. Joggers and kids and nannies. Ducks bobbing on the pond. Simon and his friend playing Frisbee with Iggy. My throat tightened and my breath eased simultaneously. Everything was exactly as it had been.

Almost. The little girl sat next to her nanny, head bent,
shoulders shaking. I looked up and saw the balloon, caught in the highest branches of the tree. Soon the wind would carry it away.

I thrust my hands in my pockets and found my star, crumpled and half-finished. Smoothing it out, I folded the rest from memory, the movements familiar and reassuring.

Addie stood, her face white and set.

“Not bad, right?” I tried to smile, but it felt as wobbly as my legs.

“No, Del. That was bad. Very, very bad.” She swiped a finger underneath each eye, erasing the tracks of mascara. “We have to keep moving.”

“We're safe.”

She shook her head and studied the playground. “When that world finishes cleaving, this one will start. It's a domino effect, and you knocked over the first one.”

My stomach twisted, and I nearly dropped to my knees again. The Key World was safe, but every Echo originating in Park World would unravel and fade. Because of me. “What about the people?”

“Del. Focus. We have to find a pivot we can use to get home. Where's our best shot?”

She must have been seriously rattled to ask me for advice, instead of ordering me around. It was almost funny. Almost, the way that this world was almost the same as the one we'd fled. “Almost,” as it turned out, meant “not at all.”

A sour taste flooded my mouth. “Parking lot,” I said. “There's a ton of decisions in a parking lot.”

“Then let's go. And don't touch anything.” I glanced over my shoulder at the little girl, still crying.

“Thanks, kid,” I murmured, and followed Addie toward the rows of cars and pivots. The instant before I crossed over, I tossed the paper star toward the signpost. Pointless, considering this world would soon vanish, but it was habit.

A breadcrumb, just like Monty had taught me.

•  •  •

For someone who spent so much time talking up how she was the mature one in the family, Addie wasted no time reverting to childhood when we arrived home.

“I'm telling Mom,” she said, slamming the car door extra hard and marching up the driveway.

I chased after her. “You're tattling on me? Seriously? Are we five now?”

“Five-year-olds have better impulse control,” she hissed. “We could have been killed. Do you think the Consort won't notice?
You cleaved a world
.”

“You grabbed me,” I said, fighting back the fear that enveloped me. “I didn't mean to do it.”

“It doesn't matter what you meant. It's what you did. And don't try to blame me—you shouldn't have been touching the strings in the first place. This is completely on you, Del.” She stalked inside.

I stood in the driveway, shivering as a chill worked its way under my sweater. Our kitchen windows glowed warm and yellow, the peeling paint less visible in the dusk. It looked homey.
Safe. Cheerful. But I knew exactly what kind of welcome awaited me when I crossed the threshold, and it was none of those things.

The barberry bushes bordering the yard rustled, and a moment later Monty popped out, his cardigan catching on the thorns. He swatted at them, not noticing when his hands came away scratched.

“You're back?” he asked, his voice thin and reedy like an oboe. Monty had been a big man once, but he'd diminished over the years. Most Walkers developed frequency poisoning as they aged, but his was especially severe. Too much time spent in bad frequencies had left his shoulders bent and his gait slower. He lost time, forgetting my grandmother was gone. Worst of all, his hearing was ruined. Without hearing, a Walker had to rely on touch to navigate through the multiverse. Difficult and dangerous, but it didn't stop him.

“Hey, Grandpa.” I took him by the elbow. “How long have you been out here?”

“I was going out. Where was I going?” He patted his pockets, pulled out a cheap little spiral notebook and a pencil stub. “I wrote it down. I drew a map.”

Walker maps didn't look anything like the jumble of lines and musical notes he was peering at. He'd end up lost. Real maps showed only the major, stable branches of an Echo, their important pivots color coded to show strength and stability. Computers had made them easier to maintain—the old bound versions, drawn on onionskin paper, were inches thick and instantly out-dated. Even with technology and experience on our side, tracing
a path through the multiverse was no more accurate than charting wind currents.

“You're not supposed to Walk by yourself,” I said, taking the notebook. Then again, neither was I.

A cagey light entered his eyes. “We can go together.”

“I—” The screen door flew open and my mother appeared, anger visible in the rigid lines of her posture. Addie stood behind her like a self-righteous shadow. “Mom—”

“Not a word, Delancey. Not. A. Word.” She pointed to the kitchen table, and I slunk past her to my usual chair. Monty followed me inside.

“Foster!” she called into the twilight. From his office in the garage, my dad shouted back something unintelligible, and then hustled inside. Nobody messed around when my mom used that tone.

Monty patted my arm. “She's in a temper, isn't she? Been snappish all day.”

“Do not move from that spot,” Mom said, her glare nailing me to my seat. Addie smirked as they filed into Mom's office and shut the door.

“You've been out a long time.” Monty drew two glass bottles out of the fridge. “Root beer?”

“Not thirsty,” I mumbled as he pried off their tops.

He brought both bottles over and drained half of his. I rolled mine between my hands, listening to the faint hiss and snap of the carbonation.

“I screwed up,” I said. “Big.”

He belched gently, and I wrinkled my nose. “Nothing's done that can't be un-, Delancey.”

It's what he'd always said, when I was a kid and we'd gone Walking together. A song he'd invented, special for me.

Nothing's done that can't be un-,

Nothing's lost that can't be found,

Make a choice and make a world,

Find another way around.

It had cheered me whenever our Walks had gone awry, and with Monty, they usually did. But I'd figured out by now that plenty of things—and people—stayed lost forever.

People like my grandmother. She had been a medic—the Walker equivalent of a doctor—charged with keeping Cleavers like my grandfather and my father healthy during their trips through the multiverse. A few months before I was born, she'd gone out on a Walk and never returned.

My parents and Addie had been living in New York at the time; Monty and Rose were here, in this house. According to my mom, the Consort's teams had searched for weeks, but she'd vanished completely. Their official verdict was that Rose had been caught on the wrong side of a cleaving, like we'd been today.

Monty wouldn't accept it. They were meant to be together, he insisted—Montrose and Rosemont, two halves of a whole. He'd wandered the multiverse alone, looking for her, until the Consort had stepped in and issued a second verdict: Either my
parents come back to take care of Monty, or they'd send him to a home. So, a month after I was born, we returned permanently.

It was Walker tradition to name a kid after big pivots in their parents' hometown, and few pivots were bigger than train stops, where decisions accrued on a regular basis, day after day. Everyone else in my family was named for Chicago, but I'd been named for New York, a reminder of what could have been. My grandmother's disappearance had given me my name and an entirely different life.

When someone vanishes, it leaves behind a scar. Some heal better than others. My grandmother had unwittingly left her mark on our whole family. My mom saw the world as a collection of messes to be contained. Addie was so desperate to please her, she'd taken that need for order and translated it as a need for perfection. My dad tried to keep everyone happy, ever the peacemaker. The only path left to me was the one marked trouble.

Even now Monty didn't believe my grandmother was really gone. He slipped away whenever he could to continue the search. But instead of finding Rose, he'd lost his mind.

His song had failed us both, but I didn't tell him so.

“Now,” he said, leaning back in his chair and lacing his hands over his stomach. “What's this about?”

“I cleaved an Echo,” I said. The words felt leaden as I spoke them, and Monty's head snapped back as if he'd taken a punch. I hurried to explain.

“Not on purpose. I touched the strings for a second and it sort of . . . happened. Everything fell apart crazy fast. I've never
been inside a cleaving. I didn't know . . .” My throat clogged up. “There was a guy from school—an
Echo
of a guy from school. Simon Lane. One minute I was talking to him and the next he was gone.” Monty's eyebrows lifted, his watery blue gaze turning sharp. “I know they're not real, but . . . that's not how it felt. It felt awful.”

He nodded. “As it should.”

“We barely got out in time, Grandpa. I thought unravelings took days.”

He looked like I'd given him a prize instead of a problem. “How'd you manage to escape?”

When I explained about the balloon, he chuckled. “Clever girl.”

I didn't feel clever. I felt sick. “I didn't mean to. It was an accident.”

“There are no accidents,” said my mother from the doorway. My father's hand rested on her shoulders, a unified front.

I turned to plead my case. “I only wanted to know what the threads felt like. I'd never been anywhere so out of tune. Then Addie yanked me away, and they split. That's it.”

“That's it?” Mom's voice was like a lash. My father stepped between us.

“You two must be starving. We'll talk after dinner.”

I barely touched my food. Monty smacked his lips, slathering butter and jam on a biscuit. How could he be so cheerful after what I'd told him? My parents were ominously quiet, while Addie spooned up delicate bites of lentil soup with a satisfied air.
Whatever punishment they'd decided on, she was happy. It must be bad.

Finally my dad pushed his bowl away. “Your actions today were reckless. And dangerous. Do you know what could have happened to you and your sister?”

I stared at the brown ooze congealing in front of me.

“You could have been killed. And we'd never have known. This is exactly why we don't like you going out by yourself. Did you even think about us? What it would have done to your mother, living through that again?” Dad asked.

“This isn't about me,” said my mom. She folded her napkin precisely and set it on the table. “This is about you, and your behavior, and your constant need to flout every rule that has been laid out for your own protection and the protection of the Key World.”

“I'm sorry.” I slid lower in my chair. “I didn't mean for it to happen.”

“You never do,” my mom said. “You rush in and trust that your gifts will be enough to get you out of any mess you create.”

I poked at my bowl. I'd screwed up, but I'd also saved us. That should count for something, shouldn't it?

“It was a neat trick,” Monty said. “Getting out of there. You should give her some credit.”