Harmonic (6 page)

“Garnett's not here,” she replies. “And I'm cuter.”

“True. But irrelevant.”

“Garnett didn't find this Echo,” she retorts. “I want in, Addie.”

I pause. This is a bad idea, but telling Laurel no after she's taken a risk for me seems like a slap in the face.

The old Laurel would have put this off. Waited to tell me until the next morning, so it didn't interfere with our plans. She'd had a tough time understanding that for Cleavers, work doesn't stay at the office.

The new Laurel brought the office to me.

“This is your job,” she says, so low I can barely hear her. “This is who you are. I'm not trying to change you. . . . I just want to understand it better. See if I can be a part of it too.”

Before now, I'd thought that was impossible. I am the job, and there's no room for anything else. But she makes me want to
find
room. She makes me think that Walking shouldn't be my whole life. If Laurel can change, I can try to meet her halfway.

I clink my mug against hers. “Drink up. We've got a lot of Walking to do.”

CHA
PTER NINE

W
e leave without saying good-bye to Del. Violin music drifts down from the attic, her own composition. It's the only song she plays lately.

“It sounds so sad,” Laurel says, stopping to listen. “Mournful.”

I can't speak past the lump in my throat. Del's song hollows me out tonight in a way it hasn't before. It's not just sympathy, but fear: that she'll never move beyond these measures of loss, that love has the power to break someone like this. That it might break me, too, someday.

Laurel watches me try to speak, and takes pity on me.

“I can't believe you do this all winter,” she says with forced cheer. “How do Cleavers keep from freezing to death?”

I'm not Del; Laurel is not Simon; we are not as they were. But hope can make you vulnerable, too. I shake my head as if it will dislodge my worries, make my tone match hers.

“The power of layers,” I say. “And coffee.”

We're so bundled up, sporting an array of down and wool and polar fleece, the heater of Laurel's bright red Mazda is virtually unnecessary. We leave the car in its usual spot in Lakeview, her neighborhood, and cross over using a pivot outside one of the innumerable bars. The map points us in the direction of Wrigley Field, a few blocks away, so we set out, moving briskly.

There's no instability here—the Echo resonates at a low, steady thrum. Even this late, traffic whizzes by, and the El station spews clusters of people at regular intervals.

“Half a block more,” I say, glancing at my screen. The pivot flashes erratically, like a strobe light. “No wonder it was on the Repertoire.” Discord surrounds the rift, like someone flipping through radio channels.

Laurel's eyes have gone wide and worried. I forget that she hasn't Walked anywhere unstable since she was Del's age. Archivists don't need to deal with cleavings.

Her nerves are contagious, and I stop ten yards away. “Forget it. Let's go home. Enforcement can handle this.”

She swallows and sets her shoulders, steeling herself. But she can't stop staring at the pivot. “I can handle it.”

“This Echo's really unstable,” I say. “Worse than you're used to.”

“I have cleaved before,” she points out. “I got a license, same as you.”

“Fine. But we stay together, and close to a pivot. Echoes can go bad faster than you'd think.”

Park World went bad so quickly because of Simon's anomaly; this Echo should be okay long enough for us to investigate.

But having Laurel here changes things. My hands are unsteady as I reach through the pivot and find the correct frequency. The string skitters beneath my fingers, but it's not out of control. It doesn't feel like it's going to disintegrate at a touch.

“Stay close,” I warn, and begin to cross over.

The cold vanishes. The only thing I can feel is the weight of the air as it presses against me, heavy and churning like the sea. I tighten my grip on Laurel's wrist and force my way through.

Winter returns first. The bitter wind numbs my fingers but I keep moving, and when we finally emerge, reality is fighting with itself: color leaching from the people and buildings in some spots, and flowing back into them in others. On one side of the street, the buildings slump as if melting into the ground, passersby unaware that they're fading. But across the road, the buildings look vibrant and Technicolor, as sturdy and proud as they day they were built.

“The report said they hadn't cut any strings,” she calls over the screeching pitch.

“The report was wrong. They must have started the cleaving without realizing it. Let's go.”

I turn to cross back, but Laurel follows the split, heading down the street. “This doesn't look right. Shouldn't the damage be radiating out from the cut site?”

She has a point. Like throwing a stone in a pond, the ripples of a cleaving should be strongest at the center and spread outward, the path of the unweaving moving in ever-larger rings. This is like the threads can't make up their mind.

I don't like what I can't explain, and this Echo is inexplicable. “Let's go back. I'll come back tomorrow with a full team. Security, navigators, the works.”

“What if it's totally cleaved by then?” She grabs my sleeve. “Someone else is here—listen!”

The Key World frequency is strong—I wonder, briefly, if that's what's bolstering the strings somehow. Swiftly, I check the threads. They're slack, but not uniformly. At this stage of a cleaving, I should feel them fluttering free, but instead, they're still loosely woven together.

Laurel begins hauling me toward the signal, but I plant my feet. “No way. You don't know who's down there.”

“Free Walkers,” she says. “And this is our chance to see what they're doing. We could follow them back to their base.”

“We could be killed,” I say. “If this place cleaves too fast, I won't be able to get you out.”

The idea hits me square in the chest and for a moment, I can't breathe. This is exactly what Del went through. My sister has lived through my worst-case scenario, and suddenly I'm amazed she manages to stand up, let alone make it through the day.

“Any pivot will get us out, right?”

“Assuming they don't unravel before we get there.”

She shakes her head. “But we'd have warning, wouldn't we? It would look different or sound different. We'd have time to escape.”

“Technically, yes.” I'm not afraid of regular cleavings—I'm good at handling them, discord and all. But this isn't a typical cleaving, and Laurel's here. Nothing's going as it should.

“Keep an eye on your map, and we'll stick close to pivots as we go. If things get bad, we take off.”

I start to protest, but she interrupts. “You'd check it out if Garnett was here.”

“That's not fair.”

“Exactly. You need this information, so let's go get it.”

“You're as stubborn as Del.”

“I'll take that as a compliment,” she sniffs, and sets off toward Wrigley Field. The Key World signal coming from the old stadium is strong, and the sky above it is split along the lines of the cleaving—one side smeared and dismal, one crisp and vibrant.

We take a roundabout approach—the pivots are holding, at least for now, but I make sure our path hews to the strongest of them. As the Key World frequency increases, so does my pulse.

But Laurel is fearless, dodging dog-walkers and patches of ice, her pace never flagging.

Onscreen, the pivots that were once fluttering unsteadily are only growing stronger, like tiny beacons. It's a reassuring sight in terms of an escape, but it's the opposite of how a cleaving should work.

We come around the corner of a building, onto Clark Street, and I grab for Laurel so swiftly that we both stumble. Thirty yards ahead, a team of Walkers moves in an intricate dance of cutting and weaving. But it's like no cleaving I've seen—four people, not three, their knives flashing, their fingers jerking and tugging with none of the fluid grace I'm accustomed to.

Cleaving requires you to reweave the fabric of the parent Echo, maintaining a constant tension. Once started, you have to continue or the threads will slip out of reach. But these people—Free Walkers, I assume, two young, two old, clad in an assortment of coats and hats and fingerless gloves—work far more slowly. Periodically they pause and test their work, fingers gripping the strings, the four of them arranged like a diamond instead of the traditional triangle.

I yank Laurel out of sight, and her hand stays wrapped around mine, her eyes dark and startled as we process what we've just seen.

“We should go,” I say. “We know they're here. We'll notify Enforcement branch . . .”

Laurel puts her finger to my lips. “They might hear us.”

“They're a block away,” I murmur, her touch sending sparks through me. “And it's
loud
.”

“Our signal,” she chides. “If we could track them here, I'm guessing they can pick up ours, too.”

I peek around the corner. None of the Free Walkers are looking at us, too focused on the delicate work in front of them. “They're busy.”

“What if they're not alone?” she asks.

Panic rears up. Screw getting back to our entry pivot. We'll take the nearest one I can find. “We need to leave. Now.”

“But—”

“You promised,” I hissed. “You promised to follow my lead on this.”

She opens her mouth to argue, then shuts it again.

We head for the nearest intersection. A dark form steps out from between two cars, and I shriek.

“You shouldn't be here.”

It's a girl's voice—not a woman's, but a girl's. She's wearing a down vest over a sweatshirt with a hood, which she leaves up. She sounds like the Key World and she looks like a nightmare: shadowed eyes, gaunt features, mouth tight with fury.

“We were just going,” I say. Maybe we can pass this off as a lover's jaunt, two girls out for a late-night stroll with no clue that Free Walkers even exist. “We didn't know this world was slated for a cleaving.”

“It's not,” she says, eyes narrowing behind thick glasses.

I bite my lip to keep from asking what they're doing.

Laurel's hand squeezes mine, and I flick a glance in her direction. A second figure is approaching, slow and ponderous, twice as bulky as the girl in front of me. On the far corner of the intersection, a pivot beckons, steady in the encroaching grayness. Escape. “We'll get out of your—”

A keening sound fills the air, coming from the direction of the cleaving. The girl whips her head around and I get a glimpse of dark blond hair. Behind her, the pivot grows more pronounced.

I try to step around the girl, but she swiftly blocks us.

“Stop sticking your nose in,” she growls.

“We went for a Walk,” Laurel says. I can hear the faintest beginning of a tremor in her voice, but only because I know her. These people must think she's copping an attitude.

Behind us, I can hear the second figure approaching, cutting off our retreat.

“You,” the girl says, pointing at me. “You're making things worse poking around. He'll keep coming after us, and this will only escalate.”

“He?” Garnett? Lattimer? Either way, she knows who I am. The fear catches in my chest like a bonfire.

I lift my chin, the same way Del does when she's about to really dig in her heels, and tap the back of Laurel's hand three times. A signal I hope she can decode.

Laurel nods imperceptibly.

First tap.

“We know you don't want to hurt anyone,” Laurel says.

“You don't know anything.” The girl's lip curls. “You're like sheep.”

Second tap.

“Why else would you finish the cleaving? You're protecting the Key World,” I say. Next to me, Laurel tenses, shifting her weight.

The girl's shoulders shake. She's laughing. “You think that's what we're doing? We're—”

Third tap, and I spring forward, Laurel in tow, hoping the element of surprise will be enough to get past our opponent.

“No!” the girl shouts as we head toward the pivot.

We're almost there. The girl nearly snags the back of my coat, but I put on an extra burst of speed and she's left clutching air. I stretch out my hand toward the rift—if we can get to the Key World, we'll be safe. But a third figure appears out of the shadows, and we're forced to veer away.

“Come on,” I pant. We'll find another way home. But the girl is catching up. Other figures have joined the chase, and as we tear down the side streets, it becomes clear they're pushing us away from the crisp, stable parts of the world and back toward the sagging, graying area. Even the pavement under our feet seems softer, like asphalt under a hot sun.

Behind us, someone yells. I can't make out the words through the dissonance and the blood pounding in my head.

“Stay away from the static,” I shout to Laurel, who nods. Parts of the landscape—buildings and trash cans and trees—are disappearing in bursts of static, flickering colorless patches that look like a TV with bad reception. If we're caught in it, we'll disappear too.

They're trying to kill us.

Garnett was right. Lattimer was right. I wanted to let Laurel see my world, and in doing so, I've probably killed her.

We're still running, even though the cleaving is taking hold around us. I scan the street signs—we're only a block away from our original pivot, and our pursuers are closing in, leaving me with one choice. At the next intersection, I take a hard left, directly into the cleaving.

Laurel lets out a shriek and resists.

“Trust me,” I shout. She stops fighting.

Our entry pivot is only a few yards away, and while the surroundings look like newspaper left in the rain, muddled and soggy, the rift itself is still crisp and wide.

I tighten my grip on Laurel's wrist and dive, my free hand grasping for the Key World strings, the movement as familiar as my favorite arpeggio.