Tether (5 page)

He paused, shuffling wood chips with the toe of his Chucks. “I can’t breathe here. There’s no way I’ll be able to survive another year.” Grant was supposed to start college in the fall, but he’d deferred, because he couldn’t bear to think
about school. Neither could I; every time I caught a glimpse of September on the calendar, I started to panic. In a classroom full of people, there would be nowhere to hide.

“What’s that look?” he asked, searching my face.

“Nothing,” I said, because the truth was embarrassing. As much as it hurt to look at Grant, the prospect of never seeing him again was a hundred times worse. He was the only connection to Thomas I had left, and the only person on Earth who understood even a fraction of what I’d experienced. Without him, I would truly be alone.

And then, all of a sudden, Grant’s face wasn’t his face, and it wasn’t Thomas’s, either. It was another boy’s, nobody I recognized. I could see him only dimly, as if I were looking through a piece of fogged-up glass. His lips moved, but I couldn’t hear him at first, and then his voice came at me in a rush of sound:
Are you sure you want to do this?
I didn’t know how to answer him, or if I even could, but I heard myself say
Yes, I’m sure
before his face faded away.

“Sasha?” Grant shook my shoulder. I blinked, trying to erase the image of the unfamiliar boy’s face from my mind. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Maybe I should’ve told him, but I didn’t know how to explain it, not even to myself. All I could be sure of was that the visions coming through the tether that bound me to Juliana were getting worse. They didn’t happen only in dreams anymore. They could strike at any moment, shards of another life slicing through my own reality. Sometimes I couldn’t tell whether something was happening to me or to my analog.

And sometimes I couldn’t tell whether the visions were coming from Juliana or someone else. These new visions were not like the ones I’d had before. They felt
different—intentional, even. Like messages instead of dreams. I was afraid to think too hard about who might be sending them, but I knew she was there, and that neither she nor Juliana was going away. I would have done anything to make them stop, but I couldn’t figure out what to do.

“Come on,” Grant said, steering me toward the sidewalk. “How about you let
me
walk
you
home? It’s getting dark.”

The house was empty. Most of the time, I liked the quiet, but tonight it was oppressive. It was weird having Granddad gone; he hadn’t wanted to leave me alone, but his hovering was getting on my nerves and I persuaded him to give me space. I needed time to finish my project. It would be a relief not to have to hide what I was doing. I could spread out across the whole house if I wanted.

The first thing I did when I got to my room was the first thing I did every time I woke up, or came home, and the last thing I did before bed every night. Two items had come with me through the tandem—just two, plus Juliana’s clothes, which I’d been wearing. The clothes had lost their magic a long time ago, but I pulled a plastic bag out of my nightstand drawer, removed its contents, and laid them flat on the bed.

Item number one was the drawing Callum had given me in the Castle gardens. The edges were torn where he’d ripped it from his notebook. I’d folded it and unfolded it so often that the paper had lost its crispness and the charcoal was smudged. It was a simple sketch of a metal doorframe emitting a bright light, but I felt the same uneasiness I had the first time I saw it. It was a door into the unknown, and it forced me to ask myself where I was going even as it helped me remember where I’d already been.

Item number two was the Angel Eyes map I’d taken from
the king’s study. It was a digital rendering of Aurora’s North American continent, with Farnham and the United Commonwealth of Columbia clearly divided. The only unusual thing about it was the collection of dots in random locations within the two countries; I’d noticed they were more concentrated around bodies of water, but other than that, I had no idea why the map was so important.

“It was real,” I said aloud. That was my other mantra, the one my therapist didn’t know about.
It was real.
My mind flooded with things I couldn’t keep safely hidden away in Zip-loc bags: Thomas and I on Oak Street Beach, before I even knew who he was; the heady, charged moment when he told me that he saw me, the real me, beneath the Juliana disguise; our first kiss, at Asthall Cottage. Reuniting with him at Adastra Prison, when I thought I’d lost him for good. Those were all real, too; I just didn’t have anything to prove it except my own memories.

Without warning, another vision slammed into me. I was standing on the shore of a wide river. The wet hem of my white dress clung to my ankles as I climbed up the bank. I looked up at the sky, and an enormous building swam into view. I was excited, but I was tired, too, shaking all over and sick to my stomach. I glanced down at my left wrist, which was tattooed with a symbol that filled me with power and purpose: two overlapping circles in silver ink.

Wrenching myself out of the vision, I sank to my knees, breathing hard. I pulled up my sleeve to check my wrist, but there was nothing there.

By the time I trekked up to the attic, the sun had sunk below the horizon. I switched on the light and surveyed the large, cluttered room. It smelled like sawdust and cardboard, the
scent of a past best left forgotten. But I hadn’t come to forget. I had come to learn, and to remember.

One half of the attic was full of furniture, carefully arranged like a Tetris puzzle and draped with old sheets. The other half contained what had once been an overwhelming number of boxes, but now that I’d made my way through most of them, it didn’t seem like enough.

The furniture had belonged to my parents, and the boxes were theirs, too. For the last few weeks, I’d been sifting through what remained of their lives, excavating my family history in the hope of discovering something—anything—that could help me understand who they really were. I used to think I knew them. They died when I was seven, so I had some memories, but not many, and they were a child’s memories, anyway, barely distinguishable from dreams. Now Mom and Dad were total enigmas.

When I came back from Aurora, I’d had to lie to a lot of people—police, reporters, the director of my school—but I couldn’t bring myself to lie to Granddad. So I’d given him a version of the truth, and he told me a secret he’d been keeping for ten years, confirming what I already knew to be true. Dad was born in Aurora; he was a KES scientist who crossed through the tandem to frustrate the attempts of researchers on Earth to develop many-worlds technology. That was how he met Mom. She was one of the researchers whose work he was trying to sabotage, but he fell in love with her instead. He turned his back on his mission for her, and for me.

Every time I thought I’d gotten a handle on all this, it reared up and walloped me in the face. I always missed my parents, but I’d never needed them as much as I did now. I wished I could talk to Dad about Aurora or ask Mom for advice. Mom had known who Dad was, and she’d loved him anyway. She’d accepted him, stayed with him, started a family
with him. I could only guess why, but I understood. If I’d never met Thomas, I would probably have thought she was foolish for following her heart instead of what logic must have been screaming at her:
He’s not worth it.
I thought giving Thomas up for the safety of home was the brave choice, the
right
choice. But knowing what she’d done raised a question that kept me up nights: of the two of us, who was the brave one, and who was the fool?

Everything repeats indeed.

There were only two boxes left. Most of what I’d found was useless: tax returns, bank statements, receipts. I’d hoped my parents’ research would help me find a way back to Aurora, but it was incomprehensible. I found a box full of old makeup and toiletries from their bathroom, and another with a huge plastic bag stuffed with dried-out pens. There were clothes and linens and carefully wrapped dishes, none of which had been touched in a decade. I wanted to feel a connection to these things, but I didn’t, although I did find a tattered baby blanket with my name stitched into the corner. I couldn’t bear to leave it, so I brought it down to my room and tucked it away in a drawer.

I’d been saving these two boxes for last. One was marked
PHOTOS
and the other
MEMORIES
. I tackled the photo box first and spent hours flipping through albums chronicling Mom’s childhood and college years. There wasn’t a single picture of Dad before age thirty, but then I came across their wedding album, and there he was, wearing a seersucker suit on a tropical beach, smiling at the camera with his arm around Mom’s waist. The sight of them young and happy and alive made me so unbelievably sad. I couldn’t even look at my baby pictures. I put the photo box away, figuring I could go back to it whenever I wanted.

Mom was a devoted keeper of scrapbooks, and the memory
box contained five stuffed binders full of ticket stubs and invitations, birth announcements and programs. I found a small jewelry box with their wedding rings, their marriage license, and my original birth certificate. Buried under everything else was a manila folder with several newspaper clippings. Most of them were irrelevant, random things Mom must have kept for reference. I almost didn’t go through the whole pile, but something—a vague, unsettling feeling in my gut—told me to keep looking.

Hidden between a recipe for homemade potato salad and an old advice column, I found an article with the headline “Princeton University Researchers ‘Closer Than Ever’ to Discovering Secrets of Parallel Universes.” The piece included a picture of three people: Dad on the left, Mom on the right, and in the middle, with an arm around each of them, someone else I recognized. The man in the photo looked exactly like Dr. Moss—from
Aurora.

“What the hell?” I whispered. The caption read
Drs. George Lawson and Mary Quentin pose with lead researcher Dr. Anthony March.

Dr. March was not an easy person to track down. A Google search told me he no longer worked at Princeton, but other than a brief stint at Northwestern, there was no sign of him in over five years. Then, on a popular science website, I came across an interview with him that was only a few months old. It said he was working on a book and listed him as a professor emeritus.

There was no doubt in my mind that Dr. March had been the one to leave the star in my mailbox—a message from Dr. Moss, I assumed. Thomas had said Dr. March didn’t exist, but not only did he
exist,
he was exactly who I should’ve known all along he was: Dr. Moss’s Earth analog. Dr. Moss had called Dr. March his research partner and claimed to have consulted with him about my connection to Juliana. I could think of no other explanation than that Dr. March and Dr. Moss were able to communicate over their own tether; when I’d asked Dr. Moss if he knew of anybody else who could do that, he’d said, “Not as such.” He hadn’t said
no.

If Dr. Moss had the technology to cross the tandem, it stood to reason that Dr. March did, too. That meant there was a chance—a small one, but greater than there had been
before—that I could find my way back to Aurora. Back to Thomas. Back to the self I was just beginning to discover.

The reporter who’d conducted the interview was named Magdalena Polovsky, and her email address was listed in the sidebar of the post. I wrote her a quick email, saying I’d read her piece and wanted to talk to Dr. March as part of a school project and asking if she could put us in touch.

It took two days for Magdalena Polovsky to get back to me, and by the time her email landed in my inbox, my insides were tied up in knots.

I spent a long time crafting my email to Dr. March. I decided to tell him I recently discovered he’d mentored my parents, and I was hoping to talk to him in the interest of finding out more about them. I added a short note to Carla at the top, asking her to pass the message along, and settled in for what I figured would be a pretty long wait.

Which was why I was surprised to get a response in just under two hours.