Ash and Darkness (Translucent #3) (12 page)

“Or South Carolina. The biggest meteor hit in South Carolina, maybe there’s something there. All I’m saying is we have everything we need. We have a
year’s
supply of food. We can at least
try
.”

“So you spend two months crossing the country and there’s nothing there. Then what?”

“Then we try something else. We look somewhere else.”

“There is nothing out there,” she spat. “
Nothing
. This whole planet . . . it’s a copy of what’s real, an imitation. A fake. It updates only when it collects a victim, and only locally, only the relevant parts. I doubt there even is a Los Angeles out there, or a South Carolina, or a Europe or an Africa or an Asia. Because none of that exists here. None of it.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but a faint sound tickled my ear, cutting me off. Music.

Music?

“What is that?” Sarah looked around. “Where’s that coming from?”

I traced the sound back to my sweatshirt, which I shoved aside. My cell phone tumbled out of the folds and skittered to a rest, screen brightly lit.

“It’s my cell phone,” I whispered.

“Did you set an alarm?” she said.

“No, it’s . . . it’s . . .” I picked it up, hardly believing my eyes, “it’s my ringtone. It’s ringing.”

“It’s
ringing?
” she said.

“Um . . . I think?”

“You mean someone’s calling you?”

“Uh-huh. What do I do?”

“Well . . . answer it.”

Chapter 13

“Wait, do you
recognize that number?” said Sarah. “That’s an eight-oh-five area code.”

I squinted at the number on the phone, which continued to chime in my hand. “I think . . . I think it’s my number.”

“Your number?”

I nodded.

“How can it be—never mind, just answer it.”

I swallowed and accepted the call, raising the screen to my cheek. “Hell . . . hello?” I croaked.

The other end hissed.

“Hello?” I said again. “Is anyone there?”

Nothing. Just background static. My own heartbeat, amplified against my ear.

Now that the sun had set, its warmth quickly receded from my skin, leaving only cold. I shivered and reached for my hoodie.

Then, so faintly I almost thought I’d imagined it, a girl’s voice spoke on the other end.

“. . . ello . . . nyone . . . ere?”

At first, I thought it might be my own distorted voice echoed back to me.

But the inflection was different.

I squeezed the phone to my cheek and swiveled away from Sarah to better focus, clearing my throat. “This is Leona Hewitt,” I stated. “I can’t hear you very well, so you’re going to have to speak up. Do you need help? Where are you? We have food and water and shelter. I repeat, we have food and water and shelter. Do you need assistance? We can help you.”

Silence.

“Kind of hoping they could help
us
,” Sarah muttered next to me.

“Shh!” I waved her off.

Then, scarcely audible, the voice from the other end spoke again. “. . . 
ona!
. . . oly shit . . . at . . . eally . . . ou?”

I recognized the voice.

“Megan!” I shouted. “Megan, is that you? How are . . . how are you . . . ?” A tear welled in my eye. “Where are you? How are you calling me? Are you here?”

She continued, “. . . ajor Connor’s idea . . . your phone . . . wrapped it . . . ark matter . . . alled it . . .” 

And then I understood. She was calling from Earth, not here.

“Megan,” I squeezed the phone to my cheek. “It’s so good to hear your voice—”

The line went dead.

Call ended. Zero bars of service.

Hands shaking, I redialed the number, but it gave me an error.
Mobile network not available
.

She was gone.

“Megan,” I whispered.

“Your phone . . .” Sarah peered intently at the device in my hand, rubbing her jaw. “How’d your phone do that?”

“Megan has it,” I said. “When I was disappearing, I told her to get it and call Major Connor. She has the fake copy of it. This is the real one.”

“What’d she say?”

“She said she wrapped it in dark matter and called it, but for some reason I got the call here. On this phone. There must be a connection between them.”

Sarah rubbed her jaw harder, nodding. “Wrapping it in dark matter . . . that must have caused the mobile carrier waves to cross over into dark matter, so they were transported here, just like we were transported here.”

“My voice went through,” I said. “My voice went back to Earth. She heard me.”

“She would, yes. While the channel was open.”

“But that’s proof, right?” My pulse hiked at the realization. “That’s proof something can get back to Earth. You said that was impossible.”

She shook her head. “That is not what I said. I said it didn’t work. In theory, it’s possible, since the channel will permit travel in both directions. But there needs to be a hole in space on the other end, an opening, a volume of dark matter large enough that a human can pass through. Otherwise it just loops back to its starting point. In this case, a channel formed between your two phones, but it was miniscule, and unstable. Just enough for an electrical signal to get through, but nothing else. Sending actual matter through dark matter is a completely different story.”

“Sarah, if you knew all this stuff about dark matter, why didn’t you tell me?” I said.

“Because it’s graduate level physics and you’re only sixteen. It would just confuse you.”

“I’m smart,” I said hotly. “Try me.”

“I barely even understand this stuff, Leona. It won’t make one bit of sense to you.”

“I don’t care. Just tell me.”

“Fine . . .
fine.
” She exhaled a sigh, puffing her cheeks. “You want to know what dark matter is? You want to know how it teleported us here? You want to know how it’s possible that our entire planet has been replicated here in a nonreal medium? You want to know how a creature that lives a billion miles away can talk to you from inside your head?”

“Yes, yes! I do.”

“Dark matter is a naked singularity. That’s how.” She glanced up at the dusk sky, now showing the first stars. “We should be going inside. It’s getting dark.”

She stood up, indicating the conversation was over. Explaining nothing.

“Wait!” I grabbed
her elbow in the doorway. “What is that? A naked, uh, singularthingy, what does that mean?”

“
Singularity
,” she said, shaking me off. “A naked
singularity
.” She glanced over my head again at the night sky. “Come inside and shut the door, Leona.”

“But my stuff—”

“Go,” she barked. “Now. Right now.”

I sprinted back down the driveway, pocketed my cell phone, threw my hoodie over my shoulder, and hoisted the telescope under my arm. With a terrified glance up and down the darkening street, I ran back.

Sarah yanked the door shut behind me. Then she locked it, deadbolted it, slotted the security chain, and backed away. Next she went around the room and drew all the blinds, plunging the room into blackness.

She paused at one and nudged it aside to peek out, again looking up at the sky.

“What is it?” I stammered. “What’s out there?”

“At the center of every black hole,” she said, “lies what physicists call a singularity.” She let the blinds shut. “It’s a theoretical point of infinite density. A black hole forms when you have so much mass that gravity overpowers all other forces and pulls everything into a tighter and tighter ball until it collapses in on itself and has zero size. What you have left is a singularity.”

“Uh-huh.” I followed her silhouette into the kitchen, where she flipped on the lantern, bathing us in a cold fluorescent light.

“So here’s what happens,” Sarah continued. “Mass causes spacetime to bend. Einstein figured that out. That’s general relativity. Imagine a bunch of balls resting on a rubber sheet. Heavier balls form deeper depressions in the sheet. The sheet is spacetime. You following me so far?”

“I . . . think so?”

“Good. You’re doing better than my undergrads. Now imagine a singularity. It’s a point of infinite density. It doesn’t just form a depression in spacetime, it punches a hole right through it. Like a needle. It’s a complete breakdown of physics. It’s a division by zero. A hole in spacetime. No one knows what that does. One theory is that the holes can line up, forming what’s called a wormhole, a tunnel between two otherwise vastly separated locations in space.”

“A wormhole,” I muttered, struggling to follow along. “Is that how we got here?”

She nodded and shuffled to the window above the sink, nudging the curtains aside to peer up at the starry sky. Her eyebrows furrowed. “The trouble is, a singularity only forms at the center of a black hole, at the bottom of a deep gravity well, forever beyond our reach.” She tucked the curtains back in place. “For a long time, though, physicists have theorized about the existence of a singularity that can form without a gravity well around it—a
naked
singularity, as they call it.”

She reached for the tiny vial hanging from her neck and rolled it between her fingers, lost in thought.

“A naked singularity . . .” The vial distracted me and I trailed off. “What’s in that thing?”

She dropped it, startled. “Nothing.” She tucked it out of view. “Yeah, so according to string theory calculations, a naked singularity—if it was ever found to exist—would have fluid-like properties, it would transmit light instantly from one side to the other, rendering anything in between invisible, and it would form the mouth of a wormhole to another location in space.”

“You mean like dark matter?” I said.

“Exactly like dark matter. Whenever we put on dark matter, Leona, we were literally stepping inside a naked singularity. We were stepping right into a wormhole . . . and if we stayed in it long enough, it took us here.” Again, she cracked the blinds and stared up at the stars, and the furrow in her brows deepened.

“What’s up there?” I said. “Why do you keep looking up there?”

Gaze fixed on the night sky, she clenched her jaw and swallowed. “Leona, can I ask you a favor?”

“Sure. What?”

“Can I borrow your telescope?”

Chapter 14

“Well, there’s the
star Deneb . . .” Sarah muttered, squinting into the telescope which she had erected at the floor to ceiling window in the dim master bedroom. “That’s something familiar, at least. But where’s the rest of the constellation?”

“Can I see? Can I see?” I said, bouncing on my toes.

“Where the hell is the rest of Cygnus?” she said, ignoring me. “Or the other constellations? I’m not finding anything.”

“I can find the Big Dipper for you,” I offered.

“Shh,” she said.

“Is there a moon here?” I asked. “How come I haven’t seen the moon once?”

“What the hell is this?” she whispered, distracted.

“Come on, just let me look. You’ve been hogging it.”

“No, wait, wait . . . there’s Gamma Cygni! Gotcha. Now where’s Albireo? Nowhere.” She backed away, scratching her head. “Where
are
we?”

I pounced on the telescope.

She had it focused on a hazy dusting of stars, dominated by a bright yellow one at its center. I strained to make it out. “Is that a UFO?”

“That’s Gamma Cygni, the second-brightest star in the constellation Cygnus.”

“Where’s the Big Dipper?”

“It’s called
Ursa Major
,” said Sarah, “and it’s not up there. Orion’s not up there, Canis Major’s not up there, Gemini’s not up there. None of the constellations are up there.”

“So . . . where are they?”

“The real question is where are
we?
” Under the lantern, she consulted the short list of celestial objects she had found. “So we’ve got the Large Magellenic Cloud, we’ve got the Andromeda Galaxy, we’ve got Deneb, which is supposed to be in the constellation Cygnus, but I’ve got no idea where Epsilon Cygni, Albireo, or the others are.” She studied her notes. “The good news is we’re still in the Milky Way, still in our galaxy.
Where
in our galaxy, I have no idea. Maybe somewhere out on the Perseus Arm, but that’s just a guess. I don’t recognize anything nearby.”

“Wait.” I blinked. “You mean we’re actually somewhere
real?
This isn’t just a weird, parallel version of Earth that’s in an alternate reality or something? We’re actually just way out in space?”

“Well, we have to be
somewhere
in the known universe, don’t we?”

“How far are we from Earth?” I asked, feeling hopeful. “From the real
Earth?” If it was just distance that separated us from home, then suddenly it didn’t seem so bad. A distance, we could cross. Earth might even send help. Or we could build a spaceship—

“Maybe ten thousand light years,” she said. “Again, that’s just a guess.”

Her words finally registered. “
Ten thousand
light years?”

“It’s just a guess.”

“But that’s . . . that’s . . .”

“Far,” she finished for me. “Incomprehensibly far. So far that we might as well be in a different universe. So far it doesn’t even matter.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “So the good news in we’re at least in the same galaxy as Earth. But the bad news is it’s really far away.”

“I haven’t given you the bad news yet.”

I cringed. “Please don’t say that.”

“You want to hear the bad news or not?”

“No. Yes. Maybe.”

“The bad news is that patch of sky right there.” She pulled back the blinds and pointed, and I squeezed in next to her to look. Her finger ended low on the horizon, near a strange swirl of stars. “I noticed that patch a while ago. It was only just now I realized what it was, when we were outside talking about this stuff.”

It was that smudge I’d noticed the first night.

“Here, I’ll bring it up on the telescope again.” She withdrew to adjust the tripod, aiming the device at the swirl. “Now look at it through the eyepiece.”

I peeled my eyes off the anomaly, pulled my hair back, and looked into the telescope. The smudge swam into view, magnified a hundred times.

At first, I couldn’t tell what I was looking at.

“When you realize what that is, everything makes a lot more sense,” Sarah said grimly.

Suddenly, the stars snapped into focus.

In that one spot, the pricks of light smeared together into a spiral, as if a giant fist had taken the night sky and scrunched it together, dragging everything along with it.

“That’s an effect known as gravitational lensing,” said Sarah. “It happens when something massive and invisible passes between you and a distant source of light, bending it like a lens. That we can see the effect with the naked eye means it is both very heavy, and very close. That’s the bad news.”

I pulled away from the telescope and found her face in the darkness. “Why is that bad news? What does that mean?”

“It means,” she said, “that this planet is orbiting around a black hole.”