BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller

Table of Contents

Symmetry breaking
: a phenomenon where (infinitesimally) small fluctuations acting on a system which is crossing a critical point decide the system’s fate, by determining which branch of a bifurcation is taken.

Chapter 1

Lip gloss finally
applied, I blew a kiss to the visor mirror and climbed out of my new Jeep Wrangler thoroughly ready to get asked to prom by Josh Hutchinson.

Even at midnight, the perimeter of lights around The Scripps Research Institute could wake the blind. Since this morning, the U.S. Army had erected more than a dozen sixty-foot towers arrayed with Metal Halide floodlights. The lights combined with the drone of diesel generators and the occasional scream of power tools destroyed all hope of a quiet evening on the Torrey Pines Golf Course.

Maybe this was not the best night for stargazing.

I tied my hair back and wiggled under a loose section of the barbed wire fence, grateful that three years of cross-country had carved my figure down to practically nothing.

At least we’d be alone. As of twelve hours ago, La Jolla’s world-class biomedical research institute, the thirty-five acre campus, and the golf course were all part of the quarantine zone.

I reached our lookout spot at the edge of the green. My hair, loose again, caught the sea breeze and whipped across my face.

“Josh?” I whispered.

Surf thumped the beach two hundred feet below me.

“Joshua?”

“There! Shooting star,” his voice said. He stepped out of the shadows, head angled skyward. “Did you see it?”

I straightened up. “I see you didn’t wuss out at the fence.”

Josh smoothed back his wavy hair and thrust his chin forward, flaunting a jawline that could have doubled as an architect’s straightedge. “There is my reputation to consider, Blaire.”

It was only sort of a joke. Captain of the basketball team and student body president and way too charming for his own good, Josh Hutchinson was the kind of guy everyone loved to hate.

Unless, of course, he was asking you to prom.

“So . . . stargazing in a hot zone,” I said, breaking the silence. “This is romantic.”

“I’m telling you I booked the place before they did,” he said, pointing a thumb behind him at the Army.

“You don’t think they had someone pulling strings for them, do you?”

“Anything’s possible.” He tossed a bent metal sign into the light. “At least I was able to nab one of these for my room.”

On the reflective yellow background, I recognized the international biohazard symbol. I had ignored similar signs spaced evenly along the perimeter fence. “That’s cute.” I tilted my head. “Maybe if there’s enough radiation it will even glow in the dark.”

The floodlights behind us left his eyes in shadow. “So you’re not even scared a little bit?”

“Were you hoping I’d be?”

He shrugged. “I know it’s just a drill, the whole quarantine thing. It’s just . . . we’re
really
not supposed to be in here.”

“Your idea, remember?”

“About that . . .” He stepped closer and took my hands in his. “I didn’t actually invite you here to stargaze.”

My heart sped up, and I squeezed his hands without meaning to and loosened my grip just as fast, hoping he didn’t notice. Act cool, Blaire.
Act cool
. “Yeah, I kind of figured,” I said.

“Can I ask you something?” he said.

I nodded.

“Blaire, will you go to pr
—
”

My cell phone cut him off. I cringed and yanked it out of my pocket to silence it. Probably my idiot friends calling for the scoop.

But then I saw the caller ID.

My fingers froze over the screen. I’d forgotten the number was still in my phone.

Josh crossed his arms. “Who is it?” he said, his eyes wandering to the Navy destroyer anchored offshore.

“I need to take this.” I raised the phone to my ear. My hands trembled, but not from the cold. “Hello?”

“Blaire. Detective Joe Paretti.”

Just the sound of the his voice unearthed layers of emotion I had no idea I still had, fear and hopelessness, and that one terrifying pang of hope that hurt worst of all.

“It’s midnight,” I said, my throat dry. “Why are you calling me?”

“You better come down to the station.”

“Joe, why are you calling me?”

A sigh on the other end. I could picture him rubbing his forehead. “We found him.”

We found him
.

Three words I had waited to hear for eleven months. The cliffs blurred and the floodlights from The Scripps Institute kaleidoscoped around me. Nothing mattered anymore. That I was two seconds away from getting asked to prom by La Jolla High’s undisputed heartthrob Joshua Hutchinson could have been another lifetime.

I choked out the only question that mattered. “Is he alive?”

“Just come down to the station,” he said. “I’ll explain everything here.”

And he hung up.

The phone slipped from my hand. It bounced on the rock and skittered toward the cliff edge.

“I have to go,” I said, pushing away from Josh and grabbing the phone. “I have to go right now.”

“Wait, Blaire
—
” He lunged for my hand, but I tore out of his grip. I was already sprinting to my car.

***

My name is Blaire Adams.

At the end of my sophomore year my father disappeared without a trace. I was fifteen. I remembered the last evening
—
he kissed me goodnight then went up to bed himself.

In the morning, he was gone.

Detective Joe Paretti of the San Diego Police Department led the investigation, and found nothing for the next eleven months. In his words, it was as if my father had evaporated.

Tonight, they had finally found him.

The gas pedal bottomed out under my toes, but my Jeep didn’t budge. The engine just revved out of control, and its sudden, violent vibration stung my fingertips through the steering wheel.

First gear. Put it in first gear.

Except I had only just learned manual transmission, and I was dizzy, hyperventilating. It was like solving one of those ball-in-a-maze toys blindfolded.

Finally the stick slotted into place.

But not in first gear. The car shook and lurched forward. I floored it and rode the clutch for two blocks. The burnt smell hissing from my new car only sharpened my focus, reminded me to breathe. Instinct took over.

An eternity later, I squealed to a stop in front of the San Diego Police Department, Northern Division and tore up the ramp. A billion fragments of hope cluttered my mind to the point of popping. At the door, I gave up thinking.

Up ahead, at the end a dark linoleum hallway lit only by orange emergency strips, light spilled from a single office. And voices.

By now I knew the police station well enough to recognize the office as Joe Paretti’s. From inside the office, one voice cut through the others. A voice that made me think of a gurgling brook in winter, deceptively quiet before a flood.

Dad.

My heart did this funny thing, like I’d swallowed it wrong. My legs put on a burst of speed, raising the chilled police station air to a whistle in my ears and plowing me straight into the hulk of a man blocking the office doorway.

Joe Paretti whipped around. “Wait a sec, kid
—
”

I lunged for the gap at his side, and almost slipped past him. He grabbed my wrists and hauled me up the corridor, kicked the door shut behind him, and planted me against the wall. “Blaire, just wait a sec. I might have called you in too soon.”

“Daddy!” I twisted my neck to peer through the sidelites, but barely discerned a standing figure through the frosted glass. “Let me see him!” I screamed.

“Just give me time to sort this out,” Joe said. His radio crackled with an incoherent message.

“No, I’m seeing him
now
—
” Using both hands, I shoved his arm off the wall, and his other arm came around behind me to stop him from falling into me. Like pushing through a turnstile. I cranked the doorknob.

Once again, Joe’s hand closed around my wrist. “Blaire, I don’t want you in there yet.”

“That’s my dad
—
”

“I called you in too soon,” he barked. Only the deep creases lining the detective’s forehead betrayed his fatigue. “Give me a chance to sort this out. We just picked him up a half hour ago”

“Where?”

“Over by the Institute.”

“The quarantine zone?”

“And I deserve the goddamn Medal of Honor for getting those jarheads to hand him over. ‘Community exercise’ my ass. Just scratching each other’s nuts if you ask me. Just give me ten more minutes to sort this out.”

“Sort out what?”

“Listen to me, Blaire,” he said, and for the first time that night his voice was gentle, his eyes full of sympathy. “Your dad’s got amnesia . . . he can’t remember a damn thing about you.”

***

Behind us, muffled shouts seeped from the glass sidelites.

My father.

And I understood what Joe meant. My father’s yells scared me, sickened me. Suddenly I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want to see what had become of him.

Because people don’t just vanish for eleven months and come back normal. They come back changed. Scarred in some way.

Crazy.

A nervous chill crept up my throat. I swallowed it back down and stood up straight. “It’s temporary,” I declared. “He just needs to see me, and he’ll remember me.”

“Oh, he remembers you just fine,” said Joe. “In fact, he was able to give us a picture perfect description of you . . . when you were four.”

“Four . . .
years old
?”

“Everything after that’s toast. I’ve seen it just like this a thousand times
—
post-traumatic retrograde amnesia, or something like it.”

“From what?” I said.

He shrugged. “A hit on the head.”

Another officer emerged from the office, his radio hissing on his belt, and in the brief moment the door hung open, I glimpsed my father. I surged forward. But the door latched shut, and I froze, eyes glued to the metal door between us, no longer sure I had the strength. Instead, my gaze fell to Joe’s gleaming black shoes.

His hand gripped my shoulder. “Blaire, you will survive,” he said. “There is one thing I can show you right now, something he had in his possession that might have sentimental value to you. Would you like to see it?”

I nodded, a tear forming in my eye.

The detective produced a paper envelope. “It’s all we found on him. Neither me nor the other officers make any damn sense of it.” He dumped the contents of the envelope onto his palm. “You recognize this?”

I studied the object in his hand, and the back of my neck prickled. He was holding the key to the mystery of my father’s disappearance and where he had been for almost a year.

***

In another office down the hall, far away from my father
—
now relocated to a holding cell
—
Paretti carefully extracted the evidence from the paper bag and laid it on the desk in front of me.

It was a leather-bound diary the size of a deck of cards. And from the frayed edges and the spots worn thin, I guessed well-used.

“Mean anything to you?” said Joe.

“It’s a diary.”

“I didn’t bring you down here to be a smart ass, kid. We figured that ourselves. Now open it up.”

“Oh, did that part stump you?” I said, my voice suddenly all attitude. “See, you slide the elastic off and then it opens just like a book. Here, you try it
—
”

The cop fixed me in an unblinking gaze. “Read it, Blaire.”

I flipped through the diary. Pages filled with my father’s longhand, practically illegible to anyone but himself. And me. As his only daughter, and the closest living person to him, I could read his loopy cursive.

Ever since I was little, he had kept a diary just like this. And if my intuition was correct, it would contain a detailed account of the last eleven months of his life. An account of his disappearance and what happened afterwards. At the thought, my heart picked up speed. 

“It’s gibberish right?” said Joe.

“Only if you’re illiterate,” I said, returning to the first page, the first sentence.

I couldn’t read it.

Confused, I flipped to a random page halfway through.

Not English. Not even recognizable letters. I opened to another page, and another. Page after page of the same, foreign calligraphy. Was it Greek?

I peered closer. No, more foreign than Greek. Russian, maybe. Yet still western. Arabic? No, the symbols
looked
like our letters
—
oh, please, who was I trying to fool? I couldn’t tell.

I shook my head and closed the diary.

“Jesus, I’ll send for a linguist.” Paretti returned the diary to the bag and creased it shut. “Everything’s backwards with this guy.”

Backwards.

“Wait, let me see the diary again,” I said.

“It’s going into evidence.”

“I think I can read it.”

“You’re wasting your time,” he muttered, but handed me the diary anyway.

I opened to the first page, and the letters clicked into place. It was so simple, I laughed.

“Did I miss a joke in Farsi?”

“It’s not a foreign language,” I said. “It’s just backwards.”

“You better get to the point, and fast
—
”

“
Backwards.
Look, hold it up to a mirror
—
” my eyes darted to the office’s dark windows, where I glimpsed my reflection, long auburn hair crusted to blotchy, tear-stained cheeks, “or glass . . . hold it up to the glass.”

Joe did as I instructed, and his eyebrows scrunched together. “I’ll be damned. Must have hit his head harder than we thought. He’s all scrambled.”

“He’s not scrambled,” I said, my face hot. “For your information, Leonardo Da Vinci wrote backwards. He wrote forward with his right hand and backwards with his left hand.”

Joe just shook his head, massaging the creases out of his forehead. “Spare me, Blaire. I’ve had a long night.” He waved over one of the uniformed officers, a rookie, fresh out of the academy by the looks of his crew cut. “I want this scanned and typed up. The
correct
orientation.”

“Ten-four.” The rookie carried the diary out of the office.

“Am I ever going to see that again?” I said, watching him disappear up the hall with the diary.

“It’s going into evidence,” said Joe, facing me again. “Now, you wanted to see your daddy? Let’s go see him. He’s been asking for you.”

***

My father watched me enter the police interrogation room but said nothing. At the sight of him my heartache sharpened to a sting. Soft, straight brown hair framed a hardened face. His hazel eyes glowed from within, from his spirit. I barely resisted running to him. 

But something was wrong.

The sleeves of a tattered T-shirt hung off bruised, cut up biceps. Always lean and toned before, he appeared outright emaciated now, like he hadn’t eaten in months. Nor had he shaved recently. His pale, sweaty skin gleamed under the fluorescent lights. He was clutching his stomach, as if on the verge of puking. But the worst was his eyes.