BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller (18 page)

My hair filtered the red glow like tinsel. I brushed it out of the way and read the title of the article which lay open
—
and immediately felt chills skittering down my back.

***

Our Universe May Be a Giant Hologram

Charles had highlighted a portion of the text itself and in the margins scribbled notes, long since smeared. I read the highlighted text, all of it a mirror image.

The strangest version of all parallel universe proposals is one that emerged gradually over 30 years of theoretical studies on the quantum properties of black holes. The work culminated in the last decade, and it suggests, remarkably, that all we experience is nothing but a holographic projection of processes taking place on some distant surface that surrounds us. You can pinch yourself, and what you feel will be real, but it mirrors a parallel process taking place in a different, distant reality.

Fake
. In other words, our universe was fake. Just like reflections.

The magazine rested on top of a stapled stack of paper. I slid it aside, revealing another article bearing a similarly eerie title, this one from The Scripps Research Institute and more scholarly than the Discover Magazine article.

The Holographic Principle In Relation To The Artifact

At the top of the list of authors, circled, was a name I recognized
—
Dr. Sal Benjamin. My neighbor.

The article’s publication date was April 12
—
I consulted the calendar on my phone
—
April 12
, the day before he committed suicide.

The day before Damian paid him a visit. Again, Charles had highlighted and annotated lines of text. Some of his notes jumped out at me.

My eyes fell to the bottom of the page, to a single statement he had written in the bottom margin
—
and prickles danced across my scalp.

We exist in a reflection

No. I shook my head. That was just Charles’s paranoia.

But the articles
—
sure,
this
was a reflection, but I had broken symmetry an hour ago. These articles also existed in the source, where Charles had been reading them.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” I muttered, flipping to another page.

“But doesn’t it?” said a voice from the doorway, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

***

Charles leaned against the wall, arms crossed, eyes drilling into me. Standing there for who knew how long.

Just watching me.

He unfolded his arms and ambled into the room, his wide shoulders brushing against the door frame.

And I understood, more than ever, how large and powerful a man he was.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just wanted to figure out what else you knew about the artifact and my DNA.” I paused, biding my time. “So you think we’re in a reflection?”

“It’s occurred to me to ask that question,” he said. “Blaire, you could have just asked me.”

I edged around the desk toward the door, the tightness in my throat forcing me to swallow. I had expected this. That’s why I’d crossed over in the first place, so everything I did could be undone.

I had handled worse than Charles in reflections
—
all I had to do was slip by him. Get home. Return to the source. Break the mirror.

Undo it all.

“I didn’t think you would tell me,” I said, “since it was my DNA and you wouldn’t want to scare me. I thought you’d want to protect me from the truth.”

Almost imperceptibly, Charles shifted closer to me, studied me. His eyes narrowed slightly, intent on my own eyes, then the rest of me.

“You have a very symmetrical face,” he said. “Symmetry is attractive. That’s one of the reasons you’re so striking.” He flipped on the light in his office, and the fluorescent glare blinded me, forced me to shield my eyes. “And such perfect skin. Not one flaw.” He continued to scrutinize me under what now felt like a spotlight.

He was looking for something.

I backed away from him, now scared. He wasn’t acting right. 

“I want your keys back,” he said. “I don’t trust you with them anymore.”

I hesitated, but knew I had to get him to trust me again. There was no harm in giving up the keys; they were reflections. I pulled the keys out of my pocket and struggled to unloop the ISDI keys from my car keys, hands trembling.

He watched them intently, his eyes tracking every movement of my fingers.

Finally I got them loose and tossed them to him. “I’m sorry, I’ll just go,” I said. “You can fire me if you want.”

He caught the keys. “Just like that, Blaire? Don’t you care about this internship? About your father?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I made a mistake coming here.”

Smiling, he jangled the keys and pocketed them. “Actually, the mistake you made,” he said, “was doing an action that requires dexterity. You’re left-handed Blaire, yet I just saw you favor your right hand when you took the keys off the ring.”

I said nothing, just stared at him, as fear froze my heart.
Caught
.

He continued. “I suppose that means I’m just a reflection.” His eyes took on a darker hue. “Naturally, that troubles me.”

“What do you want?” I whispered.

“Put yourself in my shoes, Blaire. What if one of us
—
say, Damian
—
snuck into your bedroom in the middle of the night and told you that you were a reflection, that you weren’t
real
. What would you do?”

“Who cares?” I said. “We do it to each other all the time. This is no different.” I gestured to the articles he’d collected. “Besides, you don’t even think that’s the source up there, anyway.”

“It’s one step closer to it,” he said. “Don’t tell me you honestly expect me go on living my life down here, knowing I’m living in the orphaned world you left behind . . . when I can go higher.”

“Too late. You’re already in the source.”

“But you broke the symmetry, Blaire. The source Charles isn’t
me
anymore. The source Charles doesn’t have this conversation. We’ve diverged, and I want
me
to live, not the source Charles.”

“I can’t take you back,” I said. “That’s one of your own rules.”

“And another one is never engage a fellow carrier’s reflection. Now you see why.” He paused, jangling the keys again. “I’m guessing you didn’t use rooms A or B
—
otherwise, you would have had to break into ISDI before you broke symmetry. No, you would have done it from someplace safe . . .”

I stared at him, horrified, as he worked out the details of my betrayal, and undid my last hope of keeping him down here.

“A friend’s house,” he mused, studying my expression. “No, Damian’s the only one you trust who knows about crossing over, and you wouldn’t want him to know about this. That means you used a mirror in your own house. Probably a full length mirror in one of the bedrooms. But which one . . .” He massaged his chin. “It’s only your fourth crossover, so you’re still scared of it. I’m guessing you crossed over from the safety of your own bedroom.”

“I
didn’t
,” I whispered.

His eyes lit up with glee. “Seventy-three twenty-two Via Capri, if I remember correctly, is the address of your house.” He grinned. “Good luck explaining my disappearance and why you’re backwards to Damian and my daughter. I wonder if you’ll ever tell them, or if you’ll just suffer away by yourself while the poorly reflected laws of physics slowly deteriorate your body from the inside out and drive you to suicide.”

Then he was gone.

I stared in shock at the dark hallway where he had stood an instant before. He was going to my house. Charles’s reflection was going to my house, and if he made it there first, he would orphan me before I got there. And then do what? Kill his own source?

The rattling of the office’s front door downstairs threw me into action. It was a race for my life and the integrity of the source universe I’d left behind. I bolted after him, my heart clawing itself into my throat.

I had to beat him home.

Chapter 17

By the time
I made it to my Jeep, the headlights of Charles’s Prius had already disappeared around the corner. I revved the Jeep’s engine and peeled out after him, nearly stalling in the process.

He had a head start on me, but he also drove the slower Prius. On the freeway, my car should gain on his. I rounded the corner and spotted his red tail lights a quarter mile ahead. My toes bottomed out the petal, and the growl of the Jeep’s engine rose to a roar.

Just south of a hundred, the tachometer redlined in sixth gear. My maximum speed. Intersections whizzed by, and I prayed my path stayed clear, though I wasn’t sure who’s jurisdiction this was
—
God’s or Satan’s. Miraculously, I caught a string of greens. Yet Charles’s red tail lights taunted me just out of reach. I hadn’t gained an inch.

Now that I thought about it, a Prius was built for highway travel, a Jeep for off-roading. Maybe my car wasn’t faster.

My heart thundered. If I didn’t make it to my house before him, I would be orphaned down here. A fate I’d never really considered. All those precautions and all that protocol created the illusion of safety, the illusion that everything was under control.

When nothing about crossing over was ever safe or under control.

Charles’s headlights veered onto the freeway onramp, and I backed off the pedal, dread replacing my stomach acid. I had already lost. The freeway was the fastest route to my house, and on a straight shot like that, no way I could beat him.

Come on,
think,
Blaire. I rolled through another intersection going the actual speed limit, wasting precious seconds, unable to commit to either the freeway or my shortcut home through city streets, which I knew took longer than a freeway trip. Then it hit me.

The speed limit.

The freeway was only faster because it allowed cars to drive nonstop at eighty miles per hour, but that didn’t mean it was the most
direct
path.

I yanked the wheel and veered onto Morena Boulevard instead, which would take me over Soledad Mountain Road. If I could manage to average sixty on the city streets, which wove a more direct path through the hills to my house, even if Charles drove a hundred on the freeway I would beat him.

Minutes later, I careened onto my street, and scanned the block for his Prius. Relief flooded through me. I was first
—

A pair of high beams swung onto the street at the opposite end of the block and burned my retinas. Charles. My house waited in the middle, directly between us. I floored it, and the acceleration shoved me into my seat. A hundred yards away, he did the same.

It was going to be a game of chicken.

***

Hopefully my Jeep weighed more than his Prius, because I had no intention of letting up on the gas. Right in front of my lawn, we collided head on with a sickening crash. The impact threw me forward, crushed me into the air bag.

The speeds weren’t fatal, though. We both jumped out of our cars at the same time. But my driver’s side faced my house, his faced away. By the time he circled his vehicle, I had a two second lead, and I flew toward the front door. His guttural intake of breath sounded right behind me.

I crashed into the door, jammed the key in the slot and twisted the lock open. I dove inside and kicked the door shut just as Charles slammed into it behind me. The frame trembled.

I leapt to my feet and locked the door, cranked the deadbolt, and slotted the security chain. And then I stood there, panting. I had made it
—

A crash from the kitchen made me jump. A dark figure tumbled onto the counter, square bits of glass showering off his dark hulk. He’d plunged right through the window. And with incredible speed, he charged.

In the darkness, I hardly believed it. My eyes couldn’t adjust in time. He materialized before me, burning in the glare from the porch light now spilling through the torn butcher paper, and he threw me to the floor. His hands groped up my chest for my throat.

I twisted and writhed out of his grip and scrambled up the stairs on all fours, desperate to escape his iron grip. He trailed me, panting like a wild dog, and his fingers latched onto my ankle, yanked me back. I jammed my other leg back, hammered his face with my heel. He grunted and sank back, and I scaled the remaining stairs to the top with him still probing blindly right behind me.

But my bedroom was downstairs, at the end of the hall.

He didn’t know that.

I scuttled sideways on the landing, scarcely resolving his silhouette in the pitch black. He froze, listened. But he’d hear my thundering heart. He’d sense me, now cornered less than an arm’s reach away against the railing.

The wooden balusters dug into my back. The railing guarding the landing’s edge.

I had no choice.

I dragged myself up and swung my legs over the railing, and leapt.

The air rose to a whistle and my stomach floated up my throat. I dropped blind for what seemed like eternity, and then pain shot through my legs and my body crumpled to the floor at the bottom of the stairs.

No time to assess the damage. I rose to my feet and ran up the hall to my bedroom, ignoring a sprained ankle. Hearing my movement, Charles cursed and barreled down the stairs after me.

I darted into the pitch black cave of my bedroom, and Charles plowed through the door right after me. He fumbled for a light switch, slapping every square foot of wall around the doorway, and without a sound I slipped back through the mirror into the source.

My fingers coiled around the axe handle, and I raised it over my head. Through the mirror, Charles found the lights, and my reflected bedroom flooded with brilliant light. Our eyes froze on each other through the glass, him in the reflection, me in the source.

I swung the axe, but the tool was too heavy, I couldn’t get good leverage. The blade glanced off the mirror. The impact merely jolted the glass. It wobbled between us, unbroken.

Charles lunged at the mirror, snarling. Terrified, I raised the axe again, swung, but my swing was weaker this time. Another glance. I hoisted the axe a third time, adrenaline scorching the insides of my veins, angled the blade and drove it forward with the entire weight of my body. We reached the mirror at the same time.

***

The blade connected first, and a single splinter etched the glass between us.

Charles vanished, his scream severed mid-breath, and the light he had turned on extinguished. The crack spread and splintered. Shards fell to the floor, and with them, me. I cowered in shock as glass rained on top of me.

I curled into a ball on the bed of broken glass, unable to move. Shivering. Breaths I didn’t want to take ripped through me, left me convulsing.

I thought of him standing now in my dark bedroom, orphaned in a reflection. Inches away from me just seconds earlier, now forever cut off. He would never cross the gulf that now separated us, neither in this life nor the next.

What would he do knowing he’d missed his one chance? Go back to the office and keep working?

Commit suicide?

No one really knew what happened to the reflections we left behind, and I never wanted to find out. But two things I did know
—
one, they were just as scared of getting left behind as we were. And two, with each crossover I seemed to be cutting it closer and closer. Sooner or later, I wouldn’t make it out in time.

That was the ultimate fate of all carriers. They either died of crossover sickness or became orphans.

I shook the glass out of my hair and dragged myself to my nightstand, cringing with every twitch of my sprained ankle. I clutched my cell phone and backed against my bed, hugging it between my knees. 

I dialed Damian’s number and pressed the phone to my ear. It went to voice mail, and my heart sank. I speed dialed Josh, and he answered after the second ring.

“Hey hottie,” he said, clearly still awake. “I was just thinking about you.” I could hear his teammates in the background, teasing him with oohs and cheers. After a few shuffles and the bang of a door shutting, he spoke from somewhere much quieter. “What’s up?”

His calm, laid-back voice pacified my buzzing nerves, and I shut my eyes and tried to pretend I hadn’t just crossed over. Instead, my anxiety was replaced by a stab of guilt.

Even though it had happened in a reflection,
my
lips had kissed Damian’s.
My
skin had burned under his touch. That should have been reserved for Josh.

“Sorry, I meant to call Josslyn.” I ended the call, and the phone slipped out of my fingers. I squeezed my legs to my chest and lay my cheek against my knees, feeling more alone than ever.

The buzz from my phone made me flinch.

Damian.

I dived for the phone and answered the call. “Why didn’t you pick up?”

“Blaire. It’s three in the morning.”

“Can you come over?” I said, my voice instantly melting into a scared little girl’s.

After a moment of silence, he said, “I’m not in the mood.”

“Just for tonight, can you not be a jerk to me?” Another silence, filled only with the erratic thumping of my heart.

“Blaire,” he said, finally catching the edge in my voice, “tell me what happened.”

Tears stung my eyes. “Just come over,” I whispered, “and don’t ask any questions.”

***

Damian found me shivering in my dark bedroom fifteen minutes later. He flipped on the bedside lamp and sat down on the floor next to me, but didn’t put his arm around me.

Instead, his eyes took in the broken shards still hanging off the frame of my sliding closet door. He remained silent for a long time before he finally spoke.

“You ran into Charles, didn’t you?” he said.

“How do you know I wasn’t crossing over to make out with you again?”

“I figured you’d want your next kiss from the source.”

I peered sideways at him. My
next
kiss? Whatever that
meant. Interpret later, Blaire. “He tried to come back with me,” I said. “He was like a different person.”

“Yeah, he’s a bit sensitive about that,” he said. “I’ve run into him too.”

“I think
sensitive
is an understatement. He doesn’t overlap, does he?”

Damian chuckled. “It probably would have been a good idea to ask that question
before
you crossed over.”

“What’s the point of that? I did a pretty good job figuring it out for myself with you, didn’t I?”

He smirked. “I think we all agree that was a particularly . . .
titillating
bit of sleuthing.”

My face flushed. “Does he overlap or not?”

“Not a bit.”

I sighed. “So you’re not mad at me?”

“Why would I be mad at you?” he said, locking eyes with me. “You only just broke every single rule and protocol there is for crossing over so you could betray our trust and find out information I probably could have told you if you’d just asked.”

A smile tugged at my lips. “So you
are
mad? At least I’m doing something
right.”

His eyes narrowed at me. “I think crossover’s getting to your head.”

“Charles thinks there’s a true source out there somewhere. He’s convinced we’re in a reflection right now.”

“Not an excuse for you to act suicidal.”

“Do you think there is?”

He held my gaze, so many emotions I was dying to understand swirling behind those cryptic, black eyes. “Isn’t that why we do what we do, Blaire? To get to the bottom of this? Figure out the mechanism in our genetics and work backwards . . . figure out where this all began?”

“And you think that’s the true source?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. One thing I do know is if there is a true source
—
and this is just a reflection
—
I’m not sure I’d want to go up there. I belong here.
We
belong here.” He faced forward and lowered his gaze. “You know, I knew I was in a reflection . . . when you kissed me.”

I curled my lip and edged away from him. “Congratulations, Damian. I guess that finally clears your name, doesn’t it? You were just
toying
with me.” My voice came out more biting than I’d intended, meaning I had let him get to me.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I only figured it out after you’d walked out the door. I knew you were going back to the source, but for some reason I didn’t try to chase you.”

“No duh,” I sneered. “That’s because you overlap. You knew you were actually in the source experiencing a reflection.”

“It doesn’t work backwards like that,” he said. “You only overlap down, never up; you’re only aware of the levels below you. The only thing I knew about the source me was that I wasn’t it. Plus, I hadn’t fully thought through what you walking out that door actually meant. Once you went back to the source, neither you nor your reflection would exist in my world. You’d be
gone
.”

I searched his dark eyes. “What would you have done instead, popped open a bottle of champagne?”

He smirked. “You seem to think you’re much more irritating than you actually are. That’s a compliment.”

I stared at him in disbelief. “On what planet is that a compliment?”

He stood up. “Come on.”

“No, I’m going to call you out for being a dick,” I said. “And you’re going to like it because I’m refreshing, and I’m a challenge.”

“That’s cute. Now come on.”

I eyed his outstretched hand dubiously. “I can’t walk. Sprained ankle.”

He raised an eyebrow, then effortlessly scooped me off the floor and carried me out to the living room, where he deposited me on a couch, leaving my heart a quivering, hyperactive mess.

“I didn’t say you could pick me up,” I said, my voice edged with warning.

“Don’t need your permission,” he said, and without asking he went into my kitchen and started preparing something. A Ziploc baggie filled with ice flew over my shoulder and landed in my lap, stinging my thigh.

“Ouch!” I said.

“Don’t be such a wuss,” he said, clinking glasses down on the counter behind me. The microwave beeped, and he came back with two mugs of hot chocolate and gave me one. I took a sip and nearly gagged.

“What’d you put in this?”

He took a long, deep drink from his. “Rum. It does the heart good.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Your dad’s stash. I’m surprised you haven’t finished that off yet.”

“Yeah, because I’m not an alcoholic like you.”

Damian got up and scanned my collection of movies. “What’ll it be? Beauty and the Beast or Snow White and the Seven Dwarves?”

“Those are lame choices.”

“Trust me, it’ll help.”

“Snow White.”

Damian put the movie in, and came back to the couch and sat at the opposite end, as far away from me as possible. Who did he think he was?

“If you’re worried about cooties, there’s another couch,” I offered, holding the ice to my ankle. “Or you could watch from the bar.”

He exhaled loudly and slid reluctantly to the center of the couch. “There. Normal.”

“No . . .” I scooted over to him and leaned my head against his shoulder. “
Normal
.”