BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller (24 page)

“Didn’t think we’d have a car, did they?” he said, smirking. The tunnel’s emergency lights gave his skin a bronze glow and accented the rigid set of his jaw. I gazed at him, mesmerized. It was official; he was beyond sexy.

We shot up the tunnel, engine roaring, and I felt my insides floating forward. I stole a glance at the tachometer: deep into the redline. We were pushing the reverse gear to the max.

Bullets tore up the bumper and stamped the windows with spider webs. A side view mirror snapped off. The car jerked, and my door dented in, nearly crushing my knee. The impact plastered me to the window then sprawled me out on his lap.

He straightened us out. “Sorry.”

“You did that on purpose,” I said, peeling my face off his thigh.

“They’re closing the blast door,” he said.

“
What?
”

“Hang on to something,” he said, his eyes fixed on the black stretch of tunnel behind us. “This is going to be tight.”

I just had time to grab my door. With a nauseating squeal, the blast door
—
now half closed
—
raked the length of the car, pulverized the other mirror, and again crunched me into the door. Then we shot out of the tunnel. Suddenly airborne, the vehicle pitched backwards, and through the windshield the cliffs dropped off and I glimpsed the moon’s glowing crescent
—
before the car groaned to a stop and I was squashed into my seat. A wall of water shot up behind us and rolled down the windshield. We’d backed right into the ocean.

Water submerged my window. I stared out at bubbles, terrified. Unfazed, Damian shoved the stick into first gear, and gave the engine gas.
Is he crazy?
He couldn’t possibly think we were still on land
—
the wheels caught on the seafloor, and the Mustang shuddered and hauled itself out of the surf, shedding foam and seaweed. Damian jerked the wheel and we skidded up the beach, gathering speed on the wet sand.

“Now that’s how you fucking do it!” he whooped, flipping on the windshield wipers to clear the last of the foam.

Behind us, the Humvees peeled out in hot pursuit.
Hah!
On an open stretch, there was no way they could outrun a souped up Ford Mustang GT. We were home free
—

The Humvees opened fire. To our right, the dunes erupted in a fountain of sand, strafing toward us.

“Come on, come on,” Damian muttered, coaxing more speed out the car and hugging the curve of the wet sand, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. The needle crossed forty, then fifty, then sixty.

In the rearview, I caught a glimpse of the Humvees’ roof-mounted miniguns, muzzles blazing white-hot.

The bullets tore through the rear bumper, pierced the bulletproof glass and ripped apart the dashboard before cutting off abruptly when we rounded the curve of the beach and escaped their line of sight.

Miraculously, our bodies hadn’t been hit.

After that only silence remained, the growl of the engine, and the sound of wet sand splattering the undercarriage.

“We made it!” I grinned and looked over at Damian, only to find his face grimmer than ever.

“Do me a favor, Blaire.”

“I’m not going to like this, am I?”

“Watch the USS Halsey,” he said. “Tell me if you see a flash . . . toward the bow.”

Behind him, the high cliffs stepped down, revealing a grove of densely packed eucalyptus. “You mean the destroyer?” I said, confused.

“Just watch.”

“Why?” My eyes flicked to the warship, its black hulk blotting out the horizon. “They’re all asleep
—
” A bright flash near the front of the ship surprised me. “Flash!”

Damian slammed on the brakes, and once again, I was thrown forward and bent around the glove compartment. We lurched sideways.

In slow motion, an entire sandbank beyond the Mustang’s hood swelled from the earth, sand and rocks levitating, and burst into a fireball. The windows shattered. So did my eardrums.

Damian
—
somehow still in control of the vehicle
—
didn’t wait for the debris to stop raining. He jammed the stick into gear and gunned the engine, plunging right through the still rising fireball. Flames enveloped the car, swirled inside and burned my hair, singed my skin. We caught air, my stomach rising into my throat, and then the hood plowed into the sand on the other side. The Mustang climbed up the rocks, tires skidding, and darted between the tree trunks.

“We’re fine,” he yelled. “That was just a five inch round. We can hide in the woods.”

The destroyer’s gun flashed again, and I screamed loud enough to tear out my vocal chords.

Damian dragged the wheel to the right, and my rib cage crunched against the door frame.

“Cover your ears
—
”

I didn’t have time. The forest to our left, just where we had been a second ago, lifted on a bed of fire. The trees shook like rubber dolls, then sprawled flat, as if a rug had been tugged out from underneath them. The blast rippled across my skin, and the shockwave sent our car careening sideways. We tipped up on two wheels, then fell back, landing with a groan of metal. I touched my cheeks. Thank God . . . my face was still there.

I glanced behind me, and caught glimpses of the destroyer between the trees. As I watched, a dozen blinding streaks rose from the ship, burning arcs into the sky and lighting the entire Pacific . . .
really?
They were launching
fireworks?

But what I saw next froze my heart. One by one, the blazing streaks curved inwards, like claws, each one aligning its trajectory with our car. Not fireworks, moron.

Guided missiles.

***

“Damian,” I croaked, “they just launched missiles at us.”

“Come on, come on,” he growled to himself, teeth gritted. “Where’s the road?”

Just then we burst out of the trees and skidded onto a winding two-lane highway. Then the missiles hit. The sky erupted in a white haze, and the sound of the blast seemed to rise from the ground.

Eventually, I realized I wasn’t dead, and stopped screaming. I sat up straight. We were on a highway doing a hundred and twenty. But we’d exploded, right? In fact, the blast still echoed outside the car, only now lingering to a deep rumble.

I peered out the window, at the great plumes of smoke mushroomclouding in the sky, where they had detonated harmlessly a thousand feet off the ground.

Damian grinned. “We’re out of the quarantine zone,” he said. “They’re not authorized to fire past the highway, they called off the missiles. Now it’s just us and the San Diego PD.”

I buckled my seatbelt. “Good. For a second there, I was a little worried.”

Compared to taking fire from a guided missile destroyer, getting the rest of the way home was a joke. We turned into the alley behind ISDI only a few minutes later, police cars well behind us, and skidded to a stop in the garage.

“Well,” said Damian. “Looks like you’ll be stripping for me at Black’s Beach.”

“Ah, that explains why we’re still alive,” I said. “Let’s not forget the nude sunbathing at my high school.”

He peered at me, eyebrow raised. “Sure you want all those other girls seeing me naked?” he said. “I mean, we wouldn’t want you getting jealous, after all.”

“
Jealous?
” I said, gleefully, grabbing the handle. “Of what? Catching a glimpse of your pale butt cheeks?”

“You only say that because you haven’t seen the butt cheeks,” he said, climbing out.

We climbed the stairs, me suppressing a giggle, and stepped into room A
—
and both of us stopped dead. I blinked, my throat constricting like a fist. My eyes had been damaged by shrapnel, I couldn’t be seeing right. It wasn’t possible.

What remained of the blue tape held some of the broken shards to the frame, but the rest of the mirror littered the floor. Just slivers. Our only way home, just broken slivers. Useless.

The source.

Gone.

Chapter 22

It didn’t matter
how many times we scanned the room; it wasn’t there. It wasn’t hidden just out of view, it wasn’t propped up against the opposite wall.

The mirror was gone, what remained hung in shards off the frame.

“We have to move,” I said finally, my throat dry. “They’re still chasing us.”

Damian didn’t budge.

I tugged at his sleeve, pulled him toward the stairs. He broke away from my grip and stormed around the room, tearing the soundproof paneling from the walls.

“We have to move,” I repeated. “It’s broken.”

“It can’t be broken,” he said. “Charles moved it. He
hid
it.”

“If we stay here they will put us in jail, Damian. And this time there won’t be anyone to break us out. We need to move . . .
now
.”

He stared at me, and all at once snapped out of his daze. “We need a place to hide,” he said. “Somewhere we can think.”

I followed him downstairs, back into the garage, where police sirens were closing in. “The other mirror,” I said. “We’ll go down another level, they can’t crossover after us.”

“Not an option. We break symmetry, we’re right back where we started . . . just with their reflections.”

“Then where?”

“The failsafe,” he said. “We’ll wait it out in the failsafe
—
”

Six flashing police cars jammed the alley, blocking us in. We stood in the garage like two caged animals.

“Through the office,” I said.

“Locks are backwards,” he said, shaking his head, and the surrender in his eyes terrified me. More than anything else had all night.

Don’t give up, Damian, please
 . . .
because then I will.
But he was right, our keys wouldn’t fit. And we didn’t have time to override the lock in room A. I scanned the garage. Trapped.

No, not trapped. I dragged my own keys out of my pocket and jumped into his Mustang, where I held them up to the rearview mirror. In a swift motion, I plucked out the keys’ reflection.

“We’ll take my car,” I said. With my new set of keys, I unlocked the door at the back of the garage.

“Smart. That’s why we hired you,” he said, nodding his approval.

“Oh, so not just for my looks?”

“I already had that covered.”

We sprinted through the office
—
absent of Charles’s reflection, I noticed
—
and burst onto the street. My Jeep waited at the curb.

“I’ll drive,” said Damian, holding out his hand for the keys.

“You don’t let me drive your car,” I said. “You don’t drive mine.”

“Blaire, come on
—
”

“
Other side, asshole
,” I spat, pointing a finger.

He held up his hands in surrender and circled to the passenger door.

We peeled out from the curb just as more police cars squealed to a stop in front of ISDI. I took the Jeep onto the curb and squeezed around them.

“Guide the way,” I said.

***

Damian directed me a few blocks away to a U-Haul self-storage warehouse, where we ditched the Jeep next to a Prius
—
the only car in the lot.

“Uh . . . Damian
—
”

“It’s not his,” he said. “It can’t be.”

At the shatterproof plexiglass door, he typed in the access code, then led me through a maze of hallways lined with steel roll up doors painted bright red, the cops still on our heels.

He knelt down at one and spun a combination padlock. The lock clicked open, and he rolled up the door. A string hung from the ceiling, which he pulled, and a fluorescent tube flickered to life.

Inside the storage unit, which was the size of a bathroom, a single mirror leaned against the corrugated metal wall. Lines of red tape traced the perimeter. The mirror didn’t reflect the light
—
or us
—
indicating its symmetry was already broken.

The failsafe.

Other than the mirror and a cardboard box stashed in the corner, the unit was empty.

Damian lowered the roll up door behind us and locked us inside the unit. He faced the failsafe, and his jaw clenched. “After you,” he said.

“You know this is nesting, right? Once we crossover, we’ll be two levels down.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“I’m not worried about me.”

The door rattled. Police, trying to yank it up. “Get me a drill and a snake cam,” a gruff voice ordered. “And call in a bomb squad. No one touches this door until we know what’s inside.” Then to us, louder, “SDPD, we have you surrounded. Come out with your hands behind your heads.”

“I don’t think we have a choice,” said Damian, and he stepped into the failsafe.

He was right. Without hesitating, I crossed over after him, and a familiar wave of prickles cut through my body. I stepped out the other side into the dark storage unit
—
and collapsed.

My cheek slapped concrete, and my body convulsed, muscles twitching. I dragged myself to all fours and threw up. My thoughts
—
so clear a second ago
—
hissed in my brain, reduced to ear-splitting static. Just white noise.

Above me, unfazed by the crossover, Damian switched on the light, revealing a storage unit identical to the one we had left behind
—
except reversed and without police banging on the door. He watched me, lips tight. “We’re in a reflection of a reflection now. Each level down multiplies the damage.”

“Debuisti enim indicavit coram me,” I said. Wait
 . . .
what?

“You’re speaking Latin, Blaire.”

“Nescio latinum loqui . . .”

“Just give it a sec,” he said, bending over the cardboard box. He took out a can of silver spray paint, which he shook.

I closed my eyes, straining to remember English. My nausea eventually subsided, and I sat up, still clutching my legs in a fetal position. “What the hell was that?” I said.

Damian knelt in front of the mirror
—
this side outlined in blue tape
—
and pressed the can’s nozzle. A thin stream of silver coated the glass. He sprayed until the can was empty, completely concealing the portal.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“From the other side, it’ll look like a normal mirror.”

“What if they shoot it?”

“They won’t shoot it.”

I considered our lopsided reflections in the dripping coat of paint he just applied. “Can we crossover through that?”

“You wouldn’t want to,” he said. “The other mirror’s still there, just separated by the glass. We’ll scrape off the paint before going back through.” Damian yanked the cord, plunging us in darkness
—
leaving only a few tiny pricks of light, which leaked through his hasty paint job from the brightly lit storage unit we had just left.

He sat next to me. “For now we’re safe. Let’s get some sleep. In the morning we’ll piece together what happened and hopefully find a way back to the source.”

***

All night the muted voices of bewildered police officers seeped through the mirror. Mere feet away, oblivious. I lay on the bare, ice-cold cement, my eyes flicking from corner to corner of our tomb. I breathed twice as fast as normal, my breath misting, and my heart strained against unseen resistance. It was something wrong with the air, like I couldn’t quite catch my breath.

If I fell asleep down here, two levels down, I knew I would wake up dead. I glanced over at Damian, where his motionless form lay a few feet away.

“Damian?” I whispered. He didn’t answer, and a shiver crept through my body. “
Damian?
”

“I’m here,” he said.

“Are you awake?”

“I am now.”

“Can we go somewhere else? Like a hotel. I don’t care if it’s seedy.”

“Blaire, whoa, slow down. I didn’t know you were that kind of girl.”

“You’re gross,” I said, turning away from him. I could
feel
him smirking behind me. “Trust me,
you’d
be sleeping on the floor.” The cold sank into my exposed back, setting my teeth chattering. Jesus, did they freaking air condition this place?

“We need to stay close to the mirror.”

“Whatever.”

“Come here,” he said.

“No.”

“I can hear you shivering. Come here.”

“Too bad, Damian. I’m not that kind of girl.”

He shuffled behind me and slid closer, then his arm wrapped around me, and I felt his chest press against my back.

Alarmed, I said, “What do you think you’re doing?”

“It’s called sharing body heat so you don’t freeze to death.”

“No, it’s called deliberately making a cute girl really cold so you can take advantage of her.”

“Alright, prickly pear, I’ll move.” He lifted his arm off my waist.

I grabbed his arm, stopping him. “I never said it didn’t work.” I pressed my back into him, arching my spine and shaping my body to his. I felt his chest rise and fall as he breathed, could hear his heart rate hike from our contact.

Good, so it wasn’t just me. Where my waist dipped, his hand wrapped around me and his fingers splayed across my abs, exploring the length of my stretched out torso. His thumb brushed my belly button
—
the skin bare where my shirt had hiked up
—
and his pinky slipped under the waistband of my jeans. I bit my lip, and wiggled closer

“The gyrating’s a nice touch,” he said. “But I think that’s called moving seductively in an attempt to take advantage of your heat source.”

“Actually, I’m generating heat,” I said. “It’s called friction.”

“In that case, carry on.”

***

My eyes opened at some point later that night, and in my disoriented state I could just make out an elongated figure standing in the corner
—
blurry, as if only really seeing it through the corners of my eyes. But then Damian shifted and his flush body shot heat up my backside, and my eyes lulled shut. Euphoric, I snuggled into him and drifted off again.

The glow of the fluorescent tube woke me up hours later, alone. Damian slumped against a wall, a spiral notebook
—
which he must have pulled from the box
—
propped on a knee. He was working out the details of our orphaning.

“What time is it?” I said.

“Cell phones are toast. I think we slept thirteen or fourteen hours.”

“
What?
”

“Things are different down here, Blaire. Our circadian rhythms are off,” he said, all hints of last night’s flirtatiousness forgotten.

My heart sank a little. We had both been scared, trapped in a reflection, our brains scrambled . . . of course it hadn’t meant anything. I dragged my body to the opposite wall.

But thirteen or fourteen
hours?
I did the math. That put us around six or seven on Saturday evening. We’d lost an entire day sleeping when we should have been trying to get back to the source.

“So it had to be the van,” I said.

He nodded. “The SWAT team, during the rake and break. They were looking for Amy, and they probably thought the mirror led to an adjacent room. They would have broken it to get through.”

“So we’re orphans.”

He nodded.

“Can we at least get something to eat?

Again, he nodded.

The police were still mulling about on the other side of the mirror, a level up, so we left the storage facility and walked to the abandoned ISDI building in the failsafe, which was stocked with supplies. 

“Who’s down here with us?” I said.
“I mean, whose reflections?”

“Charles broke the symmetry by himself,” said Damian, unlocking the front door, “so his reflection isn’t down here.”

“But yours is?”

“All of ours
—
including Amy’s doppelgänger. Just not Charles.” We stepped into the office’s musty interior.

My nose wrinkled. “Ew. Do you smell that?”

“Something must be rotting. No one’s been inside the office for months.” Damian flipped a light switch, and the row of fluorescent panels closest to the door flickered to life.

“You just said you guys were still here?”

“I thought we would be too,” he said. “But without Charles, we don’t keep coming to work. In fact, the two of us left La Jolla two months ago.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Overlap. Plus I had to track myself down.” He held up his right hand, still contained in the wrist guard. “For this.”

A spiderweb brushed my face, sending a shiver across my skin. I averted my gaze, and it settled on a dark lump under my former desk, still cloaked in shadow. “So your reflection is dead?”

“No, that was in another reflection of the failsafe . . . through a different mirror.”

My eyes snapped into focus . . . the lump under my desk. “What the hell?”

“That’s why we don’t nest crossovers,” said Damian. “It gets confusing.”

“No . . . under my desk,” I said. “I think that’s where the smell’s coming from.”

“It’s just trash, Blaire.” He held his nose and strolled to my desk, grabbed one end of the lump, and, with effort, dragged it into the light. It was a tarp, rolled into the shape of a cigar. He reached for the edge of the plastic.

“Don’t open it,” I warned.

“Your reflection is down here too,” he said, continuing our conversation and ignoring my warning. His fingers closed on the hem. “Except in this version, you never met me
—
and Charles, of course, doesn’t exist. You still have no idea what happened to your father. Of the four of us, you’re the only one in La Jolla.”

I watched him lift the tarp off the lump
—
an object about six feet long. The tarp flapped open, finally revealing its contents:

A body, lying in a pool of syrupy blood. In a dizzying rush, the odor of decay wormed up my nose, and my heart lodged in my throat. I backed away, palm clamped to my mouth.

We both recognized the curly gray hair, the broad jaw and forehead, the blue eyes tucked behind a broken pair of frameless glasses
—
in this reflection, the one person whose body shouldn’t have existed.

Charles.

***

“He’s reversed,” Damian announced after scrutinizing Charles’s face for a full minute. To my relief, he stretched the tarp back over the corpse. “He’s not from the source.”

“Then where?”

“One level up. When we got back from our mission, his reflection still would have been in ISDI packing things up.”

I nodded. “The Prius we saw at the storage facility.”

“Exactly. We brought the police to his doorstep; he would have heard them. He would have checked room A, seen the broken mirror, and panicked. I bet he had the same idea we did
—
to hide in the failsafe. He must have slipped out of the office while you were reversing the keys.”