BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller (29 page)

“Don’t bother. He took the printout with him.” Damian stooped over the printer and keyed in a series of commands. “This printer stores its last job. Let’s just hope it’s more robust than the computer.” He hovered his finger over a blinking green button, took a deep breath, then pressed it.

The printer remained silent. “Crap
—
”

A screech from inside the device cut him, off, and then the printer hummed to life, spitting out another copy of the fax followed by page after page of densely packed letters.

Sequenced DNA.

“Bingo,” he said.

Out in the hall, Damian flipped to a blank page in his notebook and
—
referring back to his diagram
—
wrote out a string of eight letters.

ABCACABC

“These were his first eight crossovers. Now let’s see if we can translate.” He slapped the printout of my DNA on top of his notebook and scanned the first line
—
what appeared to be a random string of the letters G, C, A, and T.

I remembered from biology they stood for the nucleotides Guanine, Cytosine, Adenine, and Thymine. Arranged in a specific order, they formed a code
—
like a computer program
—
that could be run to create a unique life form.

Or give that life form the ability to walk through mirrors.

“A could match up with A,” I offered.

“I figured that out myself, Blaire.” He wrote the first eight letters of my DNA under Charles’s path.

ABCACABC

AGACCACA

We studied the two strings of letters, side by side, straining to peer into the logic behind Charles’s maze. The pattern eluded me.

“It doesn’t match up,” I said.

“Not helping, Blaire.”

“G could match up with B,” I said. “They rhyme. Or maybe he’s not even following the DNA and we’re completely off
—
”

“Quiet, Blaire. I’m thinking.”

I leaned my head against his shoulder and watched the letters swirl on the page like puzzle pieces, trying
—
and failing
—
to connect them to each other. Disparate ideas tugged at my mind. My DNA, taken off the artifact. Two C’s, back to back. There was something there, a theme, something we were both missing that explained everything. Exhausted, I closed my eyes and rubbed my cheek against his muscular shoulder.

“Try to imagine the letters as mirrors,” he said, remaining statue still.

Two back to back mirrors. My eyes snapped open. That was it. “They cancel,” I said. “The double C’s in the middle cancel. If you followed those directions literally, you would crossover through a mirror, turn around, and go right back through the same mirror. You’d end up back where you started.”

Damian stared at his notebook, raised his pencil, and crossed off the two C’s in the middle. Which left the two A’s next to each other.

“Those cancel too,” I said. “Three in a row would mean you go through, come back out, then go through again.”

“My God,” said Damian. “That first time we thought Charles was setting a trap, he wasn’t. He went through A, through B, through A, through C, then
back
through C,
back
through A again, then continued on through C. He was following the DNA exactly.”

He crossed off the duplicate A’s, leaving four letters, then erased the list and rewrote it under Charles’s path with the next four letters from the printout, omitting a pair of back to back G’s.

We stared at the two series.

ABCACABC

AGCACAGC

“I told you G refered to room B,” I said.

He faced me, grinning, and raised his palm for a high five.

***

We followed my DNA deeper into Charles’s maze, having mutually decided to skip the tape to make better time. At first, we carried a spool of string with us, which we pinched from a toolbox downstairs and tied to the bathroom doorknob. But even a hundred and twenty feet of string ran out after four crossovers.

We ingested more potassium iodide and kept going. I read the letters out loud. He wrote them down in his notebook and read them back to me. I read them a second time. He confirmed.

We said little else.

Because this wasn’t a map. A map told you if you were lost, helped you get unlost. My sequenced DNA did no such thing. If we missed one letter . . . one single letter, if our eyes misread a G as a C, or if we mistook a string of five A’s for six, it could be thousands of crossovers before we realized our mistake. Thousands of crossovers before we stumbled on a mirror that should have had broken symmetry, but instead was still intact.

By then it would be impossible to retrace our steps, impossible to know where we made a wrong turn, impossible to find our way out of this maze.

“G, A, G, G, C
—
”

“Cross out the G’s,” said Damian. “So that’s G, A, C?”

“Correct. G as in goat, A as in apple, C as in cat.”

He nodded. “Translate that to room B, room A, then the bathroom.”

It went on like this for a while. Each level hazier than the last, as if we were peering through a thick, oily fog. The crossovers didn’t hurt anymore. Our bodies were too numb for that.

Then the inevitable happened.

I stopped in the hallway and stared at the DNA sheet, prickles creeping up my spine.

“Well, which is it?” said Damian, coming to stand by my side. “A, G, or C?”

Of course. We should have seen this coming. There aren’t just three letters in DNA.

There are four.

“A, G, or C?” he repeated.

“Neither,” I said. “It’s a T.”

***

Damian just stared at me.

“Maybe he just skips the T’s,” I suggested. “Since he’s only using three mirrors.”

Damian shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck, eyebrows knit with frustration. “Charles stuck his hand through the bathroom mirror and pulled it out just because there were two C’s in a row. He’s following this exactly.”

I asked the question we both dreaded. “You think there’s a fourth mirror?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “There’s only three mirrors in the office.”

“Maybe he left the office. I mean, maybe this is the end. Maybe he got off here.”

“To go where?”

I rifled through our stack of papers, about fifteen sheets, a thousand letters apiece. “He has to stop before the end of this, right?”

“Either that or we’ll find his corpse.” Damian craned his neck to peer up and down the hall. “Room A, Room B, the bathroom . . . where’s the fourth mirror?” he muttered.

“Could it be the failsafe?”

Damian’s eyes brightened, but only briefly. “No, he broke that mirror, remember? Besides, I think it’s in ISDI. I don’t think he’s leaving the office.”

I mentally listed off the rooms in ISDI. Upstairs: Room A, room B, the bathroom, the hallway, Charles’s office, a closet. Downstairs: the bullpen work area, the garage.

“Is there a mirror in the garage?” But I already knew the answer. During my second ever crossover, I had scoured the garage for mirrors and come up short. The side view mirrors on the Prius didn’t count.

“He must have one hidden,” said Damian.

Like him, I peered up and down the hall. “I swear, I’ve seen another mirror here . . . the dumpster! If there’s a large enough shard.”

“Not a chance. The mirrors are tempered glass, they shatter into small cubes.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “We go through mirrors like potato chips. We break twenty of them a week, and we’re saying there’s only three mirrors in the whole building?”

He caught my eye. “The replacement mirrors?”

“They’re stacked in Charles’s office, right?”

“Blaire, you’re a genius.”

“Come on!” I grabbed his hand and pulled him up the hall. In the office, though, the mirrors were still boxed up in a neat pile, untouched.

My heart fell.

“He probably moved one,” said Damian. “It could be anywhere. We have to search the office.”

We were about to go when something atop the filing cabinet caught my eye. “Hang on,” I said, tugging Damian’s sleeve.

A roll of clear acrylic packaging tape and a yellow box cutter perched on the steel’s edge, which I swear had been bare a few levels up.

I grabbed the box cutter and sliced open the top box, and Damian helped me push the cardboard off the mirror. We stared through glass into a shadowy hole, six feet long and three feet wide, absent of our reflections.

Broken symmetry.

The fourth mirror.

“That clever bastard,” muttered Damian.

***

Each in turn, we gripped the edge of the stack and swung our bodies through the T mirror. Since it lay flat, gravity reversed on the other side. The crossover left my head spinning.

Out in the hall, one level deeper, Charles had left another message for us between rooms A and B, this one in silver spray paint.

I’m impressed

Damian stared at the message, his mouth tight. “
I’m impressed?
” he said. “Isn’t that why you hired us, asshole.” Damian kicked the wall under the writing. “Isn’t that why?” He turned away, then rushed back and kicked the wall again, harder this time, jaw clenched. “Huh, Charles? Isn’t that why you hired us?”

“Damian, stop,” I pleaded.

He ignored me, torqued back his arm and slammed his fist into the acoustic paneling. The walls shook, and dust rained from the ceiling. He did it again, and again, the impacts dislodging the framed pictures of office interiors, which shattered one by one on the floor. Half yelling, half sobbing, he slumped against the wall and unleashed his anger into Charles’s message
—
into the only part of him he could reach.

“Damian,
please
,” I said.

He dropped to his knees, his strength spent, and cradled his face in his hands. Then he screamed at the top of his lungs, and his voice echoing long after.

I rushed to his side and flung my arms around him. “Stop it, Damian . . . we need to be strong,” I said, on the verge of tears myself. “
I
need you to be strong.”

“I thought this would be it . . . I thought this would be the end of the maze.” His voice wavered, and I could hear the guilt.

He took blame for it all.

“Damian, I’d rather be here with you right now than anywhere else in the world,” I confessed.

“Why Blaire?” He stared at me, black veins pulsing around his eyes. “Why would you rather be down here in this shithole than up in the source?”

“Because . . .” I lowered my eyes, and whispered, “I love you.”

Damian said nothing, and I peeked at his face. His eyes
—
eroded like dark, extinguished cinders
—
broke my heart all over again. But I couldn’t look away. I was forever weightless, forever falling into them, his prisoner.

Eventually, he leaned forward and kissed me, and his lips lingered on mine, then brushed my cheek, cranking my pulse into overdrive.

“Blaire, I want you to do something for me,” he whispered, his breath tickling the skin behind my ear.

“Anything,” I breathed, putty in his hands.

“I want you to bury my body in the source.” Without another word, he released me and climbed to his feet.

I rose after him, tears stinging my eyes. “Bury yourself, Damian. You’re
not
leaving me down here alone.”

“I already have,” he said, letting himself into room A
—
our next crossover. He stepped toward the mirror, raised his right arm to the surface. Only his trembling hand betrayed his fear.

“Damian, don’t,” I warned.

He reached through the mirror, up to his elbow, and stopped. On the other side, his arm raised and tilted to the side, and he inspecting it through the glass. Flakes of skin floated off his arm and swirled in the room beyond the mirror. No, not skin
—
ash
.

His forearm blistered, the skin decaying and dissolving into ash. A single drop of blood trickled out from under his wrist brace, tracing the contour of a vein. The liquid bubbled. He swiveled his arm, his eyes tearing up as his flesh broke apart before his eyes.

“Damian, come back
—
” I moaned.

“I’m sorry, Blaire. I’m sorry it couldn’t be me too.” In a single, slow motion stride, he went all the way through.

He crossed over.

On the other side, he fell to his knees.

“
Damian!
” I leapt through the mirror after him.

***

He clutched his stomach and made a choking sound, coughed. Bits of vomit and blood splattered the wall, dribbled down his chin, and he toppled to the ground.

“No!” I rushed forward to hold him, to save him. For a moment he gazed past me, straining his eyes as if trying to recognize someone in the distance. Then his eyes glazed over, and he went limp in my arms.

“Damian, no . . .” I cried, my tears now striking the floor. “You can’t!”

He slumped in my arms, his body motionless, his heart still. I laid him on the ground, hands shaking violently, and pressed my lips to his mouth, emptied my lungs into his. I tasted smoke.

I pounded on his chest, squeezed his body, blew into his mouth again. His body remained inert. Lifeless.

I needed to get him back up through the mirror. Up high . . . as high as we could go. All the way back to the top of the maze. I lugged his body back through the mirror and laid him out on the floor of room A, gasping for breath.

“Damian, please . . . I love you.” My voice sounded hollow, like it was still on the other side of the glass. I shook his body and leaned over his mouth again to breathe for him, and that’s when I smelled it. Slithering out his throat and worming into my sinuses
—
the putrid smell of decay and ash, tinged with sweetness.

The smell of someone who hasn’t been alive for a long time.

I prodded his neck, unable to steady my finger through my shivering. But I already knew he didn’t have a pulse. I screamed, and collapsed sobbing onto his chest.

He was gone.

Like the rest of him, crossover had corroded his heart and left only a burnt out shell. I fell away from him, curled up beside him and shivered uncontrollably. Inexorably, the horror seeped into my blood. In the utter quiet, my mind hissed with static. Nothing but static. Shadows oozed out of the mirror and suffocated the light, and as if on cue, the flickering bulb above us, barely hanging on at this depth, gave a final zap and blinked out.

Then darkness.

Just cold, quiet, pitch black darkness.