BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller (6 page)

“Famous last words,” he said, shaking his head. “Even so, I don’t think you could handle the time commitment on top of your school work. It’s supposed to be a summer internship.”

“I’ll stop going to school.”

“Not exactly the answer I’d hoped for,” said Charles. “I expect you to continue your studies just as diligently. After all, this internship is preparing you for the rigors of college curriculum.”

“I’ll stop sleeping. Whatever. Just give me the job.”

“Internship,” he corrected, rubbing his chin again. “Hmm . . . I’ll admit, I do admire that kind of work ethic. Because you’re right about that, you won’t be getting much sleep once you work for this office. That much I can guarantee.”

“I’ve heard. My boyfriend’s older sister is studying architecture.” I peeked at Damian. Nothing, not even a hint of a reaction.

As if he would care about Josh, my not-even boyfriend.

“Blaire, this internship is a serious commitment, do you understand that?” said Charles.

“Sure.”

“I need you to work four to ten, Monday through Friday, and probably most weekends too.”

“You’re kidding.”

“It’s supposed to be a summer internship.”

I bit my lip, kissing goodbye to my social life. “Fine.”

“Well, alright then. I suppose I’ll give you a try,” said Charles. “Why don’t you come in after school tomorrow and we’ll get you started. Damian will train you.”

***

My heart sped up, but my excitement was immediately replaced by nervousness. Although I wasn’t sure what to blame: the sudden, irrevocable realization
—
as if for the first time
—
that my father had died in this line of work . . . or Damian.

Before my first day, I made myself a salad wrap. Whole grain flat bread, spinach, chicken, cottage cheese
—
you know, the stuff rabbits eat.

An off-season runner’s grub.

My mind still reeled with the previous week’s events, and I was going through it all in my head while I chewed. I was so close to the truth about my dad; now wasn’t the time to let it all slip away
—

That’s when it happened.

Déjà vu.

Like I’d experienced this very breakfast in a dream but only now remembered.

In the other version, there was someone here with me. I glanced around my breakfast nook, feeling both loneliness and the creepy sensation of another presence.

Without warning, I found myself whispering, “chicken, spinach, cottage cheese.” The feeling didn’t pass, and the sustained creepiness raised goose bumps along my skin.

I felt off for the rest of the morning.

***

After school, Charles guided me to the cubicle furnished with the one computer. “This is going to be your desk,” he said. “We have a learn-on-the-job mentality here, so we’ll just give you your first assignment and cast you off.”

A look over my shoulder confirmed that Amy, the secretary, was watching YouTube videos, while Damian hadn’t even shown up. I got the feeling I might be the only one doing work around here.

I surveyed the rest of the office, no longer paying attention to Charles. Which desk had my father worked at? My eyes settled on one across the room buried under plump rubber-banded manila folders. I veered in that direction.

“Over here, Blaire. This desk.”

Foiled. I let my fingers trail over the folders, flipped one open, and scanned a detailed report of a property
—

“Blaire, don’t touch that!”

I sauntered back to my desk, defeated. Before the end of the day, I’d grab one of those folders and take it home with me. I doubt anyone would miss it.

“Any questions?” Charles said after he finished explaining my work, none of which I’d caught.

“Uh
—
yeah, don’t I need to fill out paperwork or something?”

“Already got your paperwork,” said Damian, appearing behind me and tossing a paperclipped stack of paper into my arms, which I dropped.

In the mix were an I-9 tax form, employment contract, and pages and pages of liability agreements. I flipped through them. All had been filled out and signed, dated today.

“You know, if I’m going to sign over my life to you guys, I’d rather do it myself.”

“You did,” said Damian, settling in for a nap on the couch. “This morning.”

I glanced down at the forms again. “So you forged my signature. That’s a terrific way to earn the trust of a new employee.”

“Intern,” Charles corrected.

“Came by this morning,” said Damian, his eyes still closed. “See the stain, top left corner? That’s from that salad wrap you were eating. Carrots, spinach, and cottage cheese or whatever.”

“I think I would have remembered if you came by,” I said, his joke just pissing me off now. “And there weren’t any carrots in my wrap. Buy a more powerful telescope if you want to spy on me.” I felt my lip curl, thoroughly disturbed.

Note to self: close all blinds in my house, always.

“You mean I visited you this morning and you don’t even
remember
it? Ouch,” said Damian, an unmistakable smirk crossing his lips.

Screw him.

But how they had faked my signature . . . I scrutinized the forms for the forgery, but couldn’t spot it. Had they hired a professional? Okay, seriously
—

No. The signatures weren’t forgeries. I signed the forms. I remembered doing so, but in some other place . . . in a dream. And then it registered.

The déjà vu.

That was Damian.

***

Hours later I was still cleaning junk off my new desk and wondering if I would ever get answers from this place. The déjà vu thing still weirded me out, but I was no sucker for the mystical. There was another explanation. Period.

I recalled something my father had said once
—
unlikely yet ordinary events, when combined, will appear extraordinary.

His wisdom gave me comfort. Although eerie, déjà vu was indeed ordinary. I felt it often, in fact. And anyone in this office could have been a skilled forger; I suspected Damian. He moved with the calculated precision of someone skilled in sleights of hand. Charles probably just wanted to hurry things along and sent Damian to my house that morning to get the forms signed.

Damian, the misogynist he was, spotted me eating breakfast and decided to play me.

Unlikely, but not extraordinary at all.

The moment Charles went upstairs, I slipped over to the other desks and rifled through the folders.

All I saw were client contracts for commercial properties, invoices, shrunk down architectural plans, and paperclipped interior photographs. My eyes lingered on the client contracts.

A former client
, Charles had said. But there had to be millions of contracts here. “Don’t you guys digitize anything?” I asked.

“It’s so snitches like you can’t find top secret information,” said Amy.

“If you’re looking for something to do,” said Damian, eyes still closed, “you might organize those.”

“Are you napping, or being a smartass?” I said.

“Both,” said Amy. “He talks in his sleep.” She gave me a wry smile. Translation: I sleep with him, so I would know.

“Whatever. Isn’t he supposed to train me?”

“Oh, didn’t my dad tell you?” she said, fake sweetly. “We actually have a learn-by-doing philosophy, Blaire.”

I rolled my eyes. A while later I found myself back at my computer, exploring the folders they hadn’t wiped from the hard drive. Just AutoCAD files, which flashed an error when opened, and more pictures. The computer clock showed 9:45 PM. In fifteen minutes, my first day would be over.

A whole day gone . . . and for what? I hadn’t found out a single thing about my dad.

A shuffle from the couch snapped me out of my focus. Damian came over and perched his laptop on a stack of textbooks at the cubicle next to mine. At his nearness, my body went stiff.

“What are you doing?” I asked, my anxiety audible. “I thought you worked on the couch.”

“This is my space,” he said, waving his hand around his desk, “that’s your space.” He indicated my cubicle, his tone implying the issue was closed.

I caught a whiff of his cologne, one of those nauseatingly dreamy Abercrombie & Fitch brands packed with pheromones and hallucinogens. My nails dug into my palms.

No way I could work with him this close. My brain now useless, I gave up on my own computer and glanced toward his. He caught me peeking and tilted the laptop away from me, but not before I glimpsed a satellite image. I recognized the geography.

The Scripps Research Institute.

Damian rose from his chair and gave me a head tilt that indicated I should follow. “I have a job for you,” he said.

I climbed to my feet with a sigh.

This couldn’t be good . . . or it could be
very
good. My chance to ask questions, alone. Without Amy eavesdropping, whose jealous dagger eyes I could feel burning through my scalp. I ignored her glare and followed Damian through a door at the back of the office into another hallway, only a little nervous about being alone with him.

“She could use a polish,” he said, unlocking a door to the garage. “Turtle wax is in the cupboard behind you. Make sure you don’t buff too hard. Oh, and you might need to get the blood stains off the bumper first.”

“I’m not
waxing your car,” I said.

He shrugged. “You said you wanted to work here. I’m giving you work.”

“I’m here for my dad, not this dumb job.”

“Internship,” he corrected. He popped a cigarette in his mouth and undid the dead bolt.

“You
smoke?
” I said, not meaning to sound so disappointed.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Then what’s that?”

“It’s not lit, is it?”

“So you just hold it in your mouth like an idiot?”

Damian pushed open the door and stepped into the garage, which was completely dark. I followed him, for no particular reason I could tell other than to warn him about the dangers of emphysema
—
not that I cared one bit whether or not he got lung cancer and died.

He flipped on the lights, and a fluorescent bulb jittered to life, illuminating a sight that shot chills through my body.

I stared at his car, my heart making hollow thuds. He regarded me calmly, reached for a yellow leather jacket, which he slung over his shoulder, and pulled the cigarette from his mouth. “You like?”

I peeled my eyes off the yellow Mustang GT, its gleaming black racing stripe, and stared into Damian’s dark eyes. They shimmered beneath the fluorescent haze, in this light, distinctly the black of charcoal.

The boy from my dream.

Chapter 6

“
I dreamt about
you,” I said breathlessly, unable to pull away from his alluring, ashy eyes.

“It’s been known to happen,” he said.

“Shut up. I dreamt about you. You burned down a house on my street and killed my neighbor.”

Nothing. Not a flicker of recognition. So he thought I was crazy.

Or knew I wasn’t.

“You killed Doctor Benjamin . . .” Fear crept into my voice. He was something dangerous.

He raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.

“Damian, I swear I dreamt about you
—
before we even met. It was your car and your jacket. I
swear.
” As I said it though, I had the distinct impression I was confiding in the wrong side of good and evil.

“You must have seen me around,” he said, still unfazed. “Where do you live?”

“As if you don’t know.”
As if I would tell you if you didn’t.
“You came to my house this morning.” The thought terrified me.

I got the sense he was peering inside me, calculating something. The only sound in the garage was a jingle from the pocket of his leather jacket. Keys.

“Let’s go for a ride,” he said, nodding to his Mustang.

“Um. No.”

“Past your bedtime?” he asked, amused.

“You scare me.”

Time to leave, Blaire. Just reach for the door. Just turn the knob and walk inside.
Now
.

I couldn’t move.

“I want to show you something.” He popped the cigarette back in his mouth and climbed into the Mustang. “Get in.”

Infuriatingly, a tinge of excitement fluttered up my spine. Caught in his icy stare, my flesh heated . . .
everywhere
. What the hell was this?

He was luring me in like a Venus flytrap. I was the fly.

But I needed answers. Maybe he wanted to show me what happened to my father.

So be it if he took my soul.

I hurried around to the other door. He pushed it open, and I was swallowed by burgundy colored leather bucket seats.
Why
, exactly, was I so excited to let him take me for a ride? Why did I even consider trusting him for a second?

He hit a button under the steering column somewhere, and with a quiet electric whir the garage door retracted in front of us.

Damian cranked the ignition, revved the engine a few times, and then burned out in the alley. We skidded onto the street, the wheels caught, and we shot forward.

On the freeway onramp, the needle crossed a hundred in seconds. Damian veered over the double yellow to pass a Jetta, straight into oncoming traffic, and I almost lost my dinner. Damian showed no sign of letting up.

I realized I had stopped breathing. No blood ran through my veins, just adrenaline.

“Been cooped up awhile?” I said.

“We’re in a rush.”

“We are?”

“Police department closes soon.”

***

True to Damian’s word, we rolled up to the police station a few minutes later. He leapt out of the car and flashed me an amused smile, and I felt myself fumbling with the handle on my own door.

“What are we here for?” I asked.

“Zoning codes.”

I followed him through the entrance, feeling both foolish and embarrassed at my prior overexcitement.

Zoning codes?

He stepped up to a counter sealed behind plexiglass and started schmoozing with an administrator. I stood at his back, throwing wary glances around the lobby for officers who might recognize me.

Damian handed me a stack of CDs, along with huge rolls of city planning maps and architectural drawings, all of which ended up on the floor.

“Come on,” he said, grabbing my elbow once I’d managed to pick it all up and dragging me outside. “Try to keep up, Blaire.”

“You didn’t show me anything,” I fumed, crossing my arms as we drove away from the police station, feeling more and more like a little kid. He ignored me.

He took me to a nightclub next. I stepped out of the car, and my eyes fixated on the word
Sin
hanging in psychedelic blue letters over a curtained archway. But we weren’t twenty-one, I wasn’t even eighteen
—

No problem.

Damian nodded to the bouncer, who unclipped the rope for us without a word. Stares followed us inside.

Intriguing . . . did he want to dance with me?

We skipped the dance floor. I practically had to jog to keep up with Damian’s long strides which took us to the back of the club, into a seedy little lounge drenched in smoke.

Again, the cigarette hung in Damian’s mouth. He eased into a bar stool and patted the seat next to him. For me.

I took the seat, but slid it away from him out of spite. At my movement, four heads swiveled my direction from a smoky corner booth, a group that resembled the crime lords I’d seen on TV
—
sunglasses, greased hair, and smoldering cigars the size of tree branches. They eyed the distance I’d put between myself and Damian hungrily.

I squirmed as close to Damian as our stools allowed, almost knocking him over and earning myself one of his eyebrow raises.

“What are we doing here?” I whispered in his ear. Up close, his musk washed over me, calmed me.

“Just listen,” he said, and to my horror, he waved over one of the booth guys. “Don’t say anything.”

“Are you crazy?”

The thug sat on Damian’s opposite side, and my mouth clamped shut.

“I just had a huge project dry up on me,” said Damian. “I need information.”

“What’s the project?” the guy said.

“The Immunology & Microbial Science building,” he said. “Scripps.”

The thug whooped with laughter. “The quarantine zone? It’ll be ten months before you set foot on that campus.”

“That was a year-long project for us,” said Damian. “You heard anything?”

“Word on the street is that isn’t no drill.”

“What’s your source, the five o’clock news?” said Damian. “My senile grandmother could have told me that. I said
information
.”

“How about you be nice and introduce me to your girlfriend?”

“Didn’t peg you for the jealous type,” said Damian. “Forget that favor I owe you.” With that he stood up, kicked over his stool, and stormed out of the lounge.

I was forced to follow, looking like his sycophant girlfriend. This was stupid. Why was he even dragging me around?

“What happened to my dad, Damian?” I asked on the drive home, sick of him dictating everything.

“He was kidnapped,” he said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“So sue me.”  He pulled in front of my house. “Charles doesn’t trust you yet. I
don’t trust you yet. Now get out. I have to go back to work.”

“I think you have problems, Damian . . .” I stepped out of the car. “It’s midnight. And thanks for wasting two hours of my life.”

He regarded me for a second, his gaze dark and cryptic. Then he jammed the stick into gear and skidded away, leaving me with a page long list of uncomfortable, contradictory emotions.

***

Work sucked on Friday.

Damian hadn’t arrived yet to train me, and Amy
—
who still came in even though she had Fridays off
—
droned on the whole afternoon about how she always caught him checking her out, and around six, Charles heaved a stack of schematic drawings onto my desk, flattening all of my origami pigs.

“Here’s your first assignment,” he said. “Need it by the end of the day.”

I gaped at the stack. There had to be a thousand sheets, each as large as a table and packed with diagrams and microscopic text. The middle of my desk sagged under the weight.

“Maybe if someone trained me first,” I muttered.

“No time. You know how to read architectural plans, right?”

“Charles, I’m in high school.”

“I’ll show you.” He peeled back a handful of sheets and they spilled off the table in a great rush of air, revealing a sheet titled A001. “This is the floor plan of the Immunology & Microbial Science Building at Scripps. Thick lines mean walls. The open areas are rooms.”‘

“Okay, I’m not stupid either.”

At that moment, Damian arrived and slumped into the couch. He yanked his laptop out of his backpack, and I halted everything to watch him. He skin glistened, pale and slick with sweat.

“Where have you been?” said Charles, marching toward him. “You’re supposed to be prepping.”

Damian closed his eyes, as if shutting out a headache. “Relax . . . I’ll get it done.” He rubbed his temples, wincing.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“What the hell do you think’s wrong with me?” he said. “I had a bad crossover last night.”

Charles’s lips thinned. “Talk to me about it later. Not while Blaire’s here.”

“Why don’t you just tell her?” said Damian.

“Tell me what?” I said.

Charles ignored me. “She’s not ready, Damian. You know that.”

“Or you’re not ready,” he said. “Just make up your goddamned mind, already.”

My head jerked between them, hanging on to every word.

“Not yet,” said Charles. “Not quite yet . . . Blaire, if anything’s unclear on those plans, you can refer to the detail drawings and tables at the back. Everything should be labeled.”

“But what am I supposed to do with this? It’ll take a hundred years . . .” But he was already heading for the stairs. “You want me to color it in? I could get my crayons. I’ve got the big hundred-and-twenty pack
—
”

“Blaire, come on.” Damian shut his laptop and hobbled over to my desk. “Charles wants a breakdown of the security systems . . .”

He leaned over me, and his scent hit me in a hot, crazy flash. Like ash and dust. And blood. I hated his smell.

But wanted him
.

Damian’s voice lulled over me, so much gentler than yesterday, and again I noticed the paleness of his skin, the sweat clinging to his brow.

I nodded, though I didn’t catch a word. My eyes traced his jawline, deciphering every microscopic twitch. Yesterday, the late night drive. He wasn’t treating me differently now, was he?

His explanation ended too soon, though, and he teetered back to his laptop, clutching his stomach. In his absence, I felt cold air at my side. Had we been touching? God, I couldn’t even remember.

Maybe all sensations of Damian faded like dreams . . . leaving only déjà vu.

I dragged my body back to the desk and doodled hearts and Cupid’s bows in the margins. Two minutes in and I was already bored out of my mind.

Sure, I knew the ISDI internship wouldn’t be easy, but
office
work?

That was for grownup cogs. Not me, Blaire Adams. I mean, hadn’t my dad died
at this job?

Amy appeared next to me, smiling cruelly.

“Blaire,” she drawled, “I might need your help with something.”

***

“Can’t,” I said, detailing the feathers on an arrow. “I’m busy . . .
clearly.
” I nodded to the stack of drawings.

“How about something more fun?” she said. “My dad wants you to replace the mirror upstairs.”

“Too bad. I’m not a handyman.” If she was going to get all jealous that Damian noticed me, that was her problem.

“You are the intern.”

“Give me a minute.” I had filled up all the margins within reach with doodles, so I flipped to another sheet and started fresh.

Maybe this wasn’t so bad.

Amy sighed, exasperated, and slid onto the couch behind Damian and began massaging his shoulders. I rolled my eyes and went back to my drawing of a skull and crossbones, snakes slithering out of the eyes.

My eyes focused on the drawing I had just flipped to, and my hand tapered off. It was a cross-section of the Immunology building, as if someone had cut it down the middle.

I recognized the part above ground.

But what drew my gaze was the part below ground.

According to the architectural plans, the Institute was built on top of something.

What looked like an elevator shaft plunged deep into the earth. I counted eighteen levels to the bottom, where a bunker-like structure expanded around a single room.

The room was labeled with two words, written in all caps.

ARTIFACT CHAMBER

Other details jumped out at me. Over a cluster of machinery around the chamber, I read
Gamma Ray Shielding
. Describing another cluster,
Particle Collider
and
X-Ray Laser Apparatus
.

But that wasn’t all.

Back up at the Institute, the perimeter. There too I saw things that surprised me. Electric fences, armored car garages, security checkpoints,
SAM Missile Silo. Phalanx Close-In Weapon System. EMP Device
.

These were not original plans. They were dated recently
—
July, in fact, two years ago.

Now I understood.

Charles Donovan
—
and my father
—
didn’t just design commercial interiors. They designed
militarized
interiors.

For the U.S. Army. 

They had fortified the Institute two years prior to quarantine. And at the center of it all, eighteen stories underground, shielded inside a bunker
—

“Blaire!” Charles’s voice jerked me upright, making me flinch as if I’d been doing something wrong. “I need you upstairs. We have a broken mirror to replace.”

***

“This will be fun,” said Charles, ushering me into his office.

Yeah, right.

My mind still spun after what I’d seen on the Institute’s blueprints.

“See that stack there?” Charles pointed behind me, where a huge stack of objects boxed in cardboard stood six feet high. “Just got a delivery this morning.”

“Of what?”

“Mirrors. I need you to replace the one in room A.”

Room
A
. I was about to find out why ISDI’s dumpster was filled with shards of mirrors. “How’d it break?”

“I’ll show you.” Charles led me down the hallway to room A, where a red LED blinked on a device mounted beside the door. Charles pressed his finger to the device
—
a fingerprint scanner, I realized
—
and held it there until the device chirped and emitted a green light.

He pulled out a set of keys, unlocked the dead bold and the latch, and hauled open the door. The three inch slab of armor-like steel elicited thoughts of a bank vault.

I found myself in what looked like a high-tech dark room. Recessed in the ceiling, circular lights issued a dim, mechanical red. Like other rooms in ISDI, floor to ceiling acoustic padding soundproofed the space, and the utter seclusion raised hair on the back of my neck. We could have been in a submarine.