BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller (10 page)

I reached for the handle, doubting he would let me just walk away after all he’d told me. Doubting I would let myself
—

“But if you leave, you leave behind the truth,” he said. “You leave behind your father.”

There it was.

My hand froze on the steel, and my eyes darted to the mirror, a doorway to answers. He was right. Everything else
—
clues, leads, my dad’s entire case
—
led to a dead end; I knew because I had reached it. This internship was all I had left of him.

If I wanted answers, I had to follow in his footsteps and carry this internship through to the end. No matter what they asked of me.

They were asking me to walk through a mirror.

I mean, I could at least stick my hand through, right? It couldn’t hurt that much . . .

“He wouldn’t ask me to do this for him,” I blurted out, cranking the handle another inch. “He just . . . wouldn’t.”

“You’re right. He didn’t,” said Damian. “He never wanted you involved. That’s why we didn’t recruit you until now.”

“And now that he’s dead, I’m fair game.”

“Blaire, have you ever seen your whole world shimmer?” he said. “Just for a second, like it’s not even real.”

I studied his expression, a mask of conflicted emotion. “Like I’m dreaming.”

“Like you’re going to wake up any second. Like you’re only watching things take place from somewhere far away. Like it’s all a mirage, one endless déjà vu.”

I bit my lip, trying to keep my composure. He had just described my life. “So what? Everyone feels that way.”

“Are you sure?” He raised an eyebrow. “Because that’s who we are, Blaire. That’s why we crossover . . . it’s in our genetics. We’re constantly searching for what’s real. Walk out that door and you stay ignorant, and you live with that for the rest of your life. Stay and you learn the truth
—
but with a burden you can’t imagine. It’s your choice.”

I wanted to argue with him, but knew he was right. I eased my hand off the door handle. “I’ll do it.”

“If I were you, I would have walked out the door,” he said.

“Just shut up and teach me how to crossover.”

***

A lazy smile crossed his face. “If you insist.”

“But one more question,” I said. “Why the quarantine zone?”

“I take it you’ve figured out it’s not a drill.”

“Yeah, but what is it?”

“Hopefully, you’ll know after tonight,” he said. “Oh, and before we crossover, you have to take off your clothes. Clothes won’t go through a mirror.”

I nodded solemnly. That made sense. I waited, but he just stood there, watching me.

“Aren’t you going to look away?”

He smirked and tilted his head to the side.

“And don’t watch me in the mirror, either,” I said. Feeling exposed, confused, and nervous, I pulled off my T-shirt.

From the side, his smirk transformed into a grin. I kept my eyes trained on him to make sure he wasn’t peeking and unbuttoned my jeans. My face burned. My second piece of clothing crumpled to the floor.

“Can I at least keep my underwear on?” I pleaded.

“I was kidding,” he said, barely stifling his laughter. “You don’t have to take off your clothes. Anything that’s touching you goes through.”

My jaw fell. I jerked my jeans back on, yanked on my shirt, and punched him. Might as well have punched the mirror. I wrung out my hand afterward, trying to ease the sting in my knuckles.

“Just wanted to loosen you up.” He pulled out two rolls of painter’s tape, one red and one blue. “Are you familiar with the story of Hansel and Gretel?”

“Yeah, they get boiled alive.”

“Uh, not sure what fairytale you’re talking about, but in Hansel and Gretel they find their way home by leaving a trail of white pebbles.”

I rolled my eyes. “Can we
please
just do this already?”

He held up the tape. “These are your pebbles. Never go through a mirror unless you’ve marked it. And
never
leave the mirror on the other side unless you mark it on the back.”

“Okay, Mom.” I crossed my arms.

Damian made a neat frame of red tape all the way around the mirror. “A red mirror leads to a reflection. Once we’re on the other side, we’re going to put up blue tape. A blue mirror leads to the source. When you’re getting out of a mission, head towards a blue mirror. Blue equals safety. That’s why we never use both rooms at once, because if you go into the wrong room, the other mirror won’t lead back to the source.”

“I get it, Damian,” I said, still miffed at the clothing joke.

He shook his head. “I’m getting Charles and telling him you’re not ready.”

“
I’m
not ready? You’re the one telling me to take off my clothes and acting like a four-year-old.”

“I didn’t look, Blaire.”

“You wanted to.”

Another infuriating smirk. “Maybe.”

I uncrossed my arms. “Okay, red tape equals source
—
”

“Wrong. Try again.”

“
Blue
tape equals source.”

“Now etch that into your brain,” he said, “because it’s going to save your life.”

***

Damian booted up a laptop on a stool in front of the mirror. A laminated warning flyer hung off the seat:
Cell phones and identification only. Carry your key with you at ALL TIMES. Do not set your key down here.

“Data gets screwed up if you bring electronics through a mirror, so we transmit infra-red,” he explained. “Leave your cell phone and personal effects here. Once we crossover, we’ll pick up their reflections.”

“What . . . how?” I was still getting used to all this.

“Like this.” He set his smart phone on the stool next to the laptop. He pointed to the cell phone on the stool in front of me. “This is the source. If we bring it through the mirror, all the data gets reversed and garbled.” He pointed at the mirror, at the reflection of the cell phone. “
That
is the reflection. We use that one.”

“Aren’t they the same phone?”

“You’ll get used to it,” he said. “Once we break the symmetry, the phone’s reflection will be able to move independently of the phone’s source.”

His laptop beeped, and the nervousness hit me in a sudden hot rush. We were about to crossover.

“Hold my hand,” he said. “We have to break the symmetry together, while we’re touching each other.”

I stared at his outstretched hand, and the boy who cried wolf came to mind. “If this is just a ploy to get me to hold your hand
—
”

“It’s not,” he said quickly. “If I break the symmetry alone, your reflection will suddenly start acting of her own free will. Then when you enter, there will be two of you.”

My face must have been completely devoid of understanding, because he spoke really slowly after that.

“The first person who walks into the mirror breaks the symmetry and replaces only their own reflection. That’s why we need to crossover as a single unit, so we replace
both
our reflections.”

This was going to take a while, I realized, so I gave in and grabbed his hand. His grip stirred butterflies in my stomach. I ignored the feeling.

“Alright,” he said. “Now take a deep breath and put your hand up to the mirror.”

***

I did. “It feels hard.”

“That’s what she said.”

I shot him a glare.

“It is hard,” he said. “It’s glass. But think about it like a liquid instead of a solid. It should start to feel malleable.”

I pressed my hand against the mirror more firmly, resolved to crossover successfully. It didn’t give at all. “Is it supposed to be rubbery or something?”

“Just keep trying.”

After half a minute, I felt like a constipated idiot, my face sweating and my eyebrows tensed. “Damian, this isn’t going to work.” I was pressing so hard I thought I was going to break the glass. Yet it didn’t give a millimeter.

“Okay, cool it,” he said, tugging my hand off the mirror. “The first crossover’s the hardest. It’s a psychological block right now. You have to believe with absolute conviction that your hand
will
pass through the mirror. There’s a little resistance in the material itself, but since these are high reflectivity mirrors, that’s minimal. It should feel like the consistency of Elmer’s glue.”

“Elmer’s glue?” I stared at him in disbelief. “Is that what you’ve been sniffing?”

He sighed. “Give me your hand.”

I held it out for him. He lifted my hand and pressed it palm first against the mirror, his palm on top of mine.

This was getting ridiculous. The heat of our two hands together fogged the glass in an outline around our fingers. I could feel my fingers tensing against the surface.

“No,” he said. “You’re pressing too hard.”

I pulled back.

“Still too hard. Relax your hand.”

“It is relaxed.”

“Completely.”

It wasn’t that I couldn’t relax my hand, it was that I couldn’t relax my hand with his
on top of mine
—
as if it was no big deal that we’d been physically touching for over two minutes.

I peeked at his face, just inches from mine. Not that I could
ever
read him, but I desperately needed to. Our eyes met, and I witnessed his dark irises up close, like two burnt out worlds of ash and cinder. My heart cinched in my throat.

Locked in his gaze, my hand finally relaxed under his. And then I felt it.

The glass under my thumb gave way. It was like a thin sheet of ice . . . melting under the warmth of my finger. I squealed and yanked my hand back.

I stared at the mirror, unable to believe what I’d just felt
—
and what I was seeing. My reflection had just vanished. So had Damian’s. Gone. And I understood. The mirror was now a portal; the world on the other side no longer matched our own.

“There. You just broke the symmetry,” said Damian. “Now try to get more of your hand through.”

Once again I grabbed his hand and touched the glass. This time, I melted through much faster
—
now that I
believed
it could happen
—
and got up to my wrist. On the other side, my hand tingled, like I had pressed it into an electric field. When I stopped moving my hand, it felt solid again.

Damian chuckled. “You already broke the symmetry. You can let go of my hand.”

If his hand had been a hot coal, I wouldn’t have dropped it any faster.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s just like a door now.” In a sudden, unbelievable movement, he took a giant step into the mirror
—
into what was now another room.

I tried to follow him, worked my hand through the mirror up to my elbow, then lost it. The glass hardened around skin, and a cold sweat broke out along my body. My arm wouldn’t budge. “Damian, I’m stuck,” I said, hating the fear in my voice.

“You’re not stuck,” he said, and through the partition of glass between us, his voice sounded muted. “Just relax.”

The harder I pushed, the harder the glass froze around my elbow, now cutting into my skin. I closed my eyes.
I’m not stuck. I can walk through mirrors.
And then I pictured Damian, and fantasized about him holding my hand again.

At last the glass melted, and I tumbled all the way through the mirror, praying he never managed to pry out of me my final thoughts about him. The moment I landed in his arms, I knew I had crossed over.

And I knew something had gone
very
wrong.

Chapter 9

Where by body
passed through the mirror, the flesh felt numb, asleep. Dead. Like I’d passed through an electric field that burnt every cell in my body. My head pounded . . . a fog of hazy thoughts, flashbacks from yesterday, wild flashes of terror. Nausea ravaged me, but not just my stomach. My whole body wanted to wretch.

And I did. I jerked out of Damian’s arms and sprawled out in the corner. Without warning, my stomach emptied its content. But heaving brought no relief, and I writhed and clawed at the floor, frantic to regain what had been sucked out of me. Was it oxygen?

My abdomen clenched, my lungs spasmed, and I dragged down breath after breath. But hyperventilating only made my head spin; my lungs felt as empty as they did after the eight hundred meter run. 

Gradually the anxiety lifted, and I managed to lift an arm to wipe away my spit. My hand came back wet with blood. I wiped again, panicking. My nose was bleeding.

Something soft landed on my shoulder. A towel. I pulled it down and wiped my face, smearing it with red. Suddenly, I was crying.

“What the fuck is this?” I whimpered, and I faced Damian again, too sick to care that my hair was glued to my cheeks with vomit, tears, and blood. “What just happened to me?”

“That’s what we meant by side effects,” he said, smoothing a yard of blue tape over the red tape at the top of the mirror, covering it completely. “We’re not sure we come through entirely . . .
intact
.”

“That’s kind of need-to-know information, Damian.” My eyes flicked to the mirror, which now led to an empty room.
The Source.
Where I was last whole. I scrambled to my feet, panic rising in my throat. “I need to go back, I can’t be here
—
”

Damian blocked me, held my shoulders. “No, Blaire,” he said. “You’ll make it worse. Just give it a minute. Breathe.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You get used to it,” he said.

“But something’s missing,” I whispered, breathless. “Like a part of me . . . when I crossed over.” I clutched my abdomen, clawed at my ribs. “We get it back, right?”

“It’s gone,” he said. “We carry on with what’s left.”

I stared at him, my heart beating inside an empty cavity. I agonized over what was missing, over his betrayal, my mind racing in circles. “You
knew
—
and you let me do this?”

“It’s who you are, Blaire. You get used to it.” He tore off another yard of blue tape and pressed it to the bottom of the mirror.

“Why does it hurt so much?”

“Take a guess,” he said. “We’re in a reflection. What’s here is only a copy of what’s real . . . even the cells in your body, they’re just copies. Some of the information gets lost. That’s why Charles caps us at three hundred crossovers.”

“What happens after three hundred?”

“It’s a gray area.

“How many times have you crossed over, Damian?”

“After a while, you start to like it,” he said. “It’s like a rush.”

“You’re sick,” I declared.

He didn’t answer, and the sound of tape unrolling filled the chamber. My mind stilled
—
maybe because there weren’t any brain cells left
—
and I peered around the room, at an exact reflection of the room we had just left.

The other door now read ‘REFLECTION,’ the correct orientation. That was our exit. My eyes settled on the mirror again, as Damian covered the last of the red tape with blue.

“Wait, that mirror had red tape on it,” I said, wondering if my crossover scrambled mind was playing tricks on me. “I thought it was supposed to take us back to the source?”

“It does. That’s why I’m putting up blue tape. When I put red tape on the source side, my reflection put red tape on this side. The symmetry wasn’t broken yet. Now that it is, we put blue tape over the red tape. Once you crossover, this is always the first thing you do.”

“Is that before or after I throw up,” I muttered, wishing I could go back in time and walk out the door instead of choosing to crossover. Wishing this was all just a bad dream. I scratched at my heart, which still felt caged
—

The dream.
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t recalled it until now. “That night I dreamed about you,” I said. “You were in a reflection, weren’t you?”

He nodded.

“And that was my reflection that saw you. How come I remember that?”

“Because you overlap.”

“What’s overlap?”

“You sometimes experience what your reflections experience. You overlap. That’s what causes déjà vu.”

Another memory jumped into my head. “And the déjà vu when I was eating. That was you too. I felt that in . . . in real life.” I pointed at the mirror from which we had just come, where we no longer had reflections. The blue mirror. “Back there, I mean.”

“In the source. I know,” he said. “Partial overlap.”

“Wait
—
” This was all too much for me.

“Come on,” he said grabbing his cell phone from the stool
—
his
reflection
of his cell phone. “We have work to do. You’ll understand this all soon enough.”

“Let me see if I understand,” I said, thinking back to the déjà vu I had had during breakfast the day he’d forged my signature. “You wasted a crossover to get me to fill out paperwork?”

He shrugged. “I was done with a mission, and I wasn’t in too much trouble, so I thought I’d stop by.”

I eyed him, curious. “What’s your definition of
too much
trouble?”

“Six or more cop cars chasing me.”

***

Damian grabbed my hand and pulled me through the door marked REFLECTION. On the other side, dark stairs descended into the garage where Damian’s Mustang waited. I felt tipsy, like I couldn’t balance right.
Drunk
, almost.

“Get in.”

“Stop ordering me around,” I said.

I headed around to the passenger side door, feeling pleasantly buzzed
—
and numb. Great. My first crossover had probably given me brain damage. There went my admission to Harvard.

“Blaire. Left side.”

I paused. “Huh?”

“It’s reversed. Get in the left side.”

“Oh.” I circled the car again and slid into the left seat, even though it was the passenger side. Weird. No steering wheel on this side. Being on the driver’s side without a steering wheel or pedals, I felt exposed. My hands and feet couldn’t find anything to do. So now we were in Great Britain.

“What are the three rules, Blaire?”

It took a moment. “Always break the mirror after a crossover, never crossover once you’re already in a reflection, and don’t bring anything back with you.”

“Anything alive,” he corrected. “What’s the first thing you do after you crossover?”

“Put up red tape.”

“
Blue
tape, Blaire.
Blue
tape.”

“Okay, whatever.” I laughed. “It doesn’t seem that hard to remember.”

“It
will
be hard when you’re sleep-deprived, alone, and delirious from your crossover. I don’t want to lose you in a reflection because you’re too goddamn lazy to put up tape.”

A smile pulled at the corners of my mouth. “You don’t want to lose me, huh?” I said, feeling positively drunk now. My skin tingled, and my heart buzzed like a bumblebee. “Where did
that
come from, Damian?” I was acting like an idiot. Now I understood the rush he mentioned.

“Just pay attention.” Damian revved his Mustang, and the sound reverberated inside the concrete space, like a lion’s growl. The garage door opened, and we streaked into the alley and onto the street.

Reversed, the world appeared unrecognizable, foreign
—
for all of two seconds. Then my brain reoriented itself, and everything clicked into familiarity.

Reversed. Like my father.

“What did Charles mean when he said my dad was a reflection?” I said. “What happened to my real dad?”

“He went through a mirror, and the mirror broke while he was still inside,” said Damian, his rigid cheekbones cutting the shadows on his face. “He got cut off . . .
orphaned
. He doesn’t even exist anymore. Not in this universe, at least.”

My throat tightened. “No wonder he disappeared without a trace.”

I stayed silent a moment, watching the road’s yellow line streak by outside. We passed a billboard for Pizza, the letters all reversed, and I did a double take. Street signs and shop windows were also in gibberish.

Damian floored it onto the I-5 North. “You have to learn to read backwards.”

“Shouldn’t our eyeballs be reversed too,” I said, my stomach sinking into the seat. “Shouldn’t it cancel out?”

“They’re not. We’re the same orientation.”

With a vague sense of unease, I watched warehouses cruise by on our left. The reflection of Damian’s yellow Mustang flashed in a window.

“Can I walk through glass?”

“Reflectance is too low.”

“But I can see my reflection. What makes a mirror so special?”

“It’s not. Less reflective materials have more resistance. You could do it, but you’d end up pressing so hard you’d break the glass.”

My eyes drifted to the digital clock, and I was surprised to see only a few minutes had passed since ten. “Does it matter how long we’re down here?”

“It’s not like we’re holding our breath.”

“I know, but if crossover damages us, maybe so does staying down too long.”

“Charles would know,” he said. “He’s the expert at all this.”

“What happens after three hundred crossovers?” I said.

“We expire. It’s a precaution he set up so we don’t risk crossover sickness. Some carriers handle it better than others. Charles did his three hundred . . . he’s expired. So is Amy.”

“She’s done three hundred?”

“Charles expired her early. She was showing symptoms after only a few crossovers; we found out her chromosome was fragmented.”

“She has a crush on you.”

“She has forever.”

“I’m sure not
forever
.”

He smirked. “Yeah, well, longer than you have, at least,” he said, peeling off onto the Genesee Avenue exit.

“I do
not
have a crush on you,” I said, blushing.

The seat vibrated beneath me, lulling me into a daze. Sound was different, like my ears were plugged with water. I could almost fall asleep here.
Almost.

The first row of pharmaceutical buildings passed behind a clump of eucalyptus. Farther ahead, the lit up buildings of The Scripps Research Institute rose into view.

***

A hundred yards from the south security checkpoint into the quarantine zone, Damian pulled to the curb and let the engine idle.

“Your job,” he said, “is to occupy the guards. I’ll take care of the rest.”

“Nuh-uh,” I said, shaking my head vigorously. Floodlights drenched the intersection of Genesee Avenue and John Hopkins drive, where two thirty foot guard towers presided over a gate in the barbed wire fence.

“Relax,” he said. “This is just a reflection. Whatever we do down here won’t affect the source.”

“Yeah, but we can still die.”

“That’s why I’m here,” he said. “To protect you.”

I considered his proposition. As a kid, I’d always loved sneaking onto private property at night, and now I could do it without any consequences. I could do anything I wanted, and erase the whole thing later. At the thought, my heart rate spiked.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I’m gutting their security office.” He pointed to a portable building parked just inside the gate. “I’m packing up the visitor log and a list of the guards’ shifts . . . and whatever else I can find. Then we go home.”

“What am I doing again?”

“Distracting them.” Damian reached across my lap, popped the glove compartment, and pulled out a huge handgun. He took aim at a guard through the windshield then slipped the weapon into his pants.

“I can’t do this,” I said.

“There’s two guards in each tower, two at the gate, and two in the shed. In exactly five minutes
—
” he tapped the car’s clock, “the two guards need to be out of the shed and all eight of them need to be watching you.”

“Oh, sure, no problem, Damian.” I rolled my eyes. “Tell me what I’m actually supposed to do, asshole.”

“Flirt,” he said. “Use your looks. Why do you think Charles hired you?” He opened the door and slipped into the bushes by the road.

“Damian,
wait!
” My demand went unanswered.

That bastard. I crossed my arms, resolved to sit this one out, and mulled over whether he meant that last comment as an insult or a compliment . . . or both.

The minute on the clock changed, shooting guilt through my blood. Yet I still waited. He couldn’t expect that from me, not on my first crossover.

Another minute.

Out of the corner of my eye, a dark blur jumped behind the trunk of a eucalyptus tree, just a few feet from the gate. Damian.

My eyes crept to the guards in the towers standing on the catwalk . . . and the huge, semiautomatic rifles slung across their chests. They’d slaughter him.

I bit my fingernails and watched the scene unfold. The clock changed again. He had two minutes left.

I counted down. One-hundred-twenty . . . one-hundred-nineteen . . . one-hundred-eighteen . . . Why did I even care what happened to him? He was acting reckless and endangering both of us.

One-hundred-twelve. I licked my lips, which had dried to the consistency of sandpaper, and tried to swallow. Ninety-nine . . . ninety-eight . . .

Did I really have a crush on him?

Ninety-one . . . ninety . . . eighty-nine.

Fine, Damian.
I unlatched the door and marched toward the gate.
You win.

***

When I entered the intersection, the soldiers’ gloves tightened around their guns.

“Civilian, twenty yards,” one shouted from the tower. “Closing.”

Seriously? I was a high school girl.

One of the guards held up his palm, halting me a few feet out. “Quarantine zone,” he said. He made a twirl with his finger. “Turn around.”

I said the first logical answer that came to mind. “I’m lost. Can you give me directions?”

“Negative,” he said.

“Can I at least stand here?”

“Negative.” He made the twirl with his finger again. “Turn around.”

Tough nut to crack, this one. My heart pounded. Damian clearly didn’t understand the way girls worked. I couldn’t just flirt on call.

“You’re cute,” I said, tilting my head to the side and playing with my hair.

I got the finger twirl again, followed by a stiff point up Genesee Avenue. “Turn around. Go back the way you came.”

A shadow rose behind him
—
Damian, his gun trained at the guard’s helmet. He pressed his finger to his lips and gave me an impatient look.

I stiffened, struggling not to give him away with my eyes. “Do you want my phone number?” I said to the guard, biting my lip and batting my eyes desperately.

“This is a class one quarantine zone,” he deadpanned. “Turn around
—
”