BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller (14 page)

But another possibility had occurred to me, and I shivered at the thought. “Have you ever tried taking a mirror through another mirror?”

“It doesn’t work,” he said.

“Doesn’t whatever you touch go through with you?”

“No, I mean it’s pointless. It doesn’t help you, no matter how you spin it
—
”

“So it is possible?” I said.

“Theoretically, but all you’re doing is creating a maze for yourself. What you’re talking about has a name. It’s called
recursion
.”

“Recursion,” I repeated.

“You crossover, detach the mirror on the other side, and take it with you through a deeper crossover . . . to a deeper level. So now you’re two levels down, but you have two blue mirrors. Two mirrors that lead
up
. If you keep recursing like that, the mirrors begin to self-reference. You create branches of a fractal tree that expand exponentially. Trust me, recursion makes simple nesting look like kiddie play.”

I felt my forehead tighten as I struggled to make sense of it. “Two blue mirrors . . . does that mean you could have two mirrors that lead back to the source?”

“It doesn’t work,” he said. “They’re all dead ends except one. You’d have to retrace your steps exactly to the source mirror. You’d have to go
down
before you could go up. I told you, you’re just creating a maze.”

“Okay, but what if you take the first mirror through the second mirror, and then detach the second mirror and take it through the first?” Just imagining such a scenario elevated my heart rate.

“Double recursion.” He shook his head. “It cancels out. You’re back in the source and you get a mirror that jumps levels. We’ve tried everything, Blaire. Crossing over makes branches. They only spread out, they never circle back. They never make a loop. No matter how you arrange it, there is always only one mirror back to the true source. Period.”

***

Charles stepped into the office, and I instinctively jumped away from Damian. Upon the realization that we’d been sitting so close, my face flushed. Charles handed each of us an envelope.

“What’s this?” I said, eyeing the ISDI seal printed on the front.

“Your paycheck.”

“I get
paid?
”

“Second and fourth Friday.”

“Really?” Grinning, I tore open the envelope. When I saw the number though, my excitement fizzled out. “Twenty three dollars and fifty-seven cents. You’re kidding.”

“That’s from your crossover time. Office hours haven’t been counted yet,” Charles explained. “You get eight dollars an hour. Your first training trip with Damian was forty-five minutes, and your first mission was an hour and forty-five minutes. I rounded it up to two
—
”

“You woke me up in the middle of the night to break into a police station and I get twenty-three dollars?”

Charles frowned. “I gave you overtime pay for that. That’s fifty percent extra, so twelve dollars an hour.”

“I can do the math,” I grumbled.

“It’s not as high as you think because of income tax and social security deductions.”

I ignored him and watched Damian opening his envelope next to me. “How much did you get?” I said, my voice accusing.

“That’s impolite,” he said.

I shoved him. “How much?”

He smirked. “Three thousand.”

“Three thousand dollars?” My jaw fell open. “You get three thousand dollars and I barely get enough to buy coffee and a matinee?”

“You’re an intern,” he said. “I’m an employee. Besides, we don’t need money. There’s a trick.”

Charles sighed. “Don’t show her the trick. She’ll figure it out on her own.”

“Yeah, I’ll figure it out on my own anyway,” I said, “so show me the trick.”

“Don’t show her the trick, Damian.”

“I think I better,” he said. “Blaire, with a handful of mirrors and a hammer you can create the best counterfeits in the world.” Damian surveyed me from head to toe, a teasing glint in his eyes. “At least that way you can afford some decent clothes.”

Charles clapped his hands together before I could maul him. “Come you two. Damian, I scheduled an MRI for you today.” He turned to me. “Blaire, I want you to go with him, to make sure he goes. And I scheduled one for you too. We do one every month
—
to see how your body’s handling crossover.”

***

I went first. In the hospital, they laid me out on a narrow cot, clamped headphones over my ears, and slid me into what looked like an Apollo space capsule
—
or a human sized cryogenic freezer.

For forty-five minutes, the guts of the machine hummed and chugged around me, eclipsing my thoughts.

After it was over, while Damian was being fed into the huge MRI chamber, a nurse led me to an empty exam room, where I awaited the verdict.

The MRI was going to show how much of us was left after all those crossovers.

“As expected,” said Dr. Johnson, coming into the examination room a half hour later and shutting the door gently behind her, “you’re handling crossover extremely well. I presume Charles already explained the advantage of having duplicate chromosomes?”

I raised my eyebrows. She had used the word
crossover
. “So you have it too?” I asked. “The crossover gene?”

“No, but I have Charles’s trust,” she said, and seeing my blank look added, “he and I go back a ways. We went to med school together.” 

“So there’s nothing wrong with me?” I said. “No brain damage, hemorrhaging, tumors, radiation sickness, or anything like that?”

“Not a trace.” She opened a folder next to her computer and scribbled out a note.

I nodded. “What about Damian? He’s okay too, right?”

Her eye twitched. “I’ll be meeting with him in a few minutes. In the meantime, why don’t you wait in the lobby? I need to have a word with Charles about your MRI.” She closed my folder and started toward the door.

“I thought you said I was fine.”

“It’s just something I want him to be aware of. Nothing serious.” She left the room before I could respond, leaving me alone with the icy glare of the fluorescents and my troubled thoughts.

And my folder.

I practically lunged for the manila folder on the desk. A half dozen black and white films slid out into my palms. Cross sections of my body, nothing recognizable. A sticky note was stuck to the back of the folder on which Dr. Johnson had written two words.

Situs Inversus?

I remembered it was the condition my father had, and didn’t really tell me anything. When I closed the folder, though, a chill sank through my skin.

***

My father did not have Situs Inversus.

The man who had Situs Inversus was a reflection from a lower level who had crossed over into the source, as Charles had explained to me earlier.

Situs Inversus was evidence that someone was from another level, like how a piece of paper we took through a crossover would be reversed for everyone else, but not for us. That’s why when Damian crossed over, he became left-handed. I became right-handed.

I found Damian out in the lobby and in a hushed voice told him about the sticky note I had seen in Dr. Johnson’s office and my ensuing anxiety. “Do you think I’m a reflection?” I asked, voicing my fears at last.

“It’s not possible,” he said, shaking his head. “You would have remembered crossing over.”

“But if I have Situs Inversus
—
”

“You don’t,” he said. “It was probably a reminder she stuck in your file after your dad died to check you out too. You’re not reversed, Blaire.”

“I feel reversed.”

Damian lowered his gaze from the ceiling and leveled it with me. “If you were a reflection, I would know.”

The nurse stuck her head out. “Damian . . . Damian Silva?” She glanced around the empty waiting room.

“Can I come in with you?” I said.

“No. Stay here,” he said, his voice edged with warning. He fixed me with a threatening stare, until satisfied I was rooted to the seat, and then sauntered back with the nurse.

He didn’t want me to hear his diagnosis.

Suddenly, I
really
wanted to.

Stay here? Not a chance.

***

The moment Damian disappeared around the corner with the nurse, I checked that the receptionist was busy and darted after them. The interior halls of the hospitals bustled with nurses and doctors.

I glimpsed Damian’s yellow leather jacket rounding a corner at the end of the corridor. I hurried after him, but when I reached the intersection, the hall was empty.

They’d slipped into one of the rooms, but I couldn’t just check each one.

Think
, Blaire.

Up ahead, the hallway branched around another receptionist’s desk. I ran forward and grabbed a clipboard hanging off the desk. I scanned the columns of typed and highlighted names, then flipped the page.

Damian Silva
—
I now knew his last name.

No Damian. This wasn’t even a list of appointments.

“Excuse me, ma’am, can I help you?”

I dropped the clipboard and glanced up at the obese, wiry haired receptionist who’d spoken. “I’m looking for my brother, Damian Silva. Do you know what room he’s in?”

“I could check for you. What doctor is he seeing?”

“Doctor Johnson.”

She typed away, her arms and gut jiggling. “Nothing’s coming up. Is that in radiology?”

“Forget it.” I spun away from her. Here I was missing the crucial truth about Damian, about crossover sickness. And there was no way he was going to tell me afterwards.

My gaze scrolled up the hallway, pausing on each of the identical doors. They probably just took him to the same room where Dr. Johnson saw me. Duh, Blaire, should have thought of that first. I slipped away from the desk and located the exam room I had just left, and pressed my ear against the steel.

Just muffled voices, their words masked by the hum of background noise. My thudding heart didn’t help either.

An orderly entered the hall, striding toward me. I jerked up straight, hoping he hadn’t spotted me eavesdropping. He passed by, only briefly making eye contact.

I’d just have to risk it. I applied pressure to the handle until it clicked, then edged the door open a crack. Dr. Johnson’s voice, now audible, escaped from the gap.

“. . . you have to tell Charles about this,” she said. “You should have stopped a long time ago.”

I leaned back against the wall and folded my arms, propped the door with my heel, and listened. The staff would just think I was waiting for someone.

“Those are the normal side effects of crossover,” said Damian from inside the room, his voice laced with tension. “I’m not worried.”

“You should be,” said Dr. Johnson. “With the kind of damage your body has sustained, I’m amazed you’re functioning at all.”

“That’s because it doesn’t hurt me anymore,” he said. “Check your records; it’s not worse than last time.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” she said. “It is worse. It’s destroying your body . . . it’s killing you. You have to stop.”

“How many do I have left?”

“Damian,” she said, “your MRI shows new areas of hemorrhaging in your stomach, brain, and other vital organs. These are not minor issues
—
”

I covered my mouth with my hand.

Hemorrhaging
. Just like my dad.

“How many do I have left?” he spat. “How many crossovers before I expire?”

“I don’t know,” said Dr. Johnson. “There’s no cut and dry number. Your body is resilient to some of the effects of crossover but not others. Maybe you have a dozen left
—
maybe the very next one will kill you. I just don’t know.”

A crinkle of paper indicated that Damian was rising from the exam table. “I’ll tell Charles the good news, then. That I’m fine, just like always, and that you’ve cleared me to continue crossing over for another month.”

***

Damian bumped into me on his way out of the exam room, and I didn’t even bother hiding the fact I was eavesdropping. I confronted him right there in the hallway.

“Why do you do it?” I said.

His dark eyes flashed with warning. “I told you to stay in the waiting room.”

“You still crossover, even though you know it’s killing you.”

“Not your concern, Blaire.”

“Are you stupid?” I said. “Are you suicidal? Are you
insane?
”

He held my gaze, his cheek bones casting deep shadows down to his clenched jaw. “All of the above.”

“For once, could you give me a straight answer?”

“About why I crossover?” he said. “It’s all I know. It’s my life. Why do you care, anyway? You’re healthy.”

“I don’t want you to die,” I said, my frustration overriding the certain regrets I would have later about admitting as much.

“You’re wasting your energy,” he said. “It’s already too late for me.”

“Just stop doing it,” I pleaded, my eyes stinging with tears. I wiped them away angrily. “Stop crossing over.”

“I can’t,” he said, angling his head away from me. “I just can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m addicted.”

“To crossing over?”

“It’s different for me. You feel like crap when you crossover, but every time I go through, it’s like my cells are cleansed and reborn. They vibrate with life
—
at least until it wears off. If I don’t crossover every few days, my body starts rejecting the source. I get sick. And it just gets worse.”

“Damian
—
” I whispered, my hand inching toward my mouth, “this is horrible. We have to do something.”

“Do what, Blaire?” His black eyes drilled into me. “Haven’t you noticed? No one understands what this thing is. They’re researching crossover DNA in a freaking military quarantine zone. They have
no idea
.”

“What about Charles?”

“He wants the same thing we all want, and he doesn’t care how many of us he expires.”

“And what is that?” I asked. “What do you all want that’s so valuable it’s worth shaving decades off your life?”

“You know what it is.”

“Sorry. Never got the memo.”