BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller (26 page)

Damian rose to his feet and slipped into the dancing crowd, which closed behind him.

Josh followed, shoving kids out of the way. “Come back, you little worm
—
”

He appeared out of nowhere, and his left fist slammed Josh’s jaw. Josh flew into the couple behind him, who stood him up straight and pushed him back into the fight. Josh shook off the blow, lowered his shoulder, and plowed into Damian.

“Stop it!” I yelled, running after them.

Students backed away from the two of them, clearing a circle in the center of the dance floor. The DJ paused between songs to watch the fight. In the silence that filled the ballroom, a chant rippled through the students, getting louder and louder. “
Josh
 . . .
Josh
 . . .
Josh
 . . .”

At first, Damian dodged Josh’s blows, darted around him,
playing
with him by the looks of it. But they both knew some kind of martial arts, and Josh unleashed a kick into Damian’s side and flattened him. Damian rose, menacing eyes trained on Josh, and wiped blood off his smirk.

He fake lunged, then pulled back, sending Josh stumbling backward, then he circled, crouched low and ready to strike. He sidestepped a second attack, and with lightning speed, twisted behind Josh, clamped his arms around his waist and slammed him to the ground. Josh’s cheek slapped on the wood. Muscles flexed under Damian’s tux, and his left fist made a blur, connected with Josh’s side. He pulled back again.

I ran forward and grabbed Damian’s elbow before he could deliver a blow to Josh’s skull. “Damian, leave him alone!” I yelled.

But Josh rolled out from under him, forcing me back, and attacked again from the right, this time exploiting Damian’s weak wrist. Blood dripping from his nose, he pinned Damian and repaid him with a flurry of his own punches.

“Josh, leave him alone!” It was my voice, but not me who had spoken. The three of us, and the entire watching crowd, which had parted to reveal the better version of myself, stared in confusion.

“Whoa,” said someone at the front of the circle. “It’s Blaire’s twin.”

“What the
—
” Josh climbed off Damian, staring at her, then me. “
Blaire?
You didn’t tell me you had a twin sister.”

“I got dibs on her sister,” Bryce called from the sidelines, earning him an elbow in the ribs from his date.

“Bryce, shut your face,” said Josh.

Confused, my reflection glanced between Josh and me. Finally, recognition dawned on her face. She stepped backward, eyes wide.

The crowd muttered, mirroring her surprise, and a hundred pairs of eyes swiveled to me . . . the imposter.

Now was my chance. I hadn’t expected an audience for this, but some things just couldn’t be helped. While everyone else was still stunned, I stepped into the center of the circle, and faced my reflection.

Broken symmetry was much too complicated to explain, so I settled on the next best thing, took a deep breath, and opened my mouth.
Here goes nothing.

“Blaire, remember that movie,
Back to the Future?
” I said. “Well, this is that movie. I’m you from the future.”

Our high school audience gave a collective sigh of understanding. Mystery explained.

“How far in the future?” she muttered.

“A month. I need something from you really bad right now.”

Her voice wavered. “What?”

“I need you to tell me where you put my
—
where you put
our
dad’s diary.”

Damian, who had climbed to his feet next to me, brushed the dust off his tuxedo. Josh narrowed his eyes at him.

“The diary? It’s in my
—
”

“Don’t tell them, Blaire,” said Josh, stepping between us. “Don’t tell them anything. If she’s really from the future, she should remember where you put the diary.”

“It’s a different version of the future, numchuck,” said Damian.

“Besides,” said Josh, “she shouldn’t even be talking to us. She’s screwing with causality. I could start disappearing any second.”

I rolled my eyes. “If anyone would disappear, Josh, it’s me.”

“So, you’re dating this creep in a month?” he said, sizing up Damian for another fight.

“We’re not dating,” I said.

“It’s more of a friends with benefits thing,” said Damian.

I scowled at him.

My reflection’s eyes darted to Damian. A flash of something . . . curiosity, maybe. Or
interest?

Sorry, that one’s not for you.

“Blaire,” I said, drawing her gaze back to me. “I thought you put it with the scrap book at home, but it’s not there.”

My reflection stared at me, and I could practically see the gears working behind her forehead. God, it looked effortful. Tell me I didn’t actually look like that when I was thinking.

“Josh is right,” she said. “If you traveled back in time, you should know where I put it. But if you’re from a different version of the present, like you say, and that you never got the diary, then that means our worlds must have diverged
before
I got the diary
—
sometime before today
—
which would mean
I
should remember time travelling.”

Hmm . . . impressive.

“Look, time travel is really complicated,” I said, “Just trust me, okay?”

“Blaire, don’t trust her,” said Josh.

“It’s in my locker,” she said. “So if you don’t know the combination, you’re out of luck. I don’t know why you even want that thing . . . there’s nothing in it.”

***

“Your locker?” said Damian, as we skidded into the parking lot of my dark high school a few minutes later. “You couldn’t have guessed your locker?”

“Shut up.” I was more preoccupied with what my reflection had said. The same thing Joe Paretti had said more than a month ago.

There’s nothing in the diary.

Then why were we chasing it? Why was Charles? Were we all chasing a false hope?

With his elbow, Damian smashed in the window on the East Wing, setting off an alarm. He reached in and unlocked the door, and we raced through the school’s dark hallways.

The midnight air squeezed my skin, like the icy pressure at the bottom of the ocean. I could feel how deep we were, the weight of the two symmetries above us crushing down.

“Four-thirty-eight. Here it is.” Arms shaking with adrenaline, I fumbled with the combination lock. “Twelve, twenty-seven, twelve. Got it.”

The lock clicked open. We swung the locker open and peered in at the pile of books.

“What does it look like?” said Damian.

“It’s small. Leather.” I reached in and dragged the entire contents of my locker into the hallway. The books crunched open. But no diary.

A single half-sheet of paper fluttered to the ground behind everything else. Damian caught the sheet, and read it.

He handed it to me, his eyes dark.

It was a note.

I didn’t recognize the handwriting, which meant it wasn’t my own. Next to me, Damian slammed his fist into the lockers, and the clang echoed through the hallway, fading into the screaming alarm. I read the messy handwriting on the note, and the back of my neck prickled.

Sorry kids.

—
Charles

Chapter 24

“
So he didn’t
come down here to hide, he came down here for the diary,” said Damian, slamming the locker door shut. It bounced back open. “Because you didn’t have it in the source. Why didn’t we think of that?”

“Because he’s playing tricks on us. He’s been one step ahead of us from the beginning.” I paused to read the note I had written to my reflection, satisfied.

Dear Blaire,

Josh is a keeper. Give him a big kiss today.

I love you,

Blaire from the future.

P.S. You’re gorgeous.

Damian read the note over my shoulder. “You’re kidding . . .
Josh?
”

“
You’re
not here.”

“I’m just saying
—
”

I slapped the notebook shut. “What does it matter? They’re just reflections, right? They’re not real.”

“I’m not so sure anymore,” he said, pulling his gun out of his waistband and inspecting the barrel. “
You
were real.”

I glared at him. “Wow. Why don’t you just go back there and ask her to marry you?”

“Please,” he sneered. “I’d take you over your reflection any day.”

“As if you’ve
ever
looked at me like that.”

“I do. Come on, Blaire. This is stupid.”

“Make me believe it.”

His black eyes targeted mine. “I’ve seen you suffer,” he spat. “I’ve seen you go after what you want, and fail every time. I’ve seen you make every single wrong choice . . .” He held my gaze, breathing heavily. “And I’ve seen you get back up every time. I’ve seen you become stronger. I’ve seen you grow up. You’re a different person now.
You’re
the Blaire I know.”

The fever in his black eyes didn’t intimidate me. My heart echoed, beating in some far off place I no longer had access to. “Tell me you love me,” I whispered.

“I don’t love you. That’s not for me to do.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know.” He clenched his fist and pounded the locker again. His body stiffened, but not from the impact. “Charles has the diary,” he said. “You know what that means, right?”

“Just spit it out. I’m not in the mood for riddles.”

“If he came down to the failsafe just to get the diary, and now that he has it . . .”

I piled my reflection’s books inside her locker and carefully laid the note on top. Only when I shut the door did I comprehend Damian’s words. My eyes froze on the combination lock. “He’s going back up.”

Damian nodded. “Back up through the failsafe mirror.”

“This was a mission for him,” I said. “Once he goes back up, he’s going to break the mirror.”

“And orphan us two levels down. Come on,” he said, tugging me up the hall. “We might not be too late.”

***

Under the dim fluorescent tube in the storage unit, Damian and I stared at the shards of broken glass strewn across the floor
—
and the bare, dust-free rectangle of corrugated metal against which the mirror had leaned just hours earlier.

Orphaned.

Two levels down.

“The glass didn’t fall straight down,” said Damian. “It was propelled.”

“Meaning what?”

“The impact that broke it occurred on this side,” he said. “He broke it before he crossed over.”

“Then he’s still down here with us.”

“No one would do that. He must have gotten crossover sickness.”

“We’re fine,” I said, struggling to calm my breathing. “We already know there’s a way back up.”

“No, we
hoped
there was a way back up. We don’t know jack.”

“He knows the way back up,” I insisted.

“Then why is he still down here, Blaire? Why isn’t he
gone?
”

“He just got the diary,” I said. “Maybe he needs time to figure it out. I think he’s leaving clues so we can follow him.”

“No, he’s going deeper,” said Damian.

I met his gaze. “Then we go deeper.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Why, exactly, would we do that?”

“Maybe there’s a way out the bottom. Maybe if you go deep enough all the mirrors connect.”

Damian squeezed his eyes shut and leaned against the corrugated wall of the storage unit. “There is no way out the bottom, Blaire. It’s just a dead end.”

“Listen to me,” I said. “All we know is Charles just orphaned himself. If he does have crossover sickness, then whatever’s inside him just permanently cut itself off from the source. That’s not what they do, right?”

He frowned. “Fair point.”

“If there’s any chance of getting back to the source, he’s it,” I said. “He has the diary. He probably has the artifact. And he knows what he’s doing. If he’s going deeper, we have to follow him.”

Damian rubbed his forehead and let out a long, pained sigh. “Shit.”

***

“But how do we track him?” I said. “There must be a million mirrors in La Jolla.”

Damian paced back and forth in the tiny storage unit, shaking his head. “No, he may be crafty, but he’s predictable. He wouldn’t just pick a random mirror. He’d use one that was safe, one he was comfortable with. He always does.”

“A safe mirror,” I muttered. “Like his house?”

“Possibly,” said Damian. “Either his house, or the mirrors at ISDI.”

I thought back to my crossover through my bedroom mirror, and a wave of chills propagated down my body. “If I were him, I’d use the mirrors at ISDI.”

“ISDI,” Damian confirmed. “They’re as safe as you get. They’re stronger than normal mirrors, and he’s spent years mistake-proofing those rooms. Those are the mirrors he trusts.”

“You think that’s where he went?”

“I know that’s where he went.”

“Then let’s go.”

Around one in the morning, we pulled up to our office building. Nothing out of the ordinary struck us. Not a single light shone inside the black windows. Empty.

I killed the Jeep’s ignition, and we crept inside.

“Jesus,” said Damian, plugging his nose in the doorway. “It’s worse.”

I caught a whiff as I stepped past him, and nearly gagged. Decay soaked my lungs, and the coppery odor of fresh blood burned my sinuses.

“The body?” I said.

“Not just the body,” he said, hitting the lights. The ceiling panels flickered on, illuminating in increments a scene that made me gasp. I recoiled, backing into him.

The blue tarp lay open on the floor. In a sea of blood, Charles’s body sprawled at its center. His shirt had been removed and draped over the back of my chair, and someone had used it to wipe their bloody hands.

A line of open cases lined the tarp
—
what looked like every toolbox at ISDI’s disposal. Everything had been gathered for an operation of some sort.

“He looks smaller,” said Damian.

I stepped closer, and my hand shot to my mouth. He was smaller.

At their widest point, both of his shoulders had been hacked off. Now a sawed-off cross section of bone jutted out from the lacerated flesh. From Human Anatomy, I recognized the knobby structure as the humeral head.

I turned away and took a few deep breaths before returning my attention to the body. The severed pieces of his shoulder slumped in a pile off to the side, discarded.

My gaze fell to a series of marks above his pecs, just under his collar bone. “What’s that on his chest?” I said.

“Looks like he wrote something.”

I peered closer, unable to calm my drumming heart. A line of ink ran from shoulder to shoulder segmented by smaller, evenly spaced vertical lines. “It’s a ruler. He drew a ruler.”

“From the looks of it,” said Damian. “I’d say he was cutting this body down to size.”

“Trying to hide it somewhere?”

“Most likely. He gave up, though.”

“Hide it from what?” I said.

“I don’t know. The police.
Us
.”

“He already knows we’re following him.”

“I know.” Damian stooped and rummaged through the toolboxes. “The saws are missing. He took the saws with him . . . and the rulers and tape measures.”

“Know what else is missing?” I said.

Damian dug through the tools, scooping a handful of wrenches onto the floor. He came up empty handed. “What?”

“The yellow case. The one he had right before our mission. It’s the only one not here.”

He nodded. “Those weren’t drills.”

I grasped his meaning.
The artifact.
“God, he sent us down here to get it and it was right there in his hand.”

“Get ready to crossover, Blaire. It’s time to ferret this bastard out.”

***

First we raided the emergency supplies. In the doorway to the garage, spider webs brushed my face.

Organic matter “decayed” in deep reflections, so we stocked a backpack with rations of food: snack crackers, cereal bars, dried fruit, and instant oatmeal. Damian tossed in a few tins of cod. I hefted the backpack onto my shoulder, knowing it was pointless.

We would be taking food down through multiple nested crossovers; it would be subject to the exact same decay.

Damian pressed a flashlight into my palm and pocketed one of his own.

“What’s the point? Crossover shorts out electronics,” I said.

“These are bottom crawlers. Heavy gauge wires and solid state LEDs. They’ll go pretty deep.”

I slipped my flashlight into the backpack’s side mesh. “Ready?”

“Ready,” he said.

We ascended the stairs and paused in the dark hallway, the light from downstairs straying past us. Damian clicked on his flashlight and trained the blue beam on the light switch. A smudge of blood told us Charles had been here.

He shined the flashlight up the hall, illuminating the door to room A, then the door to room B. Both shut. Both spotless.

“Well, there’s only two mirrors he could have used,” I said.

“I hope so,” said Damian. He stepped up to the opposite wall and opened the recessed cabinet containing the tranquilizer gun.

Empty.

Charles had removed it.

“Come on.” I tugged his sleeve, not wanting to dwell on that detail. “Let’s get this over with.”

We unlocked room A and stepped into what felt like a tomb. The smell of blood lingered in the air, salty and pungent.

Damian surveyed the room with his flashlight, and the pitch black mirror swallowed the beam, giving no reflection.

Broken symmetry.

“This one’s split,” he said.

“So he went through room A first. I guess that makes sense.”

“Let’s check B, just in case.”

We filed back into the hallway and unlocked room B. It smelled sterile, and the glare of Damian’s flashlight reflected off the mirror and blinded us.

“A it is,” I said.

We went back to room A, where we stood in silence, staring at the gaping back hole. Damian picked up the roll of red tape and slapped a single foot long piece to the mirror’s frame.

“Three levels down,” I muttered. “Have you ever been that deep?”

“I’m not suicidal.”

“Maybe it doesn’t hurt as much.”

My heart clanged. I took a deep breath and plunged through the mirror. Into darkness.

***

It actually didn’t hurt as much.

The plane of the mirror passed through my body like always, only this time there was nothing in the way, nothing left inside me to hurt
—
everything just felt numb and tingly.

Crossing over had deadened my insides. The word
necrosis
flashed through my mind, and I wondered if deep down my flesh was already dead, my organs decaying with gangrene.

My limbs trembled after the crossover, and I sank to the floor, shivering. Cold. Just really cold.

A dancing flashlight beam indicated Damian had stepped through behind me. He winced and clutched his forehead. “Ooh.”

“I thought it felt good for you?” I said.

“Not that time.” He lowered his hand, and his flashlight illuminated a red spot on his shoulder.

“Damian
—
” my breath caught in my throat, “you’re bleeding!”

“Where?” He shined the flashlight at his arms, his wrist, then felt for blood along his upper lip below his nose.

“No . . .” I rose shakily to my feet and took the flashlight from his hand, and tilted his head to the side. I traced the droplets of blood from his shoulder to his cheek, to its source
—
and a fist tightened around my heart. A thin stream of blood trickled out of his ear and dribbled off his earlobe.

“It’s your ear,” I whispered.

“Like a cut?” he said.

“No, it’s . . . it’s coming out of your ear.”

Intracranial hemorrhaging
.

I swung the beam to his face, onto a spiderweb of black, swollen blood veins around his eyes just before they faded. Caught in the light, the discoloration shrank back into his skin, vanished . . . and I was certain it had been a trick of the light.

***

Fear flashed in Damian’s eyes, but his gaze steeled so quickly I wasn’t even sure I saw it. He spoke calmly. “It’s just a ruptured eardrum. I’m fine.”

“We have to go back up. You can’t survive down here.”

“Neither can Charles,” said Damian, “and I’m stronger than him. If he can go down, I can go down.”

“I’m going alone
—
”

“No, Blaire. We need each other right now. You’ve never nested before; you’ll get lost.”

I stared at him. “It’s going to tear you apart.”

“
Really?
What else is new?” He held the cuff of his shirt to his ear to stop the bleeding and swung his flashlight around room A, indicating the discussion was over.

His flashlight honed in on the doorknob, on a black smear which someone had carelessly wiped clean. Blood. “There.”

“Is that from the corpse he dissected, or him?”

“Probably both. At least we know he went this way. Put up some tape and let’s move on.”

“Don’t need to,” I said. “Look.” I pointed down at the bottom left corner of the mirror, where a tiny piece of blue tape was stuck to the glass.

“He’s leaving clues for himself should he ever need to come back up,” said Damian. “Put up something bigger.”

I leaned closer. He had also written something on the tape.

S2