BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller (28 page)

Chapter 26

Hands on my
shoulders woke me up, who knows how long later, and I sat up gasping for air. Damian collapsed next to me, and the backpack slumped against the wall.

I stared at the side of his face, split between disbelief and awe, and euphoria swelled up inside me. I flung my arms around him and collapsed against his chest, drinking in his scent. He was the only thing real in this world.

“You shouldn’t be down here,” I moaned. It wasn’t a reprimand. It was an apology.

“You did your best,” he murmured, enfolding me in his arms.

“Damian, we’re never going to make it,” I said. “I can’t breathe.”

“Here.” He dug a medicine bottle and a canteen out of the backpack. “Take one of these.”

“What is it?” I said, opening my mouth.

He pressed a white pill
—
which tasted like pure salt
—
onto my tongue, and I washed it down with a swig from the canteen.

“Potassium iodide. It helps with crossover.”

“It better help a lot,” I said, trying to suck the sting out of my mouth.

“By the way,” he said, “thanks for leaving clues.”

“I still got lost.”

“I can guess why.” He reached behind my head and peeled something off my hair. He showed me the wad, tangled up with my auburn hair, where no less than three pieces of blue and red tape had come off the mirrors on which I’d left them and attached to my hair. He curled the tape into a ball and flicked it at the toilet. I watched it bounce on the tile, two feet short.

He kissed my hair. “That’s the last time I’m letting you out of my sight. I don’t care if it kills me.”

“Deal,” I said, no longer feeling like arguing. Plus, I knew I couldn’t let him
out of my sight again either. “How deep are we?”

“You weren’t as lost as you thought you were.” His breath warmed the top of my head. “We just have to go through B, A, C , then A again to get back to where we split up. We’re nine levels down.”

The number meant nothing to me. It wasn’t like one, or two. Nine was too high to count, too much damage to our bodies to fathom. “How do you know all this?” I asked.

He slid a notebook out of the backpack and flipped it open. “Because when I was looking for you, I figured out Charles’s maze
—
and I think we’re about to go a lot deeper.”

***

I had the brief image of Damian moving swiftly through the maze, eyes fierce and determined. I never wanted us to part again.

On a blank page, he drew a triangle and tapped the center with his pencil. “This is the beginning of the maze. There are three mirrors to choose from. A, B, and C.”

He drew a second triangle, a reflection of the first. “When Charles crossed over through A, he created a reflection of the original setup.

Then he drew two more triangles branching off the first two. “When he crossed over B, he broke symmetry again, creating not only a reflection of the reflection, but also a deeper reflection of the source through A.”

He continued. “We know he crossed over C next, and he kept going. So far, I’ve got it mapped out to this.” He flipped to another page in the notebook, this one packed with triangles and annotations.

I stared at the diagram he had drawn, and dread settled in my stomach. “We’re screwed.”

***

“Where it gets really small and branches to the right,” he said. “That’s where you wandered off.”

“Let’s go back up,” I said. “We can get fake identities and start over in the failsafe; it’s not that deep.”

“Nor is it the source,” he said. “You’re going home, Blaire.”

I sat up straight. “So are you.”

He didn’t meet my eyes, and I could see his jaw tighten. “We’re descending a fractal tree. Every time he breaks symmetry, he reflects the entire maze, doubling its size.”

“So it’s expanding exponentially,” I said. “He can add on to the maze faster than we can search it.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

“He could be a hundred levels down by now. Which means there’d be
millions
of branches.” I licked away the last of the salty taste inside my mouth, already breathing easier. Whatever pill he had given me, it worked.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “The deeper he goes, the farther he has to travel to get to an unsplit mirror. That gives us a chance to catch up with him.”

“How?” I said. “I got lost after two crossovers.”

“According to this,” he said, tapping his notebook, this bathroom should be a dead end.”

“It is a dead end,” I muttered.

“Did you see your reflection?” he said.

“No.”

“That means Charles broke the symmetry. He went through this mirror. We’re on the right path, Blaire. We can systematically probe each branch and eliminate dead ends like that.” He slid out from under me and stood. “We’ll eventually find him.”

I stood up beside him. “Or die trying. Let’s do this.”

***

Damian led us two levels deeper, consulting his notebook after each crossover. He scribbled in notes, crossed off branches, and added triangles to the maze. At least the potassium iodide seemed to lessen the side effects. At least we could breathe again.

After our third crossover, Damian’s map spilled onto a second page. He hesitated in the hallway, eyebrows tensed, and penciled in thirty-two more triangles.

“Damn,” he said. “He’s broken symmetry six times, not counting his fake diversion through the bathroom, and there’s already sixty-four different versions of the office. A hundred and twenty-eight if he breaks symmetry again.”

“Then 256,” I said. “Then 512, then 1024, then 2048
—
”

“Shut it, Blaire.” His eyebrows knotted as he studied the diagram. “I wonder if there’s a pattern to his crossovers.”

“Why would there be a pattern? He’s trying to confuse us.”

“Because Charles is methodical,” he muttered. “He never does anything that can’t be undone.”

“You’re going to stake your life on that?”

Damian hesitated. “We have to. Otherwise, we haven’t got a chance in hell.” He glanced up at me. “Blaire, what would you do if you were trying to evade someone quickly and make it appear random?”

I thought about it. For me, quickly meant
running
through the maze. Which wouldn’t leave a lot of time to deliberate.

“First of all,” I said, “I think I would ignore the letters and instead think of it as going right versus going left.”

“Go on,” he said.

“You can’t go back into the mirror you just came out of, right? The triangle you drew
—
you can think of it as a circle. So when you come out of a mirror, you either have the option of using the mirror on your left or the mirror on your right.”

Damian peered at his diagram, chewing on his lower lip.

I grabbed the notebook and reinterpreted his notes using my theory. “In other words, after his first crossover, he went right, left, right, right, right, left, then left again. Does that help us?”

He shook his head. “Let’s say you needed to be able to backtrack. How would you decide whether to go right or left?”

“If I was certain I could get back to the source, I wouldn’t worry about backtracking.”

“Then he must not be certain,” said Damian, his eyes dark. “Otherwise he wouldn’t be trying to buy time and he would have broken the mirrors. What if you weren’t certain, Blaire?”

I tried not to consider the possibility that we were chasing a false hope. “Then I would use a simple rule,” I said. “Something that would appear random unless you knew the rule.”

“What kind of rule?”

“I don’t know, some kind of logic puzzle. Can’t we work backwards
—
”

“Too complicated,” he said. “Simpler.”

“A code, then. Phone numbers, social security numbers, birthdays . . . I’d turn right on evens and left on odds.”

“Or a long number that never repeated,” said Damian, nodding.

“What, like pi?”

“Maybe. I don’t think he has it memorized, though.”

“His computer was on. Maybe he just downloaded it from the internet.”

Damian raised an eyebrow. “His computer?”

“In his office,” I said.

***

We searched every inch of Charles’s office, dumped the contents of filing cabinets and combed decades of records
—
thousands of numbers he could have used to evade us, none of which felt right.

“It’s more obvious than this,” Damian announced, flipping through pages of building specs. “What was he doing on the computer?”

I slid into the chair behind the desk. On the screen, a white error message filled a solid blue background.

A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

If this is the first time you’ve seen this stop error screen, restart your computer . . .

I powered down the computer and turned it on again. Inside the tower, fans whirred to life. The same error screen flashed on the monitor.

“Why doesn’t stuff work?” I said.

“The circuits have been reflected too many times,” he said. “They start to degrade. Did he write anything down
—
any numbers?”

“Nothing. Check the printer tray.”

Damian rifled through the loose sheets in the tray. “Just a fax and a blank sheet. No numbers.”

“A fax from who?”

He scanned the printed sheet. “Life Genomics, Inc.”

“I think that’s the lab that tested my DNA. That’s not new; they sent him that fax a few weeks ago.”

Damian nodded and let the paper slip out of his fingers, defeated.

Absentmindedly, I picked up a pen and etched the letter B into the mahogany.
A few weeks ago
 . . . for some reason, the words repeated in my mind. I added a plus sign and the letter D, then scratched a heart around the pair. I covered my etching with the mouse pad so Damian wouldn’t see. Not that it mattered. We were both going to die.

Then it hit me. Life Genomics sent that fax to Charles a few weeks ago . . .
in the source
. Not in the failsafe. Charles didn’t even know me in the failsafe. In fact, he hadn’t even existed in the failsafe to receive a fax until last night.

“Damian
—
” I jerked upright, sending the chair tipping backward, and bolted around the desk. I pounced on the fax and scanned the typewritten message. “In the failsafe, no one was even here to have the DNA tested. He printed this out tonight.”

His eyes widened, and he knelt to read the paper over my shoulder. “My God, you’re right.”

My eyes fell to the last line of the fax.

Courtesy of our recent partnership with Illumina, please find attached the complimentary sequencing of 15,000 base pairs from Chromosome 47.

“DNA,” Damian muttered. “
Your
DNA, Blaire. That’s the code he’s been following.”

***

My DNA.

I didn’t know how to feel about that.

The fax didn’t have an attachment, so I rummaged through the papers already on the ground. Would I even recognize my own DNA?