Strangelets (23 page)

Sophie followed him down a narrow tunnel not much wider than her shoulders. There was a faint gleam of light
up ahead. Despite the cold, a small part of her was panicking over the possibility that her hands might be sweaty. She tried to force it aside—she was underground, with monsters after her, and all she could focus on was the fact that a cute boy was holding her hand? It was ridiculous.

After about twenty feet, the tunnel opened into a small room. The ceiling was so low that Nico had hunched over to avoid knocking his head. His father moved around the room, lighting rough-hewn candles. A tiny fire sent a thin stream of smoke up to a narrow hole above.

“The bees survived, thank God,” Bruder said cheerfully, waving a candle. “Actually, they’re probably enjoying better numbers than they’ve seen in a century. The cataclysm was a true boon for the insect kingdom. Not so much for the animal one, unfortunately,” he muttered as he bent to light another wick.

“The cataclysm?” Sophie asked, taking in the room. Yup, this pretty much completed the portrait of a mad scientist. The packed earthen walls were covered in scrawlings and formulas. There was a pile of blankets in one corner and stacks of books everywhere. No chairs or a table in sight.

“Right, you know nothing.” Bruder straightened and scratched his beard. “Hard to know where to begin, really.”

“Do you have anything to eat, Dad?” Nico interrupted.

His face split in a wide grin—which, if anything, made him look even more alarming. “Of course! Sorry, you must all be starving.” He rummaged around in a plastic bin at the far end of the room, finally withdrawing a small plastic packet.

“What is it?” Sophie asked as he ripped it open and handed her something long and brown.

“Turkey jerky,” Bruder said reverently. “Probably the last package left on Long Island.”

“Oh,” Sophie said. “Thanks.”

“Never had jerky before,” Declan said dubiously, examining it. “You’re sure it’s edible?”

“Long past the expiration date, but with jerky, that shouldn’t matter.” Bruder flashed another rotten yellow smile. “It doesn’t really go bad. That’s its chief merit.”

“It’s certainly not the taste,” Declan said, grimacing as he chewed it.

Sophie had never been a big fan of jerky either, but after the cobbled-together meals of the past few days, she wasn’t feeling picky. She devoured hers in a few bites.

“Don’t suppose there’s any more?” Declan asked, echoing her thoughts.

“That’s the last of the jerky,” Bruder said mournfully. “I had hoped it would last the winter, but … well, I wasn’t expecting company. I do have some nuts left over. Tomorrow we can fish. The fish have done well, too.” He had a faraway look in his eyes, as if he was actually seeing through the walls to some healthy-looking fish.

Sophie cleared her throat. “Mr. Bruder, we have a lot of questions—”

“Dr. Bruder,” he grunted. “Sit.” At a glance from Nico, he added, “Please.”

Following his lead, Sophie settled on the floor. It was bare earth, and the cold pressed through the thin material of her borrowed jeans. Despite what waited for them outside, she found herself shuddering at the thought of spending much time down in this dark, creepy hole. It smelled terrible, stale air mingled with body odor and dying leaves and smoke. And she didn’t like the way Bruder kept glancing over at her.

Declan cleared his throat and said, “So—”

“Silence!” Bruder thundered.

They all froze. Even Nico appeared taken aback. Bruder tugged at his beard. “I just … it’s been a long time since I’ve spoken to anyone. I need to figure out how to explain it. Have you all studied physics?”

Sophie shook her head.

Declan shrugged. “A bit. But not much,” he amended when Nico threw him a skeptical look.

Bruder sighed. “That would have been too much to hope for.” He abruptly lunged forward. Sophie reared back as he stopped inches from her face.

“Hey!” Declan protested, grabbing Bruder’s arm. “Stay back, you nutter.”

“
Vater
, what are you doing?” Nico said, sounding horrified.

“I won’t hurt her.” Bruder shook off Declan’s hand and stared at Sophie, giving her the kind of once-over she used to get in doctors’ offices. After a second, he sat back. “Doesn’t appear to be anything remarkable about you. Probably just a fluke that you were caught in an eddy.”

“An eddy?” Nico asked.

Sophie’s pulse was still racing. She swallowed hard. Bruder had moved alarmingly fast, like a snake. She had to fight the urge to run back down the tunnel and scramble up the ladder.

“Nico, you should know all about this,” Bruder said reproachfully. He picked up a small piece of wood and started carving it with a nasty-looking knife. “We’ve spoken many times about how Kolmogorov’s theory could be applied to quantum physics.”

Nico shifted uncomfortably. “Was that the one about chiral perturbation theory?”

Bruder sighed and shook his head. “I blame your mother. She was never serious enough about your education.”

Nico’s brow darkened. His hands closed into fists in his lap. Sophie felt sorry for him. He’d gone to a lot of trouble to find a dad who turned out to be a bizarre jerk. Now she was really wishing they’d stuck with Anat and Yosh. They’d probably be on a boat right now, instead of cloistered underground with a maniac.

“I’ll do my best to break it down into layman’s terms,” Bruder continued, lapsing into a professorial tone. “There was an accident at the place where I worked. It created a rift, of sorts, that kicked off a chain reaction. Strangelets, mini black holes …” He tapped the wood against his palm as he ticked off each point. “Anyway, you were all caught in a sort of eddy, just like one in a river.”

“We were in a river?” Declan asked. “That doesn’t make any sense. And what are strangelets?”

“An eddy in the
space time
continuum, not a river,” Bruder said laboriously. “Strangelets are a kind of matter containing an almost equal number of particles: up, down, and strange quarks. Although it’s a good term for you, now,” he added with a small laugh, shaking his head. “A bunch of strangelets.”

“But how did we get here?” Sophie asked, fighting back a wave of vertigo; none of this made any sense. She almost preferred Nico’s nuclear accident explanation.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Bruder held up his hands, gesturing around them. “Odd that you were all consolidated in one location. Fascinating, really.” He jumped to his feet and started to pace. “This turns several theories on their heads. If only Fitzgerald was still alive, I could run it past him, he might have some thoughts—”

“I’m sorry,” Sophie interrupted. “What are you saying exactly? We time traveled?”

“Well, yes, in a manner of speaking,” he said impatiently. “Although that’s not really how it works.”

“So what year is it?” Declan asked.

“Twenty thirty-three,” Nico muttered.

“What?” Declan spun on him. “You knew?”

“He told me,” Nico said defensively. “When I first saw him he looked so much older, I almost didn’t recognize him.”

“And you didn’t tell us?” Sophie said.

Nico shrugged avoiding her eyes. “There wasn’t time.”

“All right, then.” Declan ran a hand through his hair. “Bloody hell. So what are those creatures? Some sort of new animal? Because from what I remember about evolution, it takes a lot longer than twenty years for nature to come up with something like that.”

“The thrinaxes? Oh, they’ve been evolving for millennia,” Bruder said breezily. “Just not here.”

“What do you mean, not here?” Sophie asked. A cold ball of fear had formed in her belly. None of this could be true. If it was twenty years later, that meant … what? Her sister was now thirty-three? And her parents were in their sixties? No, Bruder had to be insane. Maybe he’d suffered a breakdown when Nico fell into a coma, and this was all a fantasy he’d concocted.

But even as she thought it, Sophie couldn’t repress the sense that this answered a lot of questions. “So where did they come from? The thrinaxes?”

“You don’t seriously believe this?” Declan challenged her.

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “But … we haven’t really come up with a better explanation for how strange everything is, right? I mean, that could be why the roads and buildings are such a mess. And why the houses are so dusty.”

“Where’s everyone else, then?” Declan demanded.

“It was hard to come up with exact numbers without accurate data sampling, but I’ve estimated that about eighty percent of the world’s population was lost to the cataclysm.” Bruder’s tone was off-handed, like he was talking about the weather.

Sophie shivered involuntarily. “Eighty percent of the people died?”

“I didn’t say died,” Bruder grumbled. “You really must pay attention. They were lost.”

“Lost to what?” Sophie asked, her ire rising at his condescending tone. “You still haven’t explained what the cataclysm was. Was it an earthquake? A volcanic eruption?”

“I told you,” he said impatiently. “It was a rift in the space time continuum.”

“And what started the cataclysm in the first place?”

“That’s a bit complicated.” Bruder tugged at his collar. Sophie got a sudden flash of what he must have looked like twenty years ago. “You see, there was an accident, of sorts.”

“The Collider,” Nico said suddenly. “It was the Collider, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” Bruder got that faraway look again, like he could see it unfolding before him. “There was an … experiment.” He hesitated, then continued, “It didn’t go as expected.”

“So basically,” Declan said softly. “Almost everyone on the planet is gone, but not dead?”

“Exactly,” Bruder said, jabbing the air with the knife before returning to his whittling. “They’re just someplace else. Although almost everyone who withstood the cataclysm has been killed by the thrinaxes,” he amended. “Vicious predators, they jumped right to the top of the food chain. It’s been years since I’ve seen another person, in fact. Although I suppose there are probably more on the mainland.”

“So where did everyone go?” Declan demanded. “The eighty percent who were lost in the cataclysm?”

Bruder shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. There are potentially infinite alternate universes out there. They’re probably scattered across them.”

“The many-worlds theory,” Nico said in a hushed voice.

“Exactly.” Bruder looked pleased. “So you retained something, at least.”

“English, please!” Declan said with exasperation.

“It’s a quantum theory,” Nico’s gaze flitted from his father to the bare earth floor. “It’s really not that complicated. Basically, a guy named DeWitt figured out that every possible outcome of every event exists in its own world. So everything that could possibly have happened, but didn’t, might be happening somewhere else.”

“I saw a show about this once,” Sophie suddenly remembered. “It said that there might be an alternate universe where Germany won World War II.”

“Exactly,” Nico said. “Or even smaller things, like say that one morning you decided to take the train instead of the bus. Theoretically, there might be another you who took the bus, and that might have led to a whole series of other events that changed the rest of your life. So there’s a version of you living an alternate life in a different dimension.”

“That’s completely nutters,” Declan said, but his face had gone pale again.

“So the …” Sophie began.

“Thrinaxes,” Bruder supplied helpfully.

“Right, them,” Sophie said, working it through in her mind. “You’re saying that when everyone else got sucked through these little black holes—”

“Mini black holes, technically,” Bruder corrected. “Strangelets.”

“The thrinaxes got sucked here, from somewhere else?”

“Precisely!” Bruder clapped his hands together. “So you’re not all cretins. Other things came through too, of course, though most weren’t quite as deadly.”

“What are they? The thrinaxes, I mean,” Sophie asked. “We found … bones. And what looked like a nest.”

“My guess is that they’re related to modern-day alligators. It’s possible that in their dimension, there was never a great extinction.”

“Hang on,” Declan protested. “Are you saying those things are bloody dinosaurs?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.” Bruder added, “Their world must be fascinating. Just imagine what we could learn by studying it. Shame we couldn’t replicate the event.”

“Yes, such a shame,” Declan said. “Unless, of course, that might bring everything back to the way it was.”

“Impossible.” Bruder furrowed his brow. “Don’t you think I already would have tried? Even if I managed to restart the Collider—which, by the way, is an extraordinarily complicated piece of equipment that requires a significant energy source—we could end up in any of an infinite number of realities. And there’s almost no chance of bringing anyone back to this one, in the past or otherwise.”

“No chance?” Sophie said faintly. “So you’re saying … we’re stuck here?”

“Most definitely,” Bruder said. After a beat, he added, “Sorry.”

Sophie saw her own shock and horror reflected in Declan’s eyes as the true magnitude of the situation hit them. There would be no calling home. No families left to return to. No
school, she realized, no government. Just this … a hole in the ground, and monsters everywhere.

The thought made her feel faint. The ceiling was too close overhead. The walls pressed inward. She was suddenly convinced that there wasn’t enough air down here, and they were all slowly suffocating.

“But
Vater
,” Nico said, looking perplexed. “No one would have survived entry into a mini black hole.”

“Jaysus, you’re focused on
that
?” Declan barked.

Sophie felt his hand lightly stroking her back. It grounded her, and her breathing slowed. Panicking wouldn’t solve anything.

“Excellent, Nico.” Bruder beamed at him. “Your mother was wrong; you do possess a scientific mind. There’s a process called spaghettification, where the gravity at your feet is much greater than that at your head. So theoretically, if you were drawn into a mini black hole, you’d be stretched as if on a rack, until you finally splintered into atoms.”