Unbreakable (Unraveling) (21 page)

I know I should tell him that we don’t have time to rest, that Ben’s family and whoever else they’re holding in the Piston are still there, that we need to get them out. But for some reason, the words don’t come to me. Instead, Barclay and I stand side by side in silence for a long time. Elijah has several open sores on his body, wounds that never healed and have been gathering bacteria and festering for who knows how long. The doctor cleans and disinfects them, bandages or stitches them up. He hooks up an IV with fluids and painkillers, and Elijah passes out, probably his first real rest in weeks.

At some point the receptionist brings in a chair for me, and I sit down.

Barclay puts an arm on my shoulder, and I yawn, leaning on him for support.

Somewhere along the line, I’m tired enough that I fall asleep.

I
wake up in my clothes, facedown in a pillow. The scratchy sheets are pricking at my skin, and my whole body is stiff and sore all over, like I ran a marathon.

Or like I escaped from a prison. The memories from last night rush back. After the hospital we came here and passed out for the night. We’re in a standard cheap motel room—two beds and a coffee maker. Elijah is on the other one. My backpack is on the floor between us, and Barclay is nowhere in sight.

I get up and move into the bathroom. I don’t look as bad as I’d expect.

There’s a nasty—and sore—bump on the back of my head and a ring of bruises around my neck, and most of my skin is red, like a bad sunburn.

I shed my clothes and turn on the shower so the water is cool but not quite freezing, and I stand underneath the faucet with my eyes closed and let the water beat against the top of my head and soak into my skin and hair.

I broke Elijah out of prison. But I also killed a man.

The guilt is so strong it’s suddenly hard to breathe. The overwhelming desire to hug my brother, thank Struz for everything he does for me, let Cecily boss me around—to be home—washes over me like a wave, and it’s like a dam inside me breaks. My eyes sting and my whole body shakes with sobs.

I killed a man. I stabbed him with a sharp piece of glass and watched his life drain away. Getting home can’t come fast enough.

When I get out of the bathroom, Barclay is there, and Elijah is awake. “How are you feeling?” Barclay asks.

I shrug.

He pulls something out of his backpack and hands it to me. When my fingers feel the metal, I know exactly what it is. The HM USP Match—the gun he gave to me when I first got to Prima. I try to shake my head and give it back. The last thing I want right now is a gun—not when all I can think about is the dead guard and how I was responsible for that—but Barclay won’t take it back.

“I need you to have my back,” he says, his voice quiet but firm.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to point the gun at someone, to pull the trigger if I need to.

Barclay steps closer to me, his voice low. “A human-trafficking ring is out there right now, snatching people—including your friend. They’ve bought their way into IA, and we’re the only ones trying to stop them. If you give up now, they win.”

I take a deep breath. I know he’s right. I don’t have time to fall apart or worry about what I’ve done. I think of Cecily and what she must be going through, pulled from our world, jabbed with a syringe, and taken through a portal. Barclay is her only hope of getting home. If something happens to him or even Elijah because I can’t get my shit together, I’ll have more deaths on my head.

Seeing my resolve, Barclay leaves the room. Elijah limps after him, but when he gets to the door, he looks back. “You did what you had to do,” he says.

I don’t exactly believe him, but I nod.

We head to a Seattle’s Best coffee shop. Barclay was right. This world is a lot like mine—or a lot like mine used to be.

“What are we doing here?” Elijah asks as we sit down at a table on the outside patio.

“I’m starving,” Barclay says as the waitress comes over. She speaks a different language, so Barclay orders for all of us. When she’s gone, he adds, “And we need a quiet place to talk.”

Elijah nods and looks at me. “So is Ben meeting us here, or are we meeting him somewhere else?”

I’m so thrown off guard, I feel like I’ve been punched.

“Somewhere else,” Barclay says, and I can’t tell if he’s actually not thrown by the question or if this is another one of those roll-with-it moments where he wants to see what kind of information he can get before revealing his cards.

Either way, I’m not having any of it. “We don’t know where Ben is.” I say the words deliberately, clearly, so there’s no room for any confusion. “That’s why we broke you out.”

“He didn’t send you to get me?” Elijah says, then he looks at Barclay. “You better start fucking talking.”

Barclay shrugs and leans back in his chair. “We don’t know where Ben is, but we need to find him.”

Elijah doesn’t say anything. “Do you know where he is?” I ask.

“I might have an idea.”

“He’s been convicted of human trafficking, unauthorized interverse travel, and treason,” Barclay says. “The order for his execution has gone through, and IA is going to execute everyone he cares about in three days if we don’t figure out who’s behind the trafficking ring and come up with the proof we need to take them down. So we need to find him.”

“Oh, that’s it?” Elijah laughs and the bitterness makes me shiver. He shakes his head. “We’ve got bigger fucking problems than that.”

My breath catches in my throat. Breaking out Elijah was supposed to find us more answers, not more problems. We have enough of those.

“About three months ago, IA grabbed both me and Ben and brought us in, threw us in that prison,” Elijah says. I almost interrupt and tell him we know this part. But I bite my lip and let him finish. “A couple guards brought this guy in, Constantine Meridian, or something pansy like that, and he told us he could get us out if we worked for him.”

Constantine
Meridian
. I picture the guy I saw outside of Derek’s cell. His military-green button-down with blood spattered on the front. His shaved head and the barbed-wire tattoo on his neck.

“The choice was join up or get your shit kicked in. When that didn’t work”—he pauses and looks at me—“it was join up or watch them kick the shit out of people you care about.”

I swallow. I’m not surprised. I saw what Derek looked like and the shape Elijah was in.

“I held fast,” Elijah says. “
Me
. I told them I didn’t give a shit about anyone including myself.” I know it’s a lie. No matter what he was like in my world, Elijah cared about getting home, he cared about getting back to his family. And he cared about Ben.

But what he says next is even more wrong.

“Ben, fucking Ben. He said, ‘Sign me up.’”

“
T
here’s no way he would do that,” I say, my voice firm.

I’m relieved there’s something I can be sure about. Ben isn’t a bad guy. He would never help them. I look at Barclay to validate what I’m saying, but he just sits there. No disagreements. Worse, there’s no surprise on his face, nothing to suggest he didn’t know this was coming.

I shake my head. “Ben wouldn’t do that,” I say again. I know Ben. I know what he went through—how guilty he felt—when he was in my world. He would never use what he could do to smuggle people—to make people slaves. Not for anything.

Elijah touches my hand.

I look from Elijah to Barclay. “You know he wouldn’t.” I’m practically pleading with him to agree with me. Elijah’s been tortured and locked away in prison for months. He’s delusional. But Barclay is rational. And we’ve talked about Ben. He told me he didn’t believe that Ben was involved—that Ben was just some kind of scapegoat for the dirty IA agents to cover their tracks.

But when Barclay looks down and avoids my eyes, I know.

This is what he expected to hear.

Which means I’m missing a huge piece of the puzzle because I can’t think of anything that would make Ben join a human-trafficking ring. Of all people, Ben knows what it’s like to stumble out of his world and end up somewhere else—somewhere he doesn’t belong. He would never inflict that on anyone else.

I turn away from the table and look around the café. It’s the first time that I notice there’s another Seattle’s Best right across the street. Apparently Seattle’s Best is this universe’s Starbucks. I’m trying to grasp some kind of normalcy, something I can latch on to, something that will tell me that I’m not losing my mind. But everything is wrong.

“Tenner, take a seat,” Barclay says.

I can’t sit down and discuss anything with Barclay. I can’t even look at him because I know he’s lied to me. Again. I know he’s kept this from me, that he brought me here, made me go through hell to break Elijah out, and he knew that Ben had done this. He knew that if we made it this far, I would find out. And he made me find out this way.

I can’t believe I trusted him, that I didn’t see this coming, that I sat on the couch in his mother’s house and listened to him tell me stories about his life and I thought we were friends.

The rage from that idea boils somewhere deep inside me. It burns deep in my chest, because I can’t believe he’s put me in this position—and worse, I can’t believe I was this stupid. I clench my hands into fists to keep them from shaking, and I wrap that anger around myself, because I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want to come through a portal and chase after bad guys. I didn’t want to watch Ben walk out of my life, or find out the best friend I have left was abducted. But I have to do something about it.

“Tenner—”

I turn back to the table, reach out, and slap Barclay across the face. Hard.

A few people at nearby tables gasp. The force blows his face to the side, and Barclay’s skin is already red by the time I pull my hand back. It stings as I sit back down.

He sits paralyzed for a moment, his head to the side, mouth slightly ajar. Whether he’s shocked, ashamed, or actually hurt, I don’t care. He deserved that, and if he didn’t know it before, he knows it now.

I take a deep breath, swallow back the flood of emotions. “You said we’d keep each other in the loop. You promised me that I would know everything I needed to.”

“You didn’t need to know this,” he says as he turns back to face me. “You needed to stay focused.”

“You don’t get to be the judge of what I need,” I say. “Anything that concerns Ben or me or my family, that’s stuff I need to know. Got it?”

Barclay doesn’t answer. He just rubs his jaw.

If he thinks he’s going to get away with not answering, he’s wrong. “I’ve had a pretty rough night. In fact, ever since you started following me around, things have gone to shit. Before I go any further, I want to know everything that both of you know.”

Elijah shrugs. “No fucking problem here.”

Barclay hesitates. He looks up at me with those big, stupid blue eyes, and I try to ignore the way something in my chest twists at the hurt I see in them. He has no right to feel hurt right now. “I don’t have all the answers,” he says. “I’ve got some suspicions, sure, but I need them confirmed by either Elijah or Ben or maybe someone else. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

It’s a shitty apology—if it even is one. But it doesn’t matter.

Because he’s right about one thing. We have a source at this table, someone who can give us concrete information about what the hell has been going on.

I look at Elijah.

He must know what I’m thinking because he says, “What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

He nods, raises his mug to his lips, drains the last of his tea, and puts the cup back down. Then he tells us everything that’s happened in the last few months. Everything that’s happened since he and Ben portaled back to their world and left me in the canyons behind Park Village with Alex’s body.

And it’s worse than I could have imagined.

W
hen Ben, Elijah, and Reid tumbled through the portal and ended up in my world, they were ten years old. They spent every free moment afterward trying to find a way to get back to their world, back to their families. Back to where they belonged.

But when they finally did, seven years had gone by.

And seven years in the wake of a national tragedy, it turns out, is a long time.

They expected to walk back into their world, back into their families, back into the lives they left behind. Only, the world they left behind wasn’t there anymore. In its place was a world much different.

Seven years ago, Elijah’s father, Nathaniel Palma, was the North American prime minister in their world, and when his firstborn son was “abducted” from a birthday party, it became a national tragedy. Every law-enforcement agency in the country was tasked with looking for the missing kids, and nothing was to stand in their way.

Anyone suspected of knowing anything related to the case was brought into custody and questioned, even tortured and imprisoned. Ben’s parents, and Reid’s too, were thrown in jail for being at the birthday party and not having the right information. Ben’s brother was sent to foster care.

The longer the boys were missing, the worse it got. Until people couldn’t stand it. There were protests, talk of revolution.

A little over two years after they went through the portal, Nathaniel Palma was assassinated and a revolution overthrew the government. The leader of the rebellion established himself as a military dictator and is still in power today.

Elijah’s mother remarried a wealthy businessman. Ben’s parents were released from prison, and Derek, Ben’s brother, got out of foster care, but any joy from that was short-lived. Their family wasn’t quite the same.

Two years after the boys went through the portal, Ben’s parents got divorced. His mother threw herself into work, and his father got remarried and started a new family.

Seven years after they went through the portal, when they came back, it was to a very different homecoming than they expected. Half the country seemed to have forgotten about Ben; the other half blamed Elijah for his father’s tyranny and the resulting crumbling of society. While his mother and Ben’s parents and especially his brother were thrilled they were finally back, the world had gone on without them.