Unbreakable (Unraveling) (22 page)

They had expected being home to calm the restless feelings inside them, the ones that screamed they didn’t belong in my world. But once they were there and reunited with their families, neither one of them felt like they fit in
there
, either. The more Elijah thought about it, the more he realized he fit in better on the earth they’d left behind.

My earth.

He realized he could have made a home there. He didn’t have his parents, but he had Ben and Reid. Only now Reid was dead, and Ben was an emotional wreck.

Elijah decided Ben was his real family now, and it would be best for both of them to turn around and go back—back to the universe they’d left behind, back to Eastview and foster care, and everything.

But Ben couldn’t do it yet. Derek was so glad to have him back, and Ben felt guilty—for tripping and falling into the portal, for pulling Elijah with him, for taking too long to get back. He felt like it was his fault that everyone else’s lives became so messed up.

But Elijah couldn’t just sit around with his mother’s new family and feel sorry for himself. So he started focusing on the abilities the hydrochloradneum gave him. He stopped drinking like Ben always told him he should.

Then he started opening portals and traveling through them, to different worlds. Technically he knew the portals were unstable, but to stay under IA radar and avoid Wave Function Collapse, he moved through worlds quickly and efficiently. He didn’t return home after each jump. He portaled in, took notes on what was different from other worlds and what was the same, and then he portaled somewhere else.

Meanwhile Ben’s depression was making him paranoid. He started to suspect people were following him, that they were out to get him.

When Elijah found a deserted world with no signs of people, he went home and took Ben there. They decided it would be a great safe zone, and if they ever ran into any trouble, that’s where they would go to meet up.

But trouble caught up with them too quickly. Eleven weeks ago, a little over a month after they got back, they met to touch base. Elijah was excited about all the worlds he’d visited, but Ben was looking over his shoulder, even more paranoid than he’d been before. He insisted someone had broken into his and Derek’s apartment, that some of his things were missing.

Elijah urged him to think about going back to the universe they’d left behind. Back to me. Ben said he was thinking about it, that despite how much he loved Derek, he just didn’t belong here anymore. Elijah agreed. Not only did he want to go back with Ben, but he thought they could probably bring Derek with them. They’d just need to get their hands on some hydrochloradneum to keep the radiation from frying him.

Ben liked that plan and promised him he’d talk to his brother about it. No matter what, he knew he couldn’t stay where he was.

But IA busted them, took them to Prima, and threw them in prison. Elijah was sure it was because he’d been universe hopping, and as a result, he’d somehow gotten Ben in trouble too.

But it was worse.

Their abilities had been recorded in Barclay and Brandt’s original case report. Two young men who could portal in and out of any world without being tracked by technology were exactly what a human-trafficking ring could use, especially a ring that was currently attracting heat from the IA’s wonder-boy agent, Taylor Barclay.

While Ben and Elijah were in prison, Meridian broke into their apartments and confiscated their belongings. He found the notebook where Elijah kept notes on the different worlds he’d visited. Meridian praised what Elijah could do, the notes he’d taken, and promised him money, power, women—anything he wanted.

For a second, it was tempting—not for the money, power, or women, but for the freedom to go from universe to universe and discover what was out there. That was something Elijah wanted.

But this was slavery, and Elijah knew what it was like to be taken from your family and your world, and he wasn’t about to do that to anyone else. So he refused.

That’s when the threats started. They threatened his life and his body—and they beat and tortured him to prove they could follow through. Still he refused. So they threatened his mother and everyone he cared about.

He bluffed, shrugged, and told them to go ahead.

So they took some of his blood and beat him for good measure, but left him in his cell.

He didn’t see Ben—not since they were first arrested. They were in different cells and weren’t allowed to see or talk to each other, but some nights Elijah could hear Ben scream.

And he heard him scream the last night Ben was there—the night before he agreed to help them. It was when Meridian and IA threatened people they cared about. They threatened to bring in his parents, his brother. And then they did. They brought someone in—beaten and bloody—and told Ben he could watch them die, or he could help.

That’s when he gave in.

“
A
nd that’s it. I’ve been rotting in that cell, eating sloppy mush and waiting for him to come back and get me out of there.” Elijah cracks his knuckles and looks at Barclay. “So, you gonna call in the cavalry or what? I’m ready to beat some asses.”

“Why did they take your blood?” I ask, ignoring his question. He just got shot; he’s not going to beat anyone’s asses, and there’s no cavalry to call in. We’re it.

“To do tests and shit.” He rolls up a sleeve and shows me the needle marks.

For a minute I don’t get it, then Barclay says, “If you were running a human-trafficking ring between universes, wouldn’t you want to somehow replicate what he and Ben can do?”

A shiver moves through my body. Criminals with the power to move through the universes—go wherever they want—without a quantum charger. They’d be virtually untraceable. And who knows what kind of damage all those unstable portals would do to the multiverse.

“Tell me more about Meridian,” Barclay says.

Elijah describes him—six feet, lanky, sandy-blond hair shaved close to his head, scruffy facial hair, light eyes, barbed-wire tattoo—and Barclay jots down notes, adding a few questions here and there, and I recognize this for what it is—a gentle interrogation. It’s the way you question a victim about their attacker. Quietly, nonthreatening, slowly.

I watch Elijah when he answers. He speaks deliberately. He’s calmer than he was in my world, more thoughtful. He still swears a lot, but it’s more habit than swearing for some kind of effect. I can’t imagine what he’s been through, not just in the prison, but in the months before it. He spent seven years waiting to get home, and when he finally did, he found out it didn’t exist anymore.

And that makes me think of Ben.

As horrible as this is, I find myself wishing it hadn’t been Elijah in that cell, that I hadn’t gone in to break
him
out. I wish it had been Ben. Because I have a fierce urge to lay my face against his chest and breathe him in until the world makes sense again.

Only I can’t, because I don’t know where he is. At least not yet.

“Why did you think Ben would come back for you?” Barclay asks.

“I couldn’t keep good track of time,” Elijah adds. “I think the bastards only fed us once a day. Four or five days, or maybe a week ago, the guards and Meridian came back into my cell. They wanted to know where Ben would go. Where he would hide.”

“They’d lost him?” I ask. He must have had a plan—he must have agreed to keep his family safe, while at the same time coming up with some kind of plan to get away from them, to get out of it.

Elijah nods. “But it was worse than that—for them, I mean. I got the impression he took someone with him.”

I
tell Barclay about seeing Meridian at the prison—about him torturing Derek. “What do you think?”

He doesn’t respond right away, and I’m tempted to reach over and slap him again.

Then he says, “Constantine Meridian is bad news. If he’s the one behind the trafficking, it makes sense—it’s clearly an organized, multi-universe operation, and he’s got the manpower and the money to back it.”

My shoulders relax a little, and I take a shaky breath. I’m suddenly less mad, because this is good news. If Barclay knows something about this guy, it means we’re a huge step closer to finding him—finding Cecily—than we were just minutes ago.

“Good,” Elijah says. “Glad I was able to fucking help. I’m ready to beat the shit out of him too, if you need me.”

Barclay shakes his head. “It’s not going to be that easy.”

Of course it’s not, but I don’t like the expression on Barclay’s face. He looks . . . defeated. “What are you leaving out?”

His eyes flick to mine. “Meridian’s been on our Most Wanted list for the last seven years, and if he’s been in and out of the Piston, it means he’s got a lot of inside help. Maybe more than I suspected.”

I bite down on my lip. We need more good news—less things for us to try to do ourselves. “We just need to prove that he’s behind it all and Ben’s not.”

“Ben
is
part of it, or he fucking was,” Elijah says. “IA’s not going to just forgive that. Hell, who knows how many of them are fucking in on it?”

Barclay puts a hand on Elijah’s shoulder. “Meridian is bad news. He grew up in the underground. He’s one of those guys with a juvenile file twenty pages long. Breaking and entering, theft, larceny. He smartened up when he was an adult, but that doesn’t mean he’s been any less active. His predecessor, Crewe Fielding, ran all the organized crime in the underground. Then suddenly he’s dead on the floor in front of one of the elevators, mutilated so badly he’s unrecognizable. It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Even worse than that house?” I say and I cringe involuntarily. An unstable portal killed everyone with high levels of radiation. It made them look like their skin was melting off their bones.

Barclay doesn’t need me to elaborate, but he nods. “This was worse.

“Eric and I had a case last year, drugs coming from other worlds and spreading through the underground. A lot of kids ended up overdosing. We had four deaths, a couple of people in a coma, and one of the dealers in custody. We suspected Meridian was responsible, but before we were able to prove it, we were reassigned, and our case moved to a different department that just sat on it. Eric thought someone might have been using Meridian as an informant, keeping him on the Most Wanted list in order to keep up pretenses but using him for information about other cases—bigger cases.”

“So what the fuck are we going to do about all this?” Elijah asks. “I’m sick of just sitting here.”

“We need Ben,” I say. It’s what I need—to see him, to wrap my arms around him, to hear what’s happened to him in the past few months in his words, to tell him we’ll get through this. But it’s less selfish. If Ben worked for this Meridian guy, he also has more information than the three of us. We need that information before we can save Cecily and come up with the proof that will expose anyone involved.

I look at Elijah.

“I know where he is, or at least where he should be,” he says.

“How are you feeling?” Barclay asks.

“Better than I was before,” Elijah says with a shrug.

“Good.” Barclay stands. “Think you can portal us to wherever you think Ben is?”

Elijah stands up. “Abso-fucking-lutely.”

“Won’t it be unstable?”

Barclay nods. “We’ll have to open it and go through quickly. No standing around and staring at it. Unstable portals attract attention and become dangerous the longer they’re open and the more they’re used. Once we’re all together, we’ll use the charger.” He looks at Elijah. “No more world hopping.”

“I make no promises,” Elijah says. “Not with your IA thugs after me.”

Barclay looks at me. “Let’s go.”

There’s a fluttering in my stomach, and I drain the last sip of my mocha latte to keep my hands from shaking.

After waiting for so long, suddenly I feel a little nervous.

So much has happened in the months that we’ve been apart. Ben’s been through so much—at home, in prison, working with the traffickers. What if he’s different?

I think of the guard I killed. The life draining out of his eyes.

What if I’m different?

B
arclay pays the check and we leave the coffee shop and walk back toward the motel. When we pass a deserted alley, we turn down it, and Elijah holds his arm out in front of him.

“How do you do it?” I ask without thinking.

Elijah looks back at me.

“I mean, how do you open the right portal?”

He smiles. “I think of the place I want to go. The more details I have right, the better, but ultimately I just feel the molecules in the air, reach for the nothingness, and try to pull it apart, expand it. The whole time, I think of where I want it to take me, and it does.”

“It sounds so easy.”

He nods. “It is. Ben was right. All it takes is a clear head and a lot of practice.”

It also sounds wrong
. But I don’t say that. It is wrong. Taking a couple of precautions doesn’t change that. Opening too many portals is what destroyed my world.

But it doesn’t change the fact that we need a portal to take us to Ben. Elijah and I can argue over his extracurricular activities when this thing is behind us. If we’re both still alive, that is.

Elijah turns around again, stretching his hand out. The air in front of him shimmers a little, and a small black hole opens up right in front of his fingers. Elijah squeezes his eyes shut tighter, and it starts to expand. Slowly at first, and then faster, until there’s a full-size portal in front of us.

Barclay nods to me before he moves through, and I suppose if he can trust that Elijah is going to get us where we need to go, I can too.

My palms touch first, and the rest of my body slams against the ground a split second after. Dust from the road springs up around me and I cough it out of my lungs as I take stock of my surroundings. At first glance, it seems like we’ve landed on the outskirts of a normal suburb. There’s a strip mall with a dry cleaner, a hair salon, and a grocery store. Beyond them is what looks like apartment buildings. I can see someone’s wash hanging on the balcony, flapping in the wind.