Unraveling (37 page)
“No.” I shake my head. “My skin.”
“I said don’t touch her!” Barclay yells from somewhere else. “Her skin is sensitive from the radiation. You could end up hurting her worse, even killing her.”
Ben pulls his hand back, but he still hovers over me, and when his head eclipses the light from the ceiling, silhouetting him, I have a sense of déjà vu. It makes me wonder what cataclysmic events will come next.
“I’m right here if you need me,” Ben whispers.
I nod, still trying to get my breathing under control.
“The good news is he knows it’s not me,” Ben says. “The bad news is someone opened another unstable portal, and it triggered more earthquakes. The worst one was in San Diego, but each portal causes shifts beneath the earth, and it’s—”
Barclay is there again, cutting Ben off. He picks up my head and slips a weird braided wire necklace over it before lowering me back to the floor. “It’s made from hydrochloradneum; it’ll help.”
Then he disappears, but I can still hear him. “You shouldn’t do that.”
“What do you mean?” Ben asks.
“It’s not natural. The hydrochloradneum must have altered your genetic makeup, but people aren’t meant to have abilities like that, and I doubt you really know what you’re doing. You shouldn’t mess with things you don’t understand. You have no idea what it could do to you as you get older.”
And then he’s back. “How’s your skin?”
“It’s okay, I think.” I hold my arm toward him, and there don’t seem to be any adverse effects. I don’t feel like a live wire anymore.
“Good,” Barclay says, then sticks me with another shot. This one makes me feel like I’m dead. It travels from my wrist up my arm and into my chest, then everything goes black.
I dream of buildings collapsing and imploding. Cities turning into rubble in huge clouds of debris. A slew of tornadoes have taken out downtown Chicago. Earthquakes have leveled areas of Dallas and Las Vegas. A tsunami blankets New York City. Another one rises up and crashes against the Gulf Coast, and New Orleans is completely sunk. A third tackles the California coast. And then there are the wildfires—and they’re everywhere. They spring up in different spots, but they seem to be sweeping the nation in all directions, and there’s no one to fight them, so they just burn.
Millions of people are dead.
Millions more are missing.
The hospitals still standing are bursting with those who are injured.
People are looting or trying to evacuate the major cities.
Chaos reigns everywhere.
And then I dream of similar images for every major country all over the world.
When I wake up, I’m on a leather couch with a blanket around me, and Ben is sitting perpendicular to me, unconsciously petting my hair. My right wrist is splinted and wrapped with something a little better than an Ace bandage.
“I had the worst dream,” I say, shivering a little and trying to sit up.
“Be careful,” Ben says, helping me. “You were under a strong sedative.”
I wonder if all IA operatives have a cache of drugs.
I look around. The furniture looks a little like something out of
Modern Home & Living
magazine—everything is sleek blacks and whites. The wall in front of me is covered with a few big frames showing digital backlit pictures of Barclay shaking hands with people who are presumably important. The light is bright, but I don’t see any lamps—like it’s all ambient.
Next to me is something that looks like a giant iPad, and when I touch it, it flares to life and a computerized voice asks me who I would like to call.
I look at Ben. “Where are we?”
“Taylor calls it Prima. We’re at his home Earth.”
I watch as his gaze lifts above me, like he’s looking through me. Only I realize he’s looking at something behind me, and when I turn around I see why.
The wall behind me is all windows—floor-to-ceiling windows—that look out over a city, like we’re in one of the highest floors of a high-rise. Entranced, I stand up and move toward the window. At first glance, the sky looks gray, but when I look closer I realize it’s iridescent. I can see shimmering shades of purple, blue, and pink depending on which angle I’m looking from. The gray is smog, hovering like a thick blanket of storm clouds.
A sliver of sun peeks through for a second and flickers off the crystal skyscrapers, making them look like ice castles or flowing liquid creations—the buildings are something out of an
Alice in Wonderland
–esque LSD trip.
Leaning my forehead against the window, I try to look down, but I can barely see through the fog—I can’t see the streets, but I can see what looks like a huge brown square in front of me with a few patches of green. It looks a little like what Central Park would look like if all the grass had died....
I turn to Ben. “Is this New York?”
“They call it New Prima here. It’s the capital,” he says. “But yeah, you can see the Empire State Building—or the New Prima equivalent—from the window in his bathroom.”
Holy. Shit.
I can’t believe it. I mean, I can—I did. I believed in other universes because I had to in order to swallow Ben’s story. But I was so wrapped up in trying to stop the countdown, I didn’t really have a chance to think about what
other universes
really means.
I wonder if this is what Ben’s world looks like, or if his looks more like mine. I’m about to ask, and I turn to him. But there’s something about the look on his face. There’s no hint of a smile anywhere—no hint of relief that we’re alive, that Barclay knows it’s not Ben opening the portals.
“I had the creepiest dreams,” I say, because I’m hoping talking about them will make him tell me what’s wrong—and allow me to expunge them from my memory.
Only it doesn’t.
Because Ben whispers, “Those weren’t dreams,” when I’m not even halfway finished. He looks at the wall where the TV is.
It’s the largest TV I’ve ever seen. It takes up almost the entire wall, and it’s so thin, it looks like it actually could
be
the wall. It’s split into twelve squares, each of them showing a different newscast. But all the newscasts are showing the same thing. They’re all showing footage of natural disasters and cities collapsing.
Buildings collapsing and imploding. Cities turning into rubble in huge clouds of debris. Being swallowed by the earth, blanketed by tsunamis, or eaten up by wildfires.
Ben says something, but I either don’t hear it or my ears shut down and refuse to interpret the sounds. For a second I wonder what he could possibly say at a time like this.
But that wonder only lasts for a split second.
Because deep down, I know.
We’re watching the collapse of two worlds. And one of them is mine.
Remember me when I am gone away
,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand
.
—Christina Rossetti
W
hat we’re seeing is Wave Function Collapse in action.
My legs give out and I drop to the floor where I am and stare up at the television wall under the weight of that realization—everyone I know is dying right now—and I can’t breathe. I feel like I’m sinking, like I’m underwater and weighted down, like everything is just collapsing in around me, pushing me down, and I’ll never be able to get back up again—so why even try.
Ben is there, holding me and whispering and running his hands through my hair. But it doesn’t matter—he still feels too far away.
W
hen Barclay comes back from wherever he was, he sees us and says, “Stop worrying, I’ve gotten everything sorted out.”
“Oh, like you can fix this,” I say.
He stares at me for a second and then shakes his head. “You’re not seeing Wave Function Collapse,” he says. “Trust me, we wouldn’t have reporters there showing it, if it was.”
“What are we seeing, then?” Ben asks.
“Symptoms of the upcoming collision. It’s brought back not-quite-live from reporters authorized for interverse travel in emergencies.”
“You have reporters on my Earth?”
Barclay looks at me. His face says,
Of course we do
, but he doesn’t elaborate. Instead he turns to Ben. “When they actually collide and collapse, there won’t be anything to see. They’ll cease to exist.”
I don’t know how he can treat this so calmly—even though I’ve surfaced, I still feel a little catatonic. What do we do now?
“What universe is this other one?” Ben asks, his face tight.
Barclay stares at him for a second before saying, “Yours.”
“Mine?” His voice is breathless. “What do you mean?”
“You opened portals to your world; the instability is pulling both your universes together,” Barclay says. “I thought I explained all this.”
I reach out and grab Ben’s hand, and squeeze. I know what he’s thinking and feeling. Because it’s the same thing I’m thinking and feeling—like I’m not sure whether I should just lie down and die or try to fight against the fact that all my insides feel like they’ve been torn out.
“Your ability to open
unstable
portals somehow allowed you to choose which portal to open,” Barclay says. “You just didn’t know it.”
I get up because I can’t sit still anymore. None of the stories about the apocalypse ever tell you how crazy you’ll feel when you’re watching it unfold. I’ve even had the thought that if we can’t prevent the end of the world, I wish it would just hurry up and get here already.
Barclay explains how he brought us here against the rules, but his commanding officer has cleared him. After he showers, he’s taking us to the IA building, where Ben will be taken into custody and charged for his crimes and I will be questioned.
I hear him, but I don’t really listen. Instead I stare at the changing digital pictures on the wall, and wonder what kind of world this is where people can be so nonchalant about the loss of life. If this is what technological advancement got them, I don’t want any part of it.
As soon as he disappears into the bathroom, I turn to Ben. “I don’t like this plan.”
“Good,” Ben says with a half smile. “I have a different one.”
“A good one?” I ask with a laugh, and in spite of everything, it feels good to know I still can.
“I think so.” He nods, pulling a quantum charger and something that looks like a syringe from his pocket. “I swiped this from Barclay’s closet while you were sleeping. I think I’ve figured out how it works. Every universe has coordinates based on where it is in comparison to Prima. It looks like you punch in the coordinates for the universe, plus the latitude and longitude for where we want to end up, and then it opens a portal.”
For a second, I’m worried that his plan is to go home—to his home.
“I haven’t entirely figured out all the coordinates yet, but I copied down the coordinates we came from.” He gestures to the necklace. “I think between that and the injection you had yesterday, you’ll be able to go through like I can, without it burning.”
“You think?”
“If it doesn’t work, I palmed one of the syringes, and I’ll inject you with it as soon as we’re through.” He takes a deep breath. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but I have to do this. You can stay here if you’d rather, but I have to go back for Elijah and Reid.”
“I’m going with you.”
He nods, and then looks down and away, and I can tell from his face something I don’t want to hear is coming. “I know who’s doing it.”
My face feels cold, and I’m afraid to say the words out loud, as if that might make it untrue. “Opening the portals? You know?”
Ben shushes me and nods. “I’ve spent hours going over it in my head. I was wrong when I told Barclay no one else knows the science. Both Reid and Elijah know the science, and I don’t want to think either of them would have opened a portal without me, but I know how bad Elijah wants to go home. And he was the one who first opened one with me. I don’t know who else it could be.”
I don’t know Elijah like Ben does, but I still don’t want him to have done this—and not just for Ben’s sake. Elijah bothers me, and I think he’s a jerk, but I was actually starting to not mind him that much, and I was willing to chalk his attitude up to the whole “I’m from an alternate universe” thing, because he was Ben’s friend. But Ben’s words make sense. I remember Alex saying something similar only a few days ago.
It doesn’t physically hurt to find that he might have gone behind Ben’s back to open the portals. I’m just mad.
“Let’s go,” I say, because we should be gone before Barclay gets out of the shower. Who knows how easy it is to track where one of these things can take us?
“You don’t happen to know the latitude and longitude of your house?” Ben asks.
I shake my head, but you can bet I’ll find out now.
Ben stands up and takes a deep breath. “Looks like we’re headed back to mine.”
“Hopefully not the basement.”
He doesn’t answer. He just presses some of the buttons, and that electrical sound—the sound of something powering up—is there. And then so is the portal.
I feel the cool air and smell rain and salt water first, but this time, before I step through, I really look at it. It’s circular and at least seven feet in diameter, maybe more. And it really does look like we’re about to step into a vertical pool of tar.
Which is why this time, when I take Ben’s hand and we go through it, I hold my breath.
I
t occurs to me when I’m on the ground in Ben’s driveway that we should figure out how to properly land if we plan on making interverse travel a habit.