He’d never felt more alone in his life. Which was saying something.
He put a hand on Khalid’s shoulder. “Hey, man. You okay?”
“Oh, sure,” Khalid said with a scarily calm sarcasm. “I’m just wondering if my parents had a boy in this universe. Or if they ever met at all. Maybe my dad never got out of Iran. Or, hey—maybe there is no Iran! Who knows, right? What fun!”
“Well, there’s a city here, where there’s one in our world. So it seems like this universe is pretty similar to ours. I’m sure there’s an Iran.”
Khalid grunted as he absorbed that.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you before,” Zak said. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had to offer. He couldn’t go through all this alone. And he couldn’t let the Three Basketeers break up. Not now. They needed each other too badly.
Khalid groaned. “Yeah. Me too. Crap!” He threw his hands up and turned around for the first time since being captivated by the sight across the river. “My parents were right—I should have stayed home today.”
“We should have hung out in my hospital room and watched TV,” Zak agreed.
They bumped fists and grinned at each other. “Now we have to get Science Girl to come around.”
They stood on either side of Moira, who now sat cross-legged on the ground, manipulating some rocks and twigs she’d arrayed before her, staring down at them as though they held the answers to all the mysteries of the universe (whichever one).
“Hey, Moira,” Zak said, “maybe you want to join us here in the real world?”
“One of them, at least,” Khalid joked weakly.
Moira said nothing.
“Moira, come on. We can’t just stand here all night. We need to figure out what happened.”
Moira gathered up the rocks and twigs and stood. She handed Zak a small rock. “Stand like this,” she said, positioning him so that he held the rock out at chest height, an arm’s length from his body.
Without a pause, she handed Khalid a larger rock and arranged him so that he held his at head height, hovering over Zak’s by a foot or two.
“Khalid, the rock you’re holding represents our world, our New York City. Zak, you’ve got this world.”
“What are we doing?” Zak asked.
“You said we need to figure out what happened,” she told him. “This is what happened.”
She took a twig and stretched to balance it atop Khalid’s. “This is us.”
“Looks just like us.”
Moira ignored Khalid’s barb. “I can’t explain the science behind it. Just trust me on this. Physics tells us that universes exist in great numbers, side by side. Imagine an apartment building with an infinite number of units next to one another, with thick walls so that you can’t hear the people next door. You don’t even know they’re there.”
“What’s the deal with the rocks?” Zak asked. His arm was getting tired.
“Just trying to illustrate a point, and I don’t have anything to draw with. Imagine that apartment building. And one day, you knock down the wall.”
“How?” Khalid asked. “Why?”
“Doesn’t matter. You knock it down, and you discover another apartment next door, similar to yours but a little different. Like, maybe some of the rooms are positioned differently.”
At this point, she reached up to drag the twig along Khalid’s rock. “So, this is us, in New York. And we’re going along just fine until … something happens.” She knocked the twig off the rock. It dropped and skimmed past Zak’s rock, hitting the ground.
“New York is different here,” she said. “In our world, there was land. Here, water. So we came through and ended up in the drink. Just like if you knocked down the apartment wall from your bedroom and found yourself in someone else’s living room instead. Get it?”
Zak wasn’t completely sure he understood, but he got enough of it. As he dropped the rock, he realized Moira was shaking. Just the tiniest bit. She turned back to the pedestal and leaned on it, her hands gripping the edges so hard that her fingers turned even paler than usual. Her face had blanched; her spray of freckles stood out in stark relief. Her body vibrated with some barely contained emotion, and if she’d had the strength, Zak knew, she would have ripped the pedestal right out of the ground.
She whispered something. Zak couldn’t hear it, so he said, “What was that?”
“I am thinking,” she said through gritted teeth. “You told me to think, and I’m thinking so hard, Zak, and I’ve been thinking this whole time, but I can’t figure it out. I can’t figure out how to get us home. I’m not smart enough. I can’t figure it out. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, guys. I can’t. I’m not—”
Zak pried her right hand from the plaque and held it tightly. “Stop apologizing. It’s not your fault. I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that. It’s not your job to figure out how to get us home.”
She finally turned to him. Tears swam in her eyes behind the smeared lenses of her glasses. “Then whose job is it?”
“All of ours,” Khalid said, and put his hand on top of theirs. “Three Basketeers all the way.”
Moira sniffled and nodded. “Three Basketeers.”
“Three Basketeers,” Zak said. And then, in his mind, Tommy? You want to be the fourth?
Again, there was nothing.
Almost nothing.
“Zak?”
Tommy’s voice.
In his ears this time, not his mind.
* * *
Zak spun around at the sound of his name, seeking something in the enfolding purple dark. He was surprised to realize that Khalid and Moira were glancing around, too.
“Who said that?” Khalid demanded, panicked. “Who said that?”
“You heard it?” Zak asked. “You heard it this time?”
“Is that the voice?” Moira asked. “Is that what you’ve been hearing all along?”
“I think so—”
“Zak!” the voice called again, and they all startled. It seemed even closer, as if it had emerged from the air between them. They stared at each other, then at the ground, then at the sky, but still nothing.
“I’m trying…,” it said, and faded.
“What is going on here?” Khalid asked. Moira—who had no doubt read of circumstances eerier and more terrifying in her library of creepy sci-fi and fantasy novels—looked thoroughly freaked out. Zak understood—he’d been living with this voice in his head as long as he could remember. He’d become accustomed to it, and even though it had now transferred itself into the open air, it was still the same voice. He had no fear of it, and it did not surprise him.
“Guys,” he said, “calm down and be quiet—”
“I think it was from over here,” Khalid said, pointing.
“No. It’s this way,” Moira insisted.
“Guys, just settle down and listen, okay?” He took Moira’s hand and grabbed Khalid by the shoulder. “You can’t find it, and you can’t force it. Just let—”
“ZAK!”
This time the voice doubled in on itself as its volume spiked; it echoed in Zak’s mind at the same time as it rang in the air. He hissed in a pained breath and released his friends, clapping his hands to his ears. But that couldn’t keep the voice out, as it repeated his name over and over. It was like having nails driven one by one into his skull. He flinched with each repetition of his name, driven to his knees with the pain.
Someone touched him, hands on his shoulders, and a voice shouted, but he couldn’t hear it over the voice in his head. Feet padded near him, back and forth, moving as though in desperation, but he couldn’t open his eyes to see which of his friends was in motion. The pain was too intense.
“—see it, Zak!” Khalid’s voice finally broke through, tinny and small, as if from a great distance. “You have to see it!”
Zak forced his eyes open. Khalid crouched near him, steadying them both with hands on Zak’s shoulders. Moira was running a jagged, zigzagging path from the pedestal to the two
of them and back, breathless, staring.
There, in the space between them all, a mist had gathered. Wispy and translucent, it purled and gathered and spread and regathered as if with a mind of its own, floating and grasping from a foot above the ground to six or seven feet straight up. It was a dirty-white color, a sort of grayish pearl, climbing and drifting down over and over as it pulsed in and out.
“What is it?” Moira was jogging its perimeter, watching it from all angles, her eyes wide and her expression one of sheer bafflement.
Khalid shook Zak. “What is it, man? What’s going on here?”
“I don’t—”
But then he did. He did know.
The voice in his head stopped saying his name.
Almost! it cried. I’m almost there!
“Tommy!” Zak screamed, and launched himself to his feet. He would have thrown himself at the mist, which had now coalesced into a cloud of writhing, snakelike tendrils of vapor that seemed to boil in the very air, but for Khalid, who held him back.
“We don’t know what it is,” Khalid cautioned.
Almost there! Don’t go! So close!
And then the cloud collapsed in on itself with a strangely soft hissing sound. There was an instant of silence—nothing but Zak’s own breath and his heartbeat in his ears—and then the cloud flowered back from its pinpoint of collapse, only this time it had color to it—gold and red and blue.
The eruption of light stunned them all, and they froze there, staring at a silent, contained explosion of fireworks. Its colors washed over them, harmless, until the finale, when a burst of powerful white light forced them all to flinch away and cover their eyes.
“I’m here! I did it!” said the voice.
“It’s him,” Zak shouted, blinking spots out of his eyes. Fumbling, he managed to grab both Moira’s and Khalid’s hands, and he squeezed them tightly. “It’s Tommy!”
And as his vision cleared, for the first time in his memory, he saw his brother.
TWENTY-FOUR
Tommy looked exactly like Zak, which was no surprise. When he smiled, wisps of smoke peeled away from his lips, as if the mere motion of smiling had cut loose some part of him.
“Zak,” he said, and spread his arms wide. More streamers of smoke peeled from him, and Zak realized that if he squinted, he could barely make out the trees of the park through his brother.
Zak had lunged forward, but Moira and Khalid held him back. “Dude,” Khalid said, “we don’t know what’s going on.”
“I’m not going to hurt you. Any of you,” Tommy said. “I need your help. We both do.”
“Both?”
“How do we get home?” Moira said suddenly.
Zak wrestled himself free of them and approached Tommy. The air grew colder and drier near his brother, and he knew even before he extended a hand that he would feel nothing when he tried to touch him. Sure enough, his hand went through, as though sweeping aside mist from dry ice. “Tommy, what’s going on?”
The boy seemed to take a breath. Like a hole blown through smoke by a fan, a section of his chest faded from view for a moment before filling back in. “I’m not sure how long I can sustain this projection. It’s difficult. Even here, where the rules are different.”
“What rules?” Khalid asked.
“Are the laws of physics different here?” Moira chimed in.
Zak wished they would both just shut up. He was standing mere inches from his brother! Was Tommy not truly dead after all? Or was this alternate universe a place where people from his own world went after they died?
He waved his friends quiet with a look that said, Stop messing with this! Abashed, they both fell silent.
Tommy shook his head sadly, the curls of fog that drifted away from him with each motion making him look even sadder. “I’m here, stuck. Unable to leave the physical universe, to move on. Just like poor Godfrey.”
Zak peered around, knowing he would see nothing, but straining for a glimpse nonetheless. “Who’s Godfrey?”
“He’s my friend. He’s a spirit, like I am, only he’s been trapped for so much longer. He’s endured … I don’t have time to explain it all. Godfrey is from this universe,” Tommy said, “and he’s making it possible for me to manifest like this. He has power.…”
“What kind of power?” Moira piped up.
Tommy inhaled again, and a little more of him vanished. “I have to explain everything.…” He paused. “No, there is no time for everything. I’ll try to explain enough.”
“But—” Moira said.
Zak spun around and gave her a death glare. “He doesn’t have time for questions! Let him talk!”
“Godfrey was on a ship,” Tommy told them, “sailing from the islands to Manhattan City. But a storm surprised them, and they were swamped. They should have been able to press through, but the hull was torn open, even though they were miles from shore.”
“Wait a second,” Khalid said. “That boat? The one under the World Trade Center? That was, like, centuries ago.”
“The boat crossed over,” Moira muttered. “It somehow slipped from this universe to ours, and there was land where they didn’t expect it.”
Tommy went on as if they hadn’t spoken. “He knew a spell, an old spell from the islands. He could live on after death. So he cast the spell and survived as a spirit. Alone until he met me.”
Tommy grinned sadly. Zak’s throat tightened with horror and memory. Being alone like that would be the worst thing he could imagine. He had thought that he had been alone, but there had always been Khalid and Moira. And his parents, he supposed. This Godfrey person had been alone for a long, long time until he’d found Tommy.
“You and I share a special link, Zak. Closer than any other two people in the world, closer even than most twins. United by our birth and our disease. My death was only the beginning for me. Because of our connection, I remained bound to earth instead of moving on like most of the dead. Then Godfrey and I found each other. Two lost spirits, trapped in the land of the living for different reasons. But we realized that we could combine our strength and speak to you. You couldn’t always hear us, but sometimes you could.”
“I thought you were imaginary. Or Uncle Tomás.”
Tommy paused and opened his mouth to speak again. Zak realized, to his horror, that Tommy’s feet had dissolved into a chaotic, foggy swirl of colors, and the effect was slowly climbing up his legs. It was as though he were unraveling before their eyes.
“We had to bring you here,” Tommy said quickly, aware of his time ticking away. “This world works differently. You would call it magic, but it really isn’t. Here, Godfrey and I have a chance to live again.”
“How?” Zak stepped even closer, and the conflicted eddies of light and fog that made up Tommy’s form became more indistinct. He was fading with each passing instant—Zak had to learn as much as possible. Now.
“We need energy. Power. You’ll have to figure out most of it for yourself,” Tommy said. By now, he’d unraveled even further—from his chest down, he was a dissipating patch of smoke, rapidly vanishing into the night air. “Godfrey says you’ll need something called electroleum. It’s a power source, and more. It—”
“It sounds dangerous,” Khalid said nervously.
By now Tommy’s body had disappeared all the way up to his throat. He was a wispy head floating in the air above a fast-clearing wedge of smoke, with one arm still drifting loose, like a marionette’s controlled by a separate puppeteer. “Completely safe. We need a massive energy source. Will free us.” He was beginning to sound garbled, like a drowning man calling for help. But panic never touched his eyes. They bore into Zak, drilling deep to plant the importance of what he said. “Rupture walls between life and death,” he said. “So much energy. Set us free.”
His face and head unraveled then, spinning out into a gentle drift of vapor until there was nothing left of him save for a smear of color on the air.
And then that, too, disintegrated, torn
apart by the breeze, and they saw nothing but the night and the sky and the trees and the water, and even in Zak’s own mind, they were alone again.
* * *
Zak heard Moira and Khalid chattering nearby, but he stayed rooted to the spot where Tommy had manifested and then disappeared. Zak sought any kind of contact—nothing came. He’d been so close! Tommy was … well, not alive, maybe, but still existing. Still himself. Even on some kind of … spirit plane. The idea should have sounded ridiculous to Zak. It was the garbage and nonsense his dad had railed against his whole life. But then again, his dad had also lied to him his whole life. His dad didn’t know everything. So who cared what his dad thought.
Besides: His dad was in another universe entirely. Dad—and Mom and Dr. Campbell and everyone else who had deceived him—didn’t matter anymore. He had his best friends with him, and he would soon have his twin brother as well.
That was all he needed.
If only he could make contact! As much as he tried, he could detect not even the tiniest bit of Tommy or the mysterious Godfrey. Maybe they’d used too much of their power to speak to him. Maybe it would take time.
Yeah. Time. That’s all. It would just take time.
Khalid and Moira approached Zak. “You all right, man?”
“Do you need a second?” Moira asked.
Did he? The sensible thing was probably to sit down and try to clear his mind. But the problem was, his mind felt totally clear. For the first time in a long time, he didn’t doubt his own sanity or his own senses. His brother was kinda alive, kinda dead, but it was the kinda-alive part that mattered. Tommy was, and there was a way to make him whole again.
“I don’t need a minute,” he told them. “I need to find out where we are, first.”
“One map coming up.” Khalid pulled his phone out of his pocket and fired it up. It flickered for a moment, then died.
“Water, idiot,” Moira said. “We ruined our phones when we crossed over into the ocean.”
“The Conflux,” Zak corrected her.
“Right. The Conflux. And even if our phones did work, they wouldn’t work anyway.”