I grumble and look around the room for my holoscreen. I always lose that thing, which drives Annika crazy. She keeps sending me texts on it that I don’t answer. I told her she needs to get with the program and use the hologram feature, but she says no one needs to see a 3-D image of her asking, “When are you getting home from delivering those pies already so we can go bowling?”
I find the holoscreen under a pile of comics and stuff it into my pocket.
“And it wouldn’t hurt you to change your clothes,” Annika adds. “I’m getting really tired of seeing you in that outfit.”
I look down at my clothes. I never give them a second thought. When you’re a kid, clothes in The Realms are purely functional. Colorless and nondescript, mostly. I glare at her. “I really need to get a lock on my door.”
“Haven’t you noticed your brothers have started dressing better since I’ve gotten here?” she asks.
I shake my head. Although now that she mentions it, both Bren and Grayden have looked a little more colorful lately. A splash of blue around the collar, a touch of red on the tips of their shoes. But all I say is, “Guys don’t notice what other guys wear.” If I truly had to be honest, she’s influenced more than just what people wear around here. If it wasn’t for her, I’d never have known being the seventh son actually did come with some extra benefits, and some extra responsibilities, which I’m still trying to sort out.
Even with me sleeping in, we still manage to be the first to arrive at school. Annika’s right, the Niffum have now reached the outskirts of the Milky Way. They are only a few thousand light-years away now, approaching the spiral arm where the solar system used to be. It won’t be long. In the time we’ve been secretly tracking them, we’ve seen them briefly orbit eleven other planets and move on without finding what they needed there. Kal explained to us that the Niffum fleet can only travel their preset course, so once they’ve passed through the spot where they would expect to find Earth, they’ll have no choice but to keep going. Once that happens, we’ll be able to try getting everyone back again.
Annika and I watch the fleet move silently through space until the teacher calls us away. I take out my holoscreen, ready to take notes. I’ve been paying more attention in school lately, which I can’t blame on Annika, although I’d like to. After everything that’s happened, I’m just trying to learn a little more about the universe, and about the part The Realms play in it.
What I told Annika when I first met her was right. It’s not magic, what we do. It’s all the rules of nature, set up at the very start of our universe. There’s a lot I still don’t understand, though, and no one seems willing or able to explain it to me. I don’t understand why The Realms are so different from everywhere else in the universe. If Kal’s in another universe, how many others are there, and what are they like? How are we able to pull planets and people out of time, and how can we accelerate time to get it back?
Fortunately for me, being the patient person that I am, I can wait to learn the answers. As long as I don’t have to wait too long.
After school I return with Annika to Aunt Rae’s house, always the first stop on my route now. Bren is waiting with a plate of pie and some new game to show her. “Leave the door open,” Aunt Rae calls out as the two of them disappear into Annika’s room.
I’m not sure why Aunt Rae said that, but I’m kind of glad.
“Only three for today,” she says, hefting the steaming pie boxes into my arms. I feel the familiar weight work its way through me when I touch them. Why had I never stopped to wonder why no one else mentioned feeling like that when they touched a pie? It’s like I’ve been woken up when I didn’t even know I was asleep.
“We’re almost back on track,” Aunt Rae adds, wiping her flour-covered hands on her apron.
Because of everything that’s happened, I have a lot of deliveries to make up for. Not only from Aunt Rae, but from the other pie makers, too. I don’t mind the extra work, now that I know what my job actually entails. Hey, maybe it’s not too late to write that essay!
As soon as I step out the door, I hear the drums. It’s been so long that my first thought is that the banging sound is probably just the boys down the street kicking their ball. I’m about to pass through Aunt Rae’s front gate when I hear it again. I rest the pies on the ground and strain my ears. Definitely drumbeats! He’s still alive!
I turn to go back into the house to get Annika and Bren, but then Annika cheers as one of her video avatars scores a goal or kills an alien or something, and I change my mind. “Kal?” I call out, running to the street instead.
“It’s time, Joss,” he says, or rather, his disembodied voice does.
“Time?” I repeat.
“I know the word is unfamiliar to you.”
“Hey, I’m getting better. Sort of.”
“Tell the others, okay?” His voice takes on an urgency I haven’t heard since his first contact. “The Niffum fleet is nearing where the solar system used to be. Once they’re past, you’ll need to get to work. I’d start now.”
“Hey, that’s great!” I say, trying to sound like I mean it. And I do mean it. Of course I mean it.
Don’t I?
I clear my throat. “I’ll gather everyone together now.”
“Wait, Joss. In case this doesn’t work, and, um, I don’t get to tell you this… I just want to say… I’m really sorry for all the secrecy, and for having to spoil what you’d worked so hard to do. You know, before. With the box and then when you were making that totally awesome sun. I didn’t want to rat out my parents, and I didn’t want you to stop trying for Annika’s sake. It all just got really confusing.”
“You’ve already apologized, Kal. I get it.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll still owe you a big one when you get me back.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
His voice breaks a little. “Hurry, Joss. Okay?”
That’s the first time he’s ever sounded openly desperate.
I nod. “Hang in there.” Not that I know if there’s actually anything to hang on to. He’s never described where he is. I’ve been picturing this black void of nothingness, with them sort of floating in the air, but for all I know they could have been lounging on beach chairs overlooking paradise. Probably not, though.
As I run back into the house, I force myself to push aside the cold, hard truth. In order to get Kal and his parents back and restore the inhabitants of Earth and the Afterlives, not to mention the rest of the solar system, I will have to give up something I’ve grown very used to having around.
I wonder if she’ll miss me, too.
Whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
—Charles Darwin, naturalist
We gather around the still-scorched spot of land where my sun had its short, blazing run at glory. Annika has been unusually quiet since I told her the news from Kal. I think she’s afraid to get her hopes up again. I don’t blame her. Since recovering the data dots, I’ve watched the films over and over again. I’m as prepared as I’m ever going to be.
I still don’t understand how we’re going to be make five billion years of history pass as though it weren’t any time at all. My mother tried to explain it to me on the way here, but the whole sixth-smartest-out-of-seven thing kicked in, and I stopped following after a while. Basically it’s something about space and time actually being two parts of a whole, which I knew, and you simply have to know how to manipulate space in order to manipulate time, which I didn’t know. Bottom line is, it’s something we can do here in The Realms and I might as well accept it.
Everyone watches me now, their faces reflecting a wide range of emotions—pride (Mom, Thade, and Aunt Rae), excitement (Bren), excitement mixed with doubt (Ty, Ash, Laz), and excitement mixed with doubt and jealousy (Grayden). Worry, anticipation, and something else I can’t pin down flash across Annika?
??s pinched face. She keeps yanking tiny pieces off the leaves on her hat and flicking them onto the ground. She knows what Thade had told me, about my being able to give things weight. She said it sounded like I can control a particle called a Higgs boson, which scientists on Earth had only recently discovered. So really, she knew about all this before I did.
“Here goes,” I say, closing my eyes and picturing an invisible field all around me, filled with these tiny particles that turn nothing into something when they come in contact. I instantly feel a current move through me, and I can tell things are happening. I’m not making them happen, not exactly. It’s not happening because of me. It’s happening with me. There’s a difference. And I’m not the only one. I can feel, even without seeing, that my brothers have joined me. We are links in some unseen but very real cosmic chain.
I know I’m not supposed to stare into the sun, but I can’t help taking a peek. The scene before me is hard to sort out at first. Everything is unfolding so rapidly, like random playing cards being shuffled and somehow ending up in exactly the right order. I can see the sun expanding and brightening so quickly that I know this will be a much, much bigger thing than the sun I had made before. Hydrogen fuses into helium so fast, so violently, that the helium then creates carbon and oxygen. Now comes neon, sodium, magnesium, sulfur, and silicon. And more and more, until the core is filled with iron. And then I can feel a change. The giant, massive star collapses in upon itself, and then instantly explodes in a shock wave that knocks all of us to the ground. We scramble to our feet as gold and silver and lead spew forth into the gas and atoms that already fill this place. And then… a new sun is born! Smaller this time, and much more stable. The dust and rocks left over start to come together into larger and larger spheres.
And before I know it, the baby planets are back! Some of rock, some of gas. All spinning, all bombarded over and over and over again by large asteroids and smaller comets and meteorites carrying water and amino acids. The huge gas planets get pushed far away from the sun, some turning onto their sides where they will remain forever lopsided. The largest of the rocky ones settles into its not-quite-circular orbit. Earth is back in place!
Barren and empty, the imperfect sphere is suddenly struck by a chunk of rock so large it shears the top layer off the planet and sends it whirling into space. I know time is passing, but before I can blink, the pieces have come together. Earth has a moon!
Volcanoes and earthquakes shake the planet, and before long, oceans boil from the heat of it. If anything goes wrong, at any step of the way, we’ll have failed. None of us move as we watch the ground and oceans of the new Earth cool. When the conditions are just right, the seeds of life sprout, slowly filling the air with oxygen. Creatures swim and crawl and run and dance. Millions of species, adapting to their environments, changing and surviving. Consciousness arrives, then self-awareness. Humans begin to communicate with language, form communities, make decisions and art, and grow food. They begin to wonder at their own existence.
I cannot look away as in droves, they leave the caves and huts, claw their way toward understanding, try and fail and try again, relentlessly, to get smarter, faster, farther, better. I see flashes of faces flickering by me, links on one family’s chain, altering slightly with each generation until… Annika?
Annika! I whirl around so fast I fall to the ground again. She is not here. Where is she? She was right behind me when I closed my eyes! How long ago was that? A few minutes? A few billion years? It all feels the same. No one else notices my panic. They’re all smiling and high-fiving each other, which Annika taught us and in which my brothers take a seemingly endless amount of joy, high-fiving each other at any given opportunity.
Bren runs over to me and yanks me up. He puts up his hand to high-five. When I don’t move, he lifts my hand up for me and pushes it against his.
“Where’s Annika?” My voice is hoarse, like it hasn’t been used in a long time. “Have you seen her?”
But he’s not listening. He’s pointing into the field. “Look, Joss!” His voice sounds as creaky as mine. “How cool is that?”
Impatient, I look out to see the sun is far, far away now, a gum ball–size dot in the blackness of space. Much closer, a medium-size, slightly tilted blue-green planet slowly rotates. As we watch, everything sinks down, like a curtain call at the end of a show. The gum ball sun, the blue-green planet Earth, the dusty Mars, the fiery Jupiter, all of them go down, out of The Realms, to take their rightful places in the distant Milky Way far beneath our feet.
Mom appears beside me and squeezes my hand. “It’s magnificent. I have a feeling you’ll ace Planet Building class next term.”
“Mom, where’s Annika? What happened?”
She doesn’t let go of my hand. I’m pretty sure I know what she’s about to say, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Annika merely had to go to the bathroom. Humans have to do that a lot. It’s pretty disturbing.
“Annika’s gone,” Mom says.
I hunch forward a bit, like someone just punched me in the stomach. I know this was the outcome we’d hoped for, but I hadn’t really thought it through. I think a part of me still hadn’t believed it would work.
“I know it’s hard to lose a friend,” Mom says, “and you’ve certainly had more than your fair share of that lately. But look. This will make you feel better.” She turns me around.
The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.
—Ray Bradbury, writer
When I squint, I can see two hazy figures running toward us from the right, and one lone figure from the left. They’re moving fast and getting closer and my eyes get sharper, and then… “Kal!” I shout, running toward the lone figure. I consider turning my legs into wheels, but I’m still pulling out pieces of dirt from when I chased after Bren. I found a button behind my left ankle only a little while ago.
“Joss!” Kal yells. “Joss! I’m back! You did it!”
I want to tell him that I didn’t really do much of anything. It all just… happened. But for now I’m too glad to see him to argue. I keep running. My brothers and Mom and Aunt Rae run alongside me. Ty breaks off toward the Afterlives. Now that all the residents from Earth are back, he’s going to have his hands full sorting it all out.
We all meet up in the middle, shouting and whooping and high-fiving, even the grown-ups. Seeing Kal again makes everything that happened seem unreal, like something I dreamed. Even though I don’t dream.
Kal’s mother pulls me aside.
“Annika is back where she belongs, Joss. Her family didn’t even know she’d gone. No one even knows they’d gone!”
Relief floods through me. I didn’t realize how scared I was that she’d just disappeared, maybe to an Earth that didn’t bare any resemblance to the one she left, no matter how carefully I’d reviewed the holofilms. “You actually saw her there?”
She nods. “Kal’s father and I were pulled back to Earth, just as we’d hoped. We ran over to Annika’s house, not sure what we’d find. But we knew she must have done her job and not looked in the telescope. We wouldn’t have gotten back otherwise.”
“But was she okay? What did she say to you?”
“She couldn’t really say much. She wasn’t supposed to know us as anything other than her parents’ friends from down the street. Anyway, she was too busy hugging her parents and swinging her brother around to bother with anyone else. Before we took the wormhole back here, we made sure the coordinates of The Realms were deleted from their telescope.”
“Thanks for letting me know,” I tell her, even as I feel a twinge in my stomach. I’m grateful that Annika’s safe and happy and that everything seems to have worked out. But it feels weird not to be able to celebrate with her. I feel a little like I did when Kal disappeared, like something important is missing inside me. But then Kal starts telling everyone about how he materialized right in the middle of PTB headquarters, and I focus on that and how happy I am that he’s back.
“You
should have seen your dad, Joss!” Kal says, grinning. “It was classic! He was sitting at his desk when I showed up in the middle of his office. He jumped so high he banged his legs on the bottom of the desk really hard! I said, ‘Ouch, that’s gonna leave a mark,’ and he said things like, ‘Where did you—’ and ‘How did you—’ and then ‘I’m glad you’re back.’ It took me being sucked into another universe in order for your dad to say something nice to me!”
Kal’s dad turns to Mom. “You’ll have to forgive my son. He’s just overly excited. He means no disrespect toward your husband.”
“No, ma’am, I don’t,” Kal says.
“I know,” Mom says, clasping Kal’s hand. “And I’m glad you’re back, too.”
“Oh!” Kal’s mom suddenly says to me, reaching into her pocket. “I almost forgot! Annika gave me this for you.”
My hand closes around a stiff, folded piece of paper. There’s no way I’m opening it with all these curious eyes on me.
“What is it?” Kal asks. “A present? Did I miss your birthday?”
To my relief, Mom claps her hands for everyone’s attention, and I give a little apologetic shrug to Kal and turn to listen. “The Powers That Be are going to have a lot of questions about what happened here,” she says. “Direct them to me. I’ll handle the fallout.”
Kal’s dad reaches for my mom’s arm. “Are you sure? We don’t want to cause trouble for you.”
She smiles warmly. “I’m sure. Being married to the Supreme Overlord has some perks.”
The walk back to the central Realms is leisurely, much more like the way things used to be. I’m surprised how quickly I relax into the rhythm of it. Nowhere to rush to, nothing to worry about. My brothers pepper Kal with questions about what his universe was like. I listen to him describe how he and his parents were pretty much stranded in this void of darkness (I was right!), where particles of matter and antimatter kept annihilating each other in flashes of light. Unlike our own universe, it became too dense and started to collapse. My mind keeps coming back to the little folded paper in my pocket.