“The rift blew up my entire house,” I say. “She and her mom thought it best to get out of town while the Hoods investigated everything and everyone within a ten-mile radius of the explosion site.”
She nods, the soft, compassionate gleam in her eye getting eaten by the fierce, nothing-fazes-her Cascade I know and love. “Probably a good call.”
“Yeah, like you telling us everything you know.” I step off the bus and find Heath waiting a few paces away. He wears a frown like a badge of honor, his gaze slipping to where Cas and I hold hands. He glances away, jaw tight, arms folded.
“Okay, so I have a friend who’s a doctor.”
My eyebrows go up. Cas really does have a contact for everything.
“He ran some tests on my dad, and they’re not good. His cells are near the point of near collapse, and he’s in the advanced stages of liver disease. Trader—that’s my friend—says he’s basically been poisoned by the rift radiation, probably from the explosion eight years ago, but also from continued use as he continues to cross-over to visit my mom.”
“Sounds like a lost cause,” Heath says.
“Heath.” I glare at him, though I actually agree with him.
“I’m just saying, why are we trying to save him if he’s going to die soon anyway?” He glances over his shoulder. “I don’t see what good any of this is going to do. We just need to get back to our reality and forget we even know about a rift.”
The desperate edge in his voice strikes a note deep in my core. I feel like my window of opportunity to get back to my own reality in 2073 is shrinking, shrinking, shrinking.
“I was thinking we could cross-over,” Cas says casually as she starts moving across the street to a tall, glassy building.
“Cross-over? What do you mean?”
“Get out of here. Out of this place where there’s this insane feud over a piece of property, a rift. Cross-over, find somewhere to live on the beach, and…” She shrugs. “You know. Live. Be happy.”
“Sounds so romantic,” Heath says from behind us. “But I don’t have a hot girlfriend holding my hand, and my parents have already lost one son.”
“I’ll get you home, Heath,” I promise, squeezing Cas’s hand. “Right, Cas? We’ll make sure Heath gets home.” The thought of never seeing my mom again brings a slice of pain to my gut. True, we aren’t best of friends, and I definitely won’t miss her attempts at making spaghetti, but she’s my mom.
And Dad will be hella-unhappy. I wonder if he’ll move through time and space to find me. To find Cascade. He’s threatened as much before, at least for her.
“You didn’t explain how Orville’s able to cross-over and live,” I remind her.
“Trader and I think it’s because he’s like me and you. We move through rifts, and yeah, there’s some damage. But we don’t feel sick right away. We aren’t incapacitated after only a few hours.” She clears her throat. “I mean, eventually, if we kept using the rift, we would be. Trader thinks we’d end up just like my dad.”
“So it’s not really that your dad is tied to the rift site,” Heath says. “Or another dimension. It’s simply that he’s about to die anyway.”
“Trader thinks he’s actually regenerated every time he moves through the portal.” Cascade enters the building and moves to the lift. She doesn’t need an ID card or an eyeprint or anything. No one does. I marvel at the simplistic way these people live. Anyone can walk in this building and go anywhere. Chaos.
“Regenerated?” I ask once in the safety of the lift.
“Because of the explosion, he’s actually part of the rift. If he gets too far from it, his condition worsens. But Orville—” Cascade waves her hand. “Doesn’t have any of that. He wasn’t in a rift explosion. He’s just like me and you. Getting a teensy bit more damanged with every cross-over, but not actually tied to the rift.”
The elevator dings, but the doors take their time sliding open.
“So if we can’t rescue your dad,” Heath starts. “What are we doing here?”
“I believe you’re here to see me,” a man says, and I come face to face with my great-grandpa, a man who died when I was three years old. I have a couple of snaps of him holding me, and that’s it. No memories.
His eyes are the same slate blue as mine, his jaw as square, his hair two shades darker.
“Price,” he says. “You’ve grown up nicely.”
Looking into my great-grandpa’s face when it’s not in a snap is surreal. I feel like the earth is moving but I’m not going with it. I blink, and the sensation stops.
Harlem welcomes us to his office, closing and securing the door behind us. “Your father said you’d come,” he says as he settles behind his huge desk.
“You’ve talked to my dad? In the future?”
“He sent a note.”
“How does he do that?” Cascade crosses her legs and her arms in a classic don’t-get-too-close-to-me gesture. I reach over and loosen her arms until she’ll let me hold her hand.
“We have…check-points for communication.”
I have no idea what that means. Secrets spots Dad can hide notes? Can he walk through the rift and send chats?
Harlem clears his throat. “I’m assuming you’re here because of the shift in my past.”
“Orville Openshaw suddenly appears in the year nineteen-ninety,” Cascade says. “You guys went to Stanford together.”
“You look like twins,” I add. “Wasn’t that freaky?”
“It was, yes. But I didn’t know what to do. See, all of the time rift and travel was new to me twenty years ago. He explained who he was, where he’d come from, and what he wanted. I let him do it.” He gets up and paces to the window. “I let him take my research when he left for Georgetown, and I let him finance the time rift studies at NovaRad.”
I wonder if that’s why my life changed in the future, if those actions twenty-three years ago set a new pathway into motion. “But we got our life back,” I say, not really intending to vocalize the conundrum.
Cas shoots me a look and Heath squints at me. Again, I realize that whatever Dad changed, he switched at a future point from now. Maybe Cascade’s death in two weeks…. I bite down hard to keep from speaking again.
“Why did you let him take your research, sir?” Heath asks, sitting up like a prize student. I slide him a glance that says, Sir?
He shrugs as Harlem turns from the window. “Because, if I hadn’t, he said he’d take me and everyone in my ancestry line through the portal in Shawna Phillips’ office. He said he’d make sure we got placed in the most violent universe—I believe he called it the Neapolitan Verse—and that he’d blow up any chance of returning.” Harlem’s lined face, his stern mouth, the way he folds his hands behind his back, speak of serious business. “He was not joking, and I didn’t think it wise to risk everything for a few years of research.”
“You still have your job and office here,” Cascade says. “So your timeline hasn’t changed much.”
“I never financed your mother’s research,” he says. “So that future will change.” He gives me a meaningful look, but I keep quiet. Maybe Dad went to a future year and stole Shawna’s research. I don’t know. But he still gets it. He still owns the house. He still controls time in the future.
I think these thoughts hard, hoping Harlem can somehow hear them. He glances away and reseats himself behind the desk.
“Is Orville still here?” Cascade asks.
“The agreement was that he would be allowed to come and go as necessary to finance your mother’s research. As of this moment, he is tucked safely into his own verse.”
“Do you know when he crosses-over?”
Harlem shifts in his seat, flicks something invisible from his jacket. “I have…ways of knowing when the rifts are used. Especially the one in the lab. So yes. I know when someone crosses-over. I don’t always know who it is. But Orville has kept our deal for twenty-three years. I don’t see him violating it now.”
“Wha
t deal, exactly?” I ask.
“He leaves our family alone, if we leave him and the Phillips family alone.” His gaze zeroes in on my and Cas’s joined hands. “I don’t think he’ll be happy about you dating Chloe.”
“We’re not—” I cut myself off before I can say dating. I’ve taken Cas out exactly zero times, so we can’t really be dating. Can we?
Sure, we’re together. But dating? Sounds so archaic.
“We’re not what?” she asks, a low flame burning in her eyes.
“Dating,” I say. “That’s not what we do in the future. We’re together.”
Harlem chuckles. “Well, I’m sure Orville won’t like to know how together you are.” He peers closer at me. “How together are you?”
“Together,” Cas says, shooting him a daggered glare.
“How does your dad feel about that?” Harlem asks, which causes Heath to emit a quick laugh.
“How did this turn into an examination of me and Cas?”
Harlem leans back in his chair. “Orville won’t like this. I’d keep it under wraps while you’re in this timeline. Which, by the way, your dad is expecting you home very soon.”
I don’t like the way he enunciates very soon, like he can dictate to me when I go home.
Something on Harlem’s desk beeps, and he glances down at the surface. When he looks up again, something new parades through his expression. Something laced with fear.
“The portal at the lab just opened.”
Cascade
MY HEART FEELS LIKE AN INADEQUATE ORGAN, not pumping nearly enough blood to my extremities. I sit in the back of Harlem’s car, my fingers clenched around my phone as I wait for Cedar to call me back.
Frustration boils in the pit of my stomach, mixing with a smidge of annoyance. He should know that when I ask him to call, it’s important. Otherwise, a text would suffice.
Finally, only a few blocks from my mom’s lab, the phone rings. “Cedar,” I breathe. “Where are you? What are you doing right now?”
“What’s going on?”
“How close are you to my mom’s lab?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
I curse. “Not close enough. Can you come anyway?”
“Already in my truck. Are you going to tell me what I’m walking into?”
My brain rebels against the idea. “It’s a long story. But the portal there just opened, and there’s a guy who’s crossed-over and basically integrated himself into our world.”
“Orville?”
“He used a rift in the past couple of days and lived for at least six years here.”
A terse silence comes through the line. “I hate this rift,” Cedar finally says, and I feel his loathing all the way through my soul.
“Me, too.” I press my eyes closed against the constant emotion threatening to erupt there. “Please hurry, Cedar.” I hang up as Harlem pulls into the parking lot.
“Hold up,” Price says. “What’s the plan? We just storm the building?” He exchanges a glance with Heath. Their looks says it all: Amateurs.
I can’t really disagree. My jobs were planned for me, right down to what I should wear and where I should hide if I had hours to kill. I was given ID cards, cybernetics if I needed an eyeprint, skin gloves for fingerprints, everything.
But Heath and Price have been hacking on the down-low for who knows how long. I’d been friends with the Black Hat for a few years before I found out it was the hot guy in my social group whose name I doodled in the corner of my panels.
I look at Harlem for an answer.
“I suppose we can’t all go barging in there.”
“Maybe we should just watch the building,” I suggest. “See if Orville comes out with my mom. I mean, where does he stay while he’s here?”
“Maybe it was your dad,” Price says. “Doesn’t have to be Orville, right?”
“Could be anybody,” Harlem says, and the ghosts in his voice scream a warning through the car. Because it literally could be anyone from another universe crossing-over and entering our reality.
Price hooks me with a fearful glance, one that testifies he knows more about the alternate dimensions than he’s let on.
I narrow my eyes as if I can see inside his mind, find out what he knows. Of course I can’t, and he looks away. For a moment, I consider pushing him, but not with his great-grandfather and his best friend only inches away. I’ve been patient before—it took the guy six blasted months to kiss me—I can be again.
“How many exits on this building?” Heath peers up through the window like my mom and Orville will be zip-lining off the roof.
“Several.” Harlem reaches for the door handle. “Let’s cover them all. Meet back here in a half hour.” He opens the door and steps into the chilly afternoon. At least it’s not raining, or dark. But the wind howls around me, making me wish I had more hair or a scarf or something besides a thin jacket and an even thinner T-shirt under that.
I head around to the north side of the building, my nearly-frozen thumbs padding out a message for Cedar to meet me there. I pick a spot a hundred yards away from the doors and lean against a tree in the median of the parking lot. A few minutes later, Cedar pulls into an empty stall a few down from where I stand.
I hurry to his truck and hop in, grateful for the blast of heat that greets me. “Hey.”
“Hey.” He follows my gaze toward the glass doors. “Waiting for someone?”
“Yeah.”
“Who?”
“We don’t know.”
“How long are we going to wait?”
“Less than thirty minutes.”
He sighs a lungful of exasperated air. “I could’ve been busy, you know.”
I glance at him, a smile tugging at the corners of my mouth. “Were you?”
He meets my amused expression. “I could’ve been.”
I laugh and lightly punch his arm. He freezes, and I instantly regret my actions. They could be categorized as flirty, and I should’ve known better than to touch him. “Sorry.”
He grinds his jaw, fists his fingers, and turns toward the building. Only a few seconds pass in the strained silence before my phone rings.
I swipe open the call from Price. “Go.”
“South side. Two people exiting. A woman and a man. Could be your mother. I’m sorta far—”
“Call Heath. We’re on our way.”
I hang up as Price says, “I can’t call—”
But Cedar is already backing out of the stall.
“South side,” I tell him. He ignores the speed bumps, practically accelerating toward them as we round the building. He eases up as we turn the corner and the south side of the building comes into view.
I see nothing, no one, not even Price. Cedar inches along while I stare down the rows. Finally, I see a woman wearing a white lab coat walking next to a dark-haired man. They turn between two cars just as the door next to me gets wrenched open.
I cry out as Price shoves me over on the seat. “Do you see them?”
I make room for him, sticking closer to his side than to Cedar’s. “Yeah, I saw them. Pretty sure that was my mom. They looked like they were getting in a car. Did you see the man?”
“Negative.” He presses his forehead against the window like it can magnify a certain section of his view.
A giggle escapes my throat. “Negative?”
He cuts me a glare. “This is why I don’t jam with girls.”
“Hey,” I protest. “The last jam we did was hella-successful. Got that vid implanted and everything.”
“Yeah,” he mutters. “Everything blew up after that, so I’m not sure it counts.”
“Oh, it counts, Mister.” I slug him harder than I did Cedar, who I suddenly realize is watching us with a peculiar look on his face. I can practically hear the wheels turning in his head, the questions pooling beneath his tongue.
“There’s a black car pulling out,” Price says. “Two rows over. They’re heading for the exit.”
Cedar follows them while I dial Harlem. “You don’t have Heath’s number?” I ask.
“Heath doesn’t have a phone.” Price eyes the one I hold to my ear. “We don’t have that technology where we come from.”
“Where are you from?” Cedar asks as Harlem answers. I tune them out while I tell Harlem that we’re following my mom and perhaps Orville Openshaw. He agrees that he’ll collect Heath and follow us.
“That’s my mom’s car,” I say. “And my dad doesn’t leave the room when he comes.” Ice fills my chest, expands down to my toes. “He’s come back.” I grip Price’s forearm. “Why is he back?”
“Maybe they have a budget meeting,” Cedar suggests as he turns onto Planting Street.
“Maybe,” I murmur, but my stomach riots against the idea. Another turn, leading us closer and closer to….
“Isn’t there a rift site on Jasper?” Cedar asks.
“Yes,” ghosts between my lips. But Mom continues past the derelict building. “But if Orville just wanted to rift-walk, he could’ve done that at the lab. There’s a site there.”
“Functioning?” Price asks.
“Yes. It blew eight years ago. I’m sure my mom’s fixed it.”
“I thought that was the dimensional portal,” he says.
“It’s both.”
“Maybe it can only be one at a time,” Cedar says.
“Maybe.” I honestly don’t know, and I’m tired of talking about it. I’m tired of thinking about rifts, and time travel, and where I should live, and with who, and how I’m going to get there.
The light turns yellow, and Cedar is forced to stop at a red light that my mom makes it through. “Cedar, no!”
Mom’s black car accelerates, jerks around a delivery truck, and disappears.
Price swears and knocks his head into the window.
“Might as well go back to Harlem’s office.” I sigh and tuck my arm through Price’s, hoping to soothe him.
“No,” he says. “I don’t want to go back there.”
“He has Heath.”
“We can go to my place,” Cedar says. “Can you call Heath and let him know?”
“I’ll text Harlem,” I say, firing off the message. I haven’t been to Cedar’s since I got back, so I’m surprised when he doesn’t head out in the suburbs where he used to live. He winds down one block and then turns left onto Yardley Lane.