Unraveling

  The motor connected to a laser beam, and a huge liquid circle manifested itself in the air. Right in front of them. Double their height, and even though it looked black inside, it rippled, like waves, and cold air emanated from it. Elijah dared someone to touch it, but no one would. So they started daring one another, then shoving one another.

  Until Ben tripped.

  Elijah tried to grab him, but they both fell into the circle. And Reid dove in after them. They’re all pretty sure the fourth boy stayed behind, but they don’t know. They just know they never saw him again.

  And then they were underwater—in the ocean. Reid and Elijah swam to the surface and then to shore, but Ben seemed to flounder. He knew how to swim. But somehow he just couldn’t. He hit his head on something and flailed around, trying to figure out which way was up, until he realized he was going to drown.

  Then a girl he thought at first was an angel—me—reached in and saved him. And I pulled him to the surface.

  For the past seven years, the three of them have been trying to piece together exactly what happened and figure out a way to get back home. They had three pages of Reid’s father’s notes on the machine that opened the portal. It explained what he wanted the machine to do—open a wormhole to another dimension. It had a diagram of the machine, so they had an idea of what they needed to create a new one. But they were missing so much. Even with his notes, it was impossible to get all the parts they needed to replicate it. So they read everything they could find on string theory, quantum physics, and wormholes, and they kept trying.

  Six months ago Ben and Elijah got into a fight. Elijah tried to use his powers on Ben—he tried to cut Ben by breaking apart the molecules in his body, destroying them instead of healing—but Ben fought back, and when their powers combined, they accidentally had a breakthrough—they opened a small, unstable portal that flickered and disappeared. But they instantly recognized what it was. How could they ever forget what a portal looked like?

  Fight forgotten, they worked together with Reid and changed the molecules of the air in front of them. And they opened another portal. Just like every other aspect of their abilities, it was a matter of concentrating—and practicing. But how could they know if it was the right portal—the one that would take them home? They couldn’t.

  They still don’t.

  They’ve opened hundreds of portals in the past six months. At first they could only do it when two or all three of them were concentrating on it together, though now Ben can do it alone. But they’re no closer to getting home. There are possibly thousands of Earths—they have no way to know where they’ll end up this time if they go through.

  And now, it’s worse. Twice when Ben’s opened a portal, he’s accidentally brought someone through, and they’ve died. Of radiation poisoning.

  The first body they thought was a freak accident. Ben waited a few weeks before opening another portal, and that time it was fine. He even opened several more without any problems. Elijah tried to convince them to go through one. If it wasn’t their world, they knew how to open the portals now. They’d just keep opening them until they made their way home.

  Of course, they didn’t know how many universes there were—which meant who knew how long it would take them to get home. So Ben convinced him to wait.

  The second body was worse.

  08:18:31:16

  As I’m waiting for Ben to keep going, I’m struck with a realization that makes me want to throw up. I was right to question whether Ben was dangerous. More than right. Ben, Reid, Elijah—all three of them are dangerous. It doesn’t even matter that I have a gun.

  Anyone who can cause a heart to restart like Ben did for me—anyone who can do that can also cause a heart to stop.

  If the cops hadn’t showed up, Ben probably would have killed him. Reid said that to me. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time to think exactly how Ben would have killed Sam. But I get it now.

  “I thought we should try to replicate opening the portal as close as we could to where we came through,” Ben says.

  “But it’s not like we could go out to the middle of the fucking ocean,” Elijah adds.

  I feel sick. I can’t stop thinking of all the bodies. Burned from radiation beyond recognition. The family in that house.

  “There’s that empty land across from Torrey Pines Beach,” Ben continues. He looks like he’s forcing himself to keep going—his jaw is tight, and he won’t look me in the eyes. “It was the closest we could get without being seen. So I started to open a portal there, but almost immediately something came barreling through.”

  My heart pounds.

  “What?” I ask, my voice barely a whisper.

  “A pickup truck,” Ben says.

  “Fucking full speed too,” Elijah adds.

  My John Doe in his 1997 Velociadad. And there I was, in the wrong place at the wrong moment.

  08:18:29:47

  “I stopped after that,” Ben says.

  For some reason I look at Elijah. It’s not that I trust him to tell me the truth more than Ben. I just know he won’t soften anything.

  He shrugs. “He did.”

  “I’m not going to open any more portals until we can figure out how to get everything working,” Ben adds. “It’s more than just knowing where we’re going. I’m not sure what we did back then. I’m not sure why we could come through the portal then, but now it’s killing people. I need to know how we can get back through without it killing us.”

  I nod, because that makes sense. As much as any of this makes sense.

  I look at Ben’s face, but his eyes are downcast, and I can’t make him look at me. Seven years. He’s been here, bouncing around foster homes for seven years. I can’t imagine what that must have been like—especially when he was just a kid. He must have been so scared. And alone. And homesick. My chest aches with a hollowness that reminds me of my own loss, and my throat feels tight.

  My fingers are shaking, so to cover it up, I start cracking my knuckles, and I think of how this changes what I know.

  “But what about the other bodies?”

  “What other bodies?” Ben asks.

  “Stay here,” I say before I run up to grab the backpack. I call Alex and tell him to figure out how to escape his mom and get over here. He starts to argue, but when I tell him we were wrong about the virus and I’ve found a game-changer, he shuts up, and I know he’ll get out of his house even if he has to climb through a window.

  Then I head back downstairs. I open up all the files and pass them around, and this time it’s my turn. I tell them everything. The unidentified bodies my dad’s unit was investigating, the house that had to be burned down in case there were any residual effects, the unidentified improvised explosive device the FBI found. Which of course they want to know more about. I give them my speculation, because it’s all I’ve got.

  I even tell them about Alex’s and my theory about the virus and alias Mike Cooper and the emails Dad got about him.

  Alex shows up somewhere in the middle of my explanation and sits down. He doesn’t ask any questions, but at one point, I turn to him and give an ultra-abbreviated version of the whole other-universe thing. It comes across a little crazy, something like All three of them are from some kind of alternate universe, not a parallel world, but something like that. They’ve been trying to get home and accidentally bringing people through from another universe. Those people are the ones dying of radiation.

  I say this like I totally believe it, but Alex still calls bullshit. “You can’t believe this,” he says to me. “This is crazy.”

  I open my mouth to explain more, but Ben says, “Alex, here,” and he grabs a glass of water and sets it in front of us. He holds on to the base of the glass and stares at it.

  “What am I supposed to be watching?” Alex says. Then his eyes widen, and I can tell he sees it. The water just turned into air. “How did you…?”

  “We went through the portal, and when we did, it somehow changed ou
r bodies’ molecular structure or our chemical makeup or something.” Ben runs a hand through his hair. “And now I can change the molecular structure of other things.”

  “It’s how he healed me,” I whisper.

  Alex swivels his head and stares at me for a second, but I drop my eyes. I should have told him before this.

  “Believe it now?” Elijah asks.

  “No.” Alex shakes his head. “But I’m willing to listen.”

  Which is when I realize we’re going to at least operate like this makes some kind of sense.

  “Someone else must still be opening portals,” Ben says when I finish giving him the details of the case.

  “Like who?” I can’t help but laugh at the idea. “How many people out there are running around trying to open a portal and cross over?”

  “It’s my dad,” Elijah says. His smile reaches his eyes, and I realize it might be the first time I’ve ever seen him really happy. He looks five years younger, ten years less jaded. He’s almost cute like this.

  “Your dad?” Alex asks. “Why would your dad be opening portals?”

  “My dad—my real dad,” he clarifies. “He’s in government, sort of like the president here, only we don’t have limits on the number of terms. He’s been running the country since before I was born. I know he’s looking for us.”

  “We don’t know that,” Ben says quietly, and I get the impression this is an argument they’ve had before.

  “What if one of the portals you opened was the right one?” Elijah continues. “And what if they know where we are now? They could be trying to open a portal to get us back.”

  “Or it could be Mike Cooper, or whoever he really is,” Alex says.

  “It could be anyone—or anything,” Ben says, standing up. He paces around the room. “For all we know, the portals might be opening on their own and bringing people through. We could be approaching Wave Function Collapse.”

  Elijah shakes his head. “Why do you have to be such a dickwad? I told you that’s just a theory. We don’t even know if it’s real.”

  Ben swears under his breath. “All of this is real—we’re living proof it’s real!”

  “Wait!” I grab Ben’s hand and give it a squeeze. “Somebody explain to me, what is Wave Function Collapse?”

  “In theory,” Reid says, “universes are supposed to stay separate. And each breach, each time two universes connect and cross—which would happen for three kids to get dumped from one universe into another—they move closer together. Until they eventually collide.”

  “Collide?” I repeat, because my mind is speculating what that means, and—well, I hope I’m wrong.

  But I’m not.

  “Destroy each other,” Ben whispers.

  “Wave Function Collapse?”

  Ben nods. “That’s what we think it means.”

  “Could that be the countdown?” Alex asks. I look at him. I can’t vocalize any of my thoughts—I can’t even put my thoughts into words. I was relieved at first when I realized this wasn’t a virus. But now I think maybe this—whatever this is—is worse.

  “What if the UIED that the FBI has…,” Alex says. “What if it’s not a bomb or something that will release a virus or anything else? Struz told you they couldn’t disarm it. Maybe it’s because it can’t be disarmed. What if the UIED is counting down to Wave Function Collapse?”

  Ben’s eyes meet mine, and he says, “Then we have…”

  “Eight days.”

  He nods. “We have eight days to figure out how to stop it before it destroys this world—and us.”

  08:17:42:19

  Eight days means we have to work together. It’s a tenuous alliance based only on how Ben and I seem to feel about each other, even though we haven’t really articulated those feelings.

  I trust Alex, I have feelings for Ben—and I want to trust him—though I doubt I’d expose my back to Reid and Elijah. But they’re all I’ve got at this point. If I take this to the FBI without some kind of proof, Struz wouldn’t believe me. My dad probably wouldn’t have either, and it makes me think. Because this is another secret that matters—would I have kept it from him? Even with so much at stake?

  But I try not to think about it too hard. Because what if I’d gone to him with this and he didn’t believe me?

  When Alex, Reid, and Elijah leave to go talk quantum physics, Ben looks at me. “How much do you hate me right now?”

  “Not at all.” And it’s true.

  He shakes his head. “I’m a terrible person. I’ve killed people. I almost killed you. I might have brought about the end of the world.”

  “I know.” I do know, and I still can’t find any blame to pin on him. “But you’ve been in a terrible position, and those deaths, they were accidents.” I bite my lip because even though it’s true, I wish I could think of something better to say. But I’m not about to lie to him, either. I’m not like that—and Ben deserves better.

  We sit silently next to each other, and between us, there’s this—this feeling, this electrical charge, and warmth moves through me. But I have so many questions, I barely know where to start. The weight of those secrets he, Elijah, and Reid have been carrying around—I can’t fathom what that must be like. And I already wanted to know everything about him, so I start where this all began. “What was your family like? At home.”

  Ben gives me a half smile and stares off into the distance. “My mom was a scientist. She worked for Elijah’s dad, and my dad worked in sales. He traveled a lot, and he always felt like he had to prove how good he was at fixing things around the house, because my mom was actually better.

  “One time, the toaster broke, and he insisted he could fix it.” Ben laughs. “He even took the whole thing apart and tried to put it back together. My brother and I sat around the kitchen table and just watched him work on it for hours.”

  “Did he fix it?” I ask.

  Ben shakes his head. “You couldn’t even get it to hold the bread down when he was done with it. My mom bought another one that was identical the next day, and we just pretended my dad fixed it.”

  I try to imagine that, and I can’t—at least not with my own parents. “Is your brother older or younger?”

  “Derek’s two years older,” Ben says, and his voice cracks slightly. “He’s the one who got me into cars and motorcycles. We had these miniature car kits. They were like toys, but you built a car that was about two feet long from scratch and it was real, like with an engine and everything. But they were really expensive, so when my mom bought Derek a new kit, she used to make him let me work on it with him. Then we’d take turns with the remote, racing the car down our street. We chased the dog a lot.”

  He takes a deep breath. “Hope, she was this pit bull Derek adopted from a shelter. She had this reddish-gold-colored fur and superintelligent eyes and more energy than even Derek and me. Every game we played included chasing her. She loved it.”

  I laugh, thinking of a remote-control car chasing a dog around.

  “You know what the worst part is?” Ben asks, his eyes bloodshot and watery. “I can’t remember what they look like. I mean, I think I can. I have a vague idea of them. I remember my mom was wearing a pink blouse at the birthday party. And Derek was wearing a T-shirt with some kind of cartoon robot on it. But I can’t remember their faces.”

  I don’t even think. I just grab him and pull him into me and wrap my arms around him. Because I can’t imagine anything worse than that.

  “Sometimes I even start to second-guess my memories, or I mix them up, like I can’t remember what happened there and what happened here,” he whispers into my hair.

  I put my hands on the sides of his face, and I turn him so we’re nose to nose, our foreheads touching. We’re both breathing heavily, and I wonder what he’s thinking. If his heart is beating so fast it’s ready to explode out of his skin. If he’s glad that truck came barreling through from another universe and hit me because it brought us together. If he realizes the
smell of mint, soap, and gasoline now drives me crazy—in the best possible way.

  “You’re my anchor,” he whispers, and I can feel his breath against my lips. “You were the first thing I saw when I got here. You pulled me out of the water, and I knew that we’d be okay. Even if we were stuck here.”

  The memory—vision—of me, backlit by the sun, pulling a boy—Ben—out of the water.

  What if I hadn’t been in that exact spot? I press my forehead against his—closer—because at this moment, he’s the only thing that seems to make sense anymore.

  I lean forward and kiss him.

  He kisses me back.

  And I feel like I’m on fire and my insides are exploding. Only this time, it’s amazing.

  08:17:36:29

  “Stop,” Ben whispers against my lips. “Janelle, stop.”

  But his hands don’t leave my body—his fingers press tightly into my skin as he holds my hips and lower back in place, tightly against him. His lips are back on mine, his tongue in my mouth.

  As I nibble on his bottom lip, he moans and jerks me against him tighter.

  Then abruptly, he pushes me away.

  “Stop.”

  I’m left gasping for air, my body aching with the loss of him next to me.

  “Stop, Janelle, we can’t.”

  “We can’t?” I ask with a laugh to cover up the gnawing feeling of rejection eating my insides. “Because it seems pretty obvious that actually we can. It seems to me like we were doing just fine.”

  “We can’t be together. I mean, I want to, and I thought we could, but with all of … this…” He waves a hand. “We’re from different worlds—literally. And look what’s happening. People are dying. I have to focus on fixing that.”