Undone
Author: Elizabeth Norris
Date: 2013-03-05 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Young Adult; Science Fiction; Novella; Short Stories; Fantasy; Paranormal; Romance; Dystopia; Mystery; Fiction
Description: Before the accident. Before their universes collided. Before they fell in love. Riveting and romantic, Undone: An Unraveling Novella contains three short stories set in the world of Unraveling, the first book in the gripping sci-fi duology by Elizabeth Norris. Before Ben Michaels saved Janelle Tenner’s life, Janelle saved Ben when he stumbled through an interuniverse portal into a completely new world. That day, he fell in love with the girl of his dreams. And he never forgot her. Through three stories told from Ben’s point of view, learn how Ben and his friends discovered their ability to tra
Publisher: Balzer + Bray
Rights: Copyright © 2013 by Elizabeth Norris

Prologue

Before She Knew Me

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

When I Saved Her

1

2

3

4

5

After I Left Her

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Excerpt from Unbreakable

07:15:01:55

07:00:45:13

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Certain moments in my life are imprinted in my memory.

They’re easy to recall with perfect clarity, whether I want to remember them or not. Any small thing can trigger them: a phrase, a smell, a thought. It brings everything back like I’m reliving that moment, a brief scene in the movie of my life, complete with how horrible I felt at the time. And I usually felt horrible in those moments, because for some reason it’s the moments that I want to forget that stick around.

Like in eighth grade when I had my first kiss with Jane Sheriden, and my arm got stuck awkwardly between her head and the couch: Just thinking about it still makes me cringe. Or when Ms. Wittak caught me cheating in algebra freshman year because I’d saved the formulas I needed to remember in a fake game on my graphing calculator, and she tore up my test in front of the whole class.

Then there were memories that were more significant.

The pivotal moments that changed everything.

Those I don’t want to forget. Now that I’ve had too much time to think about them, to replay them over and over again in my mind, they’re the things that I wouldn’t take back, that I wouldn’t do over.

Because of Janelle.

She saved my life when we were ten. She anchored me by being who she was, and somewhere along the line, I fell in love with her.

At just about every significant moment in my life, she was there. Whether she knew it or not.

The first time I opened a portal, it was an accident.

It was nine days after my birthday at a joint party with one of my best friends. It was at his house. We played games in his backyard, ate ice-cream cake, opened presents, then challenged everyone to a video game tournament. My brother was older, though, and he had an advantage. I ended up knocked out quickly, as did three of my friends.

Once we were eliminated, we got bored, so we went in search of something else. We just didn’t expect to find what we did. In the basement, instead of old board games, we found his father’s home lab, and when we did, even the locked door didn’t keep us out. We knew it was where he kept his failed experiments, and we wanted to check them out.

One of them wasn’t as failed as we thought, and after messing with the wires, the motor flared to life, connecting to a laser beam, and a portal opened in front of us: a huge black hole that rippled like it was made of oil. We dared one another to touch it, but no one would step up.

I don’t know who shoved who first, but it happened. Somehow, I tripped and fell. And I brought two of the three of them with me: through the portal.

We ended up in another world. In the ocean.

The second time we opened a portal, it was different.

It was because of a girl, and it changed everything.

It all started with a fight.

It was the first Thursday in March of my sophomore year. I know because I kept track of the days and months and years that had passed since we’d fallen through.

It had been an uneventful day. I skateboarded to Eastview, got to first period on time, made an appearance in my first class, ditched my second one to hang out with Eli and a couple of guys while they got high behind the football stadium, and then made it through my last two. At the end of the day, I headed to It’s a Grind for the afternoon coffee that would get me through work.

I didn’t usually frequent the unofficial campus coffee shop. It backed up to the school parking lot and was always crowded, which meant long lines and a high probability of getting sucked into a conversation with someone from class. I didn’t do conversation well. I didn’t know what to say to most people. It was hard to know what to talk about when my mind was on things they wouldn’t understand.

Most days I stopped at a gas station or something because I didn’t have any coffee shop loyalties. I just wanted something strong and convenient and preferably cheap. That day, though, my foster parents had been out of coffee, and I spilled the cup I’d bought on the way to school when a group of freshman girls knocked into me before first period. The caffeine withdrawal, combined with my fourth period world history class, had given me an unbearable headache.

If even one thing had been different: if my foster parents hadn’t run out of coffee, if those girls hadn’t knocked into me, if I had ditched world history, I wouldn’t have been there, and things might not have worked out the way they did.

When the fight broke out, I was trying to place my order. I’d only been in one real fight myself. I was more of a keep-my-head-down-and-stay-out-of-trouble kind of guy. So I didn’t see how it started.

“Small black coffee,” I ordered.

The words had barely left my mouth when the door jingled open, and some guy I didn’t recognize leaned in to shout to one of his friends, “Dude, get out here. There’s a catfight!”

For a split second, the conversations halted. Just about everyone else turned to the door and froze, straining to see behind him to the parking lot where the “catfight” was allegedly taking place. My muscles tensed. Most of the fights near or on Eastview’s campus involved Eli. He had always been the get-right-in-the-middle-of-it kind of guy, and I was his best friend, which made it my responsibility to make sure he didn’t kill someone by accident. Or get killed himself.

Then I remembered he caught a ride with Reid in the new car fifteen minutes ago, and if this was a catfight, it would be girls going at it, not guys. Thankfully, Eli usually stayed away from that. Satisfied that he couldn’t be involved, I forced my shoulders to relax.

If Eli wasn’t beating someone up, I didn’t really care. I looked at the girl behind the cash register and offered her my two dollars, but her eyes were glued to the door.

I didn’t even turn around when the guy behind me said, “Oh shit, that’s Brooke Haslen.”

“Small black coffee,” I said to the cashier, louder this time.

She unfroze, took my money, and asked, “You want me to leave room for milk?” all without looking at me.

I shook my head, about to say “Just black” when I heard it.

It was more a yell than a scream, I guess. It might have even been a word, but it was too far away and too muffled to be sure.

But I recognized the voice.

It was the same one I’d heard six years ago, when she’d pulled me half-drowned out of the ocean.

It was a voice I’d know anywhere.

At least twenty people from Eastview were just huddled together in the parking lot by the chain-link fence that separated the lot from the school grounds. They were standing on their toes, leaning against one another, trying to see what was happening. Everyone was shouting and talking, but I didn’t hear what any of them said. I wasn’t thinking, either. I just pushed my way into the thick of it.

At first, it looked like a blur of hair. Two girls going at each other. Then someone stumbled, and I recognized Janelle Tenner’s dark hair and tanned skin. The sight of her sent a spike of excitement through me. It was what I felt whenever I saw her.

I liked her. I always had. Ever since I came through the portal. If she hadn’t been at that beach, in the ocean . . . If she hadn’t been in that exact spot at that exact time, I would have drowned that day.

But she was there: an angel in a pink bathing suit.

She pulled me to the surface and swam us back to shore. She held on to me and didn’t let go. She saved my life.

She didn’t know I existed. Yet.

I pushed closer. Her head whipped back from a full-on punch. Her nose was bleeding, her T-shirt was ripped, and something had cut the skin above her left eye. That made my stomach ache. She was so pretty and funny and perfect . . . and someone had done this to her. Sweat prickled the back of my neck.

Her legs swung up, kicking at the air, and I realized two girls were holding her arms. I didn’t say anything. My throat was too tight to speak. Hands loose and ready, I pushed people out of the way so I could step in and break it up.

I grabbed the girl closest to me and tried to pull her off Janelle’s arm. She struggled, elbowing me in the ribs.

Janelle yelled again and threw her body forward, trying to get free. Seeing her like that caused my anger to swell, and before I could stop it, I felt it turn into energy.

It rushed through me, a thick heat that seared each part of my body, from my chest down my arms, eager to be channeled into something productive.

There wasn’t a thing I could do to stop it.

It burned as it moved through my fingertips, into the girl I was holding on to. She yelped and grabbed her arm, letting go of Janelle.

With one arm free, Janelle reached out, swatting Brooke’s hand in time to keep it from hitting her face. The noise of the crowd tripled.

I stepped back. My hands tingled from the rush, and I smelled burning skin. The crowd pulsed around me but didn’t recognize that anything was amiss.

“Shit.” I jerked back and glanced down at my hands. I hadn’t meant for that to happen. I’d been so angry I’d burned her. The portal had done more than just send me to another world. It had made me a freak who could burn things when I got angry.

In front of me the girl was still holding her shoulder. She didn’t know the pain was my fault.

The skin was branded red. The burn, a distorted version of my handprint.

I took a deep breath and willed my anger to dissipate. There was a single drop of blood on the ground, I noticed. A dark red circle standing out against the black pavement.

I focused on Brooke and pushed back into the center of the fight. I wasn’t the only one. A couple of guys on the baseball team swarmed in as well, and we got in between them, grabbing Brooke by the shoulders and pushing her back through the crowd, which didn’t miss the opportunity to boo us.

When it was over, I turned back to look for Janelle. This was my chance to talk to her. I took a deep breath, trying to steady my emotions, and I wiped my sweaty hands on my shorts. I hoped that they wouldn’t shake and that my voice wouldn’t crack and that the words would come. I’d just jumped into a fight for her. I’d ask her if she was okay and offer to walk her home. I’d tell her Brooke was just a jealous bitch. She would laugh and then pause to look at me. She might first recognize me as the guy she borrowed a pencil from in math freshman year, but eventually she would remember pulling me out of the ocean that day we first met. We’d laugh about the coincidence, her saving me all those years ago, and now me jumping in to return the favor. She wouldn’t care that this situation wasn’t quite as dire. She’d think it was romantic anyway, and I’d finally work up the nerve to ask her to get dinner with me Friday night.

Only I was too late. Janelle wasn’t alone. Kevin Collins stood next to her in his baseball uniform, squirting his water bottle at her face. She grimaced as she used the ripped neck of her T-shirt to wipe the cut above her eye. He acted like he was going to squirt her again, and she shoved his shoulder, in a way that only longtime friends can.

I watched them, for probably a few seconds too long, before I swallowed down the disappointment of another missed opportunity and headed back to It’s a Grind. I could at least get my coffee.

“Come watch the game. I’ll give you a ride home after,” Kevin was saying as I passed them.

“No thanks. I’ve heard what happens when you give girls a ride home,” she said, walking away. For a split second I thought about going after her.

“Hey, I’m just trying to be nice!” Kevin called.

She looked back but kept walking. “You forget, Kevin, I know you. You aren’t capable of nice.”

I paused. If I went after her now, she would think I was like him, trying to take advantage of the situation. Or she would think I was weird, jumping into a fight to help a girl that I’ve never even spoken to. Worse, she would be right.

I pulled my eyes away from her and went inside to buy my coffee. I’d get rid of this headache and go to work, and today would just be another day in a long line of days that I didn’t manage to talk to her.

By the time I got off work, Elijah and Reid had heard about it. I knew that as soon as I stepped outside the shop and saw them waiting for me.

We were hanging out tonight, we hung out every night, but even with Reid’s new car, they never would have come to pick me up.

Not unless they were pissed.

I didn’t say anything as I got into the backseat. There was really nothing for me to say. I wasn’t about to deny anything: They wouldn’t believe me. Besides, we didn’t lie to each other. Everybody else, sure, but not each other. Not after everything we’d been through.

Eli turned and stared me down as Reid drove through Pacific Beach.

I looked straight at him and refused to flinch. I couldn’t take back what I’d done. I didn’t want to.

It wasn’t until we were pulling onto the 5 that finally Reid couldn’t take it anymore. “You want to explain yourself?” he asked, breaking the silence.

I shrugged. If they’d heard about the fight, they’d know who was involved and why I jumped in. They’d have heard about the burn on that girl’s arm, and they’d know what had happened. I didn’t need to explain it.

“What the fuck, man?” Eli said.

“You broke the rules!” Reid added.

“I know.” I did know, and it wasn’t something I did lightly, which they should both know.

I was the one who’d set the rules. Coming through the portal years ago had side effects on all of us. When we got angry, we burned things with our touch. It happened to Eli first. He lost control of his temper while arguing with his foster parents. He grabbed a plastic baseball bat they’d given him, planning to snap it in half, and instead it melted in his hands. After that I did the same to a plastic water bottle, Reid burned a hole through his couch cushions, and Eli almost blew up his Christmas tree. That’s when we started to put it together.

There was something different about us.

It wasn’t just the world we lived in that had changed. We had too. The portal altered us.

Burning things in anger was problematic. We needed to know how to control it, so I started studying what I could do. I channeled the anger and tried to change things, then I took the emotion out of it, and I tried to reverse it. If I could melt ice into water, maybe I could turn it back, too.

The real progress, though, came when Brett Edgerly stole my lunch money in seventh grade. Reid gave me half his sandwich and Eli offered to beat him up, but I just watched Brett from across the cafeteria as he used my money to buy two twenty-ounce bottles of Coke. I filled a paper cup with water and stared at it, wishing that soda was mine. I tried to convince myself that it didn’t matter, then I got an idea. I thought about Coke and the molecular structure of it, and I went over to where Brett was sitting and let him call me a loser. Then I reached over and grabbed his Coke, and as I focused on it, I felt that familiar burn in my chest. It built, spreading into my arms, and I urged it onto the bottle. By the time Brett pushed me and grabbed his soda away from me, the carbonation was gone. I had turned it flat.

That’s when I realized the extent of what we could do. We could manipulate molecular structure, change the physiological makeup of things. With the right focus we could heal broken skin, turn a kitchen table to a pile of dust, or burn someone. We were like radioactive superheroes, and there were practically no limits to what we were capable of.

Which was why I came up with limits to impose on us. Rules to keep us all in check.

No using our abilities on other people.

No using our abilities in anger.

And no using our abilities in front of other people. That was the easiest way for us to get turned into some governmental science experiment.

I had just broken all three.

Eli was still staring at me. “You know? That’s it? You fucking know?”

I glanced out the window and watched the lights flicker by. There wasn’t anything else to say.

“You can’t just go around making rules and then breaking them when you feel like it,” Reid added.

“It wasn’t about that,” I said. “It was Janelle, she was in trouble—”

“She’s always in trouble!” Reid yelled. “And you always have to run to her rescue, but she doesn’t even know you’re alive. You should be helping us figure out how to get home.”

“What do you think I’ve been doing?” I said.

“I know what you’re doing. You’re risking exposing us because you’re too busy worrying about some chick who doesn’t matter.” Reid slammed his hand into the steering wheel to accentuate his point.

“I care about her,” I said, trying to keep my voice even.

“You don’t even know her.”

I looked at Eli.

“Dude, you don’t,” he added. I knew what he meant: Just because she saved my life that day in the ocean, that didn’t mean I knew her. The truth is, we had never had a real conversation.

I couldn’t tell him that I did know her, though. That I knew her expressions and her movements, that I understood the emotions in her voice. That wasn’t what mattered. Even if I thought I knew her, she didn’t know me.

“You’re right,” I said. “I shouldn’t have done it. I just . . .”

“I get it. She saved you; you think you owe her a debt.” Eli shook his head. “You don’t anymore—that debt has been repaid.”

I couldn’t force myself to put a lie into words so I changed the subject. “We’re getting closer,” I said. It was true, even if we weren’t quite there yet.

When we went through the portal, we had some of Reid’s father’s notes. From them we’d started trying to re-create his machine that had opened the portal and gotten us here. It wasn’t easy, even with the notes. We didn’t understand a lot of them, and building this thing from scratch in Reid’s foster parents’ garage had its problems even if we knew what we were doing.

Reid pulled the car into his driveway and slammed it into park. It felt deliberate, like he was disagreeing with me.

“We’re so fucking close, I can practically taste it,” Eli said. “Before summer we’ll be home, and you’ll be so famous, you’ll have to fight the chicks off. That’ll make you forget about the ones here.”

I nodded, despite the tightening in my chest. I wanted to get us home. I needed to. It was my fault we’d gone through the portal, and we’d been here so long I was having trouble remembering my real life: my parents and my brother. I had a hard time picturing their faces or hearing their voices. I had to get back to them.

I just didn’t want to forget Janelle.

As we got out of the car, I caught sight of Reid’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

He was still pissed.

The next morning I officially became a stalker.

I thought about dropping it. I knew I should. Eli had been right. Janelle didn’t know me, and checking up on her was borderline creepy, or just plain creepy, but it was daylight, and I wasn’t following her home. I was a friendly, good-intentioned stalker. I just wanted to see that she was okay and maybe get the chance to talk to her. At least that was what I told myself. They probably all say that.

During lunch I hacked into the school’s intranet with a password I’d lifted from my counselor and gave myself two third-period classes, something I could easily fix later without anyone being the wiser. Then I ditched biology. My teacher didn’t take attendance, and I wasn’t known for class participation, so it was unlikely he’d notice my absence, or care.

I headed into Janelle’s English class a few minutes late. This teacher, Ms. Kompt, apparently did take attendance. She had the screen open on her computer, and everyone in class was writing silently at their desk. Only a few looked up at me. One of them was Reid, and from the look on his face, I knew I’d have to explain this later.

Ignoring him, I handed Ms. Kompt the paperwork I’d printed out. “I think the schedule change is wrong. I’ve already filed my paperwork to have it fixed, but they said to come here anyway.”

She sighed and handed me a copy of Lord of the Flies, a book I’d actually enjoyed reading a few years ago. “Well, just grab an open seat. The prompt is on the board. Maybe you’ll learn something.”

I didn’t respond. That I would learn what I needed to in a classroom at Eastview was doubtful. Not that it was a bad school. It wasn’t, I guess. But to get home, I needed to know things beyond what Eastview’s educational system was equipped to give me.

Most of the open seats were in the back. I scanned them to see which was closest to Janelle. Then I saw her.

Her face was a little bruised, but she looked as beautiful as she always did. Her eyes were downcast, and she was writing something on her paper. Like this was just another day. I felt strangely proud of her for holding her own. For putting up a fight.

She was fine. I knew I should just leave. It wasn’t too late. If I turned around and left, changed my schedule back, or even just left for the day, nothing would have changed.

“Ben?”

I turned back to Ms. Kompt.

“Any seat will do.”

I nodded and made my way to the open seat right behind Janelle. I held my breath as I passed her, just waiting for her to look up and ask me why I was stalking her.

She didn’t look up.

I sat down behind her and rummaged through my backpack as the teacher started moving around the room, checking on everyone’s progress. When I had a broken pencil and wrinkled piece of loose-leaf paper, I looked at the prompt on the board.

Are humans inherently good or inherently evil? Support your position with at least three examples.

That was a complicated question. Something that would realistically take much more than ten minutes of free-writing time. It wasn’t black-and-white. Circumstances needed to be factored in.

The teacher paused at Janelle’s desk. She didn’t say anything at first, but when Janelle didn’t offer up any information, she said, “What happened?”

“Skiing accident,” Janelle said without looking up from her paper.

Almost everyone in class snickered at that. They’d already heard what happened yesterday, and this was San Diego in March. There weren’t any places to go skiing after school around here.

The teacher pressed her mouth into a straight line. She knew it was a lie, but she just turned to me and tapped my blank paper. I nodded and started writing the question down for good measure.

“Hey, J,” whispered the kid next to her. Chuck something. “What was the fight about?”

She didn’t answer.

“I heard you’re sleeping with Matheson.” He clutched his chest. “Say it ain’t so.”

“And you’re dumb enough to believe that?” Janelle rolled her eyes. “He texted me about homework. Brooke had to come and warn me to stay away from him.”

“Who threw the first punch?”

Janelle turned to him. “I might have told her that if she had to warn me to stay away from her boyfriend, she didn’t have a very good hold on him.” She smiled. “It might not have been the best thing to say.”

Chuck snickered. “So you’re still saving yourself for me?”

“You’re delusional.” She shook her head and looked back at her paper.

I wanted to say something, to reach out, touch her shoulder and tell her she was better than the whole lot of them. I knew she was. She saved my life.

But contrary to what Reid and Eli thought, it wasn’t just that. Janelle was different. She read The Great Gatsby during lunch, had actual conversations with teachers, was nice to underclassmen, volunteered at a tutoring center. She was loyal to her friends, and she took good care of her brother. I’d seen her walking him home from middle school and cheering for him at the community pool. She was sarcastic and funny, though she probably thought she was being aloof.

She was like me, or not exactly, since I didn’t do any of those things. I wanted to, though. Even though they weren’t the cool things, if I wasn’t so preoccupied with trying to get us home, I might have done them.

I wanted to do them.

Other than Eli and Reid, I didn’t have a meaningful connection with anyone here. My parents and my brother, they weren’t here—they were in another world. I hadn’t formed bonds with any of my foster parents. Reid and I weren’t ever the kind of friends that shared secrets, and Eli, despite the fact that he was my best friend, hadn’t coped well with the last six years. I felt weighed down by loneliness.

I wanted a connection, and I guess I felt that the person most likely to connect with me was Janelle.

It was hard to explain, but somehow she made me feel less like a freak from a different universe.

Even though we’d never had a real conversation, she was the reason that I felt like this wasn’t the worst place I could have ended up. Like maybe there was hope for me, even if I couldn’t ever get us home.

It made me wonder if there was a girl back home, someone similar, that I was supposed to fall for. Some nights I stayed up and thought about how my life would’ve turned out on the right side of the portal, who that girl would’ve been. I imagined us staying out past curfew, making out in my car, driving my parents crazy.

Either this universe knew what I was thinking about, or it was trying to torture me, because at that moment, Janelle arched her back, stretching her arms over her head. Her hair, dark and shiny, brushed the tip of my desk. It smelled sweet, and I breathed in just a little too deeply. She smelled impossibly good. I didn’t know what it was about girls and how they could always manage that. I touched the spot on my desk where her hair had been. Don’t judge me. Maybe I’m not making this clear enough.

Emotional connection aside, there were a couple of other things I liked about her. She was hot, and sometimes that was really hard to ignore. Especially right now when she pulled her hair into some kind of fancy thing on top of her head, and I could see the two little freckles behind her right ear. They were tiny, like two points of a triangle, and they always made me wonder if she had any other freckles in hidden places.

She shifted in her seat and I looked away.

I reminded myself I was trying to avoid the creepy aspects of being a stalker and forced myself to stare at my loaner copy of Lord of the Flies.

The pivotal moments in your life are always made up of smaller pieces, things that seemed insignificant at the time, but in fact brought you to where you needed to be.

Moments like breaking up a fight, arguing with my best friends, ditching biology to check up on a girl. Leaving school later than I normally would have.

Fixing my schedule took longer than I expected because I ran into my biology teacher, who forced me to sit down and take the quiz that I missed when I was in someone else’s class.

I didn’t have to work, so I was headed straight to Reid’s house when I saw it: Janelle’s truck, pulled over and abandoned on the side of Black Mountain Road, steam rising off the engine.

I couldn’t see her, but I knew the truck was hers because it was from the 1960s with a faded paint job, and everyone else with a car in this area had something new and trendy like a Prius.

I walked toward the truck and went over what I would say to her when she came back. When we were kids, my brother was obsessed with cars, and he spent all his time lecturing me about them and showing me what he could do. Now I worked restoring motorcycles, not exactly a mechanic, but the closest she was going to get just outside of the Eastview parking lot. I’d take a look, do what I could to fix it, and she’d be able drive it home.

This was my second chance in two days, or maybe my third, since I sat behind her in English only a few hours ago. It was fate or a sign from the cosmos or something telling me that I had to get up the nerve and actually talk to this girl. That thought bolstered me somehow. It calmed my nerves and forced me to stand up a little straighter.

When I got closer to the truck, I realized she wasn’t anywhere in sight. Not sitting in the cab of the truck calling someone to help her and not trying to check out the engine and see if she could help herself. It was like she pulled over, opened the hood, and then just left it there.

For some reason that image made me smile. She had probably cursed it off or something before she left.

She’d have to come back, though. No matter how much anyone hated their car, they couldn’t just leave it on the side of the road.

I took out my phone. If she came back and I was just standing here, I at least needed to look like I was trying to be helpful.

I already had a text from Eli: WHERE U AT.

I thought about responding, about telling him that I was still at Eastview or that I was on my way, but the last thing I needed was him and Reid coming down to pick me up again.

Slipping the phone back in my pocket, I looked around. It was almost four, and the parking lot had pretty much emptied out. Only five cars were left. The teachers had packed it in and headed home for the weekend. There weren’t any events coming up tonight, so the lots by the sports fields and the theater were both empty too.

I dropped my backpack on the ground and moved around to the front of the truck to check out the problem. It had been standing there long enough that the engine had cooled off, and I spotted the problem immediately: no coolant. The entire engine compartment was covered with the green liquid, hence the steam coming off it. There was definitely a leak somewhere. If I could find it, it would be pretty easy to fix, just fuse the plastic or rubber back together, depending on what was broken.

Of course, Reid and Eli would be pissed about it.

There was no one around. I wouldn’t technically be breaking any of the rules. If Janelle came back, I’d tell her I was walking past the truck and realized I could help.

It took me longer than I anticipated to find the leak. Once I did, it was easy to seal. I focused the energy inside me to my fingertips. I visualized the molecules in the plastic. I saw them multiplying, sealing up the hole, fusing back together.

When it was finished, I turned around, half expecting to find Janelle staring at me, wanting to know what I’d just done to her car, but she still wasn’t back. I grabbed my backpack and debated what to do next. I could keep waiting for her, explain she was out of coolant, or I could just head to Reid’s. The sun had already started dropping lower behind the hills, and the sky was just going to get darker. My phone seemed to be vibrating every few seconds with a new text from Eli wondering where I was. I second-guessed my intentions. What would I really say to her now if she came back? For one, the car was already fixed, minus the coolant and water that would need to be replaced. Worse, I’d been here too long to use the “I was walking home from school and saw your car” excuse.

Maybe all that stuff about fate and signs was really bull. Janelle had pulled me out of the ocean six years ago, but even though we went to the same school and should have run into each other all the time, I’d never spoken to her. Maybe that was the real sign.

I was so lost in thinking about what I should do that I didn’t hear her come up behind me.

“Hey, Ben, what are you doing?”

I jumped and whirled around, not sure what my excuse was or how she knew my name.

She stood there, her arms folded across her chest, her black hair fanned out behind her in the wind.

Only it wasn’t Janelle. It was Marissa Alegado.

“Hey,” I said. I was relieved and disappointed at the same time. “I’m on my way to Reid’s.”

“Is this your truck?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I just stopped to see what was wrong with it.”

“Oh, that’s so nice of you.” She leaned in and touched my arm as she said it.

Nice was one way to look at it. Weird was another. I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I didn’t say anything.

“What are you guys up to tonight?”

I shrugged. “Probably the usual.” Trying to re-create a machine that will open a portal between universes.

“I’m heading down to Roxy’s place,” she said, gesturing to the apartments behind Eastview. “Her parents are out of town and she’s having a party. You guys should come by.”

I nodded.

“What about tomorrow night? Do you have plans?” she asked.

“Um, I’m not sure.” Probably doing the same thing as tonight.

“Would you want to go see a movie or something?” I didn’t react and she hurried on. “We could go with Courtney and Reid and then grab dinner after?”

“Oh . . . yeah, maybe,” I said. I knew Marissa liked me. This was the first time she’d asked me out, but she always sat near me at lunch and leaned into me or touched me when she talked. She was cute, and I liked her. I mean, we were friends. At the same time, though, it just felt wrong to lead her on when I’d be keeping two huge secrets from her: that I was from another universe, and that just this afternoon I’d been stalking another girl.

Whether fate and the signs were real or just part of my imagination, when I thought about what my life would be like on the other side of the portal and about the girl that I’d make out with in a darkened movie theater and tell my secrets to and introduce to my parents, she always looked like Janelle.

“I have to check with Eli,” I said, trying to come up with an excuse. “I think he wanted me to help him with something this weekend.”

“Oh, okay,” Marissa said. She sounded like she was trying not to be disappointed, and I felt like a jerk. “Maybe another time.”

I nodded and dug my phone out of my pocket. “I gotta get going.”

Marissa nodded. “Have a good weekend,” she said, as she started down the hill.

“You too,” I said, and I texted Eli back. I’M ON MY WAY.

Where have you been?” Reid asked me when I got to his place. His foster parents didn’t mind that we’d turned their garage into a workstation. They fed us dinner but left us alone. It was ideal.

I ignored him and looked at Eli. The question was his, even if he wasn’t the one who had spoken it out loud. I spit out the details.

“So you went to her English class and fixed her truck today?” Reid said. “So much for backing off.”

“What does it matter? You’ve been dating Courtney since Christmas and nobody gives a crap.”

“This isn’t about him,” Eli said throwing his hands up.

And that was the problem, for me and for Reid. Nothing was ever about him. It was always about me. I got us into this mess and I needed to get us out.

I shook my head. “Let’s just leave it alone.”

“Oh right, because that will solve anything,” Reid said.

“Look, you can’t be a hero every time Janelle Tenner has a bad fucking day,” Eli added.

Reid pointed his finger at me. “You’re risking everything. What if someone finds out we came through a portal and now we can do some freaky shit? They’ll quarantine us in some lab and do tests on us. We’ll never get home.”

“I was careful,” I said. “No one saw me.”

“That isn’t the point,” Eli said, his voice rising.

“Really? Then what is the point?”

“You shouldn’t be standing around and waiting on some girl when we have more important things to do,” Eli yelled.

“You both were here,” I said. “And I’m here now.”

“Two hours late,” Reid said.

“I’ve spent every free second thinking about getting back. What have you done?” I yelled. “You can’t give me two hours to do something that might make me feel good about what I’m doing here?”

“I don’t care if you feel good,” Eli yelled. “We need to get home!”

“Maybe we’re never going to get home!”

It wasn’t the first time I’d thought it. For six years we’d been trying to replicate what got us here, with just half of Reid’s father’s notes. It was hard to not feel doubtful sometimes.

It was the first time I’d put that doubt into words, though. It was the first time I’d uttered them out loud. For a long time I’d taken the lead on this. I’d promised them both we’d figure out a way to get back.

Now I’d just admitted I didn’t know if I’d be able to deliver, and it stunned all three of us into silence.

I needed to take it back, but as soon as I opened my mouth, Eli tackled me. I hit the ground hard, my shoulders slamming against the concrete floor of the garage. My insides twisted from the impact, and the wind fled from my lungs. I blocked Eli’s incoming punch with my forearm, but he swung a second time and connected with my jaw.

Then his hand came down on my chest, and I felt energy rip through me.

Above us Reid moved in, to help Eli or to pull him back, I couldn’t be sure. I put a hand up, stiff-arming Eli to keep him off me.

Like that, with the three of us emotionally charged and wrestling for some kind of control over our lives, I was overwhelmed by a memory of home.

It was Christmas Eve, the last one I spent at home. The house smelled like pine from the Christmas tree and vanilla from the cookies my mother was baking. There was soft jazz holiday music playing—my father’s favorite. I knew all the words to every song, because I’d heard the album so many times. Our dog, Hope, was wearing a bright red bow around her neck, chewing a bone shaped like a candy cane. I had my hands wrapped around the warmth of a mug filled with eggnog. It was the first time my mother had let me have some.

“I know what all your presents are,” Derek whispered in my ear. “But I’m not going to tell you.”

I turned to look at him, and I didn’t need him to tell me. From the smile on his face, I knew I was going to get everything I’d asked for.

Suddenly the energy inside my chest flared, like a dam breaking open. It burst out of me, throwing Eli off me, making the lights flicker.

A chill swept through the room, the air smelled damp, and with a flash a black hole opened up in front of us.

One second it wasn’t there, and the next it was.

A portal.

I pushed to my feet. We stood there for what had to be a full minute, just staring at it.

It looked exactly how I remembered: huge and unnaturally black, like a pool of oil. Yet something about the portal made it seem like a living thing. I couldn’t help wondering if it remembered us, too.

Eli was the first one to speak. “Holy shit.” He reached out to touch the rippling black.

I caught his hand. I wasn’t sure what touching it would do.

“It’s a portal,” Reid said.

“Yeah, we caught on, dude,” Eli said.

I didn’t say anything. I just stared at it. After six years of trying to replicate that stupid machine, here we were, standing in front of a portal we’d created on our own. We didn’t need a machine. We might have been able to click our heels and go home at any point during the past six years, and we were too thick to know it.

“So why are we standing here?” Reid said. “Should we go through or what?”

It was a good question, but I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t know where it would take us.

Eli must have been thinking the same thing. He looked at me and asked, “Can it get us home?” and the hope in his voice gave me pause.

“I don’t know if it’s that easy.”

“Why not?” Reid asked.

I didn’t know how many universes there were. This one wasn’t parallel to ours—at least it didn’t seem like it was. We had portaled out of a garage and into the Pacific Ocean. Landmarks were different; societal structure seemed different. We’d never seen a double: anyone who looked like us or our parents or even anyone we knew. That all suggested there had to be more than just two universes. There could be hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of universes out there. There was too much I didn’t know, so I settled for what I did. “I don’t know where it goes.”

“So what?” Reid asked. “We can just go through and figure it out.”

“And then what?” I shook my head. “If it doesn’t take us home, it could take us someplace worse.”

Eli nodded. “We’ll figure it out.” Suddenly he let out a laugh and punched me in the shoulder. “You just opened a fucking portal with your mind!”

It wasn’t really my mind that did it, but this wasn’t the time to argue with him. We’d opened a portal for the second time in our lives. We might not know where it would take us, but if we could get a portal open, we were halfway there.

Halfway home.

I smiled. We had a shot: We could really get home.

I’d been playing the optimist and saying it for six years, making promises and assurances that I would figure out a way to get us back. But for the first time, I actually believed it.

We were going to get home.

Somehow, even after opening the portal, getting home ended up feeling farther away than it ever had before. For 148 days, I had done what I was supposed to do. I’d stayed away from Janelle and spent every free moment of my spring and summer with Eli and Reid trying to figure it out. But at the end of those 148 days, we still had more questions than answers.

How many universes were out there?

How could we open a portal that would take us home rather than somewhere else?

What kind of side effects would there be this time?

Would we even make it alive?

We’d opened a dozen more portals. That had gotten easier, but the problem was once the portal was open, we didn’t know what to do with it.

It felt hopeless. I wasn’t even sure what we were trying to accomplish anymore. Each time we opened a portal, it was just . . . there.

This was our last chance. We had to do something different. We couldn’t keep living in two worlds: physically in one and mentally in another.

We couldn’t keep killing people, either.

Dude,” Eli said, glancing back at me from his bike. “Do you really think this will work?”

I didn’t know. That we were so close and yet home was still so out of reach wasn’t lost on any of us.

“I don’t,” Reid said, as we pulled onto the dusty shoulder of Highway 101.

“I wasn’t fucking asking you,” Eli said. “I was talking to Ben.”

I didn’t need to answer him, though. I’d told him what I thought at least a hundred times. Saying it again wasn’t going to make it sound any more hopeful.

I got off my bike and pushed it behind some of the random shrubbery up there. Eli followed suit, while Reid took his bike across from us, on the other side of the bushes, like he wanted to be separate.

I’d chosen this spot. We’d tried to get out in the water once, but it was summer and people were everywhere. Even at night, there were bonfire parties and midnight surfers. We’d all snuck out and come here at three in the morning a few weeks ago, but nothing had worked right. It was too hard to concentrate and work to stay afloat offshore. Plus, there were jellyfish everywhere, and once Eli got stung, he refused to go back in. So we were here, because it was as close as we could get to where we needed to be without being seen.

“I’m just saying,” Reid explained. “This isn’t even where we came through.”

“What, asshole, you got a boat we don’t know about?” Eli asked.

Reid didn’t answer.

“Then how the fuck can we do this in the middle of the ocean?”

“I’m just saying—”

“Shit that doesn’t matter. Let Ben do the thinking.” Eli punched Reid in the shoulder. It was meant to be light and friendly, but I’d been on the other side of Eli’s punches before and it didn’t feel good.

I looked at Reid and tilted my head toward Eli, making my “he’s being stupid” face, trying to offer an apology. After all, Reid was right. When we opened the portal the very first time, we fell through and ended up here: Torrey Pines Beach, about a hundred yards offshore.

“I don’t have a better idea,” I said.

It wasn’t the heat making sweat run down my spine, and not just nerves making my hands shake. It was the way Eli rubbed his hands together, the smile on his lips when he said, “Let’s do this.” It was the pressure, the fact that I knew that in just minutes we would be home, dead, or without hope.

Eli was tired of opening portals and not doing anything. He was tired of not making progress and tired of being stuck in this fake life. He wanted to open a portal and go through.

I thought that was a risk we couldn’t afford to take. There were too many factors, too many things we didn’t understand. I didn’t want to end up somewhere worse, or dead. What if a portal opened five hundred feet off the ground? What if it opened up somewhere freezing or in the middle of a civil war? Going through a portal, we could literally end up anywhere. We had been lucky to end up here the first time. There are worse places, much worse.

But Reid sided with Eli, and I had been overruled. We were going to open a portal, and one of us was going to go through to see what was on the other side. We were essentially experimenting with ourselves. Trial by fire.

Despite the risk, a small part of me was eager to get it over with. We’d been stuck in the same repetitive rhythm for too long. I needed answers, and if this was the only way to get them . . .

Since we were taking that risk, I wanted us to be as close as we could to where we’d come through. Maybe that would make a difference.

Reid was shaking his head, though, and I knew nothing I said was going to matter. He was frustrated with me, with the rules and restrictions I put on us, and with how much faith Eli put in me. I didn’t blame him. He was stuck here because of me.

I blew air into my hands. No need to prolong the inevitable.

I looked around one last time. Highway 101 ran right against the coast. It was flat, almost even with sea level for about three miles where Torrey Pines State Reserve sat, but then it sloped uphill at a steep angle as the cliffs sprang up along the coastline. We were about a quarter mile from the base of the hill, two lanes from the cliffs, with marshland to our backs.

If we had to live a fake life somewhere, this wasn’t the worst place. There were probably an infinite number of worse places to be, but it had been seven years since I’d seen my family, and this place wasn’t home. No matter how long we were here, it would never be home.

“Is this going to happen today, or what?”

I didn’t answer. I needed a minute. To calm my nerves, to say good-bye, to send out a prayer to whatever higher power there could be in the multiverse. I wanted to be ready for whatever was going to come next.

Reid could wait.

The last few weeks, he’d been pissed. At me, at his girlfriend, at his foster parents, at everything. The fake life was finally getting to him. He was usually so good at it. There had even been times when I thought he liked it here. He ate dinner with his parents; he did his homework and got good grades. He’d dated the same girl for almost six months. He had even gotten involved with student council.

That feeling, the restlessness that comes with knowing you belong somewhere else, it never seemed to affect Reid. It consumed me, turned me in on myself. I’d grown quiet and singularly focused on the couple of things that mattered to me. It had eaten away at Eli, turned him into an escapist with a short temper and a quick fuse.

Only it was Reid with the quick fuse right now. I’d known him my whole life. We knew more about each other than anyone else ever could, but I couldn’t pretend I’d ever understand him.

The beach below us was still crowded, even though the afternoon sun was already fading. Girls in bikinis, with their coolers and beach umbrellas, their blankets and towels spread out on the sand. Surfers in their wet suits were in the water. Maybe even a few kids with bodyboards and flippers, maybe a girl in a pink bathing suit, like the one who pulled me out of the water seven years ago.

“You’re not going to be able to see her,” Reid said, reading my mind. It wouldn’t have been hard for him. I was a pretty open book when it came to that girl. “Stop staring. You’re giving me heartburn.”

I didn’t respond. I wasn’t about to deny something they both knew was true.

This place wasn’t home, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t something good here. Something I would miss.

Rather someone.

Janelle.

She was lifeguarding down at the beach; at least she probably was. She had been there most of the days this summer when I’d gone to the beach to stare at the waves, though I still hadn’t spoken to her. Still hadn’t gotten up the nerve to say something, anything. Now that I could be about to go home, I wanted more time.

Time to tell her that she made this fake life bearable.

But I never got the chance. I flexed my hands and headed over to the people who knew me.

Eli clapped me on the back. “Don’t worry, my friend. There will be plenty of hot chicks in bikinis at home.”

The if we get there hung in between us. He thought we would. I didn’t, but I was willing to try anyway. I had to. I owed it to my parents and to my friends who were here because of me.

“Ready to do this?” I asked, hoping that for some reason being here would change their minds.

Eli jumped around a little and shook his arms. He was actually smiling, something he didn’t do all that often.

“What’s the plan?” Reid asked. “You’re just going to open the portal?”

“No.” I shook my head. “We should all do it. Just like the first time.”

“The second time,” Reid corrected.

“You know what I mean.”

“Who cares?” Eli cut in. “We put our hands together, we focus, and we open a fucking portal. Once it’s open, we go through.”

“I’ll go first.” I didn’t want to, but it was only fair. I’d gone first the last time. “Take it slow. We can’t rush this.”

I swallowed hard. The plan was for me to go almost completely through to the other side. I would leave only my hand behind, for Eli and Reid to hold on to. If I made it somewhere else, I would give them a thumbs up and keep going through. If I died . . . I wouldn’t.

I left something out before when I said we didn’t know anything new since we opened that portal 148 days ago. We opened more portals since the first one. Now we weren’t sure how or why we had made it through the portal the first time and if we could really go through one now.

Because the last portal we’d opened had come at a price. Collateral damage, Eli called it.

I called it a person. We’d brought a person into this world. We’d opened a portal, and a person had come through.

A person who was dead.

I didn’t know if we had killed him or if it was something else, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to risk putting more people in danger.

This was the last portal I was going to open.

We would get home, or the portal would kill us, or we would be stuck here forever. This last portal was all I had left in me.

We stood facing each other in a half circle and put our hands in front of us, like it was some sort of partial huddle. It would have looked weird to someone else and it felt weird to us, but it seemed the most logical way to do this.

“So we just fucking hold hands and think of home, or what?” Eli said.

“Click your heels first,” Reid replied.

I didn’t know if there was a right formula. “Thinking of home makes the most sense,” I said, even though I wasn’t really sure that it made sense at all. The truth was I didn’t understand what we could do any better than they did, but I supposed thinking of home couldn’t hurt.

“All right, let’s do this,” Reid said.

All six of our hands came together.

I gathered the energy in my body into my chest, and I tried to think of something from home. Of my parents or my brother, of anything really, but for some reason a strong memory wouldn’t come. It had been so long since I’d been with them, it was hard to remember their faces, and I sometimes worried the memories weren’t real.

I pushed the energy through my arms and out my hands and I imagined a wormhole opening up in front of us. I had done it enough times now that it was starting to feel almost natural.

It started slowly. In front of our hands, the blackness seemed to open up from nowhere, and as it expanded, the wind picked up, like the portal was swallowing everything around it and sucking it inside.

“Keep concentrating on it,” I said. In front of me the portal grew into a wide circle, taller than I was, rippling and black. It looked like it was full of nothingness, the absence of space, like if you got sucked into it you would cease to exist, but I knew different.

I took a deep breath, held it, and stuck my arm right through.

“What the—” Eli said, but I ignored him.

My arm felt cold and a little numb, and the portal rippled around my skin. I felt compelled to keep going, like the portal itself was somehow urging me into it. Almost like a suction, it held on to me and pulled on me. I wasn’t sure what dying from a portal would feel like, but this wasn’t it.

I glanced back to remind them both to wait for a sign before jumping through, but I didn’t get the chance. Around me the portal seemed to shiver, and from the other side, I heard a rumble.

I pulled my arm out. “Something isn’t right.”

“I’ll go through,” Eli said, but I shook my head.

The portal was still growing, still spreading out, expanding, like it was going to swallow as much of this world as it could. It didn’t look like the portal we had originally gone through back when we were kids. It wasn’t still or steady. It looked like it was vibrating as it grew, and the edges weren’t clean. They looked like they were fraying, little tendrils of the portal spinning off and dissolving into the air.

“Shut it down,” I said, stepping back from it. I grabbed Reid and Eli each by an arm and pulled them back with me.

Then something came through the black.

I saw it first. It was fast, a streak of blue, and my mind struggled to make sense of it. I wanted to be relieved, because it didn’t look like a body, but somehow deep down, I knew there were worse things than bodies to bring in from other worlds.

Then I realized what I was hearing. Skidding tires and the squeal of worn brakes.

It was a pickup truck, old and faded blue, and not from this world. And now it was flying down the hill, down Highway 101, swerving like no one was in control.

Everything happened in slow motion.

We were only two lanes of highway from the cliffs and the beach, on a hill a quarter mile up from where people and families were laughing and relaxing and enjoying one of their last carefree days of summer.

As the truck barreled through the portal, I saw her.

Janelle.

The red of her bathing suit and matching shorts caught my eye first. She stood down the hill, at the edge of the parking lot, on the cusp of the road. Directly in the truck’s path.

Tanned skin, her brown hair pulled back on top of her head, sneakers on her feet, her cell phone to her ear.

She was talking to someone. It must have been someone important. She was pinching the bridge of her nose, like she always did whenever she was stressed and trying to figure something out, and even though I couldn’t see them, I knew her eyes would be closed. I’d seen her make that face a lot.

Before I could even think through what I was doing, I was running toward her.

When my mind kicked in, it told me what I already knew, what I should have already thought of: I was going to be too late.

So I screamed her name.

She turned toward me and saw the truck. It was almost on top of her.

She threw an arm up in front of her head, like she was bracing for the impact.

Then it hit her.

When I got to her, she was still. Not breathing. One of her eyes was open and red with blood. Her collarbone was jutting up through the skin, and her lower back was bent at the wrong angle. Worse, her head was turned too far to be natural. Her neck had to be broken.

She was dead.

A cold blankness swept through me. I somehow felt both numb and like I’d been ripped in two. I had seen it happen. I could see her in front of me, and I knew it was real, but part of me still rejected it. This couldn’t be real. I’d watched her get hit by the truck, but that was impossible because she was good and I would never hurt her.

I fell by her side, and my hands shook as I reached for her neck.

I stopped thinking. I righted her head, ignoring the wave of nausea that rolled through me at the way it flopped loosely in my hands. I wasn’t going to let this end this way, not a chance.

I could feel the break in her neck, the separation of the vertebrae and spinal cord. I gathered all my strength and funneled it down through my hands and into her, feeling the bones and flesh shift under my fingertips. When things were whole again, I moved my hands to her chest, not letting up with the flow of energy, afraid it would stop if I did. I pushed harder, focusing on her heart, willing it to start beating again.

It didn’t.

I needed more energy. I pulled with everything I had, until I was light-headed and my ears started to ring. Everything I’d ever felt for her, all those complex feelings I didn’t understand and couldn’t put a name to. I forced it through my arms, out of my fingertips, and into her.

“Janelle, please,” I whispered. “Janelle, stay with me.”

I thought of everything I knew about her, everything good about who she was, the things she did, the way she smiled, the sound of her laugh. And I channeled them into her.

I remembered the first moment we met.

I’d fallen through the portal and blacked out. The next thing I knew, I was freezing. Water was everywhere, I was submerged, my head was throbbing, and my arms and legs were too heavy and sluggish to move. I was sinking. I didn’t know how to get to the surface, or which way was up. The salt water stung my eyes, and my insides burned because I needed to breathe. I tried harder to move, but nothing happened, and I needed air. Needed it so badly, my mouth opened, even though there was only water.

Then she saved me. She wrapped an arm around my chest and pulled me up to the surface. I coughed, gasped for air, and vomited all at the same time. I even thrashed out for something solid to grab on to, but she didn’t let go. She held on to me, leaning me against a floating spongy thing, and then I had control of myself.

Soon I could look at her and see that she was an angel. Long dark hair wet and plastered against her face, long eyelashes, chocolate eyes. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Then she turned us, the sun moved behind her, and all I could see was her outline glowing against the blue sky.

I remembered that moment, her saving me, and I held on to that.

She saved me. My fake life was only possible because of her. I couldn’t exist in this world if she didn’t too.

I remembered seeing her at school for the first time. She was playing some weird game I didn’t understand with another girl and two boys on the playground. She was laughing, and the waves of her hair shook behind her. That laugh, that smile, it loosened up the fear knotted inside me, the fear of being alone, because if something that good and pure and happy existed here, it meant there was hope for me.

I recalled every memory of her I could think of: when she walked to school with her brother, ruffling his hair and teasing him; when she swam, in school meets and in the ocean, how she moved through the water like she was part of it; when she ate lunch on campus with a book on her lap; when she sat in the library and tutored underclassmen; when she was in the auditorium for debates. Even the nights when she was on the beach this summer with another guy.

And as I remembered these things, as I tried to put her back together, I realized what it was that I felt for her. It wasn’t just a crush like Eli thought, and it wasn’t even a weird obsession like Reid thought.

I loved her.

It didn’t matter that she didn’t know me or that I had never gotten up the nerve to speak to her. I didn’t need to. What I felt for her, it wasn’t about me. It was just about her. I wanted her to be happy. I wanted her to smile, whether it was small and sly, a secret smile she was sharing with a friend, or wide and contagious, the kind that turned people’s heads and made them smile too. I wanted her to laugh, the louder the better. I wanted her to feel light, happy, free. I wanted her to have everything good and perfect in this world, and I wanted to shield her from stress and sadness, no matter how small or insignificant.

More than anything, I wanted her to live. Needed her to live.

“Stay with me.” My voice cracked as I said it. I just wasn’t sure my power would be enough. “Janelle, stay with me.”

Then, as if she heard me, her eyes fluttered open, but they were unfocused.

“Hold on, Janelle. Hold on,” I whispered. I pushed her collarbone back through the skin, and set it against the other half. I winced, feeling the two ragged ends scraping together. In the next second they went smooth, as I fused the bones. She still wasn’t breathing.

“I’m sorry. You’re gonna feel this.” Next came her spinal cord. I felt her body go rigid when the connection reestablished.

She coughed blood onto my shirt. Which meant her lungs were working. One of my tears fell onto her neck.

“Ben!” It was Eli calling my name, from the direction of the truck, but I couldn’t look up or see what he wanted. I needed all my focus to fix the damage.

I moved my hand down her arm, healing the cuts she had, and then I slipped my hand under her back, feeling for the second break in her spine. When I touched it, her eyes closed and her body relaxed. She passed out.

Panic seized my chest. There was a chance that this was too much. That what I was doing to her body was too much trauma, too much energy. I could end up hurting her even more or sending her into shock or something. I thought of how she had looked right before the truck hit. Her red bathing suit and shorts, tanned skin, her brown hair pulled back on top of her head, sneakers on her feet, her cell phone to her ear, standing at the bottom of the hill, at the edge of the parking lot, on the cusp of the road. Directly in the truck’s path.

“Ben, we gotta go,” Eli said.

This was all my fault. “I’m so sorry,” I said, leaning forward, pressing my lips to her forehead.

She stirred, moving her legs with a pained sigh. I pulled back to see her eyes were open again.

“You’re going to be all right,” I breathed as I sat up. Her brown eyes looked up at me, and I said it again. “You’re going to be all right.” This time I couldn’t help but smile. Exhaustion weighed my body down, making me feel weak and dizzy, but it didn’t matter. She was really going to be okay. She looked whole again, like herself.

I brushed a strand of hair out of her face.

I had put her back together. I saved her life like she had saved mine—for real this time. She wouldn’t ever forget this. I’d be imprinted on her memory the same way she’d been imprinted on mine. Even when I went back home, we would still always be a part of each other’s lives.

Someone grabbed my arm, and I realized how little strength I had left.

“Let’s go!” Reid yelled, and Eli yanked me off the road.

Reid had his bike already, and mine and Eli’s were both lying on their sides. I didn’t have time to ask who brought my bike down or thank them for coming after me, or apologize for breaking the rules we had and the ones we didn’t.

“You okay to get up the hill?” Eli asked, grabbing my bike.

I nodded. I would have to be. We needed to get out of here. I took my bike from him, swung my leg over, and followed Reid, who’d already started up the hill.

Eli followed me, and we caught up to Reid. I felt tempted to turn around and look back, check on Janelle one last time, but I forced myself to keep going. She was alive again; she wasn’t broken. That was the best I could do.

“The guy in the truck?” I said, my voice labored.

Neither of them responded, and I knew what that meant, or I should have. I looked at Eli anyway.

He shook his head.

“Very dead,” Reid said. “Same as the other.”

“And that truck,” Eli added. “Nothing I’ve ever seen before. Definitely not from home.”

Even though I already knew that deep down, hearing it confirmed was worse than getting punched with a lead fist. I wobbled slightly on the bike, head still swimmy and weak from the exertion.

When we reached the top of the hill, the road turned inland, and I turned left down the first side street I could. I didn’t care if Eli and Reid followed me or not, even though I knew they probably would. I rode straight toward the cliffs overlooking the beach, skidded to a stop, and got off the bike.

I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t sure how everything had managed to go so wrong. We still didn’t have the right answers. We hadn’t been able to keep anything from coming through. Now we had a dead driver who was most certainly not dead when he’d been driving wherever he came from, and we’d killed Janelle. That I brought her back was a miracle, but it didn’t change that fact that everything we’d done today had been wrong. I kicked the bike and sent it skidding a few feet to the left.

“It’s okay,” Eli said. “We can try one more time, we can—”

“No,” I said, cutting him off.

The guy was a mess. He drank too much, got into too many fights, and didn’t care about anything other than getting home. He was also my best friend, and he knew me better than anyone. He heard the finality in my voice, and he nodded. A sign he knew I’d do anything for him. Anything but this.

He didn’t say another word. No outburst, no swearing, nothing. The disappointment hung heavy in the air between us, and he looked out over the ocean.

“We’ll go back to the research,” I said. “We can build a machine, something we can control. I’m not saying we won’t get home. I’m just saying this isn’t the way. There are too many variables, too many consequences.”

“Wait a minute,” Reid said, walking to Eli’s side. “We’re so close. We can’t go back to the machine. We have no chance of making that work!”

I didn’t say anything. I knew what he was getting at. We had been stuck when it came to the machine. We didn’t understand some of his father’s notes, we couldn’t find some of the same materials he’d used, and if we fixed those problems, we still didn’t know how to give the machine enough power to open a wormhole. We also didn’t know how to give it “direction.” The same problem we were having now.

Eli looked at me, and I saw him take a deep breath. He might want to get home more than any of us; he might even want to say Screw it, we didn’t know these people, and this was the price we had to pay.

“Fuck,” he said.

“Eli, come on,” Reid said. “We have to get home.”

He shook his head and looked at Reid. “We’ve also gotta live with ourselves when we get there.”

Reid turned away from us both, lacing his fingers on top of his head. I knew what he was feeling without seeing his face. I’d already faced that realization: After being an immeasurable distance from home for over six years, we’d come within inches of making it back, only to have it yanked away again.

“I’m sorry,” I said. Not just because of the way this had turned out, but because it was my fault we were here.

Eli punched me in the shoulder. Hard. I deserved it and worse. “We’ll get home,” he said. “Just another way.”

I nodded, but I didn’t believe it anymore.

I knew I would keep trying. I would devote my life to it if I had to, not necessarily for me, but for them.

I just wouldn’t tell them I’d lost hope.

Janelle knew I had to leave.

Even though I didn’t want to leave her.

A lot had happened since I’d saved her life.

Too much, it seemed, for just twenty-four days. It felt like we’d lived a lifetime together somewhere in between then and now.

After her accident, she sought me out. I told her the truth. All of it. We found the answers to my questions about the portals. We saved the world, and we lost people close to us along the way.

I fell for her even more. More than I’d thought possible. She fell in love with me, too.

So she understood.

For seven years I had thought about what it must have been like for my parents when I disappeared, when I went into the basement and just never came back. Did they know what happened to me? Did they call the cops? Did they search for me? Had they spent seven years counting the days and waiting for me to walk back through the front door?

For my own sanity, I held on to the hope that I would see them again. My mother’s hazel eyes and my father’s lopsided smile. My too-smart-for-his-own-good big brother and our goofy dog. I needed to see them again, to explain what happened, to tell them what they meant to me.

To apologize for being so careless.

Every day that passed I thought about them and what it would be like to get back home.

But when I finally got there, everything was all wrong.

Home wasn’t anything like I’d imagined.

We came home at night.

For a split second my lungs burned, my skin felt like ice, and then my knees hit concrete, hard. Around me everything was dark, but it didn’t matter, because all I could see was Janelle. The wind moved through her hair, her eyes wet with tears, her hands dark with blood. Her voice echoed in my head: the quiet desperation in the way she said my name before I left her there. I held on to that moment, willed my mind to burn it into my memory. I didn’t want to forget what we’d just been through. I didn’t want to forget even a second that I’d spent with her.

It all had just ended in the canyon behind Park Village. Reid was dead. Janelle’s friend Alex was dead. And Eli and I had just left Janelle and portaled home. In the end, what we’d tried so hard to do for seven years happened in an instant.

My throat was tight. My whole body ached. I didn’t want to leave her. I shouldn’t have left her, but I had to.

I pushed to my feet and looked around. We were in the middle of a neighborhood street, surrounded by dark, sleepy houses.

“Where are we?” Eli said as the wind picked up.

I waited. At first I wasn’t sure. Square patches of lawn and small single-family homes were everywhere.

Then I heard the wooden wind chimes.

My chest tightened. That sound. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed hearing it. I turned around, recognizing the oak tree on my parents’ front lawn. It seemed somehow both bigger and smaller than I had remembered it: a tower outside my bedroom window.

“This is my house,” I said. As my eyes adjusted, I picked out the red bricks around the garage, the white front door, the blue aluminum siding, the black shutters on the windows.

“Holy shit,” Eli said. Then he laughed, reached over, and pulled me into a headlock. “This is your house!” he screamed.

A wave of excitement moved through me. This was my house. Those bricks were the ones I cracked my head against when I was seven. I had stolen Derek’s remote control car, and he wrestled me to get it back. He pushed me and I fell. That front door, we had repainted it white with my dad. The oak tree was the same one I looked out at every night when I went to sleep, the same one I tried to climb. I had hung those wooden wind chimes after making them in school.

Nothing had changed.

I wasn’t sure how Taylor Barclay knew to send us here. Sure he was some high-up Interverse agent who was policing the universes, but I hadn’t expected him to deliver us right to my doorstep. The how and the why didn’t matter, though. I didn’t care.

My parents were inside, sleeping in that house right now.

I pulled away from Eli and jogged up the driveway. As I reached the front door, I paused.

“What are you waiting for?” Eli said when he caught up. He reached out to knock.

I grabbed his hand. “We need to remember this moment,” I said. We’d waited for this moment forever, and now we were finally here. But not all of us. Reid wasn’t here, and no matter what he had done or how it had ended, he had been part of this. Janelle and Alex had been a part of it too. We wouldn’t have gotten here without them.

Even though it might have seemed ridiculous, we needed to pause and memorize these details. I wanted to be able to tell Janelle about all of it. She loved me enough to know I needed this moment, and I wasn’t going to lose that. Our good-bye wasn’t forever. We would find a way back to one another. I knew that as much as I knew anything. We were both still alive. Just in different places.

I thought about Alex and Reid.

“Reid’s parents,” I said. I wanted to be able to tell them what this moment was like too.

Eli knew what I was thinking. “We can’t tell them what he did.”

I shook my head. We couldn’t. They deserved to remember him better than that. We could tell them this, though. We could tell them that the night was silent, the darkness almost heavy, as if the whole world was asleep. The only sounds were our own excited breaths.

I knocked on the door.

It wasn’t like in a movie. A light never flicked on. I didn’t know when she was coming. I had to keep knocking, and I had to knock hard, until my knuckles felt numb because of it.

Finally, after what seemed like minutes, I heard the locks click on the other side of the door.

A woman in a gray long-sleeved shirt and checkered blue-and-white pajama pants stood behind it. She was tall, her hair cut short around her head.

My mother.

Over seven years. Twenty-six hundred and thirty-seven days. That’s how long it had been. All of that time had added up to just one single wish: that I would get back to her, that I would see her again. I’d envisioned what she would say to me, what I would say to her.

In the end I didn’t need to say anything. She glanced at Eli and then back to me. Her mouth parted, her eyes widened, and she gasped.

I opened my mouth to explain, but she reached through the door and touched my face, as if she wasn’t quite sure I was real. Then she started to cry.

I moved in, circling my arms around her, pulling her to my chest. She was smaller and thinner than I remembered. Her skin was soft and papery, and my chest contracted. Those seven years had been long for her.

When she pulled back to look at my face again, she shook her head.

I smiled. “I’m home.”

I held her until she’d calmed down, then the three of us went inside.

My mother held my arm, leading me, and she turned on the lights as we moved through the house. “The portal,” she said. “We figured out that you went through. We looked for you. We did everything we could to try to get you back. . . .”

“I know,” I said, squeezing her hand.

She gasped when she looked down and saw mine were stained with blood.

“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “I tried to save someone who was hurt.” The blood as it washed over Janelle’s and my hands, warm and thick. The image made me shiver.

Eli and I took turns washing our hands.

“Are you hungry?” she asked as she stood in the kitchen by the sink. Under the lights I could see the lines around her eyes. She looked older than I thought she would.

I shook my head.

“How . . . ,” she started. “How did you . . .”

“Where’s Dad?” I asked. I wanted to tell them everything. We could sit in the den and drink hot chocolate. I would tell the story. It would be like every Friday night when I was a kid and we talked about the best and worst things that had happened in our week.

She didn’t answer me, though. Not right away. She moved into the den, turned on a floor lamp to its lowest setting, and then turned around. Her face was even, too even, like she was trying to keep her emotions safely guarded. “He’s not here.”

I heard her, but she sounded strange. There was an emptiness to her voice, like it was something she had said a lot. She wasn’t just saying he was out or that he was away on a trip. She was saying he didn’t live here. She sat down in an armchair.

I held my breath and waited for her to say something. For the first time it occurred to me to think about them in a different context. What if they hadn’t been sitting around waiting for me to come back? What if something else had happened? What if my father had died?

I looked around the room. It was the same beige carpet, the same comfortable brown suede couches, the same cream-colored walls. They were decorated with a few paintings that I didn’t remember, but that wasn’t the only thing that made the house seem different. It took me a second to put my finger on it. Things looked the same, but . . . shabbier. The carpet was worn, fraying at the edges, like it wasn’t nailed down properly. The couches were sunken in and droopy, the walls were scuffed, and some of the edges looked like they were yellowing. No one had taken care of this house. Not with the same love and pride we had taken care of it when I was a kid.

Something was wrong. Very wrong. I sat down on the couch, just a foot from the chair. Eli stood next to me.

“Is he . . .”

I couldn’t bear to finish.

“We’ll call him,” my mother said. Her voice was even, but she was wringing her hands. “I’ll have to make a few calls, though. His number isn’t listed.”

I looked at my mother and couldn’t find the words.

“We haven’t spoken in a while.” She frowned and looked away from me. I could tell she was understating, that “a while” meant “years.”

“What happened?” Eli asked, and for once I felt grateful that he wasn’t the type of person to just dance around the issue. It didn’t matter if my mom looked small and fragile. He could still ask the hard questions.

“Your father and I got an annulment,” my mother said.

At first I couldn’t speak. I didn’t think of my mom and dad separately. I thought of them as a unit, as my parents. How could they be apart?

“When?” I asked, because the real issue was how this happened and whether I could fix it.

She dropped her eyes, and pain ripped through my chest. They weren’t together anymore because of me.

“Derek?” I asked, even though I wasn’t quite sure what I was asking.

My mother looked up and smiled. “He has an apartment closer to the city.” She glanced at her watch. “He’ll be asleep but we can call him.”

Eli shifted his weight.

I turned to my mom. “Is the phone still in the kitchen? Eli needs to call his dad.”

She shook her head, and for a second I wondered why she would have moved the phone. Then I saw that she was biting her lip, and I realized something was worse.

Eli seemed to recognize it too, because he sat down next to me. I reached over, touching her hands, forcing her to settle them in her lap. “I’m home now,” I said. I squeezed her hand.

Tears rolled down her face. I wanted them to be happy tears, but the way her shoulders quivered and she refused to look at me, I knew they weren’t.

“Everything is going to be okay,” I added. Because wasn’t that what we all needed to hear? That I would just finally get home and everything would be okay. For seven years I’d thought my biggest problem was that I was missing. I just needed to get home and everything would be the same as it was. This was the first time I realized that maybe just being back wouldn’t actually fix anything.

My mom offered me a weak smile. Then she looked at Eli. “A lot of things have changed.”

From the way she said it, I knew the changes hadn’t been good.

It was my brother who told us what those changes were.

My mother stalled by making us tea and insisting we tell her what had happened to us. We sat on the couch and told her how we had opened the first portal and fallen through. I told her about the ocean and Janelle pulling me out. I left out the details of foster care and school, focusing on all the time we spent trying to re-create the machine.

For some reason I couldn’t tell her about opening the portals ourselves. Maybe it was because she was so dodgy with my questions, or maybe it was how small she looked when she curled herself into the corner of the couch, her long, thin fingers around her cup of tea. I had wanted to tell my family everything: the good, the bad, the ugly. I wanted them to know it all.

Now, though, sitting across from her, I wasn’t sure she would be able to handle everything we’d been through.

Instead I told her I’d fallen in love.

“That fucking girl,” Eli said.

I punched him in the arm.

I rambled about Janelle, telling my mother about her family, her friends, her brother. I even told her about how I’d taken her to Sunset Cliffs to watch the sunset.

Finally Eli had heard enough and we called Derek.

He was there within minutes. He left his car running in the driveway. He didn’t knock. He threw the door open and ran through the house. Before I had the chance to register him, he tackled me to the ground with a hug.

“What happened to Reid?” Derek asked as soon as my mother had gone up to bed.

I didn’t answer. I had forgotten how much Derek looked like me. It was a little like seeing myself in a broken mirror. We were so similar. He was a little taller, and maybe a little thinner, at least in the face. He was also a little more put together. His clothes weren’t wrinkled, and his hair was cut close to his head, but we had been growing into the same man.

No wonder my mother had recognized me so easily.

But I still didn’t know how to explain.

“I know something happened,” Derek said. “Because he isn’t here, and the two of you have been trying really hard not to talk about him.”

How could I explain that I had just started to figure it out? I was standing in the middle of that stupid empty house in Park Village in a world that wasn’t mine, yet the girl I was in love with was leaning against the wall off to the side. Her best friend was standing eerily quiet and hugging that backpack, while Eli sat across from me in that old patio furniture we’d pulled out of the community Dumpster. I was explaining that not only were we right about the multiverse theory, we were right about there being an infinite number of worlds out there. So many of them that there was an Interverse Agency, a group of military-style cops policing all the different universes, keeping track of the traffic between them. And when I put the pieces together, I was pretty sure that Reid was breaking those laws and was killing people.

How could I explain that to my brother?

I looked at him but I didn’t have the words, and what had happened only hours ago had already flooded my mind.

He had looked so guilty. Reid, standing in the doorway. He had looked at Eli and me first. Then he saw Janelle and Alex. As soon as he bolted out the door, I knew Alex was right, that it was Reid opening the portals. That it was Reid pulling the worlds closer to Wave Function Collapse. But I didn’t have time to think about that, because Janelle’s reaction was much quicker than mine. She went after him before I realized what was happening. If Reid was opening portals, he knew he was killing more people. Who knew what he was capable of doing in the name of getting home?

I took off after them. The sun had gone down, but it was easy to tell what direction they’d gone. The canyon was quiet except for the chase. I called out to Janelle as I ran. Eli was only a few steps behind me, calling out to Reid.

When we caught up to them, Janelle had Reid on the ground. She pulled back and punched him in the face. “Did you do it?” she screamed.

I reached in and grabbed her by the arms. She struggled, but I pulled her back.

“Stay there,” I said to him. The last thing we needed was to be running around in the dark in the middle of another earthquake.

Reid’s eyes met mine. I saw the answer in them, but I didn’t want it to be true. I wanted so badly for him to say no. To laugh it off, to tell me to go screw myself. He didn’t say anything.

Janelle shouted again. “Did you?” She struggled in my arms.

I turned her to face me, bracing her against my body. “Janelle, stop.”

Suddenly she stopped. Her brown eyes flicked to me. They looked wide with fear and uncertainty, and I wished that I could do something to take back the things that had happened to her, that I could somehow erase all of the things I had brought into her life.

She’d lost so much because of me. Her life, her home, any normalcy this world had offered her. And her father.

I let go of her and turned on Reid. “Did you?” My voice was hard.

Reid stared at me. I couldn’t believe that he had done this, that he had been so stupid. We’d known each other since we were babies. We’d gone to preschool together, and learned to play soccer and baseball together, and grown up together in this strange world. But now it was like I didn’t know who he was. Opening portals, putting us all at risk, killing people. “Did you kill her dad?” I said.

“It was an accident!” Reid said, his eyes changing as he looked from me to Eli.

Despite the dark, I watched the world move through Janelle’s face. The wind brushed back her hair; sadness washed over her face. I was pretty sure she felt exactly what she had when she first found out her dad was dead. Then her jaw set, and I saw the anger come through.

I wondered if this would change her, or if she’d hold on to it forever.

And my heart broke for her.

“Reid . . .” I started, but there were too many ways for that sentence to go.

“Reid didn’t make it,” Eli said.

I didn’t know what Derek saw when he looked at us, but he nodded and let it go. “You want a beer?” he said. He didn’t wait for an answer, so we followed him into the kitchen.

“I shouldn’t,” I said when he offered me one.

“Don’t be such a bitch,” Eli said, reaching for the beer. It was a can I didn’t remember. It was blue and yellow with the shape of a dolphin on it.

“It’s pretty watered down,” Derek said. “But it’s what Dad drank when we were kids, remember?”

I shook my head. I didn’t want it. For some reason it was less that I was underage and more that I didn’t want to drink something that I had forgotten.

Derek sat down at the kitchen table. “She didn’t tell you anything, did she?”

I shook my head.

He looked at Eli and then back at me. “You’re going to want to sit down for this.”

When you went missing,” Derek said, “everything changed, man. Ian came running up from the basement screaming about how the three of you had just vanished. At first we thought he was crazy or that you were playing some kind of prank, but . . .”

“Then you realized it was true,” Eli said.

Derek nodded. “Somehow Mom and Mr. Suitor figured out what happened. Dad took me back to our house. He told me Mom would fix it. But she never came home.”

“What do you mean?”

Derek bit the skin around his thumbnail and didn’t answer. Then he looked at Eli. “You gotta understand that the prime minister’s son going missing like that, no one could stop talking about it. Every conspiracy theorist in the republic had a hypothesis and a suspect. Your dad, man, he just lost it. Mom and Mr. Suitor called him to explain what happened, and he showed up with half the military and took the Suitors and my mom in for questioning. The next day they came for my dad. The military questioned them; everyone was looking for you. All everyone talked about was what had happened to you guys. But it went too far. Everyone at that party . . . all the adults were brought in, and they weren’t allowed to come home until the three of you were found.”

“For how long?” I said. Clearly they were home now.

“I spent two years in a group home before Mom and Dad got out,” he said. “I don’t know what they did to them in there, but nothing was the same. They tried to recover. We all moved back into the house, but they couldn’t even look at each other, so they got the annulment.”

“Shit,” Eli said.

“It’s my fault,” I said. “I should have been more careful. I never meant to fall in.”

Derek shrugged. “It’s no one’s fault. I just need you to know that part first.”

I braced myself.

“Both of the Suitors were executed,” Derek said. “Publicly.”

I couldn’t move. The breath I didn’t release burned my lungs. Reid’s parents were both dead. Maybe in some screwed-up way that was a blessing. They were all together now, even if he hadn’t made it home.

“Who executed them?” Eli asked.

Derek looked away. “Your dad. He executed a lot of people,” he said. His voice was quiet, his face strained, like he didn’t want to tell us what was next. “It was bad. He started throwing people in jail and he held them without cause. If someone looked the wrong way at someone else, he pulled them in for questioning about what happened to you. It didn’t matter what kind of alibi they had. Everyone was a suspect.”

“But it was an accident.”

Derek shook his head. “He set nationwide curfews and lined the streets with military. People who protested were shot.”

“He always had the worst fucking temper, but this . . . I knew he’d look for us,” Eli said. “How did it end?”

“People started talking about how to get rid of him. Rebellions broke out . . . and he was assassinated.”

My brother didn’t mince words.

Silence settled in between us. Both Derek and I looked at Eli, while he just stared into empty space.

“So he’s dead?” Eli asked.

Derek nodded.

“When?”

“Five years ago.”

Only two years after we’d gone through the portal.

“That’s when my parents were released and I got to come home,” Derek added.

“My mom?” Eli asked.

“She’s alive. I think she remarried a few years back.” Derek shrugged.

“What about Dad?” I asked.

Derek shook his head. “He didn’t know how to deal with losing you, so he married some woman he worked with and started a new family. He tries to get me to come over a lot, but . . .” He shrugged.

My parents were suddenly on different sides. Derek had chosen my mom.

I nodded, though I wasn’t sure what I was agreeing to, if anything. None of this felt real. It felt like a nightmare. I wondered if I would wake up tomorrow and be with Janelle. I wondered how much I was willing to erase, how far I would go back if I could.

Eli looked at me. “Let’s go to bed.”

We slept in my old bedroom.

The room was the same as I left it, except for the thick layer of dust covering everything. When I was nine, for Derek’s birthday, my parents gave him his own room with a new bed and let him paint it and decorate it however he wanted to. Both of our childhood beds were still in my room. They were old wooden beds that had actually been my dad’s when he was a kid. You could put them together like bunk beds or separate them.

Eli sneezed as he shook out the comforter on Derek’s old bed.

On the window was a dusty picture frame. I wiped my fingers through the dust. It was me, Derek, and our dog, Hope. I hadn’t been able to ask about her, not once Derek started telling us how things had changed. Seven years had gone by, but I’d hoped she would still be here. It was clear she wasn’t, and if my parents had been in jail and my brother sent to a group home, Hope would have gone to a shelter or new owners. Wherever she was, I hoped she was happy.

The wind whistled through the window frame, and I listened to the muted, faraway sound of the chimes outside. I looked at the bed in front of me and thought of Janelle. Was she getting into bed thinking of me, too?

We shouldn’t have left her there in Park Village like that.

The mattress on the other bed creaked from Eli’s weight. I pulled my own covers back, the fabric rustling as it revealed flannel sheets with fire trucks on them.

“Remember when we slept over here during that freak snowstorm?” Eli said suddenly. “We were, like, eight I think.”

“Yeah, it only snowed, like, an inch, but your dad declared a state of emergency and had a snowplow drive him over the next morning to pick you up.”

“I was so pissed,” he said. “You and Reid and Ian got to all stay here and hang out and play Space Shield and I had to go home.”

“They were here for almost three full days. My dad kept joking that if we ran out of food we would eat Reid first because Ian was too skinny.”

Eli laughed. “He was really fucking skinny. I wonder what happened to him.”

I didn’t want to think about it. He was just another casualty in all the lives I’d ruined by falling through the portal. Everything that had happened here—our families falling apart, the people Eli’s father had jailed or executed—that was all on me. Plus everything that had gone wrong in Janelle’s world, all the people who died from the disasters, the people who were pulled through the portals. If I just hadn’t fallen through it that first time, things would be so different.

“How could he do it?” Eli asked. I knew from his tone that he’d switched directions. He was talking about Reid now.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know.

Eli must not have expected an answer, because as I stared at my ceiling, I heard him roll over and sigh. I wondered how long it would take both of us to fall asleep. If exhaustion would claim us or if we’d lie awake, unable to relax.

I thought about Reid and how it wasn’t right what happened to him. The things he had done.

It all happened so fast.

Reid had confessed.

“He surprised me,” he said, turning from Eli to Janelle. “I was in the middle of trying to get a portal open, and he just walked in like he owned the place. The portal opened and I couldn’t let him see it. So I pulled the gun and I shot him. I didn’t know it was your dad until later!”

“And then you just kept right on going?” He never told us any of this. He lied to our faces. And when things kept getting worse, he kept lying. “Even after the earthquakes and when we were chasing Eric Brandt around?”

“You fucking got me shot for no reason,” Eli added. It would sound cold to anyone else, but I knew him. I knew he was thinking what I was. That everyone who died because of the earthquakes, that was all on us. Not just because we accidentally fell into a portal and ended up on the wrong world. Not just because we were trying to get home and made a few mistakes. Not just because of an accident.

Janelle swayed a little, reaching out a hand. I grabbed her waist, trying to steady her as she leaned over, and then I pulled back her hair as she heaved.

I should have known it was Reid. I should have stopped him.

That’s what I was thinking when the portal opened. The cool rush of portal air opened right next to us, and I had a moment of panic where I wondered what I had done to open it up. Only two soldiers came through the portal alive. With their guns trained on us, one of them shouted, “Get on the ground, hands behind your head.” I recognized the voice. It was the guy we followed, the guy who shot Eli.

“Right now!” the other one shouted. It was Taylor Barclay.

I was going to do what they said. I held on to Janelle to make sure that she would do it too. I had no doubt that these guys would shoot her if they needed to.

At first I thought they shot at us anyway. I heard the guns go off and waited to feel the pain. Janelle turned. I grabbed her, suddenly convinced she’d been hit. I tried to see if she was bleeding, and where, but she struggled against my grip and threw herself behind me.

I turned to follow her. But one of the soldiers grabbed me and pushed me to the ground. My face hit the dirt.

“Help!” Janelle screamed, and I smelled the blood.

I turned, despite the gun trained on me, and saw it was Alex. She was kneeling over him, while Reid was holding a gun.

“It’s Reid!” she screamed just as he raised the gun.

There was another shot, and he fell. Crumpled to the ground. I knew instantly he was dead.

When I finally did manage to fall asleep, it was fitful. At first it was the images of Reid, holding the gun and falling to the ground. Then it was Alex, the hole in his neck, the blood pouring out, covering Janelle’s and my hands. I heard the gunshots, I tried to save them, but no matter what I did differently, it always ended the same. Their blood soaked the ground. I stood alone, staring into their empty but open eyes.

When the dreams changed, I saw only Janelle.

She was standing at the edge of a chasm. Between us was blackness—empty and vast, like a portal. Even though I wasn’t moving, it felt like I was somehow getting farther and farther away. She looked smaller and blurrier with each second that passed. Her features were less defined, and I struggled to somehow see her more clearly.

I called out to her, but she didn’t look at me. I called again. I screamed her name, but she didn’t seem to hear me.

Then she turned her head like she was looking down into the blackness. I looked into it and saw nothing, and somehow I knew that was very, very bad. I yelled out to her again. I needed her to look at me. I didn’t want her to see into the black. I shouted her name. I begged for her to turn, to see me. I even jumped and waved my arms to get her attention.

She kept staring down into the chasm.

Then there was a loud cracking noise and she fell to the ground.

I woke up covered in sweat, heart pounding, and I couldn’t help but feel like it hadn’t been just a dream.

It felt like a warning.

Three weeks passed.

On day two Eli moved in with his mother and her new family. She insisted. He smiled and put on a good show, but I knew him well enough to recognize how stiff he was. He hadn’t wanted to go.

I spent day four with my father. I hardly recognized him. He’d put on weight and more expensive clothing. He was happy to see me of course, but once I explained how I’d gotten back, we didn’t have much to say to each other.

Day five, I moved in with Derek.

Day seven, he got me a job at the garage where he worked. It was at the edge of downtown East Clemente City, and on our way home we stopped to eat dinner with our mom at the old house.

Days eight through twenty-one were the same.

I tried to trick myself into feeling like my life was normal.

Like this was the life I was supposed to have.

I was grateful to have my family back in my life, but I couldn’t help feeling out of place.

I’d fought so hard to get back here. I’d told Janelle I didn’t belong in her world, that I belonged here. And I did. Or at least I should have.

But I moved through every day with a sense of unease that didn’t seem to be going away. In fact it just seemed to be growing. I didn’t fit here, either. I had been gone too long.

On day twenty-two, something happened.

I woke up before Derek’s alarm went off. I reached under the couch and grabbed the small notebook and pen I found there. I’d started keeping a list of things to tell Janelle. I wrote them down whenever I had a chance so I wouldn’t forget them. Not just the obvious things, like how much life had changed here or how disappointed I was in the man my father had become, but the little details of life here that I hadn’t remembered. That everyone drank this cheap beer called Light Blue Ice and it tasted like it had been artificially sweetened. That instead of Roberto’s or even Taco Bell, the only Mexican food here was from this poorly named place called Refried Beans that had great tacos and beans, but not much else worth eating. That traffic lights were red, yellow, and blue.

That morning I just wrote: I miss you.

“Hey, you up?” Derek called. “Let’s go get breakfast at Mom’s. We’ve got time and I’m desperate for wafflecakes.”

Wafflecakes: really thick waffles, 2X the thickness of your waffles, sometimes with a jelly or cream center. Served with ice cream instead of syrup. They’re pretty amazing.

“Put away the diary,” Derek said with a laugh as he came out of the bedroom. “Let’s go.”

I did what he said and left the notebook on the coffee table so I could write more when we got back.

That afternoon, I was under a car, working on an oil change, when Derek’s favorite song came on the satellite radio. I recognized it by the weird arrangement of electronica tones that played in the beginning, and I wished I had some kind of noise-canceling headphones to wear. The music just felt foreign. It wasn’t just that I didn’t really know the song, it felt like the style was something I didn’t understand: grunge rock mixed with electronica beats.

I was trying to think of a good way to describe the music to Janelle, when military-style combat boots walked past me. I flinched. They were familiar: the style, the soles, the scuff marks on the left toe, the strange way they were laced up.

I slid out from under the car and jumped to my feet, ready to ask the owner of the boots what he was doing here. But whoever belonged to those shoes wasn’t there. I walked out of the garage, surveying the area, trying to place where he might have gone.

Derek came out of the office. “What’s wrong?” he asked, wiping the sweat from his face.

“Somebody was just here. A guy wearing combat boots,” I said. “Did you see him?”

Derek laughed. “There are thousands of guys in combat boots that come through here. They’re called the city guard.”

I shook my head, but I didn’t know how to explain. I had seen those boots before. Not just the style, which no matter what Derek said seemed different from the city guard. What really stuck out, though, were the laces. They looked like they were almost braided and tied with some fancy knot. It was something I’d only seen once before. On the boots that were right next to my face the night Reid died.

“It might not have even been a guard. Those stupid boots are making a fashion surge. Would you believe I saw this cute girl in a pink miniskirt and black combat boots?” Derek said. “It was unsettling. She was hot, but those boots just didn’t look inviting.”

I pictured Janelle in black combat boots, but then I shook the image from my mind. I didn’t want it to stick. Not because I thought it was frightening, but more because it I didn’t want to picture her dressed like she was in IA.

“I didn’t see anyone, man,” Derek added. “Just try to relax.”

I nodded, but relaxing wasn’t something I’d been able to do for a long time.

As I was about to get back under the car to finish the oil change, I spotted a tan sedan parked across the street. I couldn’t remember if I had seen it before or not. It was nondescript, the kind of car that from its profile could be any number of makes and models. In a color that just seemed to fade into the background.

I stared at it. Something about it stood out. It wasn’t necessarily new, but it was too clean, too shiny, like it wasn’t used often, and its windows were tinted. It didn’t belong.

We worked from seven to five, so when it hit five on the dot, Derek was already in the car. His hands drummed on the steering wheel as he waited for me.

“I’m not up for dinner at Mom’s again,” he said when I got in.

I nodded and settled back into the car.

It only took me a few turns to realize we weren’t going home.

“I have a surprise for you,” he said when I sat up a little straighter.

“Have I ever loved surprises?”

He laughed. “Remember when Mom used to always bring us home surprises? I loved that.”

I smiled. I had too. She would come home from work and pick up surprise meals or surprise desserts or surprise presents that she gave us “just because.” I wondered if that had stopped when I left.

We pulled into the parking lot of a bar called Rusty Hinges. It was decorated like a beach bar with tiki torches and fake-grass umbrellas shading the tables, even though we weren’t really anywhere near the beach.

The drinking age here was only eighteen. “I’m still a year shy,” I said as we got out, wondering if my brother had forgotten.

He shrugged. “I know a guy.”

I followed, though I really didn’t want to go in. There were people laughing, sharing things with each other, having fun. I didn’t feel like I belonged there with them. If I was going to sit in a bar, it should be with people who knew me and understood me. With Eli and Reid and Janelle.

“Look, I know you’re upset about Reid,” Derek said. “And I respect that you don’t want to talk about it. You’ve got a lot on your plate with Dad and everything that you weren’t expecting here, but you can have fun, too. I’ve been sort of seeing this girl, Alice. We’re meeting her and a friend. It’ll be great. Like a quad date.”

“Quad date?” I said.

“Yeah, four people,” Derek said. “You know, on a date?”

I swallowed hard. There wasn’t much he could have said to make me want to go in less. That was my fault, though. Because I hadn’t told him much. It felt selfish to go into all of the things that had happened to me in another world, when right here his life, my family’s lives, had fallen apart. I hadn’t said anything to him about Janelle. Not really.

Even though I told my mom about her, it hadn’t felt right to bring her up to Derek. Not after I realized what had happened here, how much of their lives I’d ruined. It didn’t feel right to tell him that Janelle had made me happy, had made me feel alive in that other world, or that I missed her every second I was here. I wanted my brother to be happy. I couldn’t bear for him to think that I wasn’t glad to be back.

I knew which table we were going to as soon as we walked in. There were two girls sitting under an umbrella. One of them fit my brother’s taste perfectly: fair skin, blond, bright blue eyes. She looked delicate and very pretty.

She waved when she saw us.

The other girl looked over. She had long dark hair, but Derek still would have liked her. She was delicate and pretty too. “I’m Stacee,” she said, holding out her hand when I reached the table.

“Ben,” I said.

She smiled and turned to Alice. “I told you he wouldn’t remember me.”

I looked at Derek and he shrugged.

“We went to elementary school together,” Stacee said. “I was a year ahead of you, but I lived down the street from Ian.”

“Ian Shyrock? How is he?”

“He’s good,” she said. “He finished high school this past year. He took some exams to get ahead, and now he’s joined the military. He’s down at basic.”

“That’s great,” I said, even though I couldn’t picture the Ian I had known in the military.

“Oh my God, you would not believe what happened to Stacee today. Tell them,” Alice said.

Stacee turned pink and offered me a small apologetic smile. Something about it made me think of Janelle. Maybe all girls, not just Janelle, did that thing where they blushed and tucked a strand of hair behind their ear, but the way Stacee did it made it hard for me to listen to her story about how two guys in the city guard yelled at her after one of them opened a door for her and she didn’t say thank you.

All I could focus on was the fact that she wasn’t Janelle.

I wanted to be invested. Stacee was nice. She smelled good, she was funny and smart, she had a great smile, and she was pretty. She laughed at the right times when Derek interjected to say something funny and rolled her eyes when his jokes missed the mark.

Her hair was darker, her eyes smaller and less round than Janelle’s. At the same time she was taller, maybe even a little thinner, too. She didn’t have the same athletic look to her that Janelle did. I couldn’t imagine this girl swimming in the ocean or carrying a gun.

I couldn’t imagine her rescuing me, like Janelle had, in more ways than one.

After Eli had been shot and I went to her house, it was pouring rain, late at night. I went through the backyard to see if the back door was unlocked. I needed to talk to someone, which meant I needed her. The kitchen light was on, and she was sitting at the table, crime-scene photos and her father’s paperwork spread out in front of her. She was trying to solve everything. I needed that. I needed her to solve me.

When she saw me, she pulled me in, and I kissed her. I let everything go and I kissed her.

In that moment, I felt at home.

I loved my family, and I didn’t want to leave them again, but no matter how much I tried to pretend this was normal, it wasn’t. This life felt more fake than the one I’d left.

When I couldn’t take it anymore, I stood up. “I’m not feeling that great. I’m going to head home,” I said.

I offered Stacee my hand. “Thanks for the drink,” I said.

She laughed and gave me a hug. My arms didn’t fit around her right. “Anytime,” she said.

“How are you going to get home?” Derek asked as I started to head out.

“I’ll walk,” I said over my shoulder. I used to walk home all the time. I never would have thought I’d miss that. Derek called after me. I turned and held up my hands the way we used to do when we were kids and there was something we didn’t understand. It was usually when our parents were doing something stupid, but it applied here. I didn’t understand what I was doing here, and I needed to leave.

When I turned around again, I bumped into a guy in a Windbreaker. “Sorry,” I said as I moved around him. He said nothing.

“Hey, Ben, wait up!” Derek called after me.

I turned and waited for him.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m just tired.”

It was a lie and he knew it. “Didn’t you like her?”

“I did.” She just wasn’t Janelle.

“What is it, then?” Derek asked.

I didn’t answer, and he punched me in the arm.

“What was that for?” I asked.

“You never used to be so quiet,” he said with a laugh. Then he sobered. “Just talk to me, man.”

“There’s a girl,” I said, getting into the car.

Derek got in and started the engine. “Back there?”

I nodded. “She’s just in a different league.”

“Hot?”

I smiled. “Yeah. And smart and fearless. Just . . . everything.”

“I get it,” Derek said. “You need some more time. Don’t worry, though. We’ll find you a girl here.”

I couldn’t bear to tell him that he didn’t get it. Not even a little.

I didn’t want another girl. I just wanted Janelle.

At home, I flung myself on the couch and turned on the TV. Programming was more regulated here, which meant less reality TV, which I didn’t mind, but also just less entertaining TV in general. I watched the news a lot because it made me feel like I knew something about this place. Even if that was just an illusion, it made me feel better.

Without looking, I reached for my notebook on the coffee table. I wanted to remember to tell Janelle what I’d realized at the bar. Maybe I had known it all along, just subconsciously. That could have been why I stood there when the portal had first been opened and thought that I wasn’t sure I wanted to go through it.

The notebook wasn’t there.

I sat up and moved the magazines around on Derek’s coffee table. Not there.

I looked under the couch. Not there.

I checked the kitchen in case I’d accidentally carried it over there. Not there.

I checked inside the couch cushions. Not there either.

Finally I found it on the floor under the TV stand. I must have set it on the floor instead of on the edge of the table like usual.

“Try not to kick my stuff around!” I called to Derek as I sat back down.

“What do you mean? I haven’t kicked any of your stuff.” He swatted at my head as he passed the couch.

“Not on purpose.”

“Not by accident, either,” he said. “I watch where I’m going.”

I waved the notebook over the couch. “I wrote in this when I woke up and set it down. Now it’s under the TV stand. How did that happen?”

“You must have kicked it. I haven’t been over there all day.”

I sat up and turned around. He was making a sandwich, since we didn’t eat at the bar. What he said made sense. Why would he have been over here? He got up and we went to Mom’s before work.

Yet it had to be him, because this was important to me. I wouldn’t have kicked it and not noticed.

I only ever put it on the floor at night before I went to sleep.

“Someone else must have been here,” I said.

Derek laughed. “Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you the maid comes once a week.”

I looked at him. He was kidding. “No, I’m serious.” I scanned the room, trying to see if anything else was out of place.

“So am I,” Derek said. “No one has been in here, kicking your diary around. Relax.”

I nodded, but I didn’t believe him.

I didn’t say anything to Derek after that, but I paid more attention to my surroundings. I kept my eye on the cars parked close to the apartment, the garage, and anywhere else we went. I looked at the faces of the people we passed and recognized the ones I saw too often. I memorized where I set things down when I left and noted where they were when I came back. Suddenly it was obvious.

I was being followed.

The next three days were the same. The tan sedan showed up and parked across from the garage only three minutes after Derek and I got there, and it sat there all day. Then it had followed me, three cars back, when I left the garage.

The real question was who was inside.

“Knock it off, would you?” Eli said.

I pulled my eyes away from the window. We were in a diner. I’d chosen the seat in the back corner where I could sit with my eyes on the door and keep watch for the people following me outside at the same time.

“It’s just some generic town car that belongs to someone who works near the garage,” he said. “They’re not here.”

I didn’t say anything. I already knew his opinion on the subject.

“Trust me. No one is following me, and I’m public enemy number one,” he added.

The papers hadn’t left him alone since we’d been back. Everyone had known about his “abduction.” His father and his position had made sure of that. Reid and I were more like an afterthought. Some people knew, sure, but no one really cared about us. Now that Eli was back, they wanted the details. Who was responsible, what happened, where had he been, how was he back? He told his mother and the military the truth, or at least most of it, and they’d crafted a public statement that was mostly garbage and released it to the public. Everyone wanted more, though. They wanted to hear directly from Eli, and whether it was conscious or not, they wanted to direct some of their hostility at him for what happened when he disappeared.

No one needed to follow him, though. Photographers were camped outside his house. They took pictures of everything he did. He’d barely left the house in three weeks. Just getting out tonight had apparently been a covert operation.

“Here, you can have this,” Eli said, pushing a phone across the table.

It was a prototype of the new Samsung phone that everyone wanted. It was supposed to come out in three weeks, and people were already setting up tents in front of the stores. I didn’t have a phone, so Eli had taken it upon himself to rectify that. Since his stepfather was some big shot at Samsung, this is what I got.

I put it in the pocket of my hoodie, and I waited. We’d seen each other every day for the past seven years, and now that we were home, we hadn’t seen each other for almost three weeks. When he showed up at the garage, he was jittery, unable to stand still. I knew he needed to talk.

“It’s fucking awful here.” Eli shook his head as he said it. It was ironic to think how hard we had worked to get here, and now we were completely dissatisfied with everything. That whole metaphor about trying to push a square peg through a round hole. That was us. We’d been round when we left, but we’d been over there too long, and somehow that had sharpened our edges.

“It’ll get better,” I said. I didn’t necessarily believe that, but it was what he needed to hear.

“I just can’t believe my mother. She’s a completely different person, cleaning the house and cooking every meal. It’s like she’s out of some 1950s sitcom, and those kids . . .” He leaned into me. “I’ve done the math. She must have fallen into bed with this guy days after my father was shot.”

I’d also done the math. Not just for his mother, but for my father, too. He’d at least waited a little longer, but after losing us and after everything here went to hell, they’d both chosen the same coping mechanism. They started over. They left every bad memory, including us, behind.

“She wants to send me to some prep school up north and enroll me as a freshman so I can go to Officer School when I graduate. She thinks that my becoming an officer in the city guard would have made my dad happy. Can you believe that shit?”

I could believe that. His mom was right. It would have made his dad happy. He was all about military service. I was also pretty sure it would make the new prime minister of the Republic of California happy. Society here was stable, but people weren’t exactly prosperous. I doubted it was just Derek musing about what it would be like if it went back to the way things had been before Eli disappeared, and now that he was back, who better to step into the shoes of his father. Eli falling in line like a good soldier would keep him alive.

“It’s not going to happen,” Eli said. “I didn’t even go to class during my first three years of high school at Eastview. I’m not going to fucking start over and go to some prep school full of dipshits.”

“So don’t. Talk to her. Tell her what you want to do instead.”

He shook his head, but then he turned away and looked out the window.

“What?”

“I want to go back,” he said, turning to look at me.

“Go back . . . ?”

“I know it’s bat-shit crazy,” he added. “But don’t you miss it? It was the three of us against the world.”

“But there’s only two of us now.”

Eli shook his head. “There’s Janelle,” he said quietly. “Look, I’ve been meaning to tell you I’m sorry for all the shit I gave you about her. She came through in the end. Don’t you miss her?”

“Of course I do.” My voice came out harsh, but I didn’t care.

“I even miss her,” Eli said. “Not like you do, but I miss the normalcy of Eastview and the anonymity of everything. I miss the parties and being able to go wherever we wanted and not having to worry about the city guard or the fucking reporters. I even miss Roxy.”

That made me laugh. “All you ever did was complain about how clingy she was.”

“Maybe I don’t miss her exactly,” he said. He frowned and picked at his fries. He didn’t look at me. “Or maybe I do. I don’t know.” He kept talking, trying to puzzle out his feelings, but I was distracted. A lone guy came into the diner. He sat at the table closest to the front door, facing me. He ordered a cup of coffee but didn’t drink it. Something about him looked familiar. Like maybe I’d seen him before somewhere else.

I purposely dropped my napkin and leaned down to pick it up. Then I leaned into Eli. “They’re here. Directly behind you by the front door.”

“What are you, some kind of fucking spy?” He laughed, but he looked behind him anyway. He shook his head. “It’s a guy having coffee.”

“Look at his shoes. They’re military issue.”

“Maybe it’s one of the city guards on his day off,” Eli said, leaning back. “Who would want to follow you? Tell me that and I’ll stop thinking you’re a paranoid freak.”

“What if it’s IA?” That was the only thing I could come up with.

“They’d be following me, too,” Eli said. “Besides, what would they want with you? They got their man.”

I didn’t know. That was the problem. “Let’s get out of here.”

Eli stood up. “Will you think about what I said? About going back?”

I nodded. I didn’t need to think about it, not really. I wanted to go back. I just needed to figure out how to tell Derek and my mother that I wasn’t going to stay. “You should give it some time,” I said. The last thing we needed was to go back and have him change his mind.

“I’ve had three fucking weeks inside a house with my mother and her new family to contemplate it,” he said. “I want to go back.”

“Then we’ll go back,” I said, and I meant it. “I just need some more time.”

We walked out. As we passed the guy with his untouched coffee, I recognized him. He’d been at the bar where Derek had taken me. I’d bumped into him on my way out.

I made a split-second decision and pitched my weight forward and stumbled. I had to reach out and grab the corner of his table to keep from falling.

“Sorry about that,” I said.

“What the hell was that?” Eli said.

“I tripped,” I said as I stood up.

I followed my best friend outside. I didn’t tell him about the way the guy’s hand had reached into his jacket almost instinctively as I’d fallen toward him. Probably for some kind of weapon.

I had to figure out who was following me and what they wanted.

And if they were a danger to the people I would leave behind.

We went a week before I saw the man again. I wasn’t any closer to figuring out who was following me. At least not with any kind of concrete evidence.

The phone Eli gave me buzzed against the coffee table, waking me up. It was 3:47.

I grabbed it. There was a message from him.

MEET ME?

I though about saying no or even just not answering and pretending I slept through it. I was tired, and I had to work in a few hours. But I knew it could be important. I texted back: WHERE?

His reply was instantaneous: PLAYGROUND.

I knew what he meant. There was an old playground behind the elementary school we went to as kids. We used to all go there all the time: me, Eli, Reid, and Ian. Sometimes our moms would take us and stand around and talk. Sometimes we would go by ourselves. It wasn’t far. I told him I’d be there in about fifteen minutes.

I kept my head down when I left the apartment building. I pulled my jacket tightly around my body even though it wasn’t that cold. The night was eerily quiet. The street was empty. Buildings I passed were dark.

I made it four blocks before I heard them.

A set of footsteps behind me.

I didn’t look back. They were a distant echo, the kind of thing I could only hear because everything else was so quiet. But when I reached the intersection, I stayed straight instead of turning left toward Eli and the playground.

I kept walking. I didn’t change my pace, and judging by the sound of the footsteps, neither did whoever was following me.

I walked for two more blocks until I saw the gas station in front of me. It was lit up like some kind of beacon, and there were a few cars parked in the lot. I wasn’t sure exactly what my plan was, but I headed toward it.

Filling up his car with gas was a guy from the city guard, still in uniform. He’d probably just gotten off duty.

I went inside. My first thought had been maybe there was a back door I could leave through. Maybe I could sprint down a side street or something, cut through some yards and backtrack to the playground. But after I walked down an aisle to the rear of the store, I realized there wasn’t another exit.

There was, however, a kid leaning up against the cash register reading a book. He was probably a year younger than me, but he was about my height.

“Hey, you work here?” I asked.

He looked up at me like I was some kind of idiot because of course he worked there.

I leaned over the counter. He had a red baseball hat and a jean jacket back there. I made my offer.

He stared at me. “You’ll give me fifty dollars if I walk around back to the bathroom and lock myself inside for five minutes?”

“And we switch jackets,” I said.

He shrugged.

I moved around the counter, away from the window, and took off my jacket. He put it on.

“Just keep your head down,” I said.

He held out his hand, and I gave him the money.

When he was gone, I put on the jean jacket and his hat. I bent the rim so that it curled around my face and shaded my eyes, then I went outside. I walked right to the guy from the city guard.

“You like your job?” I asked.

He stood up straight, like he was sizing me up. He was blond and probably Derek’s age. His arms were as thick as my head.

I tried my best to stand in a way that said nonthreatening. “I’ve been thinking about enlisting,” I added, remembering what Stacee had said about Ian.

The guy relaxed. “The six to three shift isn’t the best one, but the job has nice perks.”

“Oh yeah, like what?” I said.

I didn’t listen to his answer. A tan sedan pulled into the lot, and a guy stepped out of the shade and got into the passenger seat. The car idled there.

They weren’t watching me, though. They were facing the bathroom.

“Thanks, man,” I said to the guard, cutting him off. “I’ll definitely look into it.”

Then I left. I didn’t walk back the way I had come. I took the long way, cutting down several different side streets to make sure I was alone.

When I finally got to the playground, Eli was waiting. He was sitting on one of the swings. “What took you so long?”

“Someone was following me. I’m pretty sure I lost them,” I said, looking around.

Eli rolled his eyes. “I’m sure you did.”

I pulled out my phone. “Check the pictures,” I said.

He reluctantly took the phone from me. “What, you’ve taken pictures of Derek’s apartment? That’s great,” he said as he scrolled through the gallery.

“No, I—”

“You look like perverts,” Derek said, coming up around the jungle gym to the bench we were sitting on.

“Good job losing Derek,” Eli said.

“What are you doing here?” I asked my brother.

“Checking up on you. Obviously.”

“How’d you know we were here?”

“You left a note, dummy. I’m serious,” Derek added. “It’s almost five a.m. and you’re checking out a kiddie playground. You look like perverts.”

“There aren’t any kids here,” I said, turning back to the phone. I scrolled through the pictures. “I’ve been taking pictures of everything in the apartment before we leave for work, and then I check it when we come back. See how stuff has moved?”

Eli looked at the phone. “Maybe you’re taking them from a different angle.”

“Thank you,” Derek said. “He’s been agonizing over this all week.”

“I think it’s IA,” I said. It was the only thing that made sense.

“Who’s IA?” Derek asked.

I swallowed and looked at Eli for permission. If it was IA, I’d need to tell Derek what happened.

“Go ahead,” Eli said.

“We didn’t tell you everything about how we got back here,” I said.

“No shit.” Derek leaned against the metal jungle gym, clearly waiting for the real story.

“It’s long.”

“Let’s get breakfast,” he said. “On me.”

We ended up at another diner, in a booth near the back. We got eggs and toast.

“Ready now?” Derek asked. We had all been silent on the way here.

I told an abbreviated version but a complete one. I didn’t leave anything out.

“Okay, so why would this Interverse Agency be following you if you’re back home now? Have you been opening any more portals?” he asked when I finished.

“No, of course not,” I said.

“So what would they want with you? Maybe they’re just trying to keep an eye on you, make sure you don’t.”

Eli shifted a little but didn’t say anything. I couldn’t tell if he agreed with Derek or not.

“I’m going to go back,” Eli said suddenly.

Derek started coughing. “Back?”

Eli nodded and looked at me. I knew he wanted me to tell Derek now, but I couldn’t. “It doesn’t feel like we fit here,” I said.

“So you’d go back? After everything?” Derek pushed back from the table. “I can’t even believe you’re considering that.”

“If we did, it wouldn’t be like before,” I said. “You’d know where we were. We could figure out some way to come and visit.”

Eli’s look told me he thought that was a ridiculous thing to say. And I knew it wasn’t exactly possible right now, but we’d figure it out.

Maybe I could ask IA.

“You’re serious, then?” he asked. “You’re considering going back?”

“Not right now,” I said. “Maybe someday.”

“I’m going back,” Eli said. “Not someday. I’m going back soon.”

I didn’t say anything else. I focused on my food. Eli had never been easy to argue with, and who was I to say he wasn’t right? No matter where he was, he’d need to start over and build a life. Maybe that would be easier for him if it wasn’t here.

We’d spent the last seven years of our lives in another world. The majority of our memories were from there. As hard as it was to admit now, it was that world that had shaped who we were.

Derek paid the check without a word, and we headed outside. The tan sedan was waiting for us.

Eli saw it when I did. “Let’s go see who it is.”

“You’re just going to walk up and ask if they’re IA?” Derek said with a laugh. The windows were tinted and we couldn’t see inside. “It’s probably just parked.”

Eli shrugged. “Beats wondering if it really is IA.”

The three of us walked toward the car.

As we got closer, Derek started to laugh harder. “I feel like we should have some kind of ominous soundtrack.”

“What if it’s two old people making out?” Elijah added.

I was the only one who didn’t think this was some kind of joke. I’d have loved to say that they were right, that I must be paranoid, but too many bad things had happened to people I cared about. If this was IA, I couldn’t just leave and go back to Janelle.

Derek swung an arm around my neck. “I’ve missed you, brother.”

I’d missed him, too. That was why it was so hard to admit I didn’t belong here.

When we were only a few feet away, the car flared to life.

We stopped.

With a speed that was too excessive to be casual, the car peeled backward, turning 180 degrees. Then the brakes squealed and the car lurched as the driver threw it from reverse into drive and sped out of the parking lot.

We stood there and watched it disappear down the street.

“See?” I said.

“See what?” Derek said.

I caught Eli looking at me. The humor was gone from his face, and I knew he believed me now. “They weren’t just parked. I told you.”

“All that proves is that they drove away,” Derek said, but I heard the false confidence in his voice.

He was trying to convince himself as much as me.

We didn’t bring it up again. Not until later that night.

After work we went to have dinner with my mother. She’d made roasted chicken, fried rice, and spinach, and the three of us sat around the dining room table, like we did most nights, trying not to acknowledge my father’s absence.

“Ben, have you thought about what you might want to do?” my mother asked.

I shrugged. It wasn’t the first time she’d asked me. I knew she didn’t think working as a mechanic was enough, not for me and not for Derek, either. But I was having the same problem that I’d had back at Eastview on career day freshman year. I had a hard time picturing my future here.

Back then I pictured myself back here with my family. Eating Sunday night dinners and going to work at the government science center, taking over my mother’s research. That was impossible, though. The science center had been shut down, her research destroyed. Because of her unlawful imprisonment, she got government aid each week, but she wasn’t allowed to go back to work.

Now when I thought of my future, all I could see was Janelle.

“You should think about finishing school,” my mother said. “It wouldn’t be easy to get you into university, of course, since you don’t have a track record, but I talked to a few people. With the right recommendation letters and good entrance exams, I think we could get you in.”

“You could join the city guard,” Derek added with a laugh.

My mother frowned.

“Oh come on, what’s wrong with what he’s doing now?” he said. “We’re hanging out every day, and he’s good with cars, like I am.”

“Derek, there’s nothing wrong with what you do,” she said. Her voice was calm and steady, but despite her words, I knew she didn’t really mean what she was saying. “If it makes you happy, it’s a good profession, but Ben needs to decide what’s going to make him happy.”

She didn’t come right out with it, but clearly she was implying she thought something else was the way to go.

“Something that involves university,” Derek said. “Something less embarrassing.”

“I don’t know what I want to do,” I said quickly. “I have been thinking about it,” I added, looking at my mother.

“That’s all I’m asking,” she said.

“I like working with you,” I said to Derek. “I like that I get to see you every day, but she’s right, I don’t love it like you do.” I paused, looked at both of them, and wondered how to say that I didn’t want to make steps for my future here because that would mean I had to stay. I wanted the right moment to tell them I was leaving.

“Mom, is there any more rice?” Derek asked suddenly.

She nodded. “I’ll get some.”

When she left the dining room for the kitchen, Derek reached over and grabbed my arm. “Just don’t leave yet.” I opened my mouth to say I wouldn’t, but he shook his head. “I can see it in your face. I could before, but I didn’t want to believe it.”

“I’m sorry, Derek,” I said. “I’ve missed you both so much, but everything here feels so foreign, it feels so different.”

“It doesn’t matter what universe you’re in, you’ll always be my brother,” he said. “I mean, stay for a while. If you want to go back, I get it, sort of. I want you to be happy, but stay for a little while. Try for Mom and for me.”

I nodded.

“Hey, Mom,” Derek called. “I don’t need more rice. I’m actually full.”

He smiled and I shook my head. “Let’s clear the dishes.”

“That’s all you, little brother,” he said, stretching his arms over his head. “You have thousands of nights of dish duty to catch up on, and taking out the trash.”

For a second, I almost pointed out that it was Dad who was supposed to take out the trash, but I caught myself before I said it. My mother always wanted each of us to have a job. She cooked and cleaned, my father took out the trash, and Derek and I alternated with dish duty.

“I could have been clearing dishes for someone else while I was gone.” I stood up and started clearing them anyway.

“Doesn’t matter,” Derek said. “Every night while you were gone I had to do it. That’s your job now, at least for the next few weeks.”

The next few weeks. I knew what he meant by that. That’s how long he was asking me to stay. I nodded, and he stood up, grabbing the dishes I couldn’t carry.

My mother stood at the fridge, putting the extra food away. As I moved around her, something in the living room caught my eye. I set the dishes in the sink and went back to look through the doorway.

For as long as I’d known her, my mother had been a fastidious housekeeper. She vacuumed a certain way, so that it left a pattern on the carpet. As a family we spent time in the den, watching TV or playing board games. We ate at the dining room table; we prepared food in the kitchen. We only went into the living room when we had company over. When we were kids, she always had a baby gate up at the kitchen to keep Hope and Derek and me out of there.

Which is why it didn’t make sense that I could see footprints marring the vacuum lines in that room.

“Who’s been here?” I said.

Derek came over and peered around me, careful not to step into the living room. As I had thought, she hadn’t changed the way she felt about the living room.

“Oh, it was nothing,” she said. She didn’t look up. And she didn’t elaborate.

“Clearly not,” Derek said with a laugh. “Someone with big feet has been all over the living room.”

“I just haven’t had a chance to get in there and vacuum today.”

“Why?” I asked. She didn’t work anymore. “What have you been doing today?”

She stood up and straightened her clothing. “If you must know, I spoke to a few men who stopped by the house today. They had some questions. I answered them, and then I made dinner.”

“Wait a minute,” Derek said. He wasn’t laughing anymore. “A few men stopped by the house with questions, and you’re just telling us now?”

“Who were they?” I asked.

“They didn’t say,” she said, ignoring Derek. “They just had some routine questions.”

“That’s bullshit,” Derek said, his voice rising. “Hasn’t the city guard bothered us enough? This is how it started last time. Just some routine questions.”

My mother didn’t respond.

The city guard hadn’t bothered my family for quite some time, and they didn’t have reason to now. Unless the reason was me.

But it wasn’t the city guard who was following me. Today I had approached that car, and now someone had come to my mother’s home and questioned her. They were upping their game.

The doorbell rang. “Derek, could you get that, please?” my mother said.

He swore under his breath, but he left. He started to head out through the den like we always would have, but then he turned around and went through the living room as some immature act of defiance.

“Were they city guard?” I asked.

She shook her head, but she didn’t look at me.

“Their questions. They were about me?”

“They asked about everything, but yes, they asked a lot about you,” she said. Then she turned, and I saw in her eyes that she was worried.

“What did they want to know?”

“Everything,” she said. “If you were clearer about your future intentions, I think it would help.”

She thought they were from the government, then. Someone from this universe. I just didn’t think anyone here had reason to be interested in me.

I thought back to my last night with Janelle. The night Alex and Reid died. The night we got back here. Taylor Barclay pulled Janelle to her feet and turned to me. I didn’t like the way he held on to her, so I didn’t really digest his words when he spoke them. I just waited for him to finish and pulled her back into my arms.

Thinking back now, though, I remember his words clearly.

There are people out there who think no one should have that kind of power, and you’d be smart not to advertise.

I didn’t have time to think too hard about it, though. My brother came back into the kitchen with Eli.

I saw the lines on his forehead and the way his eyes said whatever he came here for was serious. Then Eli said, “I need you to come with me.”

“Now?” I asked.

He nodded. His face was flushed and he seemed out of breath. “There’s something you’ve gotta see.”

I followed Eli outside and got into his car.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I think you’re right,” he said, starting up the car. I braced myself on the dashboard as he peeled out of the driveway. “IA is following you.”

“They spoke to my mother today. Questioned her about me,” I said.

“I saw them today too, a trio of douche bags with their commando boots. It’s definitely IA,” he said. “They came to my house, spoke to my stepfather. They didn’t give a shit who he was.”

“What did they want to know?”

He shook his head. “It’s my fault, Ben.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. He was never quick to admit he was wrong. If he was admitting it, he knew it was true, and he knew it was bad.

He pulled the car into a park and threw the parking brake up. The car lurched to a halt. “Get out,” he said.

I followed him.

“You know I hate it here, right?” he said, leading me down a trail.

“I do.” Out of the three of us, Eli was always the most desperate to get home. Being thrown into a different world was the hardest on him. He’d had everything here, and his first set of foster parents weren’t people I would wish on anyone. But now we were back, and he’d lost more than I had. No matter how different things were for me, no matter how much I felt like I didn’t fit here, I still had my mother. I still had Derek.

He looked at me. “I haven’t just been hiding away in my room.”

He held a hand out in front of him, and before it happened, I knew what he was going to do.

The air shifted, the wind kicked up, everything around us seemed to hush in anticipation, and I saw the blackness spread from Eli’s hand. A portal sprang open in front of him.

“What are you doing?” I said, reaching for him. I didn’t have time to be surprised at what he’d done by himself. There were more important things to worry about. He couldn’t possibly have forgotten what had happened before. “That’s unstable. Who knows what damage it could be doing?”

“Then we’d better be quick,” he said, and he stepped through it.

I ran a hand through my hair and swore under my breath, but I followed him.

Heat moved through me. My fingers and toes tingled with the sensation, and then I was pulling myself up off the ground. Eli stood next to me. The portal was gone.

“Before you flip out,” he said, “our biggest problem before was that all of our portals were open too long, and we were usually trying to go to the same place.”

“It’s still dangerous. Even if you’re trying to be careful! If you’re leaving from our world every time—”

“I’m not,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m world-hopping. I’m gone for days at a time, just moving to different worlds.” He shrugged. “I try not to open a portal here unless there are a few days in between the last time.”

“Eli,” I said. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You could still be putting our world in danger.”

“I know, I fucking know,” he said. “This morning I realized maybe they were following you because of what I was doing.”

“You mean this?” I asked. “You’ve really been opening portals?” He nodded. “How many?”

“A lot,” he said. “Off the top of my head . . . I don’t have an exact count.”

I turned around. I couldn’t believe he’d been this careless. Not just with our lives, but with everyone’s. It made it hard to look at him without wanting to punch him, and that wasn’t going to solve anything.

“But I’ve been keeping track,” he said. “Writing down details about all the worlds.”

I turned around. “‘All the worlds’? Do you hear yourself?”

“It’s easier to control than we thought,” he said. “I can open a portal by thinking of where I want to go. This one I found by thinking that I needed someplace completely deserted, where IA wouldn’t find us.”

I looked around for the first time. We were in some kind of suburb. There was a strip mall to the right and a row of apartment buildings behind it. But something didn’t feel quite right about this place. It wasn’t just that there was no one walking around or that the leaves were missing or that the grass was brown and dried up. There was no sound. No life here.

“This way,” Eli said.

I followed him down the street. Still I heard nothing.

“Where are we?”

“I don’t know, but I’ve been all over this place,” he said. “There’s no one here, and there hasn’t been for a long time.”

“How long?”

“Years at least,” he said. “We shouldn’t eat any of the food or anything here. Who knows what the fuck wiped these people out?”

It occurred to me that he was right. Whatever happened here, people had been wiped out. Everything had. That was the only thing that explained why there was no noise.

“This is the hospital,” he said, as we came to a building. It looked gray and overrun by vines crawling up the sides. “There are beds and blankets and shit, and I emptied my mother’s medicine cabinet and pantry through a portal. The fifth floor will be our safe house.”

I hoped we wouldn’t need a safe house, but I also couldn’t deny that he was right. IA wouldn’t find us here.

“No more world-hopping,” I said.

Eli shrugged.

“I mean it, not until we figure out what IA wants with us. Not until we make sure my mother and Derek aren’t in any danger.”

“You’re right,” he said. “No more world-hopping, but this is where we’ll come if we need to get somewhere safe. And we shouldn’t be seen together anymore. We need to get our affairs in order and meet here.”

“‘Our affairs in order’?”

“You know what I mean. Tell your mom and brother. Figure out how to lead IA away from them, and then we’ll meet here.”

I looked around again and wondered what Janelle would think of this place. Hopefully Eli was right and we could get out now, and I’d have the chance to tell her about it.

The next morning, the tan sedan wasn’t there. Instead it was a black one, the same make and model, the same tinted windows. Parked in the same spot.

I went through my day, did whatever Derek told me to, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this new car was a bad sign. They had to know the color of the car wasn’t going to fool me. Why not just keep the tan one? Besides, they had spoken to not just my mother but also Eli’s parents. They had made contact. Something had changed.

I was working on an oil change when Derek’s shoes skidded across the concrete and were suddenly next to me. “They’re getting out,” he said. “Four of them. You have to go now, out the back.”

I pulled myself out from under the car.

“I’ll hold them off,” Derek added.

“You can’t.” I shook my head. “I don’t know what they’ll do to you.”

“I only work as leverage if they catch you,” he said. “Go now!”

I didn’t believe him, but I listened anyway. I walked evenly through the shop and went out the back. I almost stopped when I heard a commotion in the garage, a shout, something falling over, but I forced myself to keep going. I tore down the back alley, turning left at the first street. I ran as fast as I could, and I thought about what Janelle would do. She would have a plan. She always did. It was some kind of by-product of growing up with a parent in the FBI. Without slowing I turned right down someone’s driveway and ran in between a row of houses.

I couldn’t head home. They would expect that.

I crouched down low behind a fence and pulled my phone out to call Eli.

It rang four times and went to voice mail. “They’re coming for us,” I said when it beeped. “Go now.”

I left the phone and kept moving. In front of me was a fence. I just had to get over it and I’d have the space to open a portal. I headed for it, but I was too late.

As I was pulling myself up over the fence, someone grabbed my legs and pulled me back down.

I had a moment to see their faces before they slammed me face-first to the ground. Two guys, probably in their midtwenties. One of them had a familiar object in his hand: a quantum charger that looked just like the one Barclay had used to get us back here. Definitely IA.

I heard the high-pitched sound of a portal powering up, and I struggled, bucking off the ground just enough to see the butt of a gun as the guy closest to me brought it down against my face.

When I came to, my head was pounding.

The light was bright, and for a moment it was hard to see. I tried to move, to shield my eyes, but my hands were bound behind the chair. My legs were tied to the chair legs. I struggled harder, trying to see if I could get loose. My head throbbed with more intensity each time I moved.

“Don’t bother. It’s fucking useless. I tried to hocus-pocus them into something else, and it didn’t work.”

It was Eli. I squinted at him, trying to make out his shape.

“You’ve been out for at least an hour,” he said. “I haven’t gotten anywhere.”

As the room came into focus, I realized we were in a cell. Either solitary confinement or maybe a mental institution, if movies were accurate in their description. There was a wire frame for a cot, but no mattress, and a toilet bowl that didn’t look like it had been cleaned since before bleach was invented.

“It’s IA,” I said, my voice sounded hoarse.

“No shit. They pulled us through a portal, chucked us in here.”

I noted no one had processed us or done any paperwork. There weren’t any Miranda rights or mug shots. We had just been detained without explanation.

The door opened. One of the guys who had grabbed me came in first. His hair was short, combed neatly, and he wore his IA combat attire with pride, back straight, head high. He looked like the kind of guy who liked being a soldier because it meant that he got to tell people what to do and enforce that with a gun if they didn’t listen.

He reminded me a lot of Taylor Barclay. I wasn’t a fan of Barclay, and not just because he would have shot me in the basement of my foster parents’ house if Janelle hadn’t rushed in and saved me. He was arrogant, and he didn’t care who he stepped on to get his job done.

I didn’t like this guy much either.

The guy who came in following him, though, was different.

His hair was shaved close to his head, in a military style, but he wore it more like a skinhead and less like a soldier. He had on jeans and a long-sleeved thermal shirt. As he turned to shut the door, I saw he had a tattoo crawling up his neck. It looked like barbed wire.

He didn’t look like IA, not the way the other guy did.

There was no question that this was the guy in charge. Something about his easy stance said this was his operation and the soldier was just here to back him up. He leaned casually against the door.

“I heard a rumor about some kids who could open portals with just the power of their minds. I laughed it off,” he said. His voice was low, and despite the lightness to it, there was an undercurrent of something darker. “Imagine my surprise when reports confirmed it was actually true and that you’d caused quite a bit of damage.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. It was worth a try.

“But I’ve seen it,” he said.

“I’ll stop. We won’t do it anymore,” Eli said.

“My name is Constantine Meridian,” he said. “And I don’t want you to stop. In fact, I want to offer you a job.”

I didn’t need to hear the proposal. I didn’t want to work for IA or for someone who worked with them. I didn’t want to work for anyone who would follow people around and grab them off the street. I listened anyway. I didn’t get the sense that anyone said no to this guy very often.

“It’s simple,” Constantine said. “I have a list of people. They’re on different worlds, but I need them brought to me. These people may not necessarily want to come. I need people like you to make sure they do.”

“Yeah, fucking right,” Eli said.

I let what he said sink in. It sounded a lot like human trafficking. Whatever I thought of IA, I suddenly knew that this, whoever we were dealing with, was much worse.

Constantine looked at me and I shook my head. “I would be happy to pay you for information,” he added. “I would like to know how you can open these portals.”

“We don’t know,” I said. It wasn’t completely a lie. We knew how it had happened, but it wasn’t something other people could replicate.

“Then I’ll need you to work for me.” He said it so matter-of-factly, like he was sure that we were ultimately going to do this for him. The arrogance of it scared me. Someone that confident didn’t get where they were because they were full of hot air.

“Just use those quantum chargers,” Eli said. “Clearly you have them.”

“We do,” Constantine said. “However, I’m looking for something more . . . untraceable.”

“Good fucking luck,” Eli said. “You’re wasting your time with us.”

Constantine nodded, and the slow, subtle motion of it told me we were in trouble.

Then quickly he turned, pulling a handgun out of the back of his waistband and putting it right up against my forehead. The metal was cold against my skin.

I didn’t breathe. I couldn’t.

Barclay had been right; it was dangerous for people to know what we could do, and obviously the secret was out. Eli and I both knew what it was like to fall through a portal and end up in the wrong world. We knew the effects that could have on those people, their families, and their worlds. We weren’t going to do it.

We were going to die.

Constantine cocked the hammer.

I heard Eli suck in a sharp breath.

I thought about my parents, about the dinners my mom used to cook on Sunday, about how Derek used to always feed Hope scraps under the table, while my dad told jokes about the guys he worked with. I thought about how Eli had tried to grab me that day we fell through the portal. He tried to pull me back, and he didn’t let go even when it meant he was coming with me, and Reid, trying to be a hero, jumped in after us. I thought about Janelle: beautiful, strong, intelligent, fearless. Lying next to her in her bed, I’d grabbed her hand, intertwined our fingers, and looked right in her eyes and told her what I loved about her. If this was how it was going to end, it hadn’t been a bad life.

I felt more than saw the gun ease away from me, then Constantine moved and fired a shot.

The image of Reid falling to the ground and Janelle’s hands covered in blood while she tried to keep Alex alive flickered into my mind.

Eli screamed.

I didn’t feel it at first. In fact, I was worried that he’d actually shot Eli instead. Then I saw the blood. It was seeping out of my shoe onto the floor. Then the pain roared to life. My foot felt like it was coming apart, and I stopped thinking clearly.

Constantine turned and fired another shot into Eli’s leg.

“Put them in separate cells,” he said to the soldier. “Make them change their minds.”

We were tortured for weeks. Maybe months. I lost track of the time.

I also lost track of what they did to me. Water, fire, starvation, a hammer, knives. They used whatever they could to break us. I stopped cataloging my injuries, but I knew the fingers on my left hand were all broken. Same with the toes on my right foot. I would probably have scars on my back and my arms for the rest of my life.

They came in each day and asked if I had changed my mind. Sometimes I wanted to. If I agreed to open portals for them, to go grab whoever they needed, it would all be over. But I couldn’t.

I coped by thinking of Janelle. I was so weak and feverish, sometimes I swore I could see her. Her hair in my face, the softness of her skin against mine, her voice whispering in my ear, the way she smelled supernaturally good. How she sighed when I kissed her neck, how she smiled against my lips, like she had when I said I loved her for the first time. I knew in that moment she loved me, too. I hadn’t needed to hear her say it back. It was all over her face.

My mind held on to every memory of her through the pain, because I was afraid I’d never see her again. When I died, I wanted her to be the last thing I saw.

But they stretched it out, and I didn’t die.

When they weren’t working on me, I knew they were working on Eli. I heard the screams.

I tried to open a portal or to somehow get through the wall. I even tried to heal myself.

Nothing worked.

Then I woke up at some point, morning or night, I couldn’t be sure anymore, and things were quiet.

The door to my cell opened, and two guys in uniform came in and picked me up off the floor. I didn’t bother to struggle.

They carried me into Eli’s room and dumped me on the floor next to him. His face was swollen and bloody. His clothes were stained and stuck to him. I pushed myself up to lean against the wall, and I touched something on the floor. I picked it up and brought it close to my face. It was a tooth, root and all.

It made my own mouth hurt in anticipation of what might be coming next. It didn’t exactly surprise me, though.

The door opened again and Constantine came in. “I wanted to give you both another chance to change your mind,” he said. He waved into the hallway. Then he looked at Eli. “If you don’t work for me, I will hurt everyone you care about.”

“I don’t care about anyone,” Eli said.

Constantine smiled. “I hoped that’s what you would say.”

The two guys in uniform were back. This time they had a man in a suit. His arms were restrained, he had duct tape over his mouth. I didn’t recognize him, but clearly Eli did. He looked away.

“On your knees,” Constantine said, forcing the man to the ground. Then he said to Eli, “This is your only chance. Help me or I’ll kill your family.”

“I told you,” Eli said. “I don’t have any family.” Then he looked away.

If I didn’t know him, I’d think he really didn’t care about this guy. But I did know him, and I could see from the way he clenched his jaw that he was bluffing.

They had his stepfather, the man his mother had married.

One of the guards ripped the duct tape off his mouth, and the man said, “Please,” right before Constantine shot him in the head.

I waited for them to bring in Derek or my mother.

I didn’t know if I could let them die because of me. Actually, I did know. I couldn’t. My father, his family, Ian, Stacee, anyone . . . Any person they brought in, it didn’t even matter if I knew them. I wouldn’t let anyone die because of me.

They didn’t bring my family in, though. It was worse.

I stopped breathing when I saw her.

I knew she was real and not some hallucination because her dark hair was matted to the side of her head and stained with dried blood. Her left eye was swollen shut. Her bare arms were covered with bruises. Her face was black-and-blue, and her lip was bleeding. She had put up a fight when they tried to take her.

Janelle.

This wasn’t the kind of reunion I’d imagined.

She didn’t look at me. She kept her head down, chin to her chest. The two uniformed guards held her up, their hands under her armpits, her feet dragging behind her. There were bruises around her wrists from whatever restraints they’d used. She didn’t make a sound. The only reason I knew she was conscious was that she flinched when Constantine reached for her.

“Stop,” I said, my voice hoarse.

I looked at Janelle and silently begged her to look at me.

Constantine ran his hands through Janelle’s hair. “Your friend might not have any family, but you . . .” He grabbed her chin, forcing her head up, and the sound that came out of her mouth stabbed me in the heart. It was the kind of sound a cornered animal might make, something pleading.

I tried to stand, and one of the guards grabbed me and threw me back to the ground. I strained against him, struggling to get up again.

Constantine pushed Janelle’s hair back from her face, and I could see it was wet with tears.

“If you don’t work for me . . .” he said.

“Stop,” I said. I didn’t need to hear whatever he was going to say next.

He raised his gun and pointed it to her head.

“I’ll do it!” I shouted.

He paused, turning his head toward me.

I swallowed, digesting what that would mean. Pulling people from their worlds, bringing them here to this asshole, for whatever he wanted with them. These people wouldn’t have Janelle to save their lives, to give them something to look forward to. They wouldn’t have a best friend like Eli or even Reid, guys who had their faults but were always loyal. They would be alone.

But I looked at Janelle, bruised and broken, and I couldn’t bear to let anything else happen to her.

I couldn’t let him kill her.

“I’ll work for you,” I added. “Just let her go.”

Read on for a sneak peek at the sequel to Unraveling,

Some days are so perfect, they just don’t seem real.

They’re the days when you wake up and aren’t tired, when the sun is shining and the breeze kicks up from the ocean, keeping you from getting too hot or too cold, and everything you do goes right. Like you’re inside of a movie with your own soundtrack, where you’re so happy that you can’t help just spontaneously breaking into a smile. Some days are like magic.

But I haven’t had one of those days in a long time.

So long, it feels like maybe I never did. In fact, when I’ve been up for eighteen hours, letting Cecily boss me around in an old snack bar that she converted into a kitchen—one that might be a hundred degrees—it feels like maybe perfect days are a lie.

“What are you doing?” Cecily says, scolding me. “That’s never going to work.”

“My idea, not work? That’s shocking.” I make a big show of rolling my eyes. “Come up with a better idea and we’ll try it.” I almost add that we don’t need popcorn, but I keep my mouth shut. I can only push her so far. The wrath of Cecily when plans go awry is something I’m trying to avoid.

It’s movie night at Qualcomm.

About a month ago, Cecily decided that a movie night was just the thing Qualcomm needed. It would give people something to look forward to, and with the right equipment it was something we could actually get done. She made Kevin and me spend a weekend going through the wreckage of every movie theater in San Diego, looking for the right projection equipment and an assortment of movies we could show.

So now we have a little more than thirteen hundred people seated on what used to be the Chargers football field—with more watching from the seats. Blankets are laid out, people are huddled together, and Cecily has It’s a Wonderful Life cued up on the projector. I had argued with her choice of that one—it’s not like much going on around here could be called wonderful—but my arguments had gone down in flames, and Kevin didn’t help matters since he had backed her up, hoping to win her over.

The only snag in her plan right now is the popcorn.

The generator let us use the microwave to pop over half of the bags we found scrounging around the city, but it started taking its toll on our power. Even Cee wasn’t going to argue that popcorn was more important than lights. So now I’m using a couple of old pans and a wood-burning stove.

Because I’m thinking of him, Kevin Collins pushes through the door with a wide smile for Cecily. In a surprising and I’ll admit impressive move on his part, he got his GED and enlisted in the Marines a couple of months ago. “Lady J!” he shouts as a few of the guys in his unit come in behind him. “We’ve come for you to feed us.”

I’d like to say the whole enlisting thing made him grow up, but he’s the same as ever.

I ignore Kevin. I’m good at it.

Cecily, who has only her own agenda on her mind, beams at him. “Oh, you’re here, perfect,” she says, piling bags of popcorn into the guys’ arms before they have a chance to speak. “Start with the people in the back since they’re farthest from the screen. And make sure everyone takes a small handful and passes it down. We have about one bag for every fifteen or so people; no one gets their own.”

One of the guys rolls his eyes—he’s obviously here as a favor because poor Kevin has it bad for Cecily.

Kevin bows with a flourish. “Your wish shall be done.”

I have to force myself to keep from snorting at the ridiculousness that is happening right in front of me.

Before he leaves, Kevin looks at me. “Hurry up, woman. If we have to wait for you we’ll never get to see the movie.”

Unable to control her laughter, Cecily pushes Kevin out the door, and the universe finally rewards me, because the popcorn finally starts to pop.

“So this thing with Kevin . . .” I say once he’s gone. Every guy has a thing for Cee—even Alex had a huge crush on her. Alex, my best friend, the one who told me he wasn’t going to date anyone until college because he didn’t want to have to introduce a girl that he liked to his mother unless he knew she could handle it. Alex, who will never date anyone. Alex, who’s gone because of me.

I swallow those thoughts down, despite the tightness in my throat, and focus on Cecily. I want her to be happy.

She blushes but doesn’t say anything.

“He is pretty cute,” I add. He’s also immature and drives me a little out of my mind, but I can’t deny that he’s nice to look at.

Cecily laughs and shakes her head. “He is.” Then she pauses and adds, “And he’s funny, too, you know? Like super funny. Every time I see him, he makes me crack up about something. Plus, I can’t help being surprised at how thoughtful he is. He always does really nice little things for me.”

She says it like there’s a “but” coming.

“So, what’s the problem?” I laugh a little, but Cecily doesn’t join in.

“This is terrible. I mean, I kind of want to like him.” She sighs. “I just can’t. I mean, I don’t know. I guess he’s just not really my type.”

I know what she means. About wanting to like someone and just not being able to. Kevin’s tried to hook me up with half the guys in his unit, and then of course, there’s Nick. A date or even a little romance would be such a welcome distraction from everything going on, but all I see when I look at another guy is someone who’s not Ben Michaels.

Since the day he left, I’ve been looking everywhere for Ben. Remembering his dark brown eyes; the way his hair falls in his face; the way he reached out, touched my cheek, and pulled me into one last kiss; the way he took slow steps backward toward the portal, as if he didn’t really want to leave; the way he said my name and told me he loved me; and the way the portal swallowed him up and he disappeared.

But mostly I think about how he said, I’ll come back for you.

“Okay, don’t laugh,” Cecily says suddenly, doing me a favor and pulling me from thoughts I should be able to let go. “But I kind of have a thing for the bad boys, like from afar, but still. Give me a leather jacket, a devilish smile, a guy my parents wouldn’t approve of, and you know, someone who needs to be saved.”

Ben didn’t have the leather jacket or a devilish smile. But he was definitely the kind of guy my dad would’ve been wary of. And he did need to be saved.

Only I’d saved him, and now he was gone.

“It wouldn’t hurt either if he had nice eyes,” Cecily adds.

I smile, thinking of Ben’s dark, deep-set eyes and the intensity in them when he looked at me.

Every five or ten minutes, Cecily carts an armload of popcorn bags out to the field. When we finally have them all passed out, we pick through the crowd to find my brother, Jared, and Kevin and his friends. There’s one extra bag of popcorn, and because we’re feeling gluttonous, we keep it.

I barely watch the movie because I’m more interested in watching Jared, who can’t take his eyes off the screen.

It doesn’t matter that I’ve missed more than half of the movie. Or that it’s black-and-white and from 1946. It doesn’t matter that the popcorn is too buttery, that the wool blanket itches my skin every chance it gets, or even that I’m tired and sweaty from the stove.

With about fifteen minutes of the movie left, Struz finds us and sits next to Jared, whose eyes are a little watery.

And then Struz winks at me.

I glance at Cecily, who just smiles. It’s a smile I know well. The one that says, So there, or I was right, or any other I told you so type of phrase. I give her the finger, because there’s not much else to do.

She was right.

Popcorn and movie night were exactly what we needed.

Maybe this day was a little magical after all.

The next morning, the magic has worn off. That tends to happen to me when I have to get out of bed before the sun is up, especially on my day off. The reason I’m up is that Struz is sending Cee and me on a supply run up to Camp Pendleton. He chose us because we’re charming—or, more accurately, Cecily is charming.

And it works. She manages to sweet-talk everyone we run into. I’m just there to help with the heavy lifting.

We spend the drive home, with Cecily at the wheel, in silence. It’s not because we’re sad or even tired—despite the fact that this day has already been exhausting and it’s not quite noon. This silence weighs down on us because when you do this drive, you can’t deny that the world has changed.

The coast is the worst. Buildings are collapsed, homes demolished or just gone. The roof on my favorite restaurant, Roberto’s, caved in, and the patio cracked and split open, putting an end to my burritos-after-the-beach tradition. Trees have been uprooted, and they lie on their sides as if they’ve been discarded like weeds. In my old neighborhood, the trees took out the houses that hadn’t already collapsed from the quake itself. Debris is everywhere, littered across the grass and piled up on the side of the road.

But what’s worst is how it feels. Before the quakes, San Diego was the kind of place that felt alive. The sun, the ocean waves, the crowds of tourists—it had personality. Now it feels empty, destroyed. Dead.

This silence is one of respect, the kind that you observe.

Because it’s been a hundred and forty days since an old pickup truck hit me, and the warmth of the engine, the smell of locking brakes, and someone shouting my name were the last things I remembered. A hundred and forty days since I died.

Since my whole world changed.

Because I didn’t stay dead. Ben Michaels healed me and brought me back. Because of him, I had a second chance. I don’t know how it happened, but Ben Michaels changed my class schedule, argued with me in English, took me to Sunset Cliffs, and made me love him.

And then he left.

Now the whole world has changed—for everyone.

My dad died because he didn’t know what kind of case he stumbled on. I solved his murder, saved the world, lost my best friend, and watched Ben walk through a portal and leave this universe.

I stopped Wave Function Collapse, but the damage was already done.

All the natural disasters hit at the same time—and no corner of the globe was spared. Tornadoes took out the Midwest. Earthquakes leveled cities close to fault lines and also ones that weren’t, like Dallas and Vegas. Tsunamis blanketed and sank low-level areas like Coronado Island, New Orleans, Manhattan, and parts of the California coast. Wildfires swept the nation in all different directions, reducing land, trees, houses—even people—to ashes.

And we weren’t alone. Other countries had been hit just as hard. Some of them were just gone.

Millions of people died.

Millions more went missing.

Modern life took the biggest hit. Satellites were knocked out of position, telephone lines went dead, electricity flickered out, and running water went dry. Aftershocks took out most of the buildings that were still standing. Hospitals overflowed with people injured and dying. Medicine and medical supplies were used up. We started running out of food and water. Almost nothing survived the looting.

As Cecily drives, I lean my forehead against the window and feel the warmth of the sun against the glass. I almost close my eyes to block out the reminders, but it’s pointless. I can’t forget what’s happened here.

“Don’t do that!” Cecily says, snapping her fingers at me as we go over a bump on the uneven road. “And by that, I mean that weird sad thing where you go all quiet and depressed.”

“I thought you knew I was lame like that,” I say, but I pull my head back and sit up straight. She’s bossy, but right.

Cecily smiles. “I know you better than you think, J.”

“Didn’t you know cheerleading is sort of a dead sport?” I ask. “I’m not sure you need to stay so peppy.”

She gasps and pretends to be offended, but I know she’s not. We both had a first-class ticket to seeing the world change. Well, maybe that was just me, but Cecily has seen the aftereffects up close and personal even if she doesn’t know the actual cause.

I’m about to say something else when I see it.

Ahead there’s a house, half standing with a sunken roof, and in front of it a few people are milling around, looking at an assortment of stuff laid out on the dead grass.

Cecily sees it too. “Oh, a yard sale! We have to check it out.”

It’s not that they’re likely to have anything we want. These yard sales are for trades. People need supplies—usually medicine or food—and they’re willing to give up other material possessions in order to get it.

Of course, not many people have medicine or food to spare. But we do. Between my connection to the FBI and Cecily’s family running one of the largest evacuation shelters in the area, we have access that normal people don’t. There’s a case of water and an economy-size bottle of aspirin in the back of the truck. I can’t give it all away, but I can give these people something.

“It looks like they have books,” Cecily adds as we crawl to a stop. “Maybe they’ll have something for Jared.”

He needs a new book. We can only reread Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix so many times. As he’s pointed out, it’s the middle of the story.

I get out of the truck. A man wearing broken glasses approaches us, but I let Cecily talk to him. She’s the friendly one, after all.

There are some old clothes and blankets off to the side, and then a row of DVDs. I look at them just in case there’s something X-Files. We lost our collector’s edition box set when our house collapsed. Electricity is too spotty still to play DVDs, but once it comes back, my brother will miss them.

The collection is mostly indie movies, so I head for the books. It’s a lot of literary stuff, a lot of classics, and not necessarily the good stuff, in my opinion. I know I should want to preserve Moby Dick or Great Expectations, but I just can’t make myself do it. Then I see a flash of a red-and-black book cover.

I reach for it, excitement making me feel giddy and lightheaded. I turn, ready to call out to Cee to tell her what I’ve found, but I’m not looking, so I walk straight into some random guy.

He’s taller than me, and my face plows into his shoulder. The soft cotton of his shirt rubs against my cheek as I stumble against him. He grunts and drops all of the books in his hands. I pause, taking a minute to make sure I have my balance before I look up. Even though it wasn’t really my fault, I’m about to apologize.

Only the words get stuck in my throat.

“Sorry about that. The danger of picking up too many mass-markets,” he says with a tentative smile, a smile that says he’s a little embarrassed.

And suddenly everything around me stops. The sounds of the other people, the wind in the trees—it fades away, and all I see is the guy in front of me. Everything about him is the same. The wavy hair, the dark eyes, the self-conscious half smile.

I close my eyes, sure that I’m imagining this, that too much sun and not enough sleep have finally gotten to me, but when I open them again, he’s still there.

It’s like I’ve conjured him out of thin air.

“Ben?” I whisper, because my whole body feels like it’s frozen, like I’m worried he’ll disappear.

About the Author

Elizabeth Norris briefly taught high school English and history before trading the San Diego beaches and sunshine for Manhattan’s chilly winters. She harbors dangerous addictions to guacamole, red velvet cupcakes, sushi, and Argo Tea, fortunately not all together. She is also the author of Unraveling. You can visit Elizabeth online at www.elizabethnorrisbooks.com.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Copyright

Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Undone

Copyright © 2013 by Elizabeth Norris

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

ISBN: 978-0-06-226876-1

EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780062268761

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FIRST EDITION

About the Publisher

Australia

HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street

Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.com.au

Canada

HarperCollins Canada

2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor

Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollins.ca

New Zealand

HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited

P.O. Box 1

Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz

United Kingdom

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

77-85 Fulham Palace Road

London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk

United States

HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

10 East 53rd Street

New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollins.com