The Shadow War

by Lindsay Smith

  He missed a week of classes curled up on the chairs of the hospital waiting room and steering his mother into their new life, even more hidden than the one before. He lived at the library then as he tried to catch up, building formulas and hypotheses into a wall between him and the world. Anything not to go back to that rented room, that stare.

  Quantum mechanics, atomic weights, neutron signaling, dimensional shift. Dark matter flowing away, that mysterious negative sign in the universe’s weight, throwing off everything he tried to compute. Dark matter seeping into the cracks and corners all around him, sticky as tar. Energy was neither created nor destroyed. It had to go somewhere.

  And if it entered their universe, then surely it could be used.

  He turned in his missed schoolwork and then some as he poked and poked at his formulas’ holes. Turned seventeen. Hired a day nurse. Picked up a shift at the maintenance facility on campus, hauling heavy things around, throwing them down. Soon his shoulders pushed at the seams of the suit jackets that used to swallow him whole. And all the while, he worked numbers at the library from his position at the circulation desk.

  The world beyond the library windows was black, a sea of ink, as night pressed in. After midnight no one bothered him. The stacks were his. In there, his theories made more sense than his reality, and he never wanted to leave.

  He was standing by the coffee kettle one night, staring down at his half-empty mug and trying to remember whether he’d been emptying it or refilling it, when the other boy approached. Liam flinched—he’d thought everyone else had gone home. Thick eyebrows on pale skin and a healthy sheaf of black bangs, begging to be swept back—Liam momentarily forgot the mug in his hand. Had he seen this boy before? Surely he’d remember a face like that. The troubled crease between his brows, the dark glint in his eyes like a warning, the stylish glasses, the dimple on his chin.

  The boy smiled—Liam’s pulse galloped, not just from the caffeine—and pointed to the mug.

  “Excuse me,” he drawled, his accent something Bohemian and smoky that Liam wanted to breathe in. “I think you are using my mug.”

  Liam swore. Threw back the rest of the coffee. “Sorry. Damn things all run together. Here, let me wash it for you—”

  “It’s all right. Hey.” The boy’s hand closed around Liam’s on the mug handle, silencing the never-ending stream of words Liam used like a reflex. Thick fingers, muscular, but smooth. Liam imagined them wrapped around his wrist. Cupping his neck. “You look like you need the caffeine more than I do.”

  Liam made a noise that was supposed to be dismissive. It wasn’t.

  “I’m Pitr. Medieval department.” He gently coaxed the mug from Liam’s hand. “I’ve been trying to finish this paper for . . . three days now? But I think you’ve been here even longer.”

  “Theoretical physics,” Liam muttered, then, remembering himself, “Liam.”

  “Liam.” Pitr’s mouth did something to the vowels that scraped Liam’s nerves raw like a blade shucking kernels of corn. His grin widened, revealing pearly teeth, full lips. A vein pulsed at the side of Pitr’s neck, beckoning. “Maybe we both could use a break.”

  Liam wasn’t stupid—you didn’t get into Princeton at fifteen by being stupid—and he understood, in theory, how this was supposed to work. (Liam understood many things in theory.) He knew about the men who took the streetcars over to Brooklyn. Who went strolling in the park or the basement bar of the Savoy-Plaza.

  But Liam miscalculated social cues on the best of days, and in the buzzing empty space of sleep deprivation, of his anger and desperation, he knew he might be misjudging. There were all kinds of computational errors that only revealed themselves by putting theory into practice, and—oh, had he theorized about this.

  He was willing to take the risk.

  Pitr tasted like coffee—everything tasted like coffee—as he locked the bathroom door and shoved Liam up against it. Liam’s tongue melted against his like a sugar cube. This, this was what Liam had been missing, the error in his computation: how glorious it felt to be kissed, to have that sturdy hand untuck his shirt hem, graze over the bared skin of his abdomen, flatten against his sternum as if to still his stammering heart. An impossible task, given the way Pitr nipped at his lower lip, slotted a knee between Liam’s, pressed against his thigh. Liam bit at that pulsing vein on Pitr’s neck and lapped at his salty skin.

  Liam did not, in fact, know what he was doing in practice. Fortunately, Pitr was an eager teacher, taking charge with a dark look and a stubborn smirk. With Pitr’s help, Liam learned what his theories, his hypotheses had been all too inadequate to describe.

  Over the next few weeks, it became a game between them: one would borrow the other’s coffee mug, smirking as he walked past to join his classmates for a study group or to retreat to the carrels. Minutes later, they’d find each other in the bathroom, fumbling with the lock, with each other’s clothes.

  There were unspoken rules, too. Pitr would never acknowledge him when he was with his friends, would never so much as meet Liam’s eyes. The one time Liam tried to approach him, Pitr’s glare was so swift, so angry, it haunted Liam for weeks—weeks in which Pitr completely disappeared. Liam had messed up. He hadn’t followed the rules that kept them safe, the ones Pitr already knew, and Liam had become a risk to them both.

  But just as abruptly, Pitr returned to the library, Liam’s mug in hand, as if nothing had ever happened. If Pitr could pretend, then so could he.

  Because it was only a distraction, Liam told himself at first. It was better than his formulas that wouldn’t add up, than what waited for him in the rented room. But then: a hunger. A yearning. He didn’t want to have to hide. He wanted more than the scraps of Pitr’s life offered up between gasps for air in the bathroom, the mirror over the sink thickly fogged. He wanted—needed—more.

  If he voiced it, though, he feared losing Pitr completely. Damning them both.

  Finally, toward the semester’s close, long after most sensible students had gone home, they ended up studying side by side in the dark corners of the special collections. Pitr brushed his fingers against Liam’s, and a secret frisson ran through him, crisper and more overwhelming than anything they’d already shared. He scooted his chair closer and watched Pitr as he scrawled out his thesis notes.

  “Explain it to me,” Liam said, though he would’ve listened to Pitr recite the tax code. Anything to linger in his orbit a little longer, forget the world where he hauled boxes and changed the dressing on his mother’s face, his slender illusion of control ripped away. The world where he stopped existing inside Pitr’s.

  Pitr laughed, though there was warmth in it. “I’m not sure you’ll understand it. You are two years younger than me, after all.”

  Liam pouted—not exactly helping his case—and hooked his ankle around Pitr’s. Dragged him close. “Don’t make me tease it out of you.”

  A heavy beat. Liam was sure he’d misstepped. That the rules inside the bathroom fell apart when exposed to the open air, as if they’d been written on one of Pitr’s fragile tomes. For a moment, Pitr’s expression turned hard, and Liam was overwhelmed with shame. There’d always been such darkness lurking in there, coals waiting to be lit.

  But then Pitr chuckled to himself and ran a finger along Liam’s forearm, Liam’s pulse leaping in reply. “As fun as that might be . . .” He shoved away from Liam’s chair and gathered a handful of notes. “I’m looking at a common thread between scattered writings throughout the medieval era. Medici Italy, Ethiopia, Bohemia . . . Mystics all over claiming to be following the guidance of some man named Tomasi Sicarelli to unlock another world.”

  “Mystics, huh?” Liam reached for a slender folio on top of Pitr’s stack of books. The Mysticism of John Dee. “You mean frauds who make up angelic alphabets and burn poor ladies at the stake?”

  “They weren’t all frauds.” Pitr snatched the book back.
“Some of them genuinely believed in what they were doing. Not so different from your Newton or Einstein, really,” he added, with a poke to Liam’s ribs.

  Liam rolled his eyes, but leaned closer. “Go on.”

  “Well, some of them call it the ‘wrinkle’—a folded part of the world trapped out of sight. Others think it’s a form of purgatory, a place where lost things go. But whatever the case, they all describe it as a world alongside ours that doesn’t fit so neatly into any one religion’s construct. Some even claim to have traveled there with Sicarelli and communicated with beings who lived there, who granted them access to a powerful energy source.” Pitr shrugged, looking suddenly chastened. “I thought it was interesting, that’s all.”

  Liam caught his mouth sliding open, the way it always did when he was running figures in his head. “A universe alongside our own.”

  Pitr blinked a few times. “I suppose. Is that—something that exists? Have you heard of it?”

  “In theory.” Liam snatched two sheets of Pitr’s notes and held them facing each other, about an inch apart. “Imagine these are two universes. Maybe similar, maybe not. There are infinite universes, but these can be any two.”

  Pitr stared at the papers, that familiar hunger burning in his gaze. But this time it wasn’t Liam Pitr craved. It was that thing Pitr loved far more: knowledge. Mastery. An academic accomplishment that would put the other medievalists to shame. Maybe, if Liam could be the one to give him a solution, Pitr might love him, too.

  “They still follow the same scientific laws. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. And yet we see it happening all the same. Mass and energy slipping away where everything says it should exist. Then surging forward from someplace new.”

  “So you think it’s moving between the two universes?”

  Liam nodded. “If two universes are close enough, then yes.”

  “A wrinkle,” Pitr said. “Purgatorio.”

  Liam set the papers down, one on top of the other, then folded their edges so they stuck together. He tugged one sheet up, and it lifted the other by the joined corner.

  “If we can link them,” Liam said, “then we can observe the other universe. Control the energy’s flow. Harness it as a fuel source, even.”

  “I don’t suppose you have any idea how to create such a link,” Pitr said.

  Liam dropped the paper and they fluttered apart. “It’s all just a theory.”

  But Pitr started digging through his stack of books. “Maybe not.”

  “So every time you pull this—dark matter—from the adjacent universe, you are stealing it from there?” Rebeka had asked, eyebrows raised.

  Liam had just demonstrated it for her: the frequency that let him reach through the veil, bridging the gap. He’d pulled the shadows into himself and turned them into strange shapes that twisted and writhed around the barn.

  “I prefer to think of it as borrowing.”

  “I’m sure you do.” Rebeka had wrapped her arms around herself and shrank into the corner of the barn. Daniel, though, had that glint in his eyes—the one that so perfectly mirrored what Liam felt inside. Potential. Something waiting to be cracked open like an egg. A hunger that couldn’t be sated by this world alone.

  If Liam could harness all of it, he’d never be too weak again. Maybe Daniel was thinking the same thing.

  “And what you want from Siegen . . .” Rebeka prompted.

  “A manuscript by Tomasi Sicarelli.” Liam’s voice went hollow. “It’s supposed to describe how he stabilized a bridge between two worlds for a brief period in the 1400s. If I can stabilize it again, then I can harness an unlimited amount of energy, and not just what I can draw into myself.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Liam’s fingers twitched. “When I reach into the other universe, I can only harness a bucket’s worth by myself. It’s finite. My body can’t hold any more.” Certainly not without letting those dark whispers devour him alive, though he wasn’t about to tell them that part. “But stabilizing the bridge—it would be opening the floodgates.”

  Rebeka scoffed, but Daniel had paused, no longer using his Nazi dagger to dig dirt from under his nails. His mouth was soft, open, but his gaze stayed sharp. Liam liked that stare—the way it pinned him in place like a captured moth. He wasn’t sure which carried a greater promise of violence—that stare or those slender fingers curled around the dagger—but both sent a shiver down his spine.

  “So you came all this way—in the middle of a war—for a stupid book?” Rebeka’s tone dripped with doubt.

  “I can end the war with it. Use it to topple the Third Reich.”

  He hadn’t said it out loud before. He shrank back, realizing how naive he sounded, how stupid. Pitr had regularly called him a kid when he felt like being cruel, but it was true, he’d always been the hopeless idealist, the dreamer, the youngest person in the room. He blustered his way through everything with nothing but his wits and an unquenchable lust for more, more.

  “This isn’t your war.” Daniel’s voice was twisted tight, like a rag being wrung out. “What does it matter to you?”

  Shame prickled like drying sweat on his skin. He remembered too well the panic he’d felt as he tore apart his room, the library, the laboratory in a desperate hunt for his life’s work, ripped away from him. “I have my reasons.”

  His mother’s face, her concave skull, her mottled eye socket, her crooked mouth: if he’d had the power then, he could have stopped it.

  The men rallying at Madison Square Garden, his father one of them, screaming and screaming, their red and white and black banners spreading like the Spanish influenza through Manhattan, the whole country. He could make them pay.

  Jozef Kreutzer, stealing his research, his accomplishments, so he could push Germany toward victory.

  With access to the dark energy, Liam could hold them back. Stop every awful thing that lay in wait for him. Maybe erase them, if he chose. He’d never again suffer the helplessness he felt that night in Hell’s Kitchen when he found his mother painted with blood. The frustration, the choking futility as Pitr slipped from his grasp.

  Most of all, he tried not to remember his life before the shadows—life without that canter in his pulse, that fire stoking his thoughts. He needed it. He needed it with an urgency words couldn’t explain. But he couldn’t tell them. He should never admit to that.

  “Kreutzer has my research. If he’s using something I did to aid the Nazi war machine, then I have to stop him. I won’t let this be my fault, too.”

  “Let someone else stop it,” Rebeka said. “You’re only one man—”

  “There is no one else,” Liam said, something animal in his tone. “And I’m sick of not doing everything I can. I know what it’s like to wait and hope bad things won’t come for you. I’ve gotta go to them first.”

  Both Rebeka and Daniel had stepped back from him. He was standing—when had he stood?

  Oh. The shadows. They spilled around him, flowing from his palms, swirling at his feet. Blood welled under his fingernails from his clenched fists as he hummed the resonant frequency.

  Liam sank down into the hay and closed his eyes, then forced himself to stop humming so the rift would close. In a rush of whispers, the shadows flowed back into him and curled up to wait.

  “It’s the best chance we have,” Daniel said softly to his sister. His face was gentle now, pleading. He was asking for her help, or at least her permission.

  Rebeka glanced sideways at Liam, then managed a stiff nod. “All right.”

  Daniel’s shoulders dropped, relaxing. He wasn’t smiling, exactly, but it was close enough that Liam wondered what he’d have to do to earn a full smile.

  “So.” Daniel pushed up his sleeves. “How do we start?”

  Once their plan was set and they’d stolen a few hours of sleep, Daniel led him into the woods while they le
t Rebeka rest. Those slim fingers circled Liam’s wrist as he guided him through the dark, but it was so quiet Liam thought he could follow him just by the sound of his breaths. Not that he minded being led.

  Liam barely saw the truck, tucked beneath an escarpment just high enough to block most of its bulk, until they were right upon it. Daniel released him, and Liam pressed his hands to the cool metal in awe. The white stenciled Reich symbol on the door—an eagle clutching a swastika inside a laurel wreath—almost glowed in the dark.

  “Do I even want to know how you got this?” Liam asked.

  Daniel raised one eyebrow. “I am sure you can guess.”

  “You’re a scary man,” Liam said, meaning it as a compliment.

  Daniel leaned one shoulder against the driver’s side door. “I do my best.”

  Starlight traced the side of his face, much closer to Liam’s own than he realized. Unlike in the shadow world, they were in Daniel’s territory now. Liam tried to follow his lead and propped his head against the door, too.

  “What did you leave behind?” Daniel asked, eyes glittering in the darkness. “What are you running from?”

  Liam grimaced. “I’m that obvious, huh?”

  “I know you are after this power.” Daniel’s fingertips ghosted against Liam’s chest, and his heart leapt in response. “But it’s not something you only run toward.”

  Liam curled his fingers against his sternum, though Daniel’s hand was long gone. “There was . . . an accident. A couple of them, really. My mother, and then—”

  Liam paused. He’d used up all his recklessness. But Daniel deserved to know. He pressed his hand against the driver’s door and tasted the words on the tip of his tongue:

  “And then the—the person I thought I loved.”

  Daniel exhaled. “Oh.” His face scrunched up. “Did she . . . leave you?”

  The taste turned salty, like blood. “I lost . . . him.”

  Too long of a silence, a hole dug too shallow, dirt filling it in as fast as he shoveled it out. He’d miscalculated. An ache was forming between his eyes, exhaustion and humiliation. And he’d just gotten Daniel on his side—