Evolution

by Teri Terry

  But no matter how far away I went from what I was, there were still things I had to set right.

  Could Callie help—would she? I thought so. I hoped so. While I was still everywhere and every when, I reached out and back, found her, and claimed her as mine. Then we were linked even more closely than we were before, despite the blocks inside her mind. I knew she’d find a way if anyone could.

  Reassembly came next. Every tiny speck of me was like a speeding car, heading for multiple collisions—at way beyond the maximum on a highway, or even the light of the stars in the sky. But even though it hurt as much as when I came apart before, I wasn’t so scared. Now I knew what was happening.

  When it was over, I drew a deep breath. Cold air flooded into my lungs, and I coughed.

  I had lungs? I could feel cold?

  I drew my arms around my shivering body and opened my eyes.

  Where did I find myself, and where am I still?

  It’s a new world, a new place, and while everything is subtly different, it is also the same. It’s like Earth but not Earth. They call the Earth I came from Earth-minus and this Earth-plus. They told me they are different versions of the same world. They are both in the same place and infinitely far apart—dimensionally speaking—and one is matter and the other antimatter. Which makes my head spin to think about.

  I was taken into custody to start with. Traveling between paired matter and antimatter worlds as I did—as dark light, they explained—is illegal. But they soon understood it wasn’t my fault, that Xander was behind everything that happened to me.

  They released me, found me a place to live. And everyone here is like I was as a survivor: we talk with our minds, and can do all the things survivors can do. It’s just normal.

  I could be happy here, but I can’t let go. I’m always watching, waiting to see what Xander will do, through Callie’s eyes. We were and are still a pair: light and dark light, matter and antimatter, Earth-minus and Earth-plus—two sides of a coin that never see each other but each know the other is there.

  Linked as we are, I try to help Callie when I can. It was hard at first; she resisted me, didn’t believe I was real. But then Shay helped her accept who I am.

  And now Xander might be coming here.

  We’re ready.

  As soon as Xander arrives, the same way I did—traveling as dark light—he’s taken into custody. He’s charged with crimes against the multiverse. He seems happy about that.

  There’s a trial. It plays out on this Earth’s version of TV.

  I soon get bored with all the background information. Apparently for Xander to have a fair trial, he has to know it all. But I make myself watch and listen.

  They explain how after each big bang, matter and antimatter don’t destroy each other like they should because they are shielded from each other by dark matter. So every world—every universe too—is in pairs: a matter one and an antimatter one—all kept apart by dark matter.

  Then a long time ago, before they made it illegal, the people who lived on this antimatter planet learned how to travel as dark light to their paired matter world: Earth-minus. When they arrived, all the early humans started to die. They’d brought dark light with them, and it triggered something that killed the Earth-minus people. And then the new arrivals to Earth-minus started getting sick and dying too. Normal light on Earth did the same thing to them; more slowly because it wasn’t a pure light source, but they were dying.

  They figured out this must be due to evolution. If you mix matter and antimatter together, the dark matter keeping our worlds apart will collapse the dimensions, and it’ll trigger another big bang. This has happened time after time. It’s like Earth-minus and Earth-plus used evolution to protect themselves: making us die if we went where we should never go.

  But not surprisingly, the ones who traveled to Earth-minus didn’t want to die. They messed around with their DNA. They did experiments with ancestors of cats first—that’s why cats like Chamberlain and Merlin are so weird and clever and feel a little like mind-reading survivors. They’ve got DNA from Earth-plus in them too.

  Then the travelers made hybrids of themselves with the early humans from Earth-minus, so they could survive the light on that Earth, which created people with shielding to survive dark light too—sort of like how dark matter shields matter and antimatter universes from each other. They figured out how to save early humans who weren’t hybrids by putting mutations in their DNA to stop the process that made them die in dark light.

  It turns out that when they first went to Earth-minus, they communicated with Earth-plus using entangled pairs—a person on one planet could communicate instantaneously with one on the other. Now I did listen carefully: this must be like me and Callie.

  Eventually the hybrids regressed, lost technology, lost touch with this world and where they came from. Then this next part seems to be guesswork, but they think that without any dark light around on Earth-minus anymore, the mutations in the early humans weren’t stable enough or something—and that over a very long time, their DNA started to revert to the way it had been before.

  At this point Xander gets very excited. He said that’s why some people are immune—they’ve got these introduced mutations still; most people die because they’ve reverted; and some very few, who are hybrids, start to get sick in the presence of dark light because of their Earth-minus heritage, but then this triggers their Earth-plus genes to make the dark shielding. They get better and also have these abilities awakened, like telepathy and stuff.

  Whatever.

  It all takes forever, but Xander is finally found guilty of crimes against the multiverse.

  Weirdly, he still seems happy. He’s allowed last words, and he says he’s ecstatic—strange thing to say, in the circumstances—that he was right about how to travel to this world. He says that he’s ecstatic to finally understand everything.

  His punishment is dissolution—his atoms are scattered far and wide.

  They say it is painless.

  I’m disappointed about that last part.

  CHAPTER 4

  KAI

  I KNOCK AND OPEN THE DOOR, LOOK IN. It’s Callie’s fourteenth birthday. She asked me to come, to bring cake, and I’ve got a massive chocolate fudge cake with candles.

  “Hello?” I call out.

  “We’re in the kitchen,” Mum says.

  When I walk into the kitchen, Mum is there. Rohan. Wilf. And someone I didn’t expect to see: Shay.

  She’s surprised too.

  “I blocked her so she didn’t sense you coming,” Wilf says. He, Mum, and Rohan get up, leave the room.

  It’s just Callie, Shay, and me.

  “I thought you weren’t able to come,” Shay says to me, and gives Callie a look. “This is a family thing. I’ll go.” She gets out of her chair, stands, poised to run.

  “No. It’s my birthday, and you’re both staying,” Callie says. “Anyway, I’ve had enough of this. You’re my two favorite people, and you are both suffering, missing each other. It’s beyond stupid. Work things out. Now.”

  And I stand there, helpless. Wanting Shay more than I ever did, but knowing she always pushes me away.

  CHAPTER 5

  SHAY

  CALLIE TAKES MY RIGHT HAND, Kai’s left, and puts them together. We met because of her. We were parted because of her. Can she bring us together again?

  I look up into Kai’s eyes. Callie is right. No matter how I try to get him out of my head, my heart, I can’t. He’s always there. It’s like a toothache in a tooth I can’t pull. My traitor hand clings to his tight, and when it does, there is an answering light in his eyes.

  I shake my head, fighting not to cry. “How can we forget everything that happened?” The things we should have said, the lies that came between us. “We can’t go back to what we were.”

  “No,” he says. “But maybe
we can become something better.” He raises my hand and presses it against his temple. “Come on. Come inside, and you’ll see.”

  I feel rather than see Callie leave the room, shut the door. My eyes are closed. I can’t breathe, can’t think. I don’t know what to do.

  “Shay? Please.”

  And like the petals of a flower must open to the sun, I reach to Kai inside.

  I’m crying. I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if I can let go of the hurt and the pain.

  Shay? I love you. I’ve always loved you.

  Is that enough?

  It’s all that I have, he says, and his tears are falling now too.

  Kai is here, next to me. He is also here, in my mind. Then his lips are on mine, his body is against mine, and the answer is yes.

  It is enough. It is all that there is.

  CHAPTER 6

  CALLIE

  WILL I EVER TELL ANYONE about Jenna and Xander—explain it all?

  I don’t know. I don’t know if knowing everything—no matter how happy it made Xander at the end—really helps.

  Or even if it does, if anyone would believe me.

  Anyway, I’m not sure if knowing that survivors are hybrids—that part of them comes from another planet, even if it is paired to this one—would be a good thing for Shay and the other survivors. Some people are still pretty weird about how different they are: imagine what they’d make of that?

  Besides, even though she doesn’t say it out loud, I know Shay somehow needs to believe that Xander did what he did to save her. And I know that isn’t true.

  Xander must have worked things out after finding out about the bond between Jenna and me—she had to be somewhere, but she’d vanished from our planet. He must have guessed that if he became like Jenna, eventually they’d destroy him like they did her, and he’d escape to another world. Though I’m not sure being dissolved was in his plans.

  So I’ll keep what Jenna showed me to myself.

  But it seems comforting somehow to think that this Earth we live on found a way to protect itself—that we evolved in a way that would prevent us from triggering another big bang, either accidentally or on purpose. I hope that the changes survivors have been making in people now, to make them immune, don’t affect that—even as I’m glad my mum, my brother, and I were all immune.

  As for now, there is still something I have to do. Jenna and I need to say goodbye.

  We’re closer than I could ever be to anyone else—I know this. She even finally shared with me who she was before she ended up in Shetland. She’d been in one foster home after another. Some horrible things happened to her, and she ran away. Runaways and others from shelters were gathered up by Xander’s followers and ended up as subjects in Shetland.

  My memories of Shetland were hidden by Xander and Cepta so thoroughly that even though I know the truth now, it’s foggy, like a movie I’ve watched instead of something that happened to me.

  But I know I was there, with Jenna—that’s where we met. We’d talk and hold each other in the night to stop being so scared. Even then it was like we’d always known each other—now I sort of understand why. When Jenna reached out to me, she was out of time—every when, she said—so it was kind of like she’d always been in my life.

  Xander had been so sure I’d be a survivor like he is. He’d convinced me to sneak out and meet him that morning I went missing in Killin; then he’d convinced me Mum had said I was to go with him. I started to question this and ran off into the woods when we stopped for gas. That was when Shay saw me. But Xander found me on the road—he knew where I’d be. He was a survivor, after all.

  And I was taken to Shetland, like Jenna was, to be experimented on.

  And he was so disappointed when I wasn’t a survivor, when I was immune instead—and most of all, that he was wrong. He shipped me off to Cepta to tinker with my mind so I’d forget it all.

  I would have, if it hadn’t been for Shay and Jenna.

  Jenna and I have shared fear. Horror. Joy. And Jenna is still here, right now, just out of reach. She’s always there.

  Yet in her murmurs in my dreams, and near waking, Jenna agrees: it must be this way. We both know it’s time. It’s better for Jenna, better for me too. We can’t live anything like normal lives, not tangled together the way we are.

  Goodbye, she whispers.

  “Goodbye, Jenna,” I answer her. “I hope you will be happy now.”

  She pulls away. There’s a sense of us both letting go, of solitude—one I can’t remember having felt before. I panic and want to call her back.

  But it’s too late. She’s gone.

  I get out of bed, pull the curtains. The stars are bright in the sky. Is Jenna out there somewhere I can see?

  There is silence, pure and true, in the night, in my mind. Shay taught me how to block survivors like Kai can. Now that Jenna is gone too, my mind is completely my own. For the first time in my whole life, no one can see my thoughts or make me think what they want.

  I’m not sure who I am, completely alone like this—like pages no one can write on but me.

  It’s scary. It’s lonely.

  But it’s also amazing.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  While writing this trilogy, I’ve been shamelessly stealing names from friends I’ve known a long time or met along the way. Thank you to the following for the names of their children, spouses, and/or pets:

  Addy Farmer—for Henry, Wilf, Freya, Angus, and Persey (her cat)

  Jo Wyton—for another Henry (they can share) and Merlin (her cat)

  Sally Poyton—for Spike and Beatriz

  Karen McKee—for Iona, Euan, and Duncan

  Caroline Horn—for Azra

  Thank you to my awesome agent, Caroline Sheldon; my lovely editors—Megan Larkin, Emily Sharratt, and Rosie McIntosh—and everyone at Orchard Books and Hachette Children’s Group.

  And thank you most of all to Graham, Banrock, and Scooby: cheers!