The Broken World

by Lindsey Klingele

  “There would be risks, of course,” Rafe said.

  “I already jumped through a hole into another universe to save my brother. It’s a little too late to start worrying about risks now.”

  Rafe responded with a short, barking laugh. “Well, let’s be off, then,” he said, pushing himself away from the stone wall.

  Liv started. “Wait, like, right now? Seriously?”

  Rafe’s eyes narrowed. “When else?”

  Liv looked back in the direction of the village, the direction of the tree where she’d just spoken with Cedric. She remembered the things he’d said, the way he’d dismissed her. This was maybe the best shot to get Peter she’d ever have.

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  STEP UP

  Shannon woke to the sound of Sigourney Weaver screaming.

  Half of her face was plastered against the sticky plastic of a beanbag chair, and half was mushed up against something warm. On the screen, inches from her eyes, Sigourney Weaver was shooting flames at a needle-toothed alien with saliva falling from its mouth in strings.

  “That creature looks a bit like you when you’re sleeping,” rumbled a voice just inches away.

  Shannon shot straight up, blinking sleep from her eyes. She looked down and realized the warm surface she’d been sleeping against was Merek’s arm. And there was, indeed, a small wet spot of drool on his sleeve.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, wiping the back of her hand quickly against her mouth and combing her hair out of her face.

  Shannon had been hiding Merek in the garage for almost a full day now, and they’d spent most of that time burning through Shannon’s movie collection and trying to make as little noise as possible. Her parents had barely questioned the amount of time she spent in the garage—not after she told them she needed to get away from their constant arguing (which wasn’t even a lie).

  The fighting between Shannon’s parents was just the latest weird thing to come along in this semi-apocalypse. But it upset Shannon almost as much as the constant sirens and frequent earthquakes. Her parents mostly argued about what to do next—her mom wanted to get out of the city as soon as possible, to load up the car and drive to her sister’s place in Salt Lake City. But Shannon’s dad didn’t think it was safe to leave yet. Most of the highways were still jammed with traffic, accidents, and even abandoned cars. The I-5 going north had been shut down entirely by a fire. Shannon’s dad claimed it was safer to stay and wait—at least a few more days—until the roads became clearer. He thought it was possible the worst was over.

  Shannon doubted that was true, but knew she couldn’t explain that to her parents. Not that she didn’t want to. She especially wanted to talk to them about the horrifying discovery she’d made in a small house just outside of town . . . the image of the dead man, bled out on his carpet, was impossible to expel from her mind.

  Her stomach rolled over on itself every time she thought of it.

  “When did you start watching this?” Shannon asked, squinting at the screen.

  “When you were asleep. I clicked around for more movies on your comp-ter, the way you showed me. This one is quite good. I do not understand a lot of it, but the creature is very effective.”

  “Of course you’d like Alien,” Shannon said. “Being that you practically are one.”

  Merek didn’t rise to her bait. “Why didn’t you show me this sooner? I found it here. . . .” Merek minimized the movie screen and pointed to a folder labeled “Special Projects.” “Why is this one special?”

  “No reason.” Shannon shrugged, maybe a bit too forcefully. “It’s stupid.”

  Merek just raised one eyebrow.

  “Ugh, fine, it’s just this project, okay? I took it on over the summer. Liv was doing her whole film school thing, and I just felt, I don’t know . . . like I should do something like that, too. My parents won’t let me take acting classes, so I’m kind of . . . studying.”

  Shannon exhaled and looked up at Merek, expecting to see a smirk on his face. But that’s not what she found. Instead, he looked curious.

  “Studying?”

  “Yeah, I made this list of important female performances and started working through them, watching them . . .” Shannon trailed off, wondering why she was explaining any of this. It almost made her skin itch to admit how much she actually cared about this stuff. She hadn’t told anyone about her “special project.” She’d never admit it out loud, but she kind of guessed that no one really took her acting aspirations that seriously—not her classmates, her friends, her parents, or even Liv. Not that it was their fault; after all, Shannon often joked that she’d just as soon become the next Kardashian as the next Jennifer Lawrence, so long as she was famous. But secretly, she wanted to be good at something, the way Liv was good at making movies.

  That’s how Project Watch Great Actresses Until You Secretly Also Become Great came about. Not that she’d gotten very far. It was too easy to get distracted, first by scrolling through her social media and shopping online, later by otherworldly demon creatures and the actual apocalypse.

  “Whatever, maybe it’s a dumb way to learn acting. And it’s not like I’ll ever be as good as Sigourney Weaver is at playing Ripley. I’ll probably shoot for a reality show, maybe one of the dating ones. Or I’ll just give up entirely and get some boring job that comes with a business card to make my parents happy.”

  Merek was silent for a moment. Again, Shannon was sure he’d turn the conversation back to more comfortable, sarcastic waters. Again, he surprised her.

  “Your parents have expectations of you?”

  “Well . . . yeah. Don’t everyone’s?”

  “Not mine,” Merek said, his expression darkening. “They save all their expectations for my brother. Rafe is the one who can do everything—fight, hunt, hold court. Me, they just want to stay out of the way.”

  “Guess you pulled that off pretty well,” Shannon said, smiling.

  Merek half exhaled, half laughed in response, and the warm air hit the skin of Shannon’s arm. “That’s true. I am pretty far out of the way at this point.”

  “Seriously, though, that sucks about your parents,” Shannon said. “I always thought I’d want a sibling to take some of the weight off. But that sounds just as bad.”

  Merek tilted his head just slightly toward Shannon, as if thinking. “Sometimes. In Caelum, everyone would compare me to Rafe, and I would always fall short. After a while, it became easier to stop trying. At least then I could never fail.”

  “Yeah,” Shannon said, suddenly quiet. Her eyes went back to the movie playing on the screen. “I get that.”

  Shannon watched on her laptop as Sigourney Weaver pushed the alien out of the shuttle airlock, finally getting herself free. It made her feel very small, sitting on a beanbag chair and watching someone else—even a fictional someone else—be so strong. Her eyes went to the dark orange sky out the tiny garage window.

  “But you’re not in Caelum anymore.”

  “No, I am definitely not.”

  “And maybe . . . maybe it’s time we actually do . . . try,” she said, thoughtful. “Or at least, stop hiding.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that we’re two of the only people in this world who know what’s really going on in this city. And we’re just going to, what? Curl up in here and wait for Joe to fix everything on his own? Because we’re afraid?”

  Merek eyed her skeptically.

  “Is that what Ripley would do?” Shannon asked, gesturing to the computer screen.

  “I thought you told me those people on the screen were not real.”

  “Okay, then. Is that what we would do? Just . . . nothing?”

  “We are waiting to hear from Joe.”

  Shannon shook her head. “Come on, Merek, he’s not going to call. I know he’s not going to call. He gave us an out, and he assumes we took it.”

  Shannon picked up her cell phone and hit Joe’s number. It rang
several times before going to voice mail.

  “We’ll have to go to him.”

  She cast a look at the garage door, imagining her parents in another room, two walls away. They’d be beyond pissed if they caught her sneaking out again, especially now. And yet . . .

  “We?”

  Shannon looked over at Merek, still sitting on the beanbag chair. She sighed. “Fine, you can feel free to sit here alone, moping about the friends who left you behind. Or you can help me. You can do something. If you ever want to open another portal again and get home, we have to figure out how to fix this.”

  “Who says I want to go home?”

  Shannon took a moment to figure out if he was joking. He didn’t seem to be.

  “You don’t want to go back to Caelum?”

  “Maybe not . . . at least not yet,” Merek said. “There are many things here I still have not seen.”

  “Okay. So LA is great and you want to stay here and figure things out, just like a hundred thousand other people who move here every single year. Doesn’t change the fact that the city’s currently kinda wrecked. If you want to stay here, that should give you even more motivation to help fix it.”

  This time Merek looked out the window. After a moment, he stood up ungracefully from the beanbag chair. “And if I don’t come, I suppose you will leave me alone in this pink nightmare of a room?”

  “Yes, and you’ll have nothing to eat but the Halloween candy I hid in the toolbox three years ago.”

  “Then it looks as though I have no choice.” Merek shrugged. To anyone who didn’t know him, it might have been a sign that he didn’t care—didn’t care whether he helped, or stayed in that beanbag chair forever, or watched the world fall apart around him. Just a few days before, Shannon would have rolled her eyes and made a sarcastic comment back to him. But now she saw past the shrug and the defensiveness, past what he wanted her to see.

  Not that she would ever tell him that.

  “Great. Then saving the world it is. We just need a way to the hotel where Joe’s staying.” After the warehouse fire, Joe had thought it best not to go back to his own house, guessing that the Knights—and even his own brother—might track him down to get to Liv and her siblings. They’d stopped at this hotel briefly after getting Merek out of the hospital so Merek could borrow some of Joe’s clothes. “There’s no way I can take the minivan without my parents noticing. . . .” Shannon’s eyes fell on the glittery purple bike in the corner. “Guess that’ll have to do.”

  “What is it?” Merek asked. He looked at the bike distrustfully. “Certainly not a mode of transportation.”

  “Yup. Think of it like a horse. And those handlebars? They’re your saddle.”

  Merek looked at her as though she were insane. Maybe she was.

  She grinned. “Let’s ride.”

  Shannon was certain the bike would give out on her at any second. And if it didn’t, her legs definitely would. She huffed in giant breaths as she finally made the turn onto Sunset Boulevard. Her legs wobbled as she stood up, pedaling the old bike forward. Merek sat stiffly on the small seat behind her, having flatly refused to sit on the handlebars. He held his long legs up to keep them from hitting pavement, and his hands gripped her waist at every single turn. As she hit a bump, he moved closer, fingers digging into her skin.

  “Ow,” Shannon panted.

  “Sorry,” Merek mumbled, releasing his grip by just a fraction. Riding with Merek felt very, very different from when she and Liv used to double up to ride the bike together.

  “Are we nearly there?”

  Shannon rolled her eyes, even though Merek couldn’t see her face. And even that took almost more energy than she had to spare.

  Shannon had been dropping speed every minute, and by the time she’d pedaled onto Sunset, her legs felt like rubber on a hot day. And the view did nothing to perk her up. Sunset Boulevard had always varied from looking glamorous in one blink to seedy in the next, but now it looked like something straight out of Dawn of the Dead.

  It was dark out, though not the usual dark glow of Hollywood at night. The ruined sky gave everything a sickly brown overtone. The roadway was entirely empty of cars—this particular street didn’t provide a quick route out of town—and garbage was blowing freely across the empty pavement. The sidewalks were mostly empty as well, not a tourist in sight. When Shannon pedaled past Arclight Hollywood, with its giant, geodesic dome advertising the last blockbuster of summer, three military jeeps drove by the street on her right. None of them seemed to notice her and Merek.

  Most of the stores were locked up, windows barred, though a few had clearly been smashed into. One restaurant’s entire front end was blackened char, as if the building had caught fire and been hastily put out. The concrete walkways that bore pink stars with celebrity’s names imprinted on them were covered with trash. Hollywood was still technically here, but everything that had ever made it important was gone.

  Finally, Merek tightened his grip on Shannon’s waist and motioned to a small two-level motel set just off the side of the road. Shannon tucked the purple bike out of sight behind the building and followed Merek up to Joe’s door.

  She knocked, but no one answered.

  “There’s no way he’s still with Daisy in Santa Barbara, right?” she asked, more to herself than to Merek.

  “He might have left,” Merek said, peering around the empty motel lot. “Everyone else did.”

  Shannon felt prickles of fear in her stomach. What if Joe had left to try to fix everything on his own? What if he’d gone tracking down more leads without them and had gotten hurt?

  “We have to go inside.”

  “The door is locked,” Merek said, as if that settled that.

  Shannon raised an eyebrow. “So? You’ve got superhuman strength, right? Can’t you break it down?”

  This time Merek was the one to raise his eyebrow. They stayed like that, staring at each other with their equally arched eyebrows, until Merek finally broke away. “I might try the window.”

  “That works, too.”

  Merek kicked at the metal railing that lined the concrete walkway outside the motel room until one of its bars loosened, and he pulled it free. Shannon kept a lookout in case the sound attracted any attention, but if there was anyone left in this run-down hotel in apocalypse city, they weren’t leaving their rooms to investigate strange noises.

  Merek smashed the window open with the bar railing, then kicked aside the jagged, broken pieces near the sill.

  “Perfect,” Shannon said, smiling. “It’s like you were born to be a juvenile offender.”

  “Was that almost . . . a compliment?” Merek asked, his mouth lifting in a smile.

  “Almost.” Shannon turned away to hide her own smile and crawled through the window and opened the door for Merek. Together, they looked at the small, dark room with its two twin beds and tiny, scratched-up desk pushed up against one corner.

  “God, this is depressing,” Shannon said.

  She moved to the desk, which was covered with books and papers. Most were pieces of scrap and notebook paper with messy handwriting scrawled across them. Shannon picked one up and saw a series of names written in untidy pen. Some of the names had question marks by them, others check marks.

  “What is this?” Shannon murmured.

  Merek moved closer, looking over the papers. But he only shrugged. “My ability to help ended at smashing the window.”

  “Where did he go?”

  They heard a creaking noise from behind, and Shannon and Merek both whirled around. Merek’s hand immediately rose up in a protective motion that covered them both, but then fell back down almost as quickly. “I might have some idea,” he said.

  Joe stood in the doorway, staring down Shannon and Merek with disapproval.

  Shannon, no stranger to being caught in the act by a parental figure, immediately opened her mouth to try to come up with an excuse. But before she could say anything, Joe’s posture changed abruptly. H
is shoulders fell, and he wiped one hand across his face, tired.

  “Suppose I should have seen this coming.”

  “Well . . . yeah,” Shannon said, caught off guard. “I mean, what?”

  “Keeping Liv in the dark never worked out, either.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I mean, I appreciate you letting us off the hook on this whole search after . . . what we found in Pasadena. And I get why Daisy wanted to leave. But I can’t just sit back and do nothing, Joe. I can’t.”

  Joe sighed a long sigh. It looked like he’d been up for days, ever since Malibu. “You’re just kids.”

  “Liv is just a kid, and she’s off storming a castle or something.”

  “And I am not a kid,” Merek responded, sounding genuinely insulted. “I have been trained to fight by the best instructors in Caelum.”

  “Yeah! And I . . . well, I can’t fight much, but I can help you with research and stuff.” Shannon gestured to the table. “That’s what all this is, right? You can at least tell me what you’re looking for.”

  “I’m looking for more Knights of Valere.” This time, Joe pointed to the pieces of paper on the table. “I found those papers in Pasadena, in the house of the man who was killed—”

  “I knew it! I knew you found something!” Shannon cried. “Sorry, go ahead.”

  “It’s a list of names. I believe they’re the contacts for other Knights. I thought I’d start tracking them down, see if any of them are willing to talk.”

  Shannon looked back over the list of names. “And what? Couldn’t find any?”

  Joe waited a moment before answering, his eyes on the floor. “No. I found them.”

  Once again, Joe ran a hand over his beard. Shannon noticed how greasy it was, like Joe hadn’t washed his face or showered in a while. And maybe she was imagining things, but it looked like it had much more gray in it than she remembered. Joe looked up, his tired, bloodshot eyes resting on her own.

  “They’re gone. All four Knights I’ve managed to track down from that list . . . all gone. Missing or . . . dead.”