Unraveling

by Elizabeth Norris

  I turn to Ben. “Is this New York?”

  “They call it New Prima here. It’s the capital,” he says. “But yeah, you can see the Empire State Building—or the New Prima equivalent—from the window in his bathroom.”

  Holy. Shit.

  I can’t believe it. I mean, I can—I did. I believed in other universes because I had to in order to swallow Ben’s story. But I was so wrapped up in trying to stop the countdown, I didn’t really have a chance to think about what other universes really means.

  I wonder if this is what Ben’s world looks like, or if his looks more like mine. I’m about to ask, and I turn to him. But there’s something about the look on his face. There’s no hint of a smile anywhere—no hint of relief that we’re alive, that Barclay knows it’s not Ben opening the portals.

  “I had the creepiest dreams,” I say, because I’m hoping talking about them will make him tell me what’s wrong—and allow me to expunge them from my memory.

  Only it doesn’t.

  Because Ben whispers, “Those weren’t dreams,” when I’m not even halfway finished. He looks at the wall where the TV is.

  It’s the largest TV I’ve ever seen. It takes up almost the entire wall, and it’s so thin, it looks like it actually could be the wall. It’s split into twelve squares, each of them showing a different newscast. But all the newscasts are showing the same thing. They’re all showing footage of natural disasters and cities collapsing.

  Buildings collapsing and imploding. Cities turning into rubble in huge clouds of debris. Being swallowed by the earth, blanketed by tsunamis, or eaten up by wildfires.

  Ben says something, but I either don’t hear it or my ears shut down and refuse to interpret the sounds. For a second I wonder what he could possibly say at a time like this.

  But that wonder only lasts for a split second.

  Because deep down, I know.

  We’re watching the collapse of two worlds. And one of them is mine.

  PART THREE

  Remember me when I am gone away,

  Gone far away into the silent land;

  When you can no more hold me by the hand.

  —Christina Rossetti

  01:01:26:07

  What we’re seeing is Wave Function Collapse in action.

  My legs give out and I drop to the floor where I am and stare up at the television wall under the weight of that realization—everyone I know is dying right now—and I can’t breathe. I feel like I’m sinking, like I’m underwater and weighted down, like everything is just collapsing in around me, pushing me down, and I’ll never be able to get back up again—so why even try.

  Ben is there, holding me and whispering and running his hands through my hair. But it doesn’t matter—he still feels too far away.

  01:01:15:40

  When Barclay comes back from wherever he was, he sees us and says, “Stop worrying, I’ve gotten everything sorted out.”

  “Oh, like you can fix this,” I say.

  He stares at me for a second and then shakes his head. “You’re not seeing Wave Function Collapse,” he says. “Trust me, we wouldn’t have reporters there showing it, if it was.”

  “What are we seeing, then?” Ben asks.

  “Symptoms of the upcoming collision. It’s brought back not-quite-live from reporters authorized for interverse travel in emergencies.”

  “You have reporters on my Earth?”

  Barclay looks at me. His face says, Of course we do, but he doesn’t elaborate. Instead he turns to Ben. “When they actually collide and collapse, there won’t be anything to see. They’ll cease to exist.”

  I don’t know how he can treat this so calmly—even though I’ve surfaced, I still feel a little catatonic. What do we do now?

  “What universe is this other one?” Ben asks, his face tight.

  Barclay stares at him for a second before saying, “Yours.”

  “Mine?” His voice is breathless. “What do you mean?”

  “You opened portals to your world; the instability is pulling both your universes together,” Barclay says. “I thought I explained all this.”

  I reach out and grab Ben’s hand, and squeeze. I know what he’s thinking and feeling. Because it’s the same thing I’m thinking and feeling—like I’m not sure whether I should just lie down and die or try to fight against the fact that all my insides feel like they’ve been torn out.

  “Your ability to open unstable portals somehow allowed you to choose which portal to open,” Barclay says. “You just didn’t know it.”

  I get up because I can’t sit still anymore. None of the stories about the apocalypse ever tell you how crazy you’ll feel when you’re watching it unfold. I’ve even had the thought that if we can’t prevent the end of the world, I wish it would just hurry up and get here already.

  Barclay explains how he brought us here against the rules, but his commanding officer has cleared him. After he showers, he’s taking us to the IA building, where Ben will be taken into custody and charged for his crimes and I will be questioned.

  I hear him, but I don’t really listen. Instead I stare at the changing digital pictures on the wall, and wonder what kind of world this is where people can be so nonchalant about the loss of life. If this is what technological advancement got them, I don’t want any part of it.

  As soon as he disappears into the bathroom, I turn to Ben. “I don’t like this plan.”

  “Good,” Ben says with a half smile. “I have a different one.”

  “A good one?” I ask with a laugh, and in spite of everything, it feels good to know I still can.

  “I think so.” He nods, pulling a quantum charger and something that looks like a syringe from his pocket. “I swiped this from Barclay’s closet while you were sleeping. I think I’ve figured out how it works. Every universe has coordinates based on where it is in comparison to Prima. It looks like you punch in the coordinates for the universe, plus the latitude and longitude for where we want to end up, and then it opens a portal.”

  For a second, I’m worried that his plan is to go home—to his home.

  “I haven’t entirely figured out all the coordinates yet, but I copied down the coordinates we came from.” He gestures to the necklace. “I think between that and the injection you had yesterday, you’ll be able to go through like I can, without it burning.”

  “You think?”

  “If it doesn’t work, I palmed one of the syringes, and I’ll inject you with it as soon as we’re through.” He takes a deep breath. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but I have to do this. You can stay here if you’d rather, but I have to go back for Elijah and Reid.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  He nods, and then looks down and away, and I can tell from his face something I don’t want to hear is coming. “I know who’s doing it.”

  My face feels cold, and I’m afraid to say the words out loud, as if that might make it untrue. “Opening the portals? You know?”

  Ben shushes me and nods. “I’ve spent hours going over it in my head. I was wrong when I told Barclay no one else knows the science. Both Reid and Elijah know the science, and I don’t want to think either of them would have opened a portal without me, but I know how bad Elijah wants to go home. And he was the one who first opened one with me. I don’t know who else it could be.”

  I don’t know Elijah like Ben does, but I still don’t want him to have done this—and not just for Ben’s sake. Elijah bothers me, and I think he’s a jerk, but I was actually starting to not mind him that much, and I was willing to chalk his attitude up to the whole “I’m from an alternate universe” thing, because he was Ben’s friend. But Ben’s words make sense. I remember Alex saying something similar only a few days ago.

  It doesn’t physically hurt to find that he might have gone behind Ben’s back to open the portals. I’m just mad.

  “Let’s go,” I say, because we should be gone before Barclay gets out of the shower. Who knows how easy it is to tra
ck where one of these things can take us?

  “You don’t happen to know the latitude and longitude of your house?” Ben asks.

  I shake my head, but you can bet I’ll find out now.

  Ben stands up and takes a deep breath. “Looks like we’re headed back to mine.”

  “Hopefully not the basement.”

  He doesn’t answer. He just presses some of the buttons, and that electrical sound—the sound of something powering up—is there. And then so is the portal.

  I feel the cool air and smell rain and salt water first, but this time, before I step through, I really look at it. It’s circular and at least seven feet in diameter, maybe more. And it really does look like we’re about to step into a vertical pool of tar.

  Which is why this time, when I take Ben’s hand and we go through it, I hold my breath.

  01:01:10:01

  It occurs to me when I’m on the ground in Ben’s driveway that we should figure out how to properly land if we plan on making interverse travel a habit.

  If Elijah is the one opening the portals, it also occurs to me that he might have done more than just that. The portals are connected to the bodies and the UIED—they’re connected to my dad’s investigation. The one he was working on when he was killed. It’s possible whoever is responsible for opening the portals is also responsible for my father’s death.

  I shake the thought from my head. I know I’m jumping to conclusions. Elijah might be the most likely suspect I have, but that doesn’t mean it was him. I can’t exactly see him killing someone.

  Or can I?

  I have seen how determined he is to get back to his world. He didn’t care that Ben’s portals had killed people.

  What if my dad somehow got in the way of Elijah getting home? My heart beats in my ears, and I realize at this point, I’m probably far too traumatized by everything to trust my thoughts.

  It’s not until I stand up and see Ben’s house—correction: where Ben’s house used to be—that it occurs to me that I have no idea where Jared is.

  Light-headed and short of breath, I bend at the waist and gasp. I can’t believe I could have forgotten him. I look for Ben, who’s pushing himself up off the ground. “We have to find Jared before we do anything else,” I say, and I can’t keep the hysteria from my voice. “We have to find him.”

  “Absolutely,” Ben says. “Try your house first?”

  I nod. Jared could be anywhere. He could be dead in a gutter or trapped under a building. As soon as I find him, I’m never going to let him out of my sight.

  Ben manages to get my Jeep started, even though the engine is sputtering and it refuses to move faster than twenty miles an hour. Not that we’d be able to go much faster than that anyway—Ben has to navigate around debris and fallen trees, then we have to turn around and go a different way when the bottom of the hill past Park Village Road is flooded. And then we’re derailed again because part of the 56 has collapsed. My eyes water as we drive.

  And in the car we’re silent. It’s just the sputtering of the engine, my increasingly hysterical breathing, and Ben’s occasional calm reassurances: “We’ll find him,” “It’s okay,” and “Try not to worry.”

  Because everywhere I look, civilization as I knew it is wrecked. The devastation is widespread and almost indescribable, as if San Diego got hit by every natural disaster imaginable all at once. Cars are overturned and discarded—in some places they’re piled on one another at odd angles. Houses are missing, toppled, or burned, and yards are scorched, flooded, or buried under debris.

  From far away, neighborhoods look like a discarded children’s playground, like toys that someone just bulldozed over and left carelessly tossed aside. Up close, I feel like I’ve just stepped into a T. S. Eliot poem brought to life.

  The debris is everywhere—pieces of wood and chunks of concrete are what I seem to notice first, but it’s the flecks of color that demand my attention. The discarded red baseball hat—where’s the person who was wearing it? The well-loved doll with bright golden-blond hair—where’s the child who loved it?

  When we finally get to my neighborhood, there’s an overturned car and what’s left of a house in the way, so we get out and walk.

  A couple of times, Ben reaches out to steady me or help when I have to climb over something that doesn’t belong in the middle of my street. At one point a cluster of downed palm trees is blocking our path and we have to climb over them. After I slide off one tree trunk, I curse and kick it as hard as I can, even though I know it’s hardly productive.

  “Here,” Ben says before I start trying to get over it again. He puts his hand on the trunk, and the bark turns to flakes of sawdust. It starts at one center point—where Ben’s hand is—and a hole spreads outward in a circle. When it’s big enough for us to climb through, he pulls his hand back. He’s sweating and breathing hard, but we don’t say anything.

  We keep walking.

  Despite whatever we saw on Barclay’s TV, I didn’t expect what I’m seeing now.

  Life will never go back to normal after this.

  And then I see my house, and I have to stop walking. Involuntarily, like they have lives of their own, my hands clap over my mouth and I drop to my knees in the middle of my street.

  Because correction: I see where my house should be.

  It’s been leveled. It’s just gone.

  My entire yard and driveway are a pile of debris. Discarded bricks and rubble surround two of the walls from what used to be my living room, like they’re part of a grotesque life-size dollhouse.

  Alex’s house is sunken in next to where my house should be—it looks like his house imploded and mine blew away.

  I don’t realize I’m crying until Ben pulls me back to my feet and wipes my eyes. “Jared wouldn’t have been at the house,” he’s saying. “No one was home.”

  I nod, but I’m paralyzed. I don’t know where to go.

  “Do you want to see if anything is salvageable?” Ben asks. But he’s more optimistic than I am if he thinks there’s anything anyone could salvage from that wreckage. “Okay, then let’s go to the school. Remember when they turned it into an evacuation shelter a couple years ago when we had those wildfires? He might be there.”

  He doesn’t say what I’m worried about, though. Ben was right—no one was at my house. But Jared was at school. What if we get there and it’s gone too?

  What if Jared is dead?

  I’m suddenly too weak. I reach out a hand to grab on to something. I can’t stand up anymore. Not while I’ve got that thought, and Ben has to help turn me around and carry/drag me to the curb so I can sit down. Stars are clouding my vision, and I’m dangerously close to losing my mind.

  I can’t be sure how long I’m on the curb, sitting with my head between my knees, but Ben leaves me to walk to the wreckage of Alex’s house to see if anyone’s there, and he picks through some of the debris where my house should be.

  My street looks and feels like a ghost town. Like people just up and fled and took every sign and sound of life with them. It’s eerily quiet—no sounds of traffic, people, even birds. And it’s darker than it should be, like the sun decided it just couldn’t bear witness to this. But the worst is the smell. I didn’t notice it at first because it’s far away, but the air has a permanent edge to it—the scent of burning.

  Ben comes back with a navy hooded sweatshirt that was my dad’s. It’s dirty and it smells a little mildewed, but it’s dry.

  “It’s going to get cold,” he says. “You should definitely have this.”

  I take a deep breath and grab it as I stand up. “Let’s go to Eastview.”

  We’re climbing through the fallen trees when I see the driver’s-side door of the Jeep is wide open and someone is rustling around in there. “Hey!” I call, not stopping to think that this person could be capable of violence now that civilization has literally crumbled.

  But he raises his head and goes, “Thank God, I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” />
  Struz.

  I jump down from the trunk of the tree and run toward him. He’s the first thing I’ve seen that looks the same as it did before. He’s still gangly and too tall and thin, wearing a suit with a bulletproof vest instead of the jacket. And I know he’ll know what I need to do.

  “Where’s Jared? Is he okay?”

  “Calm down,” Struz says. “Jared’s fine. What happened to your wrist?”

  I want to collapse with relief, but I stay on my feet.

  “It’s broken. Where is he?”

  “How’d you break it?” he asks.

  “I fell,” I say. “Where’s Jared?”

  Struz sighs and rubs his hair. “He’s in the hospital wing at the Federal Building. He’s fine, but he broke his ankle during the earthquake. He’s a little bitter about it, but he’ll be in better spirits once he’s not so worried about you.”

  “Why is he worried about me?”

  Struz looks over my shoulder at Ben. “Do you believe this chick? J, you didn’t go to school. You were at home when he left. Have you seen your house?”

  “Oh my God, I didn’t even think of that. I wasn’t there either.” I wonder when the fact that this is actually real will sink in.

  “Yeah, I have some questions about that, but let’s save them for the car. We’ve had a lot of trouble with looters, and it’s not safe to just be standing out here in the open.” He guides me toward a TrailBlazer—it’s not the one he used to drive, and I wonder what happened to that one, as he opens the passenger door.

  “Struz, this is Ben Michaels,” I say as I get inside. “He’s coming with us.”

  Struz nods and shuts my door.

  When we’re all inside and Struz is driving us down to the Federal Building, he asks what the hell I was doing cutting school, anyway—not that he’s mad. And he of course wants to know about the cryptic message I left him before it all happened and where I’ve been since the quake.