by Jeff Hirsch
Kevin bounded along backward in front of Glenn as she crossed the soccer field toward the train station.
“So you believe the official story. You’re like a — what do they call it? A dupe!”
Glenn’s hand curled into a fist around the strap of her bag.
Sometimes Kevin had a way about him that seemed to demand
punching. “I believe that the simplest explanation is always the best.
The government’s explanation, which, by the way, is the same as every major scientist’s — ”
“Who are all controlled by the government. Yes, go on.”
“There’s no need to be smug, Kevin.”
“I’m not being smug, Glenn. I just can’t believe you’re being so naive about this. We live right next to the border. You’ve never wondered? You’ve never been curious?”
“There’s nothing to be curious about!”
Kevin jumped in her face, dancing back and forth to block her way to the train.
“You’re curious about everything, Morgan. You’re telling me you’ve never looked? Never seen anything? Never felt anything?”
A wind rose up through the alleyways behind the school. Rushing through the concrete plains, it sounded like whispering voices. A chill rippled across Glenn’s shoulders and down her spine. She shook it off and dropped her bag on the ground between them.
“On May 5, 2023, there was a massive explosion — ”
“Glenn!”
“- somewhere between what was then Japan and the United
States. Millions of people died in the initial blast. Millions, Kevin. And then millions more died in an aftermath that covered roughly a third of the planet in toxic ash and radiation.”
“But what about — ”
“It took years after the Rift to establish the border and get life back to something remotely normal. Everything on our side of the border became the Colloquium, which, over the course of the last hundred and thirty years, pursued a massive research and education effort, which easily accounts for a spike in scientific and technological discoveries following the Rift event. As for what’s on the other side?”
Glenn whipped out her tablet and brought up a series of satellite photos. Seen from far above, the world glittered, alive with sprawling networks of lights. There were thick knots around the major cities, and tendrils reaching one to another in a shining web that was broken only by a vast clot of darkness thousands of miles wide and long, which cut through continents and oceans. Within it, not a single light shone.
Glenn clicked through the pictures as they drew in closer.
A two-mile band of forest, with a string of towering red warning lights at its center, formed a no-man’s-land between them and what lay on the other side of the border. Beyond the border there was a vast, barren plain: uncountable miles of flattened trees, scorched earth, and piles of rubble that had once been great cities.
“People look up at the clouds and they see faces,” Glenn said.
“They look at the stars and see constellations. They look across the border and instead of seeing a graveyard they see mutants and monsters.”
Kevin was watching her intently, the light in his brown eyes dimmed. Glenn remembered the clean smell of the snow as it blew between them and felt an ache in the center of her chest.
“People see what they want to see,” she said. “Whether it’s real or not.” Glenn dropped down to tuck her tablet into her bag. “Now. Do you think you can remember all of that for your test?”
“What test?”
A scream, made all the worse by the idiotic grin rising on Kevin Kapoor’s face, roared inside Glenn. She shut her eyes so tight her lids nearly cramped, and counted to ten. Why did I agree to this? What was I thinking?
When she opened her eyes, Kevin was still grinning, but now that wasn’t the worst of it. The sun was a dim orange circle dropping between two white towers in the distance. It was forty degrees at most, but since Glenn’s clothes were impregnated with a solution that either generated heat or drew it away from the body, depending on how she
manipulated an app on her tablet, she wasn’t cold. It was a miracle of science and especially handy now, Glenn thought, as the last train home glided into view over Kevin’s shoulder. It pulled into the station, pausing only briefly since there were no passengers waiting, and moved silently down the line.
“Last train just pulled out, didn’t it?” Kevin asked.
Glenn glared at him.
“Did I mention the dragons? Bunches of people have seen
dragons.”
“I hate you, Kevin Kapoor.”
Kevin took her by the arm and nodded gravely. “I know.”
“You should really thank me,” Kevin called out, struggling to keep up as Glenn tore across the soccer field. “Brisk walk on a beautiful night with a good friend? You can’t buy that kind of peace and contentment! It’s what memories are made of!”
The school’s perimeter fence clicked open as they approached.
Glenn stepped from the soccer field’s artificial grass to the road that led through Berringford Homes, a housing project that covered the two miles between school and home. Since people weren’t generally eager to buy land near the border, it wasn’t the greatest neighborhood, consisting of little more than a grid of black asphalt roads lined with fifteen-to twenty-floor apartment stacks. The stacks were pressed so close together, there was hardly a breath between them, making the street seem lined with one continuous home snaking along through the dark. Its sides were lit by fluorescent streetlights and the bluish glow of holographic games and films playing inside.
Kevin caught up and was loping along at Glenn’s side, his leather jacket creaking as he pumped his arms. “Look, Morgan …”
“Kevin, please.”
“I mean, there’s going to be a test. Eventually, at some undetermined point in the future, there will be a test. Tests are inevitable. And I’ll need to be ready for it, whenever it comes. I was being proactive!”
“Forget it. It’s fine.”
Kevin bumbled over a crack in the pavement as he tried to keep up with her. “Where, uh, where ya hurrying to, Morgan?”
“Home.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, ‘why’? Why am I going home?”
“What are you going to do there?”
“At home? Things.”
“Academy things?”
Glenn stopped in the middle of the street. Someone was playing a holo game on the ground floor of the stack across from them. It filled the street with the sound of shattering glass and sirens.
“I mean, you have to get your application ready, right?”
Glenn’s eyes went sharp on Kevin. “Third-years don’t put in applications to the Academy, Kevin.”
“No,” he said quickly. “Fourth-years do. Ones that are
graduating.”
“How did you — ?” Glenn started, but then it hit her. “You
spliced into the school’s network again.”
“Again? Ha! I haven’t been out since I spliced in two years ago.”
Glenn opened her mouth to tell him that her plans weren’t any of his business and he had no right to look at her records, but it was a waste of breath. She turned away from him abruptly and continued on down the street.
“You applied to skip fourth year yesterday morning,” Kevin said as he followed along beside her. “First thing yesterday morning.”
“So?” Glenn kept her eyes fixed on the dark end of the street and picked up her pace.
“So I was with you until after midnight the night before and you said nothing about it.”
“I don’t tell you everything, Kevin.”
“You do too!” Kevin said. “I’m the only one you tell anything.
So, since I’m not a moron, I can only conclude that you made this decision immediately after you left me at the train station. Is my deduction correct?”
Glenn stopped walking, cursing he
rself for being stupid enough to meet him.
“Kevin …”
“I didn’t think — ” Kevin turned away. There was a security cairn next to him, a waist-high tower of white plastic and touch areas to report emergencies. Kevin kicked at it with the toe of his boot. “It was dumb, okay? A mistake. Whatever. I didn’t mean it to — ” He kicked the tower again, hard this time. “I mean … was it really that horrible?”
Glenn tried to speak, but she had no breath. The walls of the surrounding stacks seemed to be pressing in on either side of her. She wished she could look up and calm herself with the points of her beloved stars, but the lights of the city washed them out of the sky, leaving nothing but a gray void.
“I have to stay focused,” Glenn said as precisely as she could.
“You know that.”
Kevin stuffed his hands in his coat pockets and looked aimlessly around at the tightness of the neighborhood and the looming stacks. An Authority skiff glided overhead, its red lights pulsing. It rounded a corner and disappeared.
“Yeah,” Kevin said. “Yeah, okay. I was just … you know. I was drunk.”
“You don’t drink, Kevin. You did once and it made you sick.”
“Yeah. Right.” Kevin shook his head and then he started off down the dark street. “Sure felt like I was, though.”
Glenn watched as the neighborhood enveloped him. He had
almost disappeared when he stopped and turned back to her.
“Come on,” he said, urging her along with a toss of his head and a reluctant smile. “Crappy neighborhood. Gotta get you home safe, Morgan.”
Down the hill, blue generator lights poured out from the open door of Dad’s workshop. She could hear the sounds of him working from where she stood. He probably hadn’t moved all day.
The front door of the house unlocked as Glenn approached it, and she let herself inside. Gerard Manley Hopkins yowled from the dark underneath the stairs. Glenn fed him, and when he was done eating, he trotted along ahead of her to her room.
As soon as Glenn made it through the door to her bedroom she collapsed onto the bed. Kevin hadn’t said another word their entire walk home. When they’d reached the turnoff to his house, he’d quietly wished her good night and disappeared.
Glenn grabbed her tablet and switched it on. She hoped she’d find the signed form back from Dad, but there was nothing in her messages. She bent over her calculus and tried to focus, but it was no use. Her thoughts kept coming unstuck, slipping back to Kevin and the snow and the train station, no matter how hard she tried to keep them locked down.
Glenn switched on her star field, stroking Hopkins’s coat
absently. For a moment the stars didn’t look like stars at all. They looked like millions of snowflakes caught in the sky, unable to fall.
Glenn could barely remember all the steps that led to what
happened two nights before. It happened so fast. She and Kevin came out of the theater laughing, making fun of the painfully ancient play their teacher had made them see. Then they were waiting for the train on an empty platform, high from giggling. It was the cold, clear kind of night when everything seemed fresh and clean and moving in fast motion. They were sitting on a bench, and Kevin was making a big show of mocking one of the actor’s exaggerated gestures.
It started to snow. Just lightly. A thin curtain of white swirled around them, caught in the station lights. It dusted the bench and Kevin’s shoulders. Flakes gleamed in his violet hair. Their breath made plumes between them, tiny clouds that tumbled into one another.
Kevin was saying something and then his hand fell onto Glenn’s, covering it. It was nothing at first, an accident, but seconds passed and his hand was still there. Neither of them was wearing gloves, so all the contour and warmth of Kevin’s hand lay along the back of hers, his fingers curling slightly and dipping into the flesh of her palm. He had stopped talking, and there was just the windy sound of the snow. Glenn was sure she was about to say something, but she couldn’t remember what it was. Her forehead and cheeks grew hot despite the cold. Was she getting sick? Did she have a fev-And then Kevin was kissing her, just like that, as if they had leapt forward in time. His hand gripped hers tighter, and Glenn was surprised to feel the muscles in her arm flex, drawing him in, her own hand rising up between them and falling on Kevin’s shoulder. Time jumped
forward again. Now Glenn was standing up and backing away from the bench, a whirl of panic inside her. Before she knew it, she was fleeing down the platform and out into the night. She looked back over her shoulder once as she ran and the snow had surged, wiping the train platform and Kevin away in a haze of white.
Glenn ran all the way home and up to her room, where she found the application for skipping her fourth year. She had received it months earlier but had let it sit, overwhelmed by its enormity. She stood over it, dizzy from the run home, her cheeks burning despite the cold. She could still feel her hand on Kevin’s shoulder, pulling him to her.
Glenn barely remembered filling out the forms and sending them off, but when she was done there was a wave of relief. She had come so close to veering off track. So close to ruining everything.
Glenn took a last look up at the sea of stars and then shut off the light show. The whir of the projectors was replaced by the sounds of her father’s footsteps, soft and shuffling, as he moved into his basement computer lab. Glenn closed her eyes and saw 813, a brilliant afterimage of green and blue. Her hunger for that other world burned inside her.
Glenn touched the tablet’s screen and it came to life. Still nothing from her father. Glenn stared at the blank screen for a moment and then flicked through old mail until she found another form, this one for a class trip into the capital city of Colloquy. At the bottom sat her father’s scrawled signature. It was nothing to break the encryption on the DSS form and drop the signature into it. After all, she was her father’s daughter.
Once it was done, Glenn sat back on her bed and looked at it, amazed that something so small could change everything.
Glenn paused, her finger hovering over the glass of the screen.
Downstairs she heard her father close the basement door and then leave the house, heading out to the workshop.
The house went quiet. Glenn touched one fingertip to the glass and sent the form flying away.
Her new life had begun.
4
“Glenn! Glenny! Wake up!”
Glenn bolted upright, twisted in her sheets. A dark figure stood over her bed.
“Dad?”
“It works, Glenny,” he said. “It actually works.”
Glenn rubbed her eyes. “What are you talking about? What
works? What time is it?”
“Get dressed and come see.”
Her father leaned into a shaft of moonlight. Glenn jerked away without thinking and gasped. His hair was disheveled and his clothes were stained with oil and soot. There was a long gash on his arm that oozed blood. Hopkins reared back and hissed as Dad reached down and grabbed Glenn by her shoulders.
“We’re really going to do it, Glenn.”
“Do what? What happened to you?”
He knelt down beside Glenn’s bed. His skin was sweaty and pale, ghastly as melting plastic.
“We’re going to get her back,” he said. “We’re going to march right over there and bring her back.”
“Go where? Get who back?”
“Your mom,” he said, his voice trembling. “We’re going to
rescue her, Glenn.”
It was like a fist slammed into Glenn’s chest. Her breath stopped.
Suddenly it seemed like he was too close to her, kneeling there on the floor. Glenn could feel the fevered heat radiating off of him.
“Rescue her from what?”
“It’s not something I can just — you have to come see!”
Before she could respond, he had leapt up and was running out of the room. Glenn stumbled out of her bed and followed, Hopkins trailing behind.
“Everything you’ve been told is a lie,” Dad said as they
descended the stairs and went out into the yard. “The Rift wasn’t an accident. And it’s not some kind of wasteland over there. Ha! I can’t believe they’ve gotten away with this for so long!”
“What are you talking about? What does this have to do with Mom?”
Dad tore into the workshop. He drew a stool from the corner and sat down between Glenn and The Project.
“Okay,” he said, one hand tugging nervously at the other. “Now, how to … yes. There’s a set of rules — physical rules — that govern cause and effect, gravity, nuclear and chemical reactions, time, momentum. All of those rules come together and we call the result reality. Is that right?”
The workshop was more of a wreck than usual. Tools lay
everywhere. Half of The Project lay in pieces on the floor, and the other half had been radically altered. The generator was now directly hooked into it, and the whole thing glowed a livid blue as if it were alive.
“Glenn?”
“Of course. But what does that — ”
“Think of a set of playing cards. The cards are always the same
— King, Queen, Ace, Jack — but the game you play changes
depending on what set of rules you decide to invoke. Use one set of rules and you’re playing poker. Choose another and you have solitaire.
What we think of as reality is no different. It’s a card game. Change the rules and you change reality.”
“Dad, that’s not possible. You can’t — ”
“Yes you can. That’s just … that’s the thing: It is, Glenn.
Possible. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. The rules can change. They were changed. That’s what the Rift was. They’ve been so good about keeping it all under wraps. The border. The stories. The fake satellite pictures! They’ve made us so afraid of what’s on the other side that no one even thinks about going over and actually looking to see what’s there.”
“Who are you talking about?”
Dad leaned closer into Glenn. She could smell sweat and the blood from his arm.