Branch Off
Page 20
Léa nodded, not sure what that meant.
“It’s sort of dying down. Maybe it’s returning to its initial state.”
“Oh.”
“What did you find?” Richards asked as he reached them.
“The anomaly is returning to a lower energy state. This confirms that it has needed external power to allow the aliens to go through it.” She ran another cycle on the detector. “Yes. Definitely going back to normal, whatever that means. If it’s linear, it will take a few minutes, maybe ten.”
“Do you think it’s going away?” Léa asked with worry in her voice.
Sarah noticed the urgency in Léa’s words. “I don’t know. Maybe not. It’s been there on its own for a few days.”
Richards looked disappointed and unsure about what to think at the same time.
“Léa…” Sarah said.
“I know.”
She looked her in the eyes and nodded. “Professor, will you find Gagnier?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll have to steal a car,” Sarah added.
Léa laughed. “Now that’s you.” Tears streamed down her cheeks. “What if there’s not your world on the other side?”
Sarah smiled and caressed her cheek, wiping tears away. “I’m sorry. I really am. But this is not my place.”
Gagnier joined them. “What happens?”
“I’m going home,” she said, hinting at the sphere with her head. “It’s getting back to normal—I hope, at least. It’s not glowing blue anymore, and it does not emit radiation.”
“How do you know it’s safe?”
She shook her head slightly. “I have to go.”
“I understand.”
“Thank you for everything.”
He nodded. “I guess I’ll have to plan a rescue mission, then, and fast.”
“Your men?”
“Yes, and all the other people. This time we’ll be prepared.”
Sarah thought that she could wait for them, help them in some way. “Maybe I can wait.”
“No. You go. If it’s closing down…”
A lump was in her throat. “Be careful, OK?
“I’m willing to take the risk. Oh, Sarah, you’ll need a diversion.”
She frowned at him.
The grin on his face told her that he had a plan. “You’ll know when to go. Be ready. I’ll see you on the other side.” With that, he jogged away.
“Professor,” she said offering Richards a hand.
He took it, and then gave her a warm hug. “Take care, Sarah.” She could swear she saw a hint of tears in his eyes.
Léa grabbed her and kissed her lips, her cheeks wet and her nose a little snotty. “I love you,” she said in between sobs.
“I love you too,” Sarah whispered in her ear. Almost having to wrestle herself out of their embrace, and trying hard not to burst out in tears, she walked over to the jeep, closed the trunk’s lid, and got into the driver’s seat without looking back.
From a dozen meters farther, one of the soldiers noticed her getting in the car and waved at her. “Madam? What are you doing?”
She cleared her throat. “Well, I was—”
A powerful explosion interrupted her. A ball of smoke rose from some fifty meters into the fields to the right, and immediately hurried voices filled the air.
“Wait here,” the soldier told her with his right index finger raised at her face, his eyes already fixed on the source of the fire. He ran off, leaving her in the car alone.
The door slammed shut with a thud. The key was in the ignition, and the engine came on with a rattle. She gave it gas and released the clutch. The vehicle gained a little speed, and she turned the wheel to point it straight at the anomaly. She put it in second gear. Craning her neck and glancing behind through tears in the unadjusted rearview mirror, she saw Richards standing in the background amidst the confusion.
Léa was running after the jeep and waving her hands.
“No.” There was no point in making things worse with another good-bye, with more tears. Her throat knotted and her mouth crooked.
Another dozen meters and Léa was still there in the mirror, running in the mud and into puddles.
She didn’t notice herself pressing the clutch and braking, but in a few seconds Léa reached the car. Sarah expected her to appear at the driver’s side, but instead she found her in the passenger seat, closing the door.
“Go,” she said with a smile, her face a mess of tears, snot, and droplets of muddy water.
Sarah studied her for a moment, unsure about what she had heard. “Are you sure? You might not be able to come back.”
“I don’t want to come back. Go.”
“And there’s another Léa on the other side.”
“I know. I’ll cope with her,” she said after a second. She looked damn serious.
In the rearview, amidst gusts of white smoke coming out of the jeep’s exhaust, she could see Richards and Gagnier standing in the distance and looking toward the car.
“They have imprisoned you before. I can’t guarantee that—”
“I’m not asking you to guarantee anything.”
“What about your sister?” She was running out of arguments.
“She will understand. I asked Richards to talk to her.” Léa bit her lip and looked away for a moment. “I don’t want to live in this place anymore. There’s nothing here for me.”
Sarah nodded slightly as joy engulfed her. “All right.” She sent Léa a smile as the car lurched forward. She didn’t know why, but she was happy. They could be together once again! “I wouldn’t have thought you able to do something this stupid.”
Léa laughed as she wiped her face with the back of her hand.
Everything blurred, and in an instant they were on the other side.
Sarah stopped the jeep fifty meters from the anomaly, the wheels slipping slightly on the wet earth. She got out and looked around at the calm landscape. It was the same place, but it felt like home.
“Is this the right place?” Léa asked from across the roof of the car.
“Stay where you are!” A group of soldiers approached them from the road, running with their submachine guns trained at them.
“I think so,” she said with a smile.
“Identify yourselves,” one demanded as soon as they had reached them.
Without losing her grin, she answered, “Sarah Davinson and Léa Bosshart.”
“Where is Lieutenant Gagnier?”
“At home.”
His expression changed, but then she noticed that his gaze and that of the others was not focused on her anymore, but on the anomaly. She turned around.
The sphere was there, shimmering, beautiful and minacious at the same time, but something was different.
Taking a few steps in the anomaly’s direction, she watched it with awe. On the edges, trees were visible. Trees that were at the opposite end of the sphere, in this same world. It was fading away.
“Sarah,” Léa said.
“Yes,” she answered without unlocking her eyes from the phenomenon.
“Oh my God!”
She looked over at Léa. She lunged forward around the car, grabbing her shoulders. “Léa!”
Slowly, in sync with the anomaly, she was becoming transparent. Her face, her hands, her legs.
“I can’t see anything!” she cried, but her voice was distant.
Sarah could not do anything but grasp at her in horror, incapable of making sense of what was before her eyes.
The sphere disappeared, and Léa with it.
She remained with an empty hoodie in her hands. Her legs gave and she fell on her knees in the mud, not yet aware that, in her pocket, the envelope with “Do not open” written on it was gone.
Epilogue
A voice came crackling through the loudspeaker. The captain awakened her announcing that the plane was about to land in Boston Logan.
As it had happened every time she woke since that day, the firs
t thing she thought of was Léa and her scared face, slowly fading off before her eyes. Sarah didn’t even know if she was alive in her own world, or if she had been sucked away into nothingness. She had thought about calling the other Léa, maybe sending her a message, but it wasn’t the same person that she had spent the last few days with. She hadn’t lived those phenomenal events. Same name, identical DNA, but different persons—like identical twins.
All the refugees held in the Morges base had disappeared as well, which by itself made Sarah smile a little. At least they were no longer prisoners. She had deleted all her documents, burned all her notes, and convinced an unwilling Frank to make sure no copy was around in the Institute’s systems. Requin had certainly made other copies, but he couldn’t use them without help from another dimension, so they were useless.
She wondered about those aliens and the reality they had invaded. Had Léa really seen their future? What had become of the entity they had found in the spacecraft, she didn’t know. Maybe it had died, or maybe it was held captive somewhere on the other side. What she did know, however, was that those two realities, those two dimensions that had branched out three years before, had now diverged completely.
The signal above her head prompted her to fasten her seatbelt, and a few minutes later the plane touched down with a smooth landing.
Before leaving her seat, she let all the other passengers get off. She didn’t want to rush in the bustle and scare Jones, who had remained surprisingly quiet inside his soft carrier for the whole flight from Amsterdam. She had petted him every now and then to keep him calm, but he had been a very good boy. The crew wished her a pleasant stay in Boston as she entered the air-bridge that linked the aircraft with the airport’s terminal. Walking slowly, she felt a little lost amid the yellow signs, as though a stranger, and she trudged on to the baggage reclaim hall to fetch her bags.
What she had in her chest was a feeling of homelessness. They had revoked her Swiss visa and work permit with a two-week notice and sent Sarah on her way as an undesirable person. A good-bye gift from Requin. He was more vindictive than she would have imagined, but it didn’t matter anymore. She no longer cared.
Returning home didn’t feel like that at all. Everything seemed unknown, as if the events had transformed the world—but it was she who had changed. She could spot it in her own eyes, squinting through the mirror in her bathroom.
Through a freezing rain falling from the sky, the taxi wrestled its way into the thick evening traffic. The heater was on in the car, turning the cabin into a pleasant space, warm and cozy. Her hands were sweaty and her heart was beating a little faster than normal. She was anxious, as if she had been expropriated of something without any chance of getting it back. Her job, which she had conquered with so much effort, and her real family.
She took a deep breath and rang her parents’ doorbell. A slight repulsion had grown in her in the minutes before, some kind of immune reaction of her soul to the fact she was returning to her fake parents for real. She felt her face stiffen like a slab of concrete. Seconds passed and her heart picked up speed.
The door opened. Without talking, her mom came forward and hugged her.
Her feelings fought in a tight knot until she closed her eyes and returned the hug, reluctantly at first. But then the warmth of the embrace melted all the ice away. Like a forgotten memory resurfacing suddenly, without searching for it, her father’s steps came from inside, and then his voice called her name.
Sarah smiled, and she understood that once again she had been wrong: here she was home, like she had always been.
Afterword
Thank you for reading this book. I hope you enjoyed it.
Branch Off is my second sci-fi novel and it comes almost a year after my debut work, White Dwarf One. The idea for this story came as a what-if scenario arising from the appearance of a so-called wormhole. Such an anomaly is a theoretical feature that connects two points in space-time, allowing a hypothetical traveler to move on all four dimensions at infinite speed. Add to that the multiverse theory, and you end up with a very fertile ground for science fiction.
I always like to ask myself what people would do when presented with unknown phenomena—both personally and as a whole, interconnected society. After all, our collective fate is determined by the sum of all the tiny decisions we make every day on planet Earth (and off). Branch Off is the result of such an exploratory effort, and I enjoyed writing it quite a lot.
As you may have noticed, this is a self-published book. Being an indie, or a self-published author, means that you have to do it all by yourself: the writing, obviously, but also formatting, publishing on bookstores, and marketing. Feedback from readers is vital, so please take the time to leave a review (hopefully a positive one!) on Amazon or Goodreads, or get in touch with me directly at dario.solera.author@gmail.com.
As vital as reviews is feedback from beta readers, in my case the veteran Stefano Scaglione, and Courtney Caroen. Big thanks to them for their suggestions and comments, which contributed to shaping this work into a coherent story.
One last word of thanks to Amy Maddox of The Blue Pencil for the excellent editing job she always does.
—Dario
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Other books by Dario Solera
White Dwarf One: bitly.com/white-dwarf-one
Lisa and Me: A Short Story: bitly.com/lisa-and-me
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Epilogue
Afterword