Unbreakable (Unraveling)

by Elizabeth Norris

  “I need you to have my back,” he says, his voice quiet but firm.

  I don’t know if I’ll be able to point the gun at someone, to pull the trigger if I need to.

  Barclay steps closer to me, his voice low. “A human-trafficking ring is out there right now, snatching people—including your friend. They’ve bought their way into IA, and we’re the only ones trying to stop them. If you give up now, they win.”

  I take a deep breath. I know he’s right. I don’t have time to fall apart or worry about what I’ve done. I think of Cecily and what she must be going through, pulled from our world, jabbed with a syringe, and taken through a portal. Barclay is her only hope of getting home. If something happens to him or even Elijah because I can’t get my shit together, I’ll have more deaths on my head.

  Seeing my resolve, Barclay leaves the room. Elijah limps after him, but when he gets to the door, he looks back. “You did what you had to do,” he says.

  I don’t exactly believe him, but I nod.

  We head to a Seattle’s Best coffee shop. Barclay was right. This world is a lot like mine—or a lot like mine used to be.

  “What are we doing here?” Elijah asks as we sit down at a table on the outside patio.

  “I’m starving,” Barclay says as the waitress comes over. She speaks a different language, so Barclay orders for all of us. When she’s gone, he adds, “And we need a quiet place to talk.”

  Elijah nods and looks at me. “So is Ben meeting us here, or are we meeting him somewhere else?”

  I’m so thrown off guard, I feel like I’ve been punched.

  “Somewhere else,” Barclay says, and I can’t tell if he’s actually not thrown by the question or if this is another one of those roll-with-it moments where he wants to see what kind of information he can get before revealing his cards.

  Either way, I’m not having any of it. “We don’t know where Ben is.” I say the words deliberately, clearly, so there’s no room for any confusion. “That’s why we broke you out.”

  “He didn’t send you to get me?” Elijah says, then he looks at Barclay. “You better start fucking talking.”

  Barclay shrugs and leans back in his chair. “We don’t know where Ben is, but we need to find him.”

  Elijah doesn’t say anything. “Do you know where he is?” I ask.

  “I might have an idea.”

  “He’s been convicted of human trafficking, unauthorized interverse travel, and treason,” Barclay says. “The order for his execution has gone through, and IA is going to execute everyone he cares about in three days if we don’t figure out who’s behind the trafficking ring and come up with the proof we need to take them down. So we need to find him.”

  “Oh, that’s it?” Elijah laughs and the bitterness makes me shiver. He shakes his head. “We’ve got bigger fucking problems than that.”

  My breath catches in my throat. Breaking out Elijah was supposed to find us more answers, not more problems. We have enough of those.

  “About three months ago, IA grabbed both me and Ben and brought us in, threw us in that prison,” Elijah says. I almost interrupt and tell him we know this part. But I bite my lip and let him finish. “A couple guards brought this guy in, Constantine Meridian, or something pansy like that, and he told us he could get us out if we worked for him.”

  Constantine Meridian. I picture the guy I saw outside of Derek’s cell. His military-green button-down with blood spattered on the front. His shaved head and the barbed-wire tattoo on his neck.

  “The choice was join up or get your shit kicked in. When that didn’t work”—he pauses and looks at me—“it was join up or watch them kick the shit out of people you care about.”

  I swallow. I’m not surprised. I saw what Derek looked like and the shape Elijah was in.

  “I held fast,” Elijah says. “Me. I told them I didn’t give a shit about anyone including myself.” I know it’s a lie. No matter what he was like in my world, Elijah cared about getting home, he cared about getting back to his family. And he cared about Ben.

  But what he says next is even more wrong.

  “Ben, fucking Ben. He said, ‘Sign me up.’”

  03:01:11:36

  “There’s no way he would do that,” I say, my voice firm.

  I’m relieved there’s something I can be sure about. Ben isn’t a bad guy. He would never help them. I look at Barclay to validate what I’m saying, but he just sits there. No disagreements. Worse, there’s no surprise on his face, nothing to suggest he didn’t know this was coming.

  I shake my head. “Ben wouldn’t do that,” I say again. I know Ben. I know what he went through—how guilty he felt—when he was in my world. He would never use what he could do to smuggle people—to make people slaves. Not for anything.

  Elijah touches my hand.

  I look from Elijah to Barclay. “You know he wouldn’t.” I’m practically pleading with him to agree with me. Elijah’s been tortured and locked away in prison for months. He’s delusional. But Barclay is rational. And we’ve talked about Ben. He told me he didn’t believe that Ben was involved—that Ben was just some kind of scapegoat for the dirty IA agents to cover their tracks.

  But when Barclay looks down and avoids my eyes, I know.

  This is what he expected to hear.

  Which means I’m missing a huge piece of the puzzle because I can’t think of anything that would make Ben join a human-trafficking ring. Of all people, Ben knows what it’s like to stumble out of his world and end up somewhere else—somewhere he doesn’t belong. He would never inflict that on anyone else.

  I turn away from the table and look around the café. It’s the first time that I notice there’s another Seattle’s Best right across the street. Apparently Seattle’s Best is this universe’s Starbucks. I’m trying to grasp some kind of normalcy, something I can latch on to, something that will tell me that I’m not losing my mind. But everything is wrong.

  “Tenner, take a seat,” Barclay says.

  I can’t sit down and discuss anything with Barclay. I can’t even look at him because I know he’s lied to me. Again. I know he’s kept this from me, that he brought me here, made me go through hell to break Elijah out, and he knew that Ben had done this. He knew that if we made it this far, I would find out. And he made me find out this way.

  I can’t believe I trusted him, that I didn’t see this coming, that I sat on the couch in his mother’s house and listened to him tell me stories about his life and I thought we were friends.

  The rage from that idea boils somewhere deep inside me. It burns deep in my chest, because I can’t believe he’s put me in this position—and worse, I can’t believe I was this stupid. I clench my hands into fists to keep them from shaking, and I wrap that anger around myself, because I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want to come through a portal and chase after bad guys. I didn’t want to watch Ben walk out of my life, or find out the best friend I have left was abducted. But I have to do something about it.

  “Tenner—”

  I turn back to the table, reach out, and slap Barclay across the face. Hard.

  A few people at nearby tables gasp. The force blows his face to the side, and Barclay’s skin is already red by the time I pull my hand back. It stings as I sit back down.

  He sits paralyzed for a moment, his head to the side, mouth slightly ajar. Whether he’s shocked, ashamed, or actually hurt, I don’t care. He deserved that, and if he didn’t know it before, he knows it now.

  I take a deep breath, swallow back the flood of emotions. “You said we’d keep each other in the loop. You promised me that I would know everything I needed to.”

  “You didn’t need to know this,” he says as he turns back to face me. “You needed to stay focused.”

  “You don’t get to be the judge of what I need,” I say. “Anything that concerns Ben or me or my family, that’s stuff I need to know. Got it?”

  Barclay doesn’t answer. He just rubs his jaw.

  If
he thinks he’s going to get away with not answering, he’s wrong. “I’ve had a pretty rough night. In fact, ever since you started following me around, things have gone to shit. Before I go any further, I want to know everything that both of you know.”

  Elijah shrugs. “No fucking problem here.”

  Barclay hesitates. He looks up at me with those big, stupid blue eyes, and I try to ignore the way something in my chest twists at the hurt I see in them. He has no right to feel hurt right now. “I don’t have all the answers,” he says. “I’ve got some suspicions, sure, but I need them confirmed by either Elijah or Ben or maybe someone else. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  It’s a shitty apology—if it even is one. But it doesn’t matter.

  Because he’s right about one thing. We have a source at this table, someone who can give us concrete information about what the hell has been going on.

  I look at Elijah.

  He must know what I’m thinking because he says, “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything.”

  He nods, raises his mug to his lips, drains the last of his tea, and puts the cup back down. Then he tells us everything that’s happened in the last few months. Everything that’s happened since he and Ben portaled back to their world and left me in the canyons behind Park Village with Alex’s body.

  And it’s worse than I could have imagined.

  03:00:47:36

  When Ben, Elijah, and Reid tumbled through the portal and ended up in my world, they were ten years old. They spent every free moment afterward trying to find a way to get back to their world, back to their families. Back to where they belonged.

  But when they finally did, seven years had gone by.

  And seven years in the wake of a national tragedy, it turns out, is a long time.

  They expected to walk back into their world, back into their families, back into the lives they left behind. Only, the world they left behind wasn’t there anymore. In its place was a world much different.

  Seven years ago, Elijah’s father, Nathaniel Palma, was the North American prime minister in their world, and when his firstborn son was “abducted” from a birthday party, it became a national tragedy. Every law-enforcement agency in the country was tasked with looking for the missing kids, and nothing was to stand in their way.

  Anyone suspected of knowing anything related to the case was brought into custody and questioned, even tortured and imprisoned. Ben’s parents, and Reid’s too, were thrown in jail for being at the birthday party and not having the right information. Ben’s brother was sent to foster care.

  The longer the boys were missing, the worse it got. Until people couldn’t stand it. There were protests, talk of revolution.

  A little over two years after they went through the portal, Nathaniel Palma was assassinated and a revolution overthrew the government. The leader of the rebellion established himself as a military dictator and is still in power today.

  Elijah’s mother remarried a wealthy businessman. Ben’s parents were released from prison, and Derek, Ben’s brother, got out of foster care, but any joy from that was short-lived. Their family wasn’t quite the same.

  Two years after the boys went through the portal, Ben’s parents got divorced. His mother threw herself into work, and his father got remarried and started a new family.

  Seven years after they went through the portal, when they came back, it was to a very different homecoming than they expected. Half the country seemed to have forgotten about Ben; the other half blamed Elijah for his father’s tyranny and the resulting crumbling of society. While his mother and Ben’s parents and especially his brother were thrilled they were finally back, the world had gone on without them.

  They had expected being home to calm the restless feelings inside them, the ones that screamed they didn’t belong in my world. But once they were there and reunited with their families, neither one of them felt like they fit in there, either. The more Elijah thought about it, the more he realized he fit in better on the earth they’d left behind.

  My earth.

  He realized he could have made a home there. He didn’t have his parents, but he had Ben and Reid. Only now Reid was dead, and Ben was an emotional wreck.

  Elijah decided Ben was his real family now, and it would be best for both of them to turn around and go back—back to the universe they’d left behind, back to Eastview and foster care, and everything.

  But Ben couldn’t do it yet. Derek was so glad to have him back, and Ben felt guilty—for tripping and falling into the portal, for pulling Elijah with him, for taking too long to get back. He felt like it was his fault that everyone else’s lives became so messed up.

  But Elijah couldn’t just sit around with his mother’s new family and feel sorry for himself. So he started focusing on the abilities the hydrochloradneum gave him. He stopped drinking like Ben always told him he should.

  Then he started opening portals and traveling through them, to different worlds. Technically he knew the portals were unstable, but to stay under IA radar and avoid Wave Function Collapse, he moved through worlds quickly and efficiently. He didn’t return home after each jump. He portaled in, took notes on what was different from other worlds and what was the same, and then he portaled somewhere else.

  Meanwhile Ben’s depression was making him paranoid. He started to suspect people were following him, that they were out to get him.

  When Elijah found a deserted world with no signs of people, he went home and took Ben there. They decided it would be a great safe zone, and if they ever ran into any trouble, that’s where they would go to meet up.

  But trouble caught up with them too quickly. Eleven weeks ago, a little over a month after they got back, they met to touch base. Elijah was excited about all the worlds he’d visited, but Ben was looking over his shoulder, even more paranoid than he’d been before. He insisted someone had broken into his and Derek’s apartment, that some of his things were missing.

  Elijah urged him to think about going back to the universe they’d left behind. Back to me. Ben said he was thinking about it, that despite how much he loved Derek, he just didn’t belong here anymore. Elijah agreed. Not only did he want to go back with Ben, but he thought they could probably bring Derek with them. They’d just need to get their hands on some hydrochloradneum to keep the radiation from frying him.

  Ben liked that plan and promised him he’d talk to his brother about it. No matter what, he knew he couldn’t stay where he was.

  But IA busted them, took them to Prima, and threw them in prison. Elijah was sure it was because he’d been universe hopping, and as a result, he’d somehow gotten Ben in trouble too.

  But it was worse.

  Their abilities had been recorded in Barclay and Brandt’s original case report. Two young men who could portal in and out of any world without being tracked by technology were exactly what a human-trafficking ring could use, especially a ring that was currently attracting heat from the IA’s wonder-boy agent, Taylor Barclay.

  While Ben and Elijah were in prison, Meridian broke into their apartments and confiscated their belongings. He found the notebook where Elijah kept notes on the different worlds he’d visited. Meridian praised what Elijah could do, the notes he’d taken, and promised him money, power, women—anything he wanted.

  For a second, it was tempting—not for the money, power, or women, but for the freedom to go from universe to universe and discover what was out there. That was something Elijah wanted.

  But this was slavery, and Elijah knew what it was like to be taken from your family and your world, and he wasn’t about to do that to anyone else. So he refused.

  That’s when the threats started. They threatened his life and his body—and they beat and tortured him to prove they could follow through. Still he refused. So they threatened his mother and everyone he cared about.

  He bluffed, shrugged, and told them to go ahead.

  So they took some of his blood and beat him
for good measure, but left him in his cell.

  He didn’t see Ben—not since they were first arrested. They were in different cells and weren’t allowed to see or talk to each other, but some nights Elijah could hear Ben scream.

  And he heard him scream the last night Ben was there—the night before he agreed to help them. It was when Meridian and IA threatened people they cared about. They threatened to bring in his parents, his brother. And then they did. They brought someone in—beaten and bloody—and told Ben he could watch them die, or he could help.

  That’s when he gave in.

  02:23:49:27

  “And that’s it. I’ve been rotting in that cell, eating sloppy mush and waiting for him to come back and get me out of there.” Elijah cracks his knuckles and looks at Barclay. “So, you gonna call in the cavalry or what? I’m ready to beat some asses.”

  “Why did they take your blood?” I ask, ignoring his question. He just got shot; he’s not going to beat anyone’s asses, and there’s no cavalry to call in. We’re it.

  “To do tests and shit.” He rolls up a sleeve and shows me the needle marks.

  For a minute I don’t get it, then Barclay says, “If you were running a human-trafficking ring between universes, wouldn’t you want to somehow replicate what he and Ben can do?”

  A shiver moves through my body. Criminals with the power to move through the universes—go wherever they want—without a quantum charger. They’d be virtually untraceable. And who knows what kind of damage all those unstable portals would do to the multiverse.

  “Tell me more about Meridian,” Barclay says.

  Elijah describes him—six feet, lanky, sandy-blond hair shaved close to his head, scruffy facial hair, light eyes, barbed-wire tattoo—and Barclay jots down notes, adding a few questions here and there, and I recognize this for what it is—a gentle interrogation. It’s the way you question a victim about their attacker. Quietly, nonthreatening, slowly.