Unbreakable (Unraveling)

by Elizabeth Norris

  I remember that day. I thought the engine was going to explode, the way the steam was pouring out from under the hood. But when I made my dad take me back that night to check it out, he ruled that it just needed more coolant.

  “You fixed my truck?” I ask. It’s weird to think I was so present, for lack of a better word, in his life, when he didn’t exist in mine. “Why?”

  “I wanted to help you,” Ben says. “You pulled me out of the ocean and you saved my life. I owed you, and then I realized you were smart and tough and different from everyone else, so I liked you.”

  I look into his eyes. They’re dark and sad.

  “The decisions I’ve made, they were always about getting home or helping you,” he whispers. Then he adds, “I thought they had you.”

  He doesn’t need to add anything else. I get it. I would have flipped out and done something crazy if I thought he was in danger. I did—I followed a guy I barely knew through a portal and into another world.

  But that’s the logic of it, and that doesn’t help undo the fact that I was alone and he was comforting someone else.

  I think about saying just that, but I don’t get the chance. Ben straightens up and takes a deep breath. “I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I just needed you to know.” Then he steps aside so I can get through the door.

  Something about how resigned he is almost breaks me. I feel it in the hollow place in my chest where my heart should be. I want to tell him that of course I’ll forgive him or that we fell in love in the middle of a situation that was worse than this.

  But I don’t want to lie.

  02:16:38:51

  My doppelgänger is awake when I enter her room.

  It was Barclay’s idea that I interrogate her, and no one can really argue with him. He’s the one with the investigative knowledge and experience to call the shots—not that I’d admit it.

  Elijah is talking to Ben somewhere else in the building, and Barclay is outside the door in case I need him.

  It’s my job to find out who she is and what she knows about all of this. Since I know myself better than anyone else, supposedly, I should be able to assess her best. I need to determine who exactly she is—how alike, how different.

  At least, that’s the plan.

  Right now, all I can do is stare at her.

  Her hair is a shade lighter than mine, but the highlights are growing out and the roots are the same dark brown. Her face is the same shape, with an identical nose and mouth, and I’m looking into the same eyes, which is something I don’t think I’ll ever get used to. Her eyebrows are different—like someone paid more attention to shaping them than I ever did to mine.

  The bruises on her face, around her left eye and her jawline, are faded and yellowed, definitely in their last stage of healing. I have no doubt they were nasty when she got them, and I don’t envy her. I’ve been lucky. I’ve been in a few fights but none left me with a beating like that.

  Pulling a chair up to her bed, I sit down and give her the time she needs to get used to what I am. I want to let her speak first. What she says will tell me a lot.

  Her mouth slightly ajar, she takes in my features. I wonder what she sees. With the burns and bruises around my neck, I’m not exactly at my best.

  When she’s done examining me, she looks down at her fingers and picks at the chipped red polish on her nails.

  I want to ask her so many things, and not just what she knows about Ben and the case, but about her family. Is her dad still alive, does she have an Alex and a Cecily who are safe and well, did her mother stay sane? But I remain silent and wait for her. If she’s anything like me, she’s dying to find out who I am too.

  After about half a minute, her bottom lip starts to quiver, and I’m left thinking that they must have broken her back in that prison.

  Turning her watery eyes to me, she says, “So I guess you’re the one he meant to save?”

  I don’t respond. Not because I’m still playing the silent routine—her first words just told me a lot—but because I remember Ben sitting on her bed when I first saw him, and my throat feels too tight to speak.

  She sniffs and looks up at the ceiling to keep from crying, and the familiarity of it catches my breath. I do that. It’s a gesture I’ve become entirely too familiar with over the last five months. “I knew it was too good to be true.”

  “What was?” I ask, using my best quiet, nonthreatening voice, which probably isn’t all that good. I’ve never done meek well, and I’ve had a pretty rough past few days.

  “Ben.” She looks to the door and the waterworks start. Her face crumples and the tears fall down her face. Her body rocks with the sobs. “He kept telling me that I was safe now, that I’d remember when I got better, that everything would be okay.”

  I want to reach out and offer her some kind of comfort—and maybe if I was friendly, I’d get more information out of her. Besides, if she’s another version of me, I should identify with her, empathize or something. But I just can’t make myself do it.

  Touching her would somehow make her more real.

  “I wanted to remember,” she says, wiping her eyes, though it doesn’t do any good. She’s crying too hard to stop. “He saved me, and he’s so perfect. I love the sound of his voice and how gentle he is . . .”

  The crying gets worse, to the point where she can’t talk. So I sit there silently next to her, my insides tight and burning, but I refuse to let go. We don’t have time for me to sit and cry and feel bad. We don’t even have time for me to figure out what’s going on between Ben and me.

  We’ve got bigger issues, and a little less than three days to solve them.

  “How could I have forgotten someone who loved me like that?”

  Someone who loved me like that.

  I know Ben did all of this for me. He didn’t come back to me because he was being followed and he didn’t want to bring danger to me—and later, he thought he was saving me. That should count for something.

  But I don’t know what.

  Because here she is, this girl who isn’t actually me, with a stylish haircut and a chicken pox scar on her forehead, and now she’s crying over being dealt a bad hand.

  I’ve cried more than I care to admit, but I get over it and come up with a plan to right whatever new catastrophe has just blown into my life. Then I do it.

  Shouldn’t he have seen differences in her—as someone who loves me, shouldn’t he have known she wasn’t me?

  “We’re not okay either, are we?”

  I shake my head. “No, we’re not.” I’m not really one to mince words.

  She nods, like she knew it deep down, but it only makes her cry harder.

  She knows I’m her double. Based on her reaction to me, it’s doubtful she ever saw her double before, but she knows that’s what I am. Which means she’s from a universe that has widespread knowledge of the multiverse.

  And she’s either the best actress I’ve ever seen, or she’s in way over her head and scared shitless, which would make her a terrible plant. So I’m going to give it to her straight. “Janelle,” I say, rolling the word around my tongue and trying to ignore how awkward it feels. “I need to know how you ended up in that prison. It’s important.”

  She nods, but it takes her a while to actually calm down enough to talk to me.

  But when she does, she tells me everything.

  I walk out of that hospital room knowing two things for sure.

  She’s not an IA plant.

  And once you get past how much we look alike, she’s nothing like me.

  02:16:00:11

  The other girl named Janelle Tenner was born and raised in Prima.

  Instead of going to West Point, spending six years in the Army, and then joining the FBI, her father worked in Homeland Security, where he excelled through the ranks.

  The creepy part is that he met his future wife the same way my parents met—at a group dinner party with mutual friends. She was a graduate student who thou
ght she knew everything and had too much to drink. He thought she was obnoxious and jumped in to correct her when she made a broad generalization about international policy, which turned into a heated debate. She got his number and took him out for coffee the next day to apologize.

  They had two children, Janelle and Jared, but any similarities other than our names seem to end pretty soon after that. Because her dad and mine made two very different crucial decisions when their wives got sick.

  When “Janelle’s” mother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, her father didn’t try to work it out on his own and then just let it go. He had her committed to a mental institution, and hired a nanny to take care of his children.

  “Janelle” and “Jared” were raised by the nanny and the housekeeper until they were old enough to be sent to expensive boarding schools. “Janelle” hated school. She wasn’t into sports, and she wasn’t particularly into classes, and as a result, she felt sort of aimless—she didn’t know what to do with her life. At her first school, she fell in with a bad crowd, drank a lot, and ended up getting expelled for breaking too many rules.

  At her next school, she tried to study and play the good student, but she met a guy, thought he loved her, and spent all of her time with him. Then she spiraled into a depression after he slept with her and moved on to someone else. She ended up failing too many classes and got kicked out again.

  When she enrolled in her most recent school, she already had a reputation, and instead of feeling sorry for herself, she embraced it and decided she would drop out instead of waiting to be expelled. Only this time, when she slipped in with the wrong crowd and fell for the wrong guy, he was a lot worse than some prep-school jock.

  And she had no one to save her.

  Three years earlier, her father had remarried. He and his new wife had a baby. Then a year ago, while on a case, her father was killed and left everything to his new wife, who didn’t want anything to do with his nothing-but-trouble daughter.

  So “Janelle” moved in with her boyfriend, who lived in the underground. She knew he was a bad drunk with anger issues, he was cheating on her, and he was involved with some pretty bad guys, but she didn’t know where else to go.

  One night he asked her to take his car and drive to the docks to drop off a package—probably drugs—to a friend of his. She did. Only some idiot rear-ended her and was screaming about how it was her fault. It wasn’t, but she’d had a beer and she had a DUI last year, so when the cops came, she fled.

  And accidentally left the package in the car.

  Her boyfriend beat her up when he found out what happened—she thought he might kill her. But the next thing she knew, she’d been arrested and handed off to a couple of prison guards and taken to a solitary cell where she was being used as leverage for a guy she didn’t even know.

  I don’t know how to feel about this—or, more accurately, I feel too many different things that don’t really mesh with one another, and I don’t know which one is right.

  We have the same parents. We share the same DNA. This girl is supposed to be my double, but our lives have been so different. And it’s sad.

  I don’t exactly think my life has been a cakewalk, but hers . . . hers has been a lot worse. She doesn’t even talk to her brother anymore and she never had anyone like Alex, who would listen to her no matter what, or someone like Cecily, who was determined to make her smile.

  And she never had someone love her like Ben loves me.

  It makes me wish my dad was still around—or that there was at least some way for me to apologize to him. I was so hard on him when he was alive. I felt like it was his responsibility to do something for Mom so that I didn’t have to take care of her. I felt like it wasn’t fair that I had to grow up so quickly.

  A rush of guilt throbs in my chest. Not just because I spent so much time feeling mad at him and now he’s gone, but also for my mom. She’s been missing and presumed dead since the quakes, and the most prominent feeling that left me with was relief.

  My parents deserved better from me, and now they’re gone and it’s too late for me to tell them I loved them or to thank them.

  If they had made different choices I would have turned out a lot different.

  And as crazy as it sounds—even though I’m burned and exhausted, even though I might be executed in three days—I’m glad I’m me.

  02:16:00:10

  Barclay is waiting for me when I come out of “Janelle’s” room. I repeat what she’s told me, but I keep my reflection to myself.

  “Who’s the boyfriend?” Barclay asks. I’m not sure what he’s thinking, but the focus in his eyes and the concentration in the lines of his forehead tell me he’s got something that might be the beginnings of a plan. I can practically see the wheels turning in his head.

  That he’s coming up with our next steps makes me breathe a little easier.

  “Joe Tarancio?” I say. Obviously the name means nothing to me, but it might mean something to him.

  Barclay smiles, and the tension in my shoulders starts to drain. His prison-break plan worked—against all odds it worked—so I’m willing to follow Barclay just about anywhere right now.

  That thought almost makes me laugh.

  Barclay must notice I’m losing it. “What?”

  “Nothing,” I say with a shake of my head. “What do you know about the boyfriend?”

  “She might be able to help us,” he says. “Tarancio is one of Meridian’s right-hand guys. Between whatever she knows and what Ben has told us about the operation and how it works, we should be able to get the proof we need to the right people at IA in order to get us all in the clear.”

  “And we can get Cecily too, right?”

  He rolls his eyes. “Relax, Tenner. I’m not going to go back on my promise.”

  “In less than three days?” I ask, thinking of the deadline and the people I had to leave behind in that prison.

  Barclay nods.

  “So what’s the plan?” Elijah says. I turn around and see that he and Ben are down the hall. I can tell from here that Ben’s eyes are bloodshot, and there’s a pang of regret that moves through my chest. No matter how I’m feeling, I don’t like seeing him this way.

  “We need food and sleep and a concrete plan of what we’re going to do,” Barclay says, scratching behind his head. “Not exactly in that order, though.”

  “We can get food,” Ben offers, looking at me. “What do you feel like?”

  “Hell yeah, food,” Elijah says. “Let’s get pizza. It’s been entirely too fucking long since I’ve had melted cheese.”

  “Is pizza okay with you?” Ben asks me. I nod. Pizza is fine.

  “Good. Get food,” Barclay says. “I’m going to talk to Janelle’s double and get some more information. Then we’ll eat and talk about how the hell we’re going to pull this off.” He looks at me. “After that we’ll sleep and then we’ll go after Cecily.”

  02:15:22:04

  The radiation levels in the hospital are higher than those in your average nuclear-disaster-free city, and if we stayed here permanently we might die before our time. But according to the tests Barclay did with his quantum charger—yeah, those things can multitask—the next two and a half days aren’t going to hurt us.

  And after that we’ll either be headed home or dead, so it’s not a problem.

  The food is pepperoni pizza, my favorite kind, and I’m pretty sure Ben did that on purpose. It comes from a different world. I don’t ask how he and Elijah got it since it’s pretty obvious. We don’t exactly have a ton of money on us, and there isn’t a common currency in the multiverse. Two guys who can portal in and out of everywhere can steal what they need pretty easily.

  The plan, however, is more complicated.

  After he’s demolished two slices, Barclay opens his backpack and spreads the contents on the table. He’s apparently been carrying an armory around with him since we left Prima. I touch the gun I’ve had with me, and think of the prison guard and
the way I could pinpoint the exact moment when his life slipped away.

  I take a deep breath and try to tell myself that I didn’t have a choice.

  “We’re going to be outmatched,” Barclay says. “I can’t be sure exactly how outmatched, but it will be bad. Our advantages are the element of surprise, their arrogance, and him.” He gestures to Ben, who’s sitting next to me. I look over at him, and our eyes meet for a second before I look away.

  Then Barclay lays out his plan for taking down the biggest interversal criminal operation anyone’s ever seen.

  We can’t go back to the Piston and get Ben’s family out. IA will expect us, and we’ll probably never be able to get out again. We just have to hope they can hold on another day or two and that we can get the proof we need to convince IA that Ben is innocent and his family shouldn’t be punished.

  Step one is the Black Hole. We’ll portal into the processing center. Ben draws us a map of what he remembers—where the guys slept, where they portaled in, where they kept the slaves, and where the control room and surveillance are located. Lucky us, they don’t have any hydrochloradneum shields in place.

  “We can go straight into the control room,” Ben says. “There will be a couple guys on duty, but we can surprise them and subdue them pretty easily. The computers are there, so we can copy the files we need. From there we’ll be able to open the cells and get any of the slaves in holding. There will probably be somewhere between twenty and thirty, and we can bring them back here with us.”

  Barclay thinks it’s as good a plan as any.

  Step two is Cecily. We’ll find out where she is and rescue her. Hopefully her location will be in the files we steal in step one.