by J. Q. Coyle
“You die in a branch, you can’t go back to that branch. It’s dead to you because you’re dead inside of it.” Olsson looks directly at me. “Have you noticed that there’s a world of your father’s that you haven’t gone back to in a while?”
My vision quivers. I squint at Olsson and Gemmy, confused, but then I know which one. “The sinking cruise ship. The Russians in the hotel, stitching up my shoulder.”
“They did it to put pressure on your dad to talk,” Olsson says.
“They? You mean Alex?”
Gemmy nods. “I’m sorry. I’ll never understand that boy. He wasn’t right, even as a kid. He always thought we loved Ellington more. He didn’t get it. He’s sick, Alicia. He’s got a sickness in him.”
“I was killed by Alex’s people … to send my father a message, to get him to say where the atlas is?”
Olsson nods. “Your prime consciousness wasn’t there, so you didn’t know it.”
Gemmy looks away, rubbing his jaw.
“So my father knows they killed me in that world?” I ask.
“It broke him,” Gemmy says. “Even though he knows you’re still alive, death is death. A father losing a child is never right. When you live many lives, joy and love are multiplied but so are grief and suffering.”
I didn’t feel my own death, can’t even imagine it, but I feel the punch of my father’s loss. I take a minute to collect myself, and then I manage to ask, “But what if my prime consciousness had been there?”
“It’s the closest you can get to death without dying,” Olsson says. “It’s like something is gone. An amputation. A branch is cut off from you forever.”
“My father’s already dead in one branch.”
“Which one?” Gemmy asks.
“The world that’s crumbling. The world where Alex is my—” I can’t say it and I don’t have to. “The one in that picture.”
Olsson knows what world I’m talking about. “He’s not dead in that world, Alicia. He’s been cut.”
“What?” That’s what Jax meant by “one way of putting it” when I mentioned my father being dead in that world. Being cut is a kind of death. My mind is reeling. “Why would he do that?”
“Maybe he was trying to protect the atlas,” Gemmy says. “But your father’s not going to remember anything now that he’s been cut like that. No way to really reach him.”
“But he knew he was getting cut,” I say. “He’d have had a tiny window of time to leave some kind of clue behind. He’d have thought ahead.”
“And he wouldn’t have told you to look for him in that world,” Olsson says. “He just wants you safe, out of harm’s way. You become a target if you know where the atlas is.”
“I’m already a target. I’m cuffed to a bed in the prime. You know that, Olsson.”
He spreads his hands as if to say “point taken.”
“If I can promise the atlas, then I have some power,” I tell Olsson. “What if I’m able to lure Alex away from the prime?”
I know his perfect world now. If I could prove it exists and piggyback him into it, he’d be convinced it’s worth saving. Couldn’t he try? He has access to the new vaccine they’re going to try out in another branch. Why not that one?
“Sure,” Olsson says, “But we can’t let Alex get hold of the atlas!”
I know what I have to do. I punch the edge of the windowsill, hard enough to make my fist bleed. I take the photo from Jane’s father and I push as hard as I can on the spot on my collarbone, the spot that will take me to Jax’s world.
The edges of the room start to blur.
“Olsson, tell Alex to have the vaccine ready.” I fix my eyes on the blood rising from the thin flap of skin. “The new one he was saving for another branch.”
“Alicia!” my grandfather calls after me. “The Liberty Hotel! We’ll make a plan to save him. You hear me?”
I do hear him, barely, but I can’t respond. The room is breaking all around me, a loud tearing as it rips completely apart.
Soon all I hear is the little girl’s high-pitched voice, louder now: “Ticky hi, ticky ho. Ticky hi-dy hi-dy ho.…”
I close my eyes and listen to the song shatter. Individual notes ring and ring and then fade to nothingness.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I WAKE up in my rich-kid bedroom in Jax’s world, sleeping under the ragged canopy of my bed. My body feels bruised and bone-tired. Did I transfer into my sleeping self and keep sleeping? I feel rested, like I got a few hours.
It’s morning but the sunlight is weak. The window is open. The curtains—dusty and frayed—billow inward. It’s almost peaceful, but the low hum of my consciousness in this world is trying to tell me, urgently, that things have gone badly.
I hear a light snore and turn to see a little boy with dark hair and crooked bangs stuck to his sweaty forehead. He’s curled up on the other side of the bed. I swing my feet to the floor. Jax is asleep against the wall. Did he fall asleep while trying to watch over us? I feel a strange twinge of jealousy. He wasn’t watching over me—he was watching over another me.
The night comes back to me in pieces. Men with guns in the quarantine camp. “Takers”—that’s what Jax called them, gangs that have risen up from the chaos.
Pynch shot a man who’d been holding a baseball bat. He shot the bat first, which shattered; I remember the man’s shocked expression and then Pynch shot him in the chest.
Jax was there with this little boy. We ran across a barren field.
I go to the window. The truck that Jax was driving when Pynch and I stole the medicine is parked in the street. A Humvee is parked on the lawn, but I don’t see any guards. One door is wide open as if it’s been abandoned. Is my mother still alive? Some part of me knows she is. Is Alex here?
The other houses seem to stare out at the street vacantly. Two have started to tilt toward each other as if there’s a sinkhole opening up between them.
Someone calls my name from below.
It’s Pynch, sitting on the steps to the house, cradling his rifle, looking up. Has he been keeping watch, too?
“You okay?” I ask.
He nods, then glances toward the master bedroom window, and I know Alex and my mother are in there, probably still sleeping. “Everyone’s safe,” he says. “The takers have cleared out.” He looks a little hollow. His face blank.
“Thanks,” I say.
“For what?”
I’m not sure. I only remember patches. “For everything. And standing guard too.”
He shrugs. “I wouldn’t have been able to sleep.”
I nod and dip back inside. I don’t want to wake Jax, but when I turn, he’s standing up.
“I’m sorry,” Jax says.
“About what?” I should tell him that I’m here, but I don’t want to miss a confession.
He sits on the edge of the bed and starts tying his boot slowly, like he doesn’t want to look at me. “Last night. I like you, I really do, but just not—”
“Wait.” I can’t let him go on. I’m afraid something happened between us—him and the other me. I have a feeling he’s about to tell me he doesn’t feel the same way I do. I don’t want to hear it. “It’s me. The other me.”
He looks up, startled. “Oh,” he says, and then he looks away.
“Who’s the kid?” I point at the little boy, trying to change the subject even further away from whatever happened—or didn’t happen—between us.
“Biddy—that’s his nickname.” And in an instant, I know Biddy had a twin sister who died a while ago. He hasn’t gotten over it. Jax takes care of him. They’re each other’s family now. And I know the Alicia in this world loves that about them because her own family life is weirdly empty and always has been.
“My father,” I say. “My real father. He isn’t dead, is he? He got cut.”
Jax nods.
“How bad is it?”
“He doesn’t know he’s your father. He doesn’t even know he’s a spandrel anymore.” He w
alks to the window. “And I guess he isn’t.”
“Why? Why did he do it?”
“He should be the one to tell you all of this, but he can’t.” Jax closes his eyes, and when he opens them, he seems to be focused on something beyond me. “My mother and your father were friends. My mother always told me this world was your father’s world. That he’d created it, trying to do the right thing.” He runs one hand over the curtain’s ruffle. Some of it turns to dust that flits and is gone. “Apparently, when your mother got pregnant with you, he worried he wouldn’t be a good father.”
I think of my mother in the kitchen, all the ways she tried to protect me. My father was trying, too, in his own way.
“So in this world, he convinced your mother to go back to your uncle while there was time for Alex to believe you were his.”
Jax looks at me for a moment, letting me take this in. I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from crying. I’m struggling to keep myself together. The buzzing starts in my right hand like some kind of instinct to run away. But I push on the spot on my left hand. I’m not leaving.
“You know, for the record, your uncle is a good guy—at least here. He gave up studying spandrels after you were born. He got a job down here and moved with your mom and you from Boston. He got my mom a job in the same facility. Things were good for a while.”
It’s surreal, finding out your parents are real people. They made big decisions and had to live with them—in more than one world. I sit down on the edge of the bed, careful not to wake Biddy.
“Are you okay?” Jax asks.
“Yeah. It’s just that my parents had good intentions but they screwed things up, and that’s why I’m here at all.”
“Me too,” he says.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“In the prime, my mom got pregnant by some guy, another grad student,” he says. “The guy took off.”
“I’m sorry.” I know how he feels. For most of my life, I thought my father had abandoned me.
“It’s okay. My mom and I were close. She made up for it.”
Biddy kicks the sheets and coughs. Jax walks around the bed, touches the boy’s head. “Shhh. It’s okay.”
Biddy settles back to sleep, and Jax pulls the sheet over his legs. “When my mother found out she was pregnant, she asked your dad for help. Because she was scared of Alex.” It shocks me to hear him refer to Alex by name—especially because the Alex he’s talking about is not the one who’s here. He’s the one I’ve known all my life, in the prime. “Alex was pissed. In that world, your mother had left him. He’d started talking about studying the children of spandrels—especially the ones with rare abilities. My mother didn’t know where that research was going, but she knew I’d be a target.”
He sits at the foot of the bed. “So she hid her pregnancy and, toward the end, she told Alex she had to be with her mother who was sick. She had me at her mother’s house. And your father came and took me with him, into what was, at the time, a better, safer world that he’d just created.” Jax clears his throat. His voice sounds frayed, dust choked. “My mother was also in this world—not her prime self, but still my mother.”
I think of Jane. In the prime, she lost what mattered to her most. She’d kept the picture of her other self, raising her son all this time. No wonder she’d gotten cut. She could see her son but couldn’t hold him. But I also imagine Jane in this world, being told the story, that a baby was coming from the prime—her own—and what it must have felt like to hold him for the first time, a kind of falling in love. This is the way my mother told me it felt when the nurses handed me as an infant to her, a headlong rush of immediate love. “But also protectiveness,” my mother would always add. “I knew I’d do anything to keep you safe.”
I stand up, reach into my pocket, and pull out the photograph of him and his mother. I hand it to him.
He looks at it and then up at me. “What’s this?”
“I found it in your mother’s desk drawer. In the prime. Maybe my father brought it to her.”
He takes it. His hands are trembling. He shakes his head. “No. The soul is the soul. My mother is dead. The one who gave me up might still be alive, but I don’t know her.”
“What if there’s a way to stop it from getting worse, to rebuild this world? Remember the tree?”
He shakes his head. “It’s all too far gone.”
“If I can get the atlas, I might be able to trade it for a new vaccine.”
“Alicia, it’s too late. The best I can do is take care of the people who are left.”
“I have to try. And I need to get to my father—the one who’s here—and see if he can help me. If he can tell me how to get to the right world, then you could navigate from there, right?”
“He won’t know.”
“I need to at least talk to him.”
We look at each other for a long moment. I want him to say something, anything. But all I see is the deep sadness in his eyes. I can’t stand it. I walk to the door. “Then I’ll find him myself. I have to keep trying.”
“I won’t be here when you get back. I’m going into Houston for more supplies.”
I look at him—maybe for the last time. “It’s too dangerous.” Part of me knows that the takers come from the city.
He walks over to me, and for a second I’m charged with hope, but then he hands me the picture. “Here. Take it.”
“It’s yours.”
“No, it’s not.”
I refuse to take it. “Keep it.”
“I’m being practical, Alicia. We need to survive as long as we can. That’s where I’m putting my energy. Nothing else.”
Biddy sits up and rubs his eyes. “Jax?” he says. “Are we okay?”
Jax shoves the picture in my jacket pocket and walks over to Biddy, brushes his hair back from his forehead.
As I head for the hallway, I hear Jax saying, “Don’t worry. Don’t worry now.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
DOWN THE mansion’s dark hallway, I find my way to the stairs. I want to turn around and tell Jax I was wrong and he was right, just to stay with him a little longer. But I can’t. I have to figure out where my father lives—the father who doesn’t know he’s my father, the man who might know where the atlas is, even if he doesn’t know that he knows.
I walk down the hall and pass the master bedroom doorway.
I see my mother propped on the bed, sleeping, her breathing labored.
Weak sunlight is blocked by cardboard duct-taped over the windows. I step closer to the bed, afraid to make a sound. Her dark hair fans across the pillow, and I smell something familiar. Lilac. The powder she loves. Eyes closed, she drags in another pained breath.
An IV line runs up to a metal tree; a line of bottles and syringes clutter the bedside table. I walk to her bedside, reach for her hand, begin to kneel down beside her, and then a lamp switches on behind me.
I stand up and turn so fast I almost fall backward.
Alex is sitting in a tufted armchair against the wall, holding a newspaper. A pile of them sits on the floor beside him. He’s wearing gray pajamas, glasses perched on his nose. This Alex has a little more paunch, more wrinkles around the eyes. His hair’s thinner on top. Behind him in the corner is a set of golf clubs. One of the clubs rests against the arm of his chair within easy reach.
Alex folds his newspaper and leans back, looking at me. “Sorry I startled you,” he says. “I was looking back to see if I could trace where we went wrong.”
A Houston Chronicle headline reads DEATH TOLL RISES. The issue is almost two years old. The ink is smudged, the paper yellowed. Next to the piles of newspapers, I notice the base of the lamp: the cord has been cut, the wires inside spliced into a car battery. The horror of this place—it all seems contained in that frayed newspaper, the dark gleam of the battery, my mother unconscious in the bed.
I remind myself that in this world Alex is a good man. “We were lucky last night. We’ve been so lucky for so
long.” He rubs his face.
There is nothing I can say. He had everything he wanted in this world, only to watch it fall apart. I actually feel sorry for him. “I’ve got to go.”
“The guards have abandoned us. Please stay here.”
“I won’t be long.”
He seems too defeated to argue or try to stop me. I pause in the doorway, look back at my mother. Even as sick as she is, she’s beautiful. I wonder if she found some happiness in this life, before all of this started.
Alex stands unsteadily and hugs me. I can’t believe it. I make myself hug him back, tell myself this Alex is a different man. He lets me go and says, “Be safe, my girl.”
“I promise.” I’m not his girl, but I am. I know he watches me as I walk out the door.
At the bottom of the stairs, I see some cards and pictures on the narrow table behind the sofa. I pick up a holiday card, furry with dust. I rub it clean. This one’s of my mother, Alex, and me, smiling in ski gear, a snowy mountain behind us. My hair is very blond—some cheerleader look I’m apparently trying to rock in this world. It reads: Happy Holidays from the Maxwells!
I fold the card, slip it in my back pocket, a little proof of this family for Alex in the prime.
I head for the kitchen, opening drawers until I find a phone book. The Greater Houston Area guide is three years old.
As I pull it out, I wonder how many of the people listed in it are long dead. I flip to the M’s. I find Alex and Francesca Maxwell first. And then my father, Ellington Maxwell, in another column on the same page—1906 Thorn Lane. As I tear it out, the page frays but manages to remain intact. I fold it and stick it in my pocket with the holiday card.
I walk out the front door.
There’s Pynch, still on the stoop.
“Do you have any gas in the truck?” I say. “I have a favor to ask.”
He takes me in for a second, turns away, and says, “You’re the other one, right? Jax told me. I can tell the difference between you and, well, you. You’re a little less stuck-up.”
“Uh, thanks,” I say, walking down the steps. “Can you take me to Thorn Lane? Do you know where that is?”