by Pam Stucky
Eve wiped her tears and pushed her hair back. “We have to find her.”
“We will,” said Ben, gently rocking side to side with Eve on the couch.
“That’s right,” said Emma. “We will.” She took a deep breath. “You’re right, though, we need to find that first letter. These tell us next to nothing. She must have said something in the first letter that tells you where to look. It doesn’t seem like she’s trying to keep it secret, does it? The way she talks about how good you are with puzzles, she’s telling you to figure this out. She’s left a clue, for sure.” Emma hoped her voice sounded more certain than she felt.
“Yes,” said Eve, her voice tinged with despair, “but where is it? We’ve looked all over. I’m almost out of hope.”
“Never lose hope!” said Charlie. “Not while we’re here.”
“I think a trip to Lero is in order,” said Emma, delighted to help her friend, but also to have an excuse to take the elevator again to another world. “Don’t you?”
Charlie and Ben nodded vigorously. “To Lero!” said Charlie.
“To Lero!” cheered Ben.
Eve smiled through her tear-stained face, her hope renewed, her heart bursting with gratitude. “Thanks, guys. I’m so lucky to have met you.” She looked up at the Hub’s infinite sky. “May the planet Xylia shine on us all. Mom, we are going to find you. To Lero!”
chapter two
Ben quickly gathered travel packs for Charlie and Emma that contained everything they needed to travel the universes, including their own stone-embedded bracelets and a pendant with a rock that served as a master key to the elevator and the Hub. Once they’d double-checked the contents of the packs to make sure nothing was missing, the foursome piled into what they called the “elevator.” It was really nothing more than a tiny room, but through science or the magic of space and time it somehow connected infinite universes. Eve’s father, Milo, had explained it this way:
“Dogwinkle is a thin spot. Think of a quilt. You know those simple quilts some people make, just layer upon layer of cotton batting, tied together every few inches with pieces of yarn? Imagine that each layer of cotton is a universe. And those points where everything is tied together, those are thin spots. At thin spots, the universes are right on top of each other, almost intermingling. At thin spots, everything is possible.”
And, he’d gone on to explain, elevators such as this one existed at many of these thin spots—portals that were fixed, in a sense, into one place within a stack of universes. The elevator the teens were entering would always return to the Balky Point Lighthouse, and would always go to the same spots in the same other universes. On Earth (or at least on this Earth, seeing as there were infinite parallel Earths), all elevators were in lighthouses. Not every lighthouse contained an elevator, but every elevator was in a lighthouse.
This elevator would also take the teens to their current destination: a location on Eve’s planet, Lero, in another universe.
As the doors slid shut behind them and fused into a seamless wall, Ben leaned in to whisper in Emma’s ear. “Have you seen Dr. Waldo today?” he asked. “When you had your tests done? Was he around?”
Holding Ben’s arm for balance, Emma sat down on the floor. “I haven’t done this for a while,” she explained. “I don’t want to fall over.” She laughed. “No, Dr. Waldo wasn’t there today. Another scientist had instructions from him, but he didn’t show up himself.”
“Did the other scientist mention where Dr. Waldo was?” Ben asked. He was trying to sound casual, but his brows were slightly furrowed.
“No, why? I saw him yesterday. He didn’t mention going anywhere,” she said. “The only non-work thing he mentioned was that we’re coming up on the anniversary of his wife’s death. He looked pretty sad about it so I didn’t push.”
“He’s … he’s been gone a lot lately,” said Ben. “I’m sure it’s no big deal. Maybe he’s just taking some time off.”
From the look on Ben’s face, though, Emma knew he was concerned. Dr. Waldo was a bit of a mystery. As gregarious and outgoing as he was, he didn’t talk much about himself. Emma remembered that he’d shown them his Secret Garden in the Experimental Building that summer. In it, he’d planted a secret that apparently was so overwhelming he couldn’t hold it inside himself. Emma had wondered then what the secret might be, and she wondered now whether his recent absences had anything to do it.
“Maybe he has an appointment somewhere?” Eve suggested as she tapped coordinates into a panel on the wall, targeting the elevator to take them to Lero. “Sorry, didn’t mean to eavesdrop. We’re in a close, confined space, though. Generally other scientists come to him—people rarely turn down a chance to visit the Hub—but it’s not impossible that he went somewhere for a meeting.” She wrinkled her nose skeptically.
“He doesn’t say where he’s been going?” asked Charlie, who had plunked himself down next to his sister. “He just disappears?”
Ben shook his head. “He just sort of mumbles that he’ll be back ‘soon’—if he says anything at all. He was gone for a whole day once. And,” Ben continued, “I’m not convinced he hasn’t been gone longer. I think maybe he’s time traveling, too, to get himself back before we start to get suspicious. Sometimes when he’s only been gone a few hours, his beard looks like it’s been growing for days. Something’s up.” He shrugged his shoulders.
“Hmm,” said Charlie.
“Very insightful, there, Charles,” said Emma.
Eve finished entering numbers into the control panel. “Ready, everyone? Hang on!”
“So long as we’re not going to a ghost universe, I’m ready!” said Emma. Despite her excitement, her stomach leaped with a bit of nausea when the elevator started whirring through universes. “I’d forgotten this,” she laughed. The elevator did not shake or make noise, but nonetheless the teens felt its movement deep within their cells. There was a jolt, a flickering of lights. The sound and vacuum-like sensation of a boot being sucked out of mud. Finally, the scent in the air that, while rather unidentifiable, was best described as a combination of metal, and smoke, and the slightest sweetness of honey.
No one had yet figured out exactly how the elevators worked. It wasn’t as though anyone could stand outside it and watch. Everything happened, somehow, within the elevator’s walls. One moment they were on Earth, and the next, Lero.
When the elevator settled again and the panel on the wall indicated they’d reached their destination, Eve tapped another button. The wall opposite the one through which they’d entered from the Hub opened up, revealing a dim room with rough clay walls.
“Where are we?” said Charlie, his jaw wide with wonder. They walked out of the small room. The doors sealed behind them, and the elevator disappeared. “Are we inside a cave?”
“Oh, that’s right!” said Eve. “You haven’t been here before! It was the other Charlie who was here, your parallel self. Yes, we’re in the side of a hill.”
Ben, the only non-Leroian of this group who had been to Lero before, led the group outside to the fresh air, into a pastoral scene of green fields and a bright sky.
“This is Lero!” said Eve, beaming as she spread her arms wide to embrace her home planet. “Welcome home!”
They stepped out into the grassy field, shimmering under the dazzling sun. Leaves glistened with drops from a recent rain, and the air was rich with the clean smell of wet dirt.
“Definitely not a ghost universe,” said Emma, with relief. Her eyes soaked up Lero’s verdant beauty. The hillside from which they’d exited was one of the tallest of dozens of small rolling hills, a landscape of fields and low hills as far as they could see, lushly covered with a carpet of moss, short grass, and scattered wildflowers.
“I know Dr. Waldo says it’s dangerous to go to the ghost planets,” said Ben, who had been here before and was less absorbed in the newness. “But I gotta admit, I wish I could have gone with you guys.”
“It was interesting, for sure,” sa
id Emma, “but I didn’t like getting stuck there. And I sneezed something awful. Who knew you could be allergic to ghosts? Did Dr. Waldo ever look into that any more, the ghost vaccine the other Charlie told us about?”
Ben frowned. “Yeah, actually, he did. I came in to the Hub last Monday, and there was a note for me from the other Charlie, just saying hi, we should meet up sometime. He and the other Emma had been to the Hub. I asked Dr. Waldo about it, and he said Charlie brought a sample of the vaccine. I don’t know if he’s done anything with it, though.”
“The other Emma was here too?” said Charlie. “Dang it, I wish I could have seen her. We should go visit them sometime. Last time was a little chaotic.” He smiled at Emma, but she was frowning, and wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“Okay, you guys lead the way!” Charlie said to Ben and Eve. He put a hand on Emma’s shoulder and held her back, waiting for the other two to start walking. When they were several steps away, he turned to his sister. “You’re not telling me something. What did Dr. Waldo find in the tests?”
Emma started walking, following slowly behind Ben and Eve. Charlie kept step. “It’s … nothing for sure, I guess,” she said. “Dr. Waldo wasn’t there today, so he didn’t tell me anything, obviously.”
“Don’t play, Em. This is serious. Did one of the other scientists say something?”
Exhaling heavily, Emma nodded. “It’s part of why the other Charlie and Emma were at the Hub,” she said. “Dr. Waldo didn’t have blood samples or DNA or anything for me from before our travel, so he wanted to compare it to theirs. He tested their DNA, and yours too, against mine. The scientist told me there’s these things called telomeres, sort of like end caps on our DNA. They shorten with age, or with stress. Yours and the other Charlie’s and Emma’s, yours are all sort of about the same length. Mine, though …” she paused.
“Yours … are shorter?” Charlie finished.
“Mine are shorter. A ‘small but significant’ difference.” Emma looked at her brother. “I’m not sure what it means. I need to talk to Dr. Waldo.” She turned her head at the sound of a bird chirping nearby, but couldn’t find its source.
“But what did the other scientist think it means?” Charlie asked, ignoring the bird.
“She wasn’t sure, but … well, they think that there could be a relationship between shortened telomeres and shortened life span.”
Charlie stopped in his tracks to take in this news. “But we all traveled through space. You only traveled alone that once, out of the ghost universe. All the other times, someone was with you. Why are your telomeres shorter if ours aren’t?” He frowned.
“I don’t know,” said Emma, grabbing his arm and pulling to get him moving again. Ben and Eve were getting farther ahead, and Emma didn’t want to lose them. To her unaccustomed eyes, all these hills and fields looked a lot alike. “That’s what I want to talk to Dr. Waldo about.”
Emma hadn’t told everyone everything about her experiences after her interuniversal travel: how she’d felt weak for weeks afterward; how sometimes she felt she could almost see through herself, like she wasn’t completely there. Her brain got muddled somehow, she was sure of that. Not all the pieces fell back where they were meant to, she thought. Or maybe it was because of her time at the ghost planet. She wasn’t sure. She didn’t tell anyone, but she did not feel completely right just yet. In science class this semester, her teacher had told the students that an atom is about 99.999999999 percent empty space; that if you removed all the empty space from all the atoms of all the people on Earth, the entire human race could fit into the volume of a sugar cube. That seemed rather unbelievable, Emma thought, but nonetheless she felt that something had gone wrong with her own empty space, and she didn’t know what.
“So when you traveled without elevators, using your mind, you shortened your life?” Charlie shook his head. “That can’t be right. You saved the universes, from Vik, and from The Void. That can’t be your reward.” He kicked the ground. “I don’t accept that.”
“I don’t know, Charlie,” said Emma. “I need to find out more. Dr. Waldo needs to find out more.”
“But traveling with the elevators, or with those other things, the pigeons and the Dark MATTER, those devices Dr. Waldo made, that’s harmless?”
“I think so. I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” said Emma. Leaving Charlie and the discussion behind, she ran to catch up with Eve and Ben, slipping between them and linking arms with each of them on either side. “So where are we going?” she asked with forced ease, as though she didn’t have a care in the world.
Eve squeezed Emma’s arm. “We’re going to where my mom used to live,” she said. “After they separated.” She frowned.
“Who lives there now?” asked Emma. She checked over her shoulder to make sure Charlie was still in sight.
“No one,” said Eve. “It’s empty. Dad … my dad kept up the house after she disappeared.”
The foursome had been walking along a well-worn dirt path, but now came to what appeared to be a road, though there were no vehicles on it. Charlie, who had been trailing behind the group, lost in thought, finally caught up to the others. He gazed down the long, paved road. “Do you guys have cars?”
Eve reached for Charlie’s hand. “We do, but not a lot. Most people travel by foot or our version of a bicycle, or on the underground subway. The people who came to Lero after leaving our mother planet of Napori were tired of seeing so much construction above ground. The houses are built into the hillsides, and a lot of the transportation is underground.”
“You’re like ants,” said Ben. “Or moles. Living and traveling in the ground.”
“So cool,” said Charlie, surveying the scene. Sure enough, in the hills alongside the road, spaced far apart and almost hidden, embedded doorways were framed by stone or wood, leading into the hillside and whatever lay beyond. “Good thing there are enough hills for everyone,” he said.
“Some of the hills are man-made,” Eve explained. “But they’re just as good as the real ones. They’re cozy. It’s home. I like it. Your houses feel so exposed to me. We were on Earth in a windstorm once, and I thought the whole house was going to blow over. Our homes feel sturdy and secure. I’m glad our founders built this way.”
Just as they reached a fork in the road, a vehicle whipped by, its driver honking and waving at the group.
“Friendly,” said Ben, jumping to the side of the road, though he’d been in no danger.
Eve laughed as she turned to wave enthusiastically at the car that had passed. “Leroians are the best,” she said. She turned back and pointed down a road to the left. “That way,” she said, her excitement subconsciously causing her to pick up her pace.
“Is it far?” Emma asked. “Your mom’s home?”
“Not much farther at all,” said Eve, her smile growing. “We’re almost there.”
Eve pranced ahead, spinning and walking backwards to face the others. “I’m so glad you guys are all here. I didn’t have a chance to show Ben and the other Charlie much of Lero last time. I can’t wait for you to see it.” She turned back around and ran ahead, stopping at a doorway tucked into the side of the hill. The door, made of wide wooden slabs, was painted red. It was surrounded on all sides by large stones, carefully interlaced so as to leave no large gaps. A dust-colored mortar filled the spaces between the rocks. On one side of the door, a thick glass window was set into the stones at approximately face level.
Eve reached into her pocket and pulled out a large, decorative copper key.
“It’s not digitized?” said Charlie. “I thought you guys would have keypads and robots and stuff.”
Eve smiled. “Just a key,” she said. “Some people have keypads. Mom liked keys.” She turned the key in the lock, and swung the door inward. “No robots. Well, some robots, but not here.”
She stood at the door, not entering. “Mom?” she whispered. “Are you here? It’s me, Evella.”
The interior of th
e house remained silent.
Eve stepped inside, and the others followed. Ben, the tallest of the group, was only about half a foot shorter than the entrance. “Are people on Lero shorter than people on Earth?” he asked, measuring the space between the top of his head and the top of the door frame with his hands.
“I think we just have shorter doorways,” said Eve. She felt along a wall until she found a light switch. She flipped it on, illuminating the inside space.
“It’s like a hobbit house!” said Charlie.
“That’s what the other Charlie said when he was here,” said Ben, smiling at the coincidence. “Totally like a hobbit house.” He paused. “I wish I’d met the other Ben. There must be another Ben on that other Earth, right? Maybe I can meet him sometime. The other Charlie should bring the other Ben to the Hub.”
Charlie tilted his head. “It’s still so weird. The other Charlie is me, but he’s not me. But we have so much in common. But not everything. Some of the same life experiences, but not all. I know how he thinks, but I don’t know what he’s thinking. Weird. Like, is he having this same conversation right now? Weird.”
“He’s not having this conversation because they’re not on Lero, dork,” said Emma, barely paying attention to the boys’ conversation. She moved slowly through the home, not wanting to disturb the sacred space of a missing person.
The house was not large. The front door led through a short entryway into what appeared to be a living room, with a light beige couch and two cozy chairs. Off to the side a space had been set up as a small office, with a desk and file cabinet, and shelves heavy with books and papers in neat piles. A doorway led off into what looked like a kitchen; a hallway on the other side led down to more rooms. Boxes—closed, taped shut, and labeled—were stacked and scattered around the rooms. “What exactly are we looking for?” Emma asked.
“I don’t know, really,” said Eve, absently opening and closing drawers in the desk as she’d done dozens of times before. “Clues.”