BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller

by Dan Rix

  I swung the axe, but the tool was too heavy, I couldn’t get good leverage. The blade glanced off the mirror. The impact merely jolted the glass. It wobbled between us, unbroken.

  Charles lunged at the mirror, snarling. Terrified, I raised the axe again, swung, but my swing was weaker this time. Another glance. I hoisted the axe a third time, adrenaline scorching the insides of my veins, angled the blade and drove it forward with the entire weight of my body. We reached the mirror at the same time.

  ***

  The blade connected first, and a single splinter etched the glass between us.

  Charles vanished, his scream severed mid-breath, and the light he had turned on extinguished. The crack spread and splintered. Shards fell to the floor, and with them, me. I cowered in shock as glass rained on top of me.

  I curled into a ball on the bed of broken glass, unable to move. Shivering. Breaths I didn’t want to take ripped through me, left me convulsing.

  I thought of him standing now in my dark bedroom, orphaned in a reflection. Inches away from me just seconds earlier, now forever cut off. He would never cross the gulf that now separated us, neither in this life nor the next.

  What would he do knowing he’d missed his one chance? Go back to the office and keep working?

  Commit suicide?

  No one really knew what happened to the reflections we left behind, and I never wanted to find out. But two things I did know—one, they were just as scared of getting left behind as we were. And two, with each crossover I seemed to be cutting it closer and closer. Sooner or later, I wouldn’t make it out in time.

  That was the ultimate fate of all carriers. They either died of crossover sickness or became orphans.

  I shook the glass out of my hair and dragged myself to my nightstand, cringing with every twitch of my sprained ankle. I clutched my cell phone and backed against my bed, hugging it between my knees.

  I dialed Damian’s number and pressed the phone to my ear. It went to voice mail, and my heart sank. I speed dialed Josh, and he answered after the second ring.

  “Hey hottie,” he said, clearly still awake. “I was just thinking about you.” I could hear his teammates in the background, teasing him with oohs and cheers. After a few shuffles and the bang of a door shutting, he spoke from somewhere much quieter. “What’s up?”

  His calm, laid-back voice pacified my buzzing nerves, and I shut my eyes and tried to pretend I hadn’t just crossed over. Instead, my anxiety was replaced by a stab of guilt.

  Even though it had happened in a reflection, my lips had kissed Damian’s. My skin had burned under his touch. That should have been reserved for Josh.

  “Sorry, I meant to call Josslyn.” I ended the call, and the phone slipped out of my fingers. I squeezed my legs to my chest and lay my cheek against my knees, feeling more alone than ever.

  The buzz from my phone made me flinch.

  Damian.

  I dived for the phone and answered the call. “Why didn’t you pick up?”

  “Blaire. It’s three in the morning.”

  “Can you come over?” I said, my voice instantly melting into a scared little girl’s.

  After a moment of silence, he said, “I’m not in the mood.”

  “Just for tonight, can you not be a jerk to me?” Another silence, filled only with the erratic thumping of my heart.

  “Blaire,” he said, finally catching the edge in my voice, “tell me what happened.”

  Tears stung my eyes. “Just come over,” I whispered, “and don’t ask any questions.”

  ***

  Damian found me shivering in my dark bedroom fifteen minutes later. He flipped on the bedside lamp and sat down on the floor next to me, but didn’t put his arm around me.

  Instead, his eyes took in the broken shards still hanging off the frame of my sliding closet door. He remained silent for a long time before he finally spoke.

  “You ran into Charles, didn’t you?” he said.

  “How do you know I wasn’t crossing over to make out with you again?”

  “I figured you’d want your next kiss from the source.”

  I peered sideways at him. My next kiss? Whatever that meant. Interpret later, Blaire. “He tried to come back with me,” I said. “He was like a different person.”

  “Yeah, he’s a bit sensitive about that,” he said. “I’ve run into him too.”

  “I think sensitive is an understatement. He doesn’t overlap, does he?”

  Damian chuckled. “It probably would have been a good idea to ask that question before you crossed over.”

  “What’s the point of that? I did a pretty good job figuring it out for myself with you, didn’t I?”

  He smirked. “I think we all agree that was a particularly . . . titillating bit of sleuthing.”

  My face flushed. “Does he overlap or not?”

  “Not a bit.”

  I sighed. “So you’re not mad at me?”

  “Why would I be mad at you?” he said, locking eyes with me. “You only just broke every single rule and protocol there is for crossing over so you could betray our trust and find out information I probably could have told you if you’d just asked.”

  A smile tugged at my lips. “So you are mad? At least I’m doing something right.”

  His eyes narrowed at me. “I think crossover’s getting to your head.”

  “Charles thinks there’s a true source out there somewhere. He’s convinced we’re in a reflection right now.”

  “Not an excuse for you to act suicidal.”

  “Do you think there is?”

  He held my gaze, so many emotions I was dying to understand swirling behind those cryptic, black eyes. “Isn’t that why we do what we do, Blaire? To get to the bottom of this? Figure out the mechanism in our genetics and work backwards . . . figure out where this all began?”

  “And you think that’s the true source?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. One thing I do know is if there is a true source—and this is just a reflection—I’m not sure I’d want to go up there. I belong here. We belong here.” He faced forward and lowered his gaze. “You know, I knew I was in a reflection . . . when you kissed me.”

  I curled my lip and edged away from him. “Congratulations, Damian. I guess that finally clears your name, doesn’t it? You were just toying with me.” My voice came out more biting than I’d intended, meaning I had let him get to me.

  “That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I only figured it out after you’d walked out the door. I knew you were going back to the source, but for some reason I didn’t try to chase you.”

  “No duh,” I sneered. “That’s because you overlap. You knew you were actually in the source experiencing a reflection.”

  “It doesn’t work backwards like that,” he said. “You only overlap down, never up; you’re only aware of the levels below you. The only thing I knew about the source me was that I wasn’t it. Plus, I hadn’t fully thought through what you walking out that door actually meant. Once you went back to the source, neither you nor your reflection would exist in my world. You’d be gone.”

  I searched his dark eyes. “What would you have done instead, popped open a bottle of champagne?”

  He smirked. “You seem to think you’re much more irritating than you actually are. That’s a compliment.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. “On what planet is that a compliment?”

  He stood up. “Come on.”

  “No, I’m going to call you out for being a dick,” I said. “And you’re going to like it because I’m refreshing, and I’m a challenge.”

  “That’s cute. Now come on.”

  I eyed his outstretched hand dubiously. “I can’t walk. Sprained ankle.”

 
; He raised an eyebrow, then effortlessly scooped me off the floor and carried me out to the living room, where he deposited me on a couch, leaving my heart a quivering, hyperactive mess.

  “I didn’t say you could pick me up,” I said, my voice edged with warning.

  “Don’t need your permission,” he said, and without asking he went into my kitchen and started preparing something. A Ziploc baggie filled with ice flew over my shoulder and landed in my lap, stinging my thigh.

  “Ouch!” I said.

  “Don’t be such a wuss,” he said, clinking glasses down on the counter behind me. The microwave beeped, and he came back with two mugs of hot chocolate and gave me one. I took a sip and nearly gagged.

  “What’d you put in this?”

  He took a long, deep drink from his. “Rum. It does the heart good.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Your dad’s stash. I’m surprised you haven’t finished that off yet.”

  “Yeah, because I’m not an alcoholic like you.”

  Damian got up and scanned my collection of movies. “What’ll it be? Beauty and the Beast or Snow White and the Seven Dwarves?”

  “Those are lame choices.”

  “Trust me, it’ll help.”

  “Snow White.”

  Damian put the movie in, and came back to the couch and sat at the opposite end, as far away from me as possible. Who did he think he was?

  “If you’re worried about cooties, there’s another couch,” I offered, holding the ice to my ankle. “Or you could watch from the bar.”

  He exhaled loudly and slid reluctantly to the center of the couch. “There. Normal.”

  “No . . .” I scooted over to him and leaned my head against his shoulder. “Normal.”

  He tensed briefly, his shoulder like rock beneath my cheek—but still preferable to a pillow—before he sighed and draped his arm over the couch behind me.

  I shifted and scooped my hair out of my eyes, letting it flow between us, and breathed in the cologne rising off his chest. Now that he was here I felt better, the tension melting out of my strained muscles, everything healing.

  Everything except the ache in my heart.

  ***

  We only got seconds into the movie before the evil queen started talking to the magic mirror. My body went rigid.

  “Maybe Beauty and the Beast is a better choice,” said Damian, rising to change the film.

  “There’s a magic mirror in that one too.”

  “Alladin?”

  I nodded. “Alladin’s okay. I think.”

  He popped in the disc and came back to the couch. I faded before the end of the first song, and the next thing I knew, Damian was pulling my comforter over me in my bedroom.

  I opened my eyes and watched him, stunned by the model precision of his cheekbones, those penetrating, unfathomable black eyes. Just . . . everything about him. “You can stay if you want?” I said.

  He shook his head. “I have to go back.”

  “To where?”

  “My place.”

  In other words, some dark hangout I would never be invited to. I held his gaze, stretching my body out seductively under the covers. He had a thing for me too. He had to.

  Or was I just being delusional?

  Surely being spunky and fun counted for something. And the fact that I ran cross country and—from what I’d been told—had a great body and was striking.

  He popped the chewed end of a cigarette into his mouth and continued to regard me with cold indifference.

  Then again, maybe not.

  “What’s it like to overlap completely?” I asked.

  “It’s fun.”

  “No. Tell me.”

  He pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and tilted it in his hand, studying it. “It’s like living through two versions of the same life. You have two different sets of memories.”

  “Can you always tell which one is real?”

  “In the source, I’m aware of both the source and the reflection. Other than that, it feels like I experienced both . . . like I lived both. I have to consciously suppress the one I know is fake.”

  “Can you do something for me?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t crossover,” I said. “At least . . . just not for a while, not until you get better.”

  “We don’t get better, Blaire.”

  “Then stop,” I said. “I can do your missions.”

  For another moment, he stared at me, and I craved to know what was going on inside his head. Without another word, he rose and left my bedroom. He shut the door gently.

  A minute later, the roar of his Mustang shattered the quiet of my neighborhood. I heard it all the way until the sound faded, several blocks away.

  Damian represented everything that terrified me about crossover. He blamed me for being suicidal, but he was the one killing himself a little bit more each day, he was the one addicted to crossover.

  Soon, he would be dead.

  Why was I letting myself fall for him?

  ***

  Charles gave no indication of overlap on Monday; he was good old Charles again, all smiles. Still, it took all afternoon before I could relax around him.

  “Okay, here’s the deal you two,” he said, collecting Damian and me into his office, “Tonight’s a big step for us. We’ve breached the outer perimeter of the quarantine zone and slipped in under USAMRIID’s radar, and we’ve gained entry to the assisting labs . . . with rather thought-provoking results.” He shot me a glance. “Tonight we’re targeting the artifact chamber itself.”

  “Let me go alone,” I blurted out.

  “Blaire, don’t,” said Damian.

  “He’s a liability,” I said, ignoring the heat in my face and speaking directly to Charles. “He’ll get us both killed. Only one of us can pass for a postdoc. Two is suspicious.”

  “Can you hack a security mainframe?” Charles asked.

  “I’ll figure it out.”

  “She can’t even hack her own cell phone,” said Damian.

  “And you’re limping, Blaire.” Impatience flashed in Charles’s blue eyes. “If I hold anyone from this mission, it’s you. In fact, give me one good reason not to.”

  “Because that’s my DNA down there, and I can talk shop with the scientists. All he can do is wag his gun around.”

  Charles nodded, conceding the point, and glanced at Damian next as if inviting a rebuttal. “Well?”

  “She’ll just slow me down,” he said. “I don’t need her.”

  “Yes, you do,” said Charles. “Tonight, you need each other.” His gaze returned to me. “Are you ready to focus, Blaire?”

  Focus? How the hell was I supposed to focus when Damian was killing himself right before my eyes? Still, I couldn’t let myself get pulled from the mission. One thing I knew: he needed me down there tonight.

  Charles studied me for another second over the rims of his glasses, then unrolled a map of Scripps and flattened it on his desk, now absent of the articles I’d seen last night. He pointed to the Immunology building. “On the second floor you’ll find a locked security office with feeds from cameras positioned throughout the building, including inside the chamber. You’ve already collected the keys that open the office, so you should have no trouble getting in. Bring an external hard drive; your flash drive won’t be large enough.”

  “Footage of the artifact,” Damian muttered.

  “And every test they’ve conducted going back a month.” Charles rolled up the map. “I’ve gone over each of your preliminaries and everything’s watertight. Tonight, boys and girls, we see what’s down there.”

  ***

  “You two seem young,” said Dr. A
nderson, admitting Damian and me into the Immunology building after we’d flashed a half dozen ID cards and name-dropped the entire Scripps Institute roster, his bushy mane bobbing with each bouncy step.

  “I’m twenty-four,” said Damian. He didn’t look the least bit convincing in his fake glasses and white coat. More like Clark Kent. He nodded to me. “She’s thirty.”

  Dr. Anderson did a double take at me but said nothing.

  Thanks, Damian. “I’m really into herbal skin cream,” I said, covering for his idiocy.

  Damian leaned toward the scientist. “Plastic surgery,” he whispered, and gave him a wink.

  “Oh, and his balls haven’t dropped yet,” I added. “That’s why he looks so young.”

  Dr. Anderson scowled at us and pulled out his cell phone. “Just . . . just let me alert the guards that you’re here.”

  He faced away from us to dial a phone number, and Damian glared at me. He mouthed furiously, “What happened to shop talk?”

  “Please. Thirty?” I mouthed back.

  Dr. Anderson was raising the phone to his ear. Damian broke away from our quarrel and flung his arm around the scientist, clamping his elbow around his neck. He torqued with his other arm, cinching the choke hold, and the phone clattered to the floor. Dr. Anderson clawed at Damian’s forearms, but lost strength quickly and went limp. Damian laid out his unconscious body.

  “Come on,” he said, grabbing my wrist and dragging me down the hall.

  A vast white room unfurled behind a glass partition on our left. One of the dozen campus laboratories working around the clock to decode the Aneuploidy-48 crossover genome—my genome.

  The space rose a full two stories, and from our vantage point on the second floor, the bald heads of blue-coated technicians gleamed under cones of bright light.

  Once we’d unlocked the security office at the end of the hall and Damian knocked out the two guards inside, I vented my frustration at him. “You’re gambling with your life and you know it,” I said. “This crossover could have been your last.”