BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller

by Dan Rix

Charles watched him leave. All at once, his face paled, and he sat forward, eyes wide. “Damian, wait—” He reached into his pocket, detached a key from his keychain, and tossed it to him. “That’s for room B,” he said. “Just . . . just be safe. Please.”

  Damian didn’t answer. He closed his fist around the key and slipped back into the hall. Not once did he meet my eyes.

  ***

  I needed to stop him. I grabbed his shoulder outside Charles’s office, but he ignored me, his eyes passing across me like I didn’t exist.

  “Damian, don’t do this,” I moaned. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please don’t do whatever you’re about to do.”

  With his left hand, he yanked out his gun, cocked it with his teeth, and took aim at the wall, balancing the weapon between his left hand and his right forearm.

  Blood trickled down his forearm from under the gauze. The gun wavered, his aim unsteady.

  He lowered the weapon, taking slow, pained breaths . . . defeated. Clenching his jaw, he holstered the weapon in his jeans, wiped tears from his eyes, and brushed past me to room B.

  ***

  “What’s the failsafe?” I demanded, back in Charles’s office. “Where is he going . . . and why didn’t you stop him?”

  Charles cradled his face in his hands. “I can’t stop him, Blaire. He has to do this.”

  “What’s the failsafe?” I repeated.

  He dragged his hands off his cheeks and knotted his fingers together. “It’s a mirror we keep at another location,” he said. “It’s something we started a while back . . . in the case of mission failure.”

  “Another mirror . . . for what?”

  “It’s not just a mirror anymore,” he said.

  Then I understood. “A mirror you kept open,” I muttered, “a mirror you crossed over but didn’t break afterwards.”

  He nodded. “A mirror with broken symmetry. As of this morning, it’s been open for two months and two days. It contains a parallel symmetry that diverged two months ago.”

  I stared at him. “Why?”

  “Theoretically, it contains a reflection of things exactly as they’d be if we hadn’t meddled,” he said. “It’s meant as a hideout. That way if we blow our cover on a mission in the source, we can hide in the failsafe while things blow over. It’s the perfect hiding place . . . a whole universe the size of a mirror. But it’s messy, and it’s not a permanent solution, which is why it’s only meant as a last resort.”

  “But we didn’t blow our cover,” I said. “We can run the mission again.”

  “He’s not running the mission,” said Charles, his blue eyes sparkling behind his glasses. “He’s harvesting a limb.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “The failsafe contains a reflection of Damian with both hands. In fact, it’s the only reflection of him that still has his right hand.”

  “He’s going to cut off his own hand,” I said, mortified.

  “And get it replanted to his source. He’s done worse than that. Look, I never meant the failsafe to be a supply of severed limbs, but he’s the best we have—and I agree with him; he needs his hand back.”

  “Why does he have to nest crossovers?”

  “Because I need the failsafe intact.”

  “What if it kills him?”

  Charles swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “In this case, I think the risks are acceptable.”

  “So your rule against nesting crossovers is what . . . a suggestion?”

  “Blaire, I couldn’t stop him,” he said softly. “He’d crossover in a Macy’s dressing room if I didn’t let him use one of ours.”

  Charles was right, of course. I collapsed into the chair opposite his desk and ran my fingers through my hair. “It was my fault,” I said, through a lump in my throat.

  “No one blames you,” he said.

  A lie.

  I pictured Damian packing a gauze-wrapped bundle in ice, his dying reflection begging for mercy at his feet. The image made me queasy.

  ***

  Damian was gone all that day. And the next. For a whole week. We didn’t know if he was still in a reflection, dead, or recovering back in the source.

  I lay awake at night, missing him. At school, I drifted through my AP tests like a zombie. At work, every minute of his absence carved out more of my heart. If he did return, he would never trust me again. He would never forgive me.

  On Wednesday, a week and a day after the sever, the sun bled into the horizon, the last of its dying light piercing the blinds.

  Damian sauntered through the front door of ISDI and sat stiffly on the couch, setting his laptop on the coffee table.

  My heart gave a nervous jolt. I followed his right forearm to a brace around his wrist, and—I rolled my chair back to peer around his laptop’s screen—his right hand. Reattached.

  I was happy for him, until he started typing. He leaned forward and pivoted his right arm at the elbow, angling his whole hand in an attempt to line his fingers up with the correct keys. He let the weight of his forearm depress the keys, wincing in the process. The effort of concentrating knit his eyebrows. I loathed myself for causing his suffering.

  He gave up and slammed his laptop shut.

  “It takes time,” I said, perching myself on the couch’s armrest.

  He stared at his wrist brace, his stiff fingers poking out. “I don’t have time.”

  “Damian, if I could go back and switch places with you, I would in a heartbeat. I was trying to save you—”

  “I told you to wait, Blaire. I told you not to press the button.”

  “They were going to shoot you.”

  “They never shoot.”

  I felt my sinus tighten with pressure between my eyes. “So you blame me?”

  “Entirely,” he said coldly. And without missing a beat, he called out to Amy. “Get your prelims done, Ames. We crossover at midnight. We’re stealing footage of that goddamn artifact if it kills us.”

  “Roger that,” she said, perking up at her desk, clearly giddy to crossover again with Damian.

  I swiveled away from him and blinked the moisture out of my eyes. “Did you overlap?” I asked. “When you did it?”

  “You bet. It was a real blast killing my reflection and feeling like I was getting killed at the same time. But who cares? I have a hand again, right?”

  “Are you sure it was worth it?”

  “Blaire,” he finally spun and glared at me—and for the first time since he sat down, I noticed the veins around his eyes were black and inflamed, “I don’t know if any of this is worth it. Just leave me alone, okay? At this point, you’ve been nothing but bad luck for me.”

  I stared at him and felt the cage only he had the key for close permanently around my heart. “I’m sorry I meant nothing to you,” I said, my voice hollow. I turned away and slipped out of the office into fresh air.

  When I returned, I found Amy leaning against Damian on the sofa, holding his right hand.

  “Can you feel that?” she asked kissing the top of his hand.

  He shook his head.

  “How about this?” she said, and while I watched from the doorway, she leaned over and slowly sucked on his finger.

  I averted my eyes and felt my lip curl in disgust. She straightened up when she saw me.

  “Oh, you’re back,” she sneered. “Damian and I were hoping you’d quit.”

  “You’re expired,” I said. “You shouldn’t be crossing over tonight.”

  “You should have thought of that before you severed his hand and left us no choice,” she said.

  ***

  I arrived home a little after ten to find a red light blinking on the home phone. A message. Wow, someone out there
was still using a landline. I pressed the play button.

  “Hi Blaire, this is . . . ah, Officer Pruitt from the San Diego Police Department. Wanted to let you know that your father’s personal effects are available to be picked up. We have a pair of loafers, khakis, shirt, undergarments, a white lab coat . . . and a diary. Feel free to come down to the station and grab those at any time. We’ll be open until ten.”

  It only took them five weeks.

  In my bedroom, I collapsed onto my bed, too emotionally spent to care. Should I just quit ISDI?

  Clearly I did more harm than good. I had injured the one person I cared most about, I had hurt him . . . just by being me. Charles was right; I couldn’t handle the responsibility of crossing over.

  Besides, I already knew my dad’s fate. He had been orphaned in a reflection.

  So why didn’t I just quit?

  I rolled over and buried myself in the folds of my comforter. I already knew the answer.

  I was a carrier. I had nowhere else to go.

  ***

  My eyelids sprang open some time later, and the sight of a spindly shadow snaking across my ceiling drove my palpitating heart up my throat.

  Just a tree branch, its silhouette cast into my bedroom by the moon reflecting off a parked car. I peered out at my dark neighborhood to confirm, then tugged my comforter over my head.

  But the fear didn’t leave my body. Instead it settled in deeper, until it was almost an ache. Just my brain’s confusion, I told myself, my amygdala going haywire and flooding my body with fear hormones before the rational parts of me came back online.

  How long had I been asleep? I peeked out from under the covers. The clock on my cell phone read 11:55. In five minutes, they would crossover. With Amy expired and Damian injured, they stood no chance; tonight was a suicide mission.

  But that wasn’t what had woken me up. Something else had woken me up.

  A presence in my bedroom.

  Goose bumps raced across my skin, and my eyes darted to the closet, the shards of broken mirror still hanging off the frame from when I’d crossed over. My lungs filled and emptied, hyperventilating. The tips of my fingers prickled as blood recoiled from my extremities to fuel my muscles for fight or flight. But against what threat?

  I was alone.

  There was just that feeling.

  I climbed out of bed and approached the partially ajar closet, willing the terror from my mind. Mirror shards still littered the carpet. I stooped and picked up the largest sliver, about a foot long and four inches at its widest point, and tilted it in my hand. My sunken eyes flashed in its reflection.

  And then something else.

  I brought the mirror closer to my eyes to see better. A shadow on the wall near my bed, drifting. No, walking. I distinctly made out a tall, waif-like torso, elongated limbs—

  The shadow separated from the wall and moved towards me.

  Prickles spiderwebbed up my arms, and I whipped around and scanned the empty space, my heart thundering in the hollow of my chest.

  But there was nothing behind me.

  My imagination? I glanced back at the mirror to be sure—and felt my insides writhe.

  It was closer to me now. A paper thin humanoid figure made only out of shadow. I stared directly at its sinewy form, yet hardly perceived it . . . as if I was only seeing it with my peripheral vision.

  I touched the surface of the mirror, probed the consistency. Mirrors felt harder when the symmetry was intact. I would recognize if the symmetry was broken—

  Or I could have noted the terror streaked eyes of my reflection, darting exactly with my own. Not diverging a single twitch.

  The mirror’s symmetry was not broken. Again, I checked behind me. Nothing.

  Still, the figure loomed behind my reflection. What I was seeing was impossible. Reflections didn’t exist on their own unless there was broken symmetry. Until you broke symmetry, they were just . . . reflections.

  Yet here I was, staring into a mirror with intact symmetry and witnessing a creature that didn’t exist in the source.

  A creature that only existed in a reflection.

  Suddenly I couldn’t move, I couldn’t yell. I could only gape, my breath frozen in my throat, at my reflection as the elongated figure raised a drifting limb toward my head.

  ***

  I screamed, broke out of my trance, and flung the mirror against the wall, where it shattered into a glittery haze. I fled my bedroom, slapped every light switch on in my path to the front door, and burst out of my house. Outside, I shuddered and scratched at my skin as if trying to wiggle out of it.

  Or scrape off invisible insects.

  All the lights were on at ISDI when I rolled up to the curb a few minutes later, having been unable to reenter my house after the encounter.

  I found Charles inside, slumped on the couch, twirling his cell phone on the coffee table. I let the door shut behind me and opened my mouth to question him about it, but he spoke first.

  “Since you’re here, Blaire,” he said, “I have to assume you’re also here in their reflection. I pray you didn’t run into them when you came in. For their sake, I suggest you go back home so your arrogant, reckless, and sloppy reflection doesn’t mess anything up.”

  The wrinkles around his eyes revealed how much he had suffered in the ten minutes since Damian and Amy had crossed over, and I swallowed my freak-out; we could discuss my encounter another time. That was his daughter down there.

  “Any word?” I asked.

  “They were supposed to call me from the other side. It’s been twelve minutes. I shouldn’t have sent her down.”

  “They’re fine. If one of them got hurt, I’m sure they would have come back.”

  “Not if we lost them both,” he said.

  My blood chilled. “They’ll call,” I said, taking a seat next to him.

  Sure enough, his cell phone rang a moment later, the shrill ring tone making us both flinch.

  Charles put it on speaker. “Damian, talk to me.”

  “Okay,” said Damian—and the sound of his voice made my heart ache, “the good news is Amy’s alive.”

  Charles sighed with relief. “What’s the bad news?”

  “She’s unconscious.”

  “What?”

  “Collapsed right after crossover. Didn’t throw up or anything, just passed out cold. Breathing and heart rate normal, though.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “On our way to the ER, three blocks out,” he said. “Charles, she’ll come to. We can still do this.”

  “Jesus. Just be careful with her.”

  “Hang on . . . her eyes just opened, I think we’re go for the mission—”

  The line went blank.

  Charles and I exchanged worried glances.

  “Damian knows what to do. They’ll be fine,” he said, more to reassure himself than me. With trembling hands, he laid a chessboard on the coffee table. “This will help.”

  But neither of us bothered to set up the pieces. We just stared at the floor, waiting.

  “Blaire,” he said, breaking the silence. “I don’t blame you for anything. I want you to know that.”

  I nodded. “Thanks. That means a lot.”

  A clock I’d never noticed made its presence known with an endless tick-tock . . . tick-tock . . . tick-tock.

  If they didn’t return, we would have to break the mirror and orphan the world. There could be no investigation, no closure. Not knowing would haunt us forever.

  Like my father.

  “Charles,” I said, my voice startling him, “could there be another way back to the source from an orphaned world?”

  He shook his head. “Not possible. Every reflection is joined to the sou
rce at a single mirror. Once we lose the mirror, the reflection is lost. It’s gone. I couldn’t even tell you where it went.”

  “Could there be another mirror?”

  “Allow me to create an analogy, Blaire. Imagine you’re swimming through an ocean infinitely deep and infinitely wide. You are blind and deaf. There are billions of people swimming around you, above and below you, in front of you and alongside you. There are fierce currents. You can’t even move your arms without getting tangled in a dozen human limbs. It is literally an ocean of bodies.”

  He raised his eyes to mine. “Now imagine you’re holding a rope in your hand. You have no idea how long it is; it could be a few miles, or thousands. All you know is Damian is holding the other end of the rope. And you have to get to him.”

  At the mention of his name, I felt a pang in my chest. “Yeah?” I said, my throat dry.

  “Damian is the source. You are the reflection. The rope is the mirror. Now imagine you’re tugging the rope and it goes limp. Frantically, you pull a million miles of rope past you before you get to the end. But there’s no Damian. The rope’s been cut. He cut it. You know he’s still out there in the infinite sea of bodies, but without a rope to connect you to him, you will never find him. You can feel your way through the ocean of flailing limbs for all eternity, grabbing each person and touching their face, praying you remember his features enough to recognize him—which you don’t—and you will never find him. You will never find him.”

  “Stop it,” I whispered. “I get it.”

  “Do you understand why there’s no way back to the source once the mirror breaks?”

  I nodded, his nightmare analogy weighing on my soul. Suddenly, I blurted out, “I want to go into their reflection.”

  He peered sideways at me. “No, Blaire.”

  “I’ll just wait in the room . . . I just . . . I just want to be there. In case anything happens—”

  An alarm pierced the office, cutting me off and jolting us to our feet. Charles bolted for the stairs, heading for the source of the alarm: room A.