by Dan Rix
He drew a second triangle, a reflection of the first. “When Charles crossed over through A, he created a reflection of the original setup.
Then he drew two more triangles branching off the first two. “When he crossed over B, he broke symmetry again, creating not only a reflection of the reflection, but also a deeper reflection of the source through A.”
He continued. “We know he crossed over C next, and he kept going. So far, I’ve got it mapped out to this.” He flipped to another page in the notebook, this one packed with triangles and annotations.
I stared at the diagram he had drawn, and dread settled in my stomach. “We’re screwed.”
***
“Where it gets really small and branches to the right,” he said. “That’s where you wandered off.”
“Let’s go back up,” I said. “We can get fake identities and start over in the failsafe; it’s not that deep.”
“Nor is it the source,” he said. “You’re going home, Blaire.”
I sat up straight. “So are you.”
He didn’t meet my eyes, and I could see his jaw tighten. “We’re descending a fractal tree. Every time he breaks symmetry, he reflects the entire maze, doubling its size.”
“So it’s expanding exponentially,” I said. “He can add on to the maze faster than we can search it.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”
“He could be a hundred levels down by now. Which means there’d be millions of branches.” I licked away the last of the salty taste inside my mouth, already breathing easier. Whatever pill he had given me, it worked.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “The deeper he goes, the farther he has to travel to get to an unsplit mirror. That gives us a chance to catch up with him.”
“How?” I said. “I got lost after two crossovers.”
“According to this,” he said, tapping his notebook, this bathroom should be a dead end.”
“It is a dead end,” I muttered.
“Did you see your reflection?” he said.
“No.”
“That means Charles broke the symmetry. He went through this mirror. We’re on the right path, Blaire. We can systematically probe each branch and eliminate dead ends like that.” He slid out from under me and stood. “We’ll eventually find him.”
I stood up beside him. “Or die trying. Let’s do this.”
***
Damian led us two levels deeper, consulting his notebook after each crossover. He scribbled in notes, crossed off branches, and added triangles to the maze. At least the potassium iodide seemed to lessen the side effects. At least we could breathe again.
After our third crossover, Damian’s map spilled onto a second page. He hesitated in the hallway, eyebrows tensed, and penciled in thirty-two more triangles.
“Damn,” he said. “He’s broken symmetry six times, not counting his fake diversion through the bathroom, and there’s already sixty-four different versions of the office. A hundred and twenty-eight if he breaks symmetry again.”
“Then 256,” I said. “Then 512, then 1024, then 2048—”
“Shut it, Blaire.” His eyebrows knotted as he studied the diagram. “I wonder if there’s a pattern to his crossovers.”
“Why would there be a pattern? He’s trying to confuse us.”
“Because Charles is methodical,” he muttered. “He never does anything that can’t be undone.”
“You’re going to stake your life on that?”
Damian hesitated. “We have to. Otherwise, we haven’t got a chance in hell.” He glanced up at me. “Blaire, what would you do if you were trying to evade someone quickly and make it appear random?”
I thought about it. For me, quickly meant running through the maze. Which wouldn’t leave a lot of time to deliberate.
“First of all,” I said, “I think I would ignore the letters and instead think of it as going right versus going left.”
“Go on,” he said.
“You can’t go back into the mirror you just came out of, right? The triangle you drew—you can think of it as a circle. So when you come out of a mirror, you either have the option of using the mirror on your left or the mirror on your right.”
Damian peered at his diagram, chewing on his lower lip.
I grabbed the notebook and reinterpreted his notes using my theory. “In other words, after his first crossover, he went right, left, right, right, right, left, then left again. Does that help us?”
He shook his head. “Let’s say you needed to be able to backtrack. How would you decide whether to go right or left?”
“If I was certain I could get back to the source, I wouldn’t worry about backtracking.”
“Then he must not be certain,” said Damian, his eyes dark. “Otherwise he wouldn’t be trying to buy time and he would have broken the mirrors. What if you weren’t certain, Blaire?”
I tried not to consider the possibility that we were chasing a false hope. “Then I would use a simple rule,” I said. “Something that would appear random unless you knew the rule.”
“What kind of rule?”
“I don’t know, some kind of logic puzzle. Can’t we work backwards—”
“Too complicated,” he said. “Simpler.”
“A code, then. Phone numbers, social security numbers, birthdays . . . I’d turn right on evens and left on odds.”
“Or a long number that never repeated,” said Damian, nodding.
“What, like pi?”
“Maybe. I don’t think he has it memorized, though.”
“His computer was on. Maybe he just downloaded it from the internet.”
Damian raised an eyebrow. “His computer?”
“In his office,” I said.
***
We searched every inch of Charles’s office, dumped the contents of filing cabinets and combed decades of records—thousands of numbers he could have used to evade us, none of which felt right.
“It’s more obvious than this,” Damian announced, flipping through pages of building specs. “What was he doing on the computer?”
I slid into the chair behind the desk. On the screen, a white error message filled a solid blue background.
A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.
If this is the first time you’ve seen this stop error screen, restart your computer . . .
I powered down the computer and turned it on again. Inside the tower, fans whirred to life. The same error screen flashed on the monitor.
“Why doesn’t stuff work?” I said.
“The circuits have been reflected too many times,” he said. “They start to degrade. Did he write anything down—any numbers?”
“Nothing. Check the printer tray.”
Damian rifled through the loose sheets in the tray. “Just a fax and a blank sheet. No numbers.”
“A fax from who?”
He scanned the printed sheet. “Life Genomics, Inc.”
“I think that’s the lab that tested my DNA. That’s not new; they sent him that fax a few weeks ago.”
Damian nodded and let the paper slip out of his fingers, defeated.
Absentmindedly, I picked up a pen and etched the letter B into the mahogany. A few weeks ago . . . for some reason, the words repeated in my mind. I added a plus sign and the letter D, then scratched a heart around the pair. I covered my etching with the mouse pad so Damian wouldn’t see. Not that it mattered. We were both going to die.
Then it hit me. Life Genomics sent that fax to Charles a few weeks ago . . . in the source. Not in the failsafe. Charles didn’t even know me in the failsafe. In fact, he hadn’t even existed in the failsafe to receive a fax until last night.
“Damian—” I jerked upright, sending the chair tipping backward, and bolted around the desk. I pounced on the fax and scanned the typewritten message. “In the failsafe, no one was even here to have the DNA tested. He printed this out tonight.”
His eyes widened, and he knelt to read the paper over my shoulder. “My God, you’re right.”
My eyes fell to the last line of the fax.
Courtesy of our recent partnership with Illumina, please find attached the complimentary sequencing of 15,000 base pairs from Chromosome 47.
“DNA,” Damian muttered. “Your DNA, Blaire. That’s the code he’s been following.”
***
My DNA.
I didn’t know how to feel about that.
The fax didn’t have an attachment, so I rummaged through the papers already on the ground. Would I even recognize my own DNA?
“Don’t bother. He took the printout with him.” Damian stooped over the printer and keyed in a series of commands. “This printer stores its last job. Let’s just hope it’s more robust than the computer.” He hovered his finger over a blinking green button, took a deep breath, then pressed it.
The printer remained silent. “Crap—”
A screech from inside the device cut him, off, and then the printer hummed to life, spitting out another copy of the fax followed by page after page of densely packed letters.
Sequenced DNA.
“Bingo,” he said.
Out in the hall, Damian flipped to a blank page in his notebook and—referring back to his diagram—wrote out a string of eight letters.
ABCACABC
“These were his first eight crossovers. Now let’s see if we can translate.” He slapped the printout of my DNA on top of his notebook and scanned the first line—what appeared to be a random string of the letters G, C, A, and T.
I remembered from biology they stood for the nucleotides Guanine, Cytosine, Adenine, and Thymine. Arranged in a specific order, they formed a code—like a computer program—that could be run to create a unique life form.
Or give that life form the ability to walk through mirrors.
“A could match up with A,” I offered.
“I figured that out myself, Blaire.” He wrote the first eight letters of my DNA under Charles’s path.
ABCACABC
AGACCACA
We studied the two strings of letters, side by side, straining to peer into the logic behind Charles’s maze. The pattern eluded me.
“It doesn’t match up,” I said.
“Not helping, Blaire.”
“G could match up with B,” I said. “They rhyme. Or maybe he’s not even following the DNA and we’re completely off—”
“Quiet, Blaire. I’m thinking.”
I leaned my head against his shoulder and watched the letters swirl on the page like puzzle pieces, trying—and failing—to connect them to each other. Disparate ideas tugged at my mind. My DNA, taken off the artifact. Two C’s, back to back. There was something there, a theme, something we were both missing that explained everything. Exhausted, I closed my eyes and rubbed my cheek against his muscular shoulder.
“Try to imagine the letters as mirrors,” he said, remaining statue still.
Two back to back mirrors. My eyes snapped open. That was it. “They cancel,” I said. “The double C’s in the middle cancel. If you followed those directions literally, you would crossover through a mirror, turn around, and go right back through the same mirror. You’d end up back where you started.”
Damian stared at his notebook, raised his pencil, and crossed off the two C’s in the middle. Which left the two A’s next to each other.
“Those cancel too,” I said. “Three in a row would mean you go through, come back out, then go through again.”
“My God,” said Damian. “That first time we thought Charles was setting a trap, he wasn’t. He went through A, through B, through A, through C, then back through C, back through A again, then continued on through C. He was following the DNA exactly.”
He crossed off the duplicate A’s, leaving four letters, then erased the list and rewrote it under Charles’s path with the next four letters from the printout, omitting a pair of back to back G’s.
We stared at the two series.
ABCACABC
AGCACAGC
“I told you G refered to room B,” I said.
He faced me, grinning, and raised his palm for a high five.
***
We followed my DNA deeper into Charles’s maze, having mutually decided to skip the tape to make better time. At first, we carried a spool of string with us, which we pinched from a toolbox downstairs and tied to the bathroom doorknob. But even a hundred and twenty feet of string ran out after four crossovers.
We ingested more potassium iodide and kept going. I read the letters out loud. He wrote them down in his notebook and read them back to me. I read them a second time. He confirmed.
We said little else.
Because this wasn’t a map. A map told you if you were lost, helped you get unlost. My sequenced DNA did no such thing. If we missed one letter . . . one single letter, if our eyes misread a G as a C, or if we mistook a string of five A’s for six, it could be thousands of crossovers before we realized our mistake. Thousands of crossovers before we stumbled on a mirror that should have had broken symmetry, but instead was still intact.
By then it would be impossible to retrace our steps, impossible to know where we made a wrong turn, impossible to find our way out of this maze.
“G, A, G, G, C—”
“Cross out the G’s,” said Damian. “So that’s G, A, C?”
“Correct. G as in goat, A as in apple, C as in cat.”
He nodded. “Translate that to room B, room A, then the bathroom.”
It went on like this for a while. Each level hazier than the last, as if we were peering through a thick, oily fog. The crossovers didn’t hurt anymore. Our bodies were too numb for that.
Then the inevitable happened.
I stopped in the hallway and stared at the DNA sheet, prickles creeping up my spine.
“Well, which is it?” said Damian, coming to stand by my side. “A, G, or C?”
Of course. We should have seen this coming. There aren’t just three letters in DNA.
There are four.
“A, G, or C?” he repeated.
“Neither,” I said. “It’s a T.”
***
Damian just stared at me.
“Maybe he just skips the T’s,” I suggested. “Since he’s only using three mirrors.”
Damian shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck, eyebrows knit with frustration. “Charles stuck his hand through the bathroom mirror and pulled it out just because there were two C’s in a row. He’s following this exactly.”
I asked the question we both dreaded. “You think there’s a fourth mirror?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “There’s only three mirrors in the office.”
“Maybe he left the office. I mean, maybe this is the end. Maybe he got off here.”
“To go where?”
I rifled through our stack of papers, about fifteen sheets, a thousand letters apiece. “He has to stop before the end of this, right?”
“Either that or we’ll find his corpse.” Damian craned his neck to peer up and down the hall. “Room A, Room B, the bathroom . . . where’s the fourth mirror?” he muttered.
“Could it be the failsafe?”
Damian’s eyes brightened, but only briefly. “No, he broke that mirror, remember? Besides, I think it’s in ISDI. I don’t think he’s leaving the office.”
I mentally listed off the rooms in ISDI. Upstairs: Room A, room B, t
he bathroom, the hallway, Charles’s office, a closet. Downstairs: the bullpen work area, the garage.
“Is there a mirror in the garage?” But I already knew the answer. During my second ever crossover, I had scoured the garage for mirrors and come up short. The side view mirrors on the Prius didn’t count.
“He must have one hidden,” said Damian.
Like him, I peered up and down the hall. “I swear, I’ve seen another mirror here . . . the dumpster! If there’s a large enough shard.”
“Not a chance. The mirrors are tempered glass, they shatter into small cubes.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “We go through mirrors like potato chips. We break twenty of them a week, and we’re saying there’s only three mirrors in the whole building?”
He caught my eye. “The replacement mirrors?”
“They’re stacked in Charles’s office, right?”
“Blaire, you’re a genius.”
“Come on!” I grabbed his hand and pulled him up the hall. In the office, though, the mirrors were still boxed up in a neat pile, untouched.
My heart fell.
“He probably moved one,” said Damian. “It could be anywhere. We have to search the office.”
We were about to go when something atop the filing cabinet caught my eye. “Hang on,” I said, tugging Damian’s sleeve.
A roll of clear acrylic packaging tape and a yellow box cutter perched on the steel’s edge, which I swear had been bare a few levels up.
I grabbed the box cutter and sliced open the top box, and Damian helped me push the cardboard off the mirror. We stared through glass into a shadowy hole, six feet long and three feet wide, absent of our reflections.
Broken symmetry.
The fourth mirror.
“That clever bastard,” muttered Damian.
***
Each in turn, we gripped the edge of the stack and swung our bodies through the T mirror. Since it lay flat, gravity reversed on the other side. The crossover left my head spinning.