by Dan Rix
“Charles, I’m here,” I said.
No answer.
Without light to guide me, I could go no deeper. This was the end of the line.
***
“I’m sorry, Damian . . . I tried.” Exhaustion buckled my knees, and I collapsed next to him. Gently, I unrolled him from the tarp and linked our hands, then lay down next to him—hoping sleep came before asphyxiation.
I kicked off my shoes, part of me relieved that it was all over, and relished the feel of air between my toes.
I bent down to remove the loafers.
The words my father had written. The loafers . . . not his loafers. The loafers.
He had been trying on shoes.
I curled up next to Damian’s body, relieved bacteria couldn’t survive down here. But every time I closed my eyes, the panic of being out of breath jolted them open.
Too weak to dictate my own thoughts, my mind replayed all the crossovers I had done through mirror T, in Charles’s office. I’d moved it to the floor to make crossing over easier, and something about that nagged me. I’d moved it; it wasn’t even attached to the wall—
A crinkle behind me made me flinch.
The backpack slumped somewhere off to my left, spilling our rations of food. Rations, I realized now, that Damian had packed for me alone.
He had put in tins of cod.
Cod was rich in iodine. I felt along the floor for one of the tins and popped the seal, then emptied the fish into my mouth. It had no flavor, just a tinge of rot, but the taste of salt burst in my mouth. Being a mineral, salt was more robust than organic matter. It survived the crossovers.
Breathing only slightly easier, I wiggled closer to Damian again and let my eyelids drift shut. Hopefully, I would suffocate in my sleep . . . in his arms, like I was supposed to.
Then it hit me. The fourth mirror . . . it wasn’t even attached.
Recursion.
Not only could the mirrors be nested, they could also be detached and carried through other mirrors.
I could have saved him.
He could have stayed at the top of the maze, safe. I could have crossed over through that first mirror alone, detached it on the other side, and carried it with me all the way through the maze, giving me a shortcut back to him. And he could have instructed me through the glass without ever crossing over a single mirror.
I could have saved him.
Tears welled up in my eyes, and a sob contorted my face. I curled into a ball, repulsed to be in my own skin.
I could have saved him.
***
I had dreams. Good dreams.
No, not dreams. Overlap. Fleeting images of me and Josh, even though I was now deeper than they were.
Then bad dreams.
Drowning in a sea of faceless people, blind and deaf, swimming for miles in search of Damian’s soul, knowing I would never find it. When I died, my afterlife wouldn’t even be in the same universe as his. I would suffer forever in a black hole.
I woke up gasping for air, my chest convulsing and pulling at the vacuum around me. I couldn’t breathe, and the ache in my heart and lungs brought tears to my eyes.
I scrambled for another tin of cod and downed it.
It didn’t help.
Lightheaded, I scanned the black hallway, frantic for anything that would help me breathe—and that’s when I saw it. Something out there moved.
I peered into the dark, heart thudding, but the shape didn’t resolve itself. No matter how I tilted my head and squinted my eyes, holding the thing in the center of my vision, it stayed in some kind of blind spot. It was only when I didn’t look right at it but instead stared a few degrees to its left that I recognized its form through my peripherals, silhouetted in the bathroom doorway.
An elongated humanoid figure.
About time. I was getting kind of lonely without that thing haunting me. I closed my eyes and lay back down—
My eyelids snapped open. Wait . . . I had actually seen something. Vision required light, some kind of light. Yet the only two sources were stuffed in my backpack, their bulbs burnt out.
I jerked upright and once again centered my vision on a point to the left of the bathroom door.
The figure had vanished, but in its place, delineated against the blacker hallway, the rectangle of the doorway glowed dimly in my peripherals.
Light.
It seeped from the bathroom mirror, seeped up from a lower level. From deeper.
***
I ditched the backpack and dragged Damian toward the bathroom, halting every few steps to gasp for air; I couldn’t leave him out in the hallway with that . . . thing.
Somehow, I managed to hoist his body onto the sink and through mirror C. I crossed over after him, and keeled over in the hallway on the other side, fighting another wave of nausea. Though I could see hints of the walls, the source of the light remained hidden.
I checked the usual suspects. Room A . . . sealed shut. Room B—its door gaped like a black throat, swallowing light, not emitting it. My eyes descended the stairs into the main work area: an abyss, also too dark. Which left Charles’s office . . . a faint glow escaped around the edges of the door.
Bingo.
I tugged the tarp with Damian’s body up the hall and peered into the office. A bluish predawn hue lit the walls.
Its source: mirror T.
We crossed over through the mirror, and I stepped out of Charles’s office into hallways alive with light, everywhere a pinkish-blue—the tint of dawn in full swing. Could this be the way out the bottom?
I followed the brightness into room B, its walls rosy with the colors of daybreak, and crossed over into sunrise. The radiance blinded me, forced me to shield my eyes. I squinted while my eyes adjusted, and lowered my hand.
Sunlight blazed in the hallway . . . real sunlight. Daytime. I peered into the hallway and glimpsed a corner of the wall lit by direct sun, blazing like filament. After days in pitch black, the brightness made my eyes throb, but I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t blink. I stared at it through a film of tears, my heart aching . . .
Sunshine.
I stepped out of room B into the bright hallway—and tripped over a body.
***
Charles’s body.
Or what was left of it.
The sight of his remains drove bile into my throat. He lay in a pool of black, flaking blood. His arm was missing. No, more than that. A diagonal slice of his torso from his shoulder to his hips was just . . . gone.
White ribs jutted out from under the pulpy mass of a lung, itself missing a chunk. The pool of dried blood snaked behind him, indicating he had dragged himself a distance across the floor. I followed the trail to its origin a few feet up the hall, confirming my suspicions.
Shards of a broken mirror—pinched from the stack in his office, no doubt—lay scattered on the carpet, drizzled with red.
Severed.
His body had been severed.
I pictured the grisly scene on the other side of the mirror, a shoulder and an arm, the beginnings of a rib cage, part of a lung and half a kidney . . . orphaned.
The end of a tape measure, also severed, was pinned under his foot. I tugged it out. The length of ribbon remaining had been severed perfectly through one of the inch markings. I leaned closer to see which number was cut in half—and my scalp tingled. Eighteen inches.
That’s where the tape stopped. The rest had been sliced off with his body. Exactly eighteen inches remained.
And now I understood. Charles had done it to himself on purpose. He had held a tape measure across his chest and arranged himself halfway in, halfway out—then shattered the mirror. He had deliberately severed his own body down to eighteen inches.
But why?
The inside of his mouth hung ajar, and I peered inside. Like Amy, his tongue and throat appeared to have been burned to ash.
***
Charles’s remaining arm sprawled toward the door to his office, the destination he never reached—and the source of the sunlight spilling into the hall.
I tiptoed closer.
The yellow equipment case lay open on the floor. Foam lined the inside of the case, imprinted with a shallow depression roughly the size of a laptop. A slot fitted to the artifact.
Empty.
Sunlight streamed past me, and where it struck the walls, the deeply decayed acoustic paneling bubbled, the matter sizzling away. All at once, the light seemed ominous, otherworldly. I had crawled down a hundred levels, and so far everything had gotten dimmer, darker.
Sunlight was out of place down here.
Wrong.
I peeked around the door frame into the office, and the glare forced me to shade my eyes. Sunlight poured into the room through a hole right in the floor.
A rectangular hole, roughly a foot by a foot and a half, radiating like white-hot magnesium. So there was a way out the bottom of the maze . . . a trapdoor straight to the fires of hell.
The rectangle dimmed as a blurry figure passed in front of it—humanoid, made out of shadow. The creature jerked around the light, drawn to it like a moth, reaching into the glare then flinching back as if burned.
No, it didn’t lead to hell.
Nor did it lead to the source from which Damian and I had been orphaned. That world was truly gone, just as we had originally thought.
No, this was something else.
In a dizzying flash, the clues slotted into place. Every one of them. The story in my father’s diary, his inexplicable reappearance from a lower level after being orphaned, my DNA found on the artifact itself. It made perfect sense.
Blaire, you are the one thing that doesn’t belong.
Charles, of course, had been right all along. Reflections were joined to their source by a single mirror. There was no other way between them—no backdoors, no exits out the bottom, no transdimensional artifacts that could crossover through thin air.
There didn’t need to be.
There was one solution to the maze that was still possible. Somehow, we had overlooked it.
Chapter 28
In the hands of the military, it had been called the artifact. But what lay on the floor spewing light into Charles’s office wasn’t anything nearly so baffling.
It was a simple mirror, of the type found under benches in shoe departments for trying on shoes . . . except with broken symmetry.
I could guess the measurement of the long side: eighteen inches.
Eighteen inches through which Charles Donovan, with his broad shoulders, had been unable to squeeze. Eighteen inches through which I, Blaire Adams, had easily crossed over at age four—before I was even old enough to believe it was impossible, before I was even old enough to remember.
I had broken the symmetry.
Me.
I had crossed over through a shoe mirror and unknowingly created a parallel universe. A reflection. And I had lived out the rest of my life in that reflection, oblivious.
In the reflection, my father had probably taken me home, none the wiser. In the source, my father had no doubt searched the store. But those angled shoe mirrors . . . you can never tell what they’re supposed to reflect. Most likely nobody even noticed the broken symmetry.
Not until later.
In one version—the version I knew—the U.S. Military got hold of the mirror, buried it under Scripps, and bombarded it with radiation and gamma rays. That was understandable, considering a mirror with broken symmetry looked an awful lot like a portal between parallel universes. In the other version . . . well, I guessed I would soon find out.
I picked up the glass, and the sun’s beam danced across the ceiling.
When Charles built his fractal maze, he hadn’t just nested crossovers. He had done something else.
It was called recursion.
Since he carried the mirror down with him, it didn’t matter how many levels above him got cut off; he had the mirror that led to the true source. It had also been his source of oxygen and light.
I held the mirror above me and glimpsed blue sky. Bluer than anything I had ever seen.
My home. The place where I was born . . . in which I hadn’t existed for twelve years.
I had often wondered if I came from below, if I originated in a reflection; never had I considered the possibility that I came from above.
I took a deep breath, scrunched my shoulders together, and let the mirror fall around me like the hem of a shirt, wiggling a bit to get it past my hips.
I opened my eyes and found myself standing in blinding daylight.
***
Euphoria filled my lungs. The warmth spread to every cell in my body, replenishing each one with oxygen. The sun dazzled in a cloudless blue sky, forcing me to squint. Head spinning, I ripped off my dress and sprawled out on a dry, cracked lake bed and let the sun’s warm rays soak my bare skin. I rolled over and dug my fingers into the earth, kissed the ground, savored the taste of dust . . . real dust on my lips. I was crying.
The true source.
I sat up and scanned the horizon, licking my parched lips and thinking about thirst for the first time in days. The dry, blistering lake bed extended horizon to horizon, shimmering with heat waves—broken only by a pickup truck a dozen yards away.
I grabbed the scraps of my dress and attempted to cover myself, but no one lingered. The truck was abandoned. Next to me, the mirror lay flat. A square, black pit in the ground.
Clearly this mirror had a very different previous twelve years than its reflection.
How the hell had it gotten here?
I imagined a store clerk stumbling across the mirror after hours, detaching it and taking it home with him, selling it online to a UFO fanatic . . . some guy who brought it to the middle of nowhere in an attempt to signal extraterrestrials, then left it behind as a “beacon.” And at any time, it could have broken.
Where the hell was this, anyway? Not a single mountain shimmered beyond the haze.
I could figure that out later.
I held my breath and crossed over back into the reflection to get Damian. Back in the hazy office a hundred levels deep, I folded his hands in front of him and pushed him into the true source legs first. But I only managed to wedge him up to his elbows before he got stuck. Like Charles, he didn’t fit.
And I had sealed off my only supply of air. Out of breath, I sipped at the air still in Charles’s office. Big mistake. The poison stung my lungs and activated my gag reflex.
I freaked and shoved Damian with all my weight. To my amazement, his shoulders squished together, and he slid through the mirror. I climbed out after him, gasping for breath.
And I had breathed that stuff for days.
All those nested crossovers had left Damian’s flesh and bones squishy. No wonder Charles had gone so deep; he had hoped to degrade his body enough he could just ooze through the mirror rather than having to sever himself. Yet he was simply too large.
Only my father and I, with our narrow frames, had been able to squeeze through the mirror intact.
It turned out the pickup truck was his.
In the cabin, I found my dad’s wallet and newsletter clippings from a local amateur sky watchers group that had recently detected a nearby source of gamma rays—and maps of Nevada with the mirror’s location triangulated in the desert.
So that was how he located the mirror; the U.S. Army had started probing it with gamma rays.
Seven weeks ago, he’d found the mirror, crossed over into the artifact chamber—where it
had originally been—and emerged into my world. He had been searching for me since the day I vanished.
In case he had to dig, he had piled shovels and pick axes into the bed, along with a cooler full of warm beers floating in water—ice, long since melted. I cupped my hands and drank the water.
Then I dug Damian’s grave.
I wiped sweat off my forehead and gazed at him, letting my eyes wander over the contours of his face. I loved him more than ever.
For the past few days—or however long I had been down there—I had focused solely on escaping the maze, not on his death. Now, staring at the boy I loved, my mind numbed. The maze had zapped the emotion out of my body, dried me up. There was nothing left to grieve for him. Not that I could feel that part of me, anyway. A cage had sealed around my heart, and I didn’t even have the key.
I just wished he could have tasted the air up here.
He still wore the tuxedo, as if he had known he was dressing for his funeral the night of prom. My eyes fell to an unsightly bulge in his front pocket: the bullet clip from when he had taken apart his gun after I threatened to shoot the mirror. The memory brought a lump to my throat.
I knelt to remove the bulky object, and a slip of paper fluttered to dirt. I picked it up and unfolded a note he had written, which had been in his pocket the whole time.
A note to me.
Blaire, go home.
I crumpled the note in my fist and flung it into his grave. My lungs heaved, and I fought back an angry sob. “I am home, Damian . . . I’m here, like you wanted . . .” My voice tumbled across the dry lakebed. “Where the hell are you?”
***
Charles Donovan’s sprawling house crested a hill in San Diego. Beyond a fence draped with bougainvillea, a shiny blue Prius reflected the waves of a swimming pool. I was here for one reason: to figure out how much the reflection I created as a four-year-old—in other words, my entire world—had diverged from the true source.