The Summer It Came for Us

by Rix, Dan

  The sun had set by the time we made it back to the spot where Jace had vanished.

  I eyed the creepy woods, quickly sinking into shadow, and felt a stirring of fear now that my earlier adrenaline had worn off.

  I hoped the Glipper was gone.

  “Let’s do this quick.” He pulled out his gun and checked his mag. “Down the hill, into the wormhole before they even know we’re there.”

  My eyes froze on the gun. “Wait, is that for the Glipper? Or for the DIA guys?”

  He hesitated, and looked up. “Remi, all that matters is we get through that wormhole. That’s all that matters. As it is, we’re leaving our parents without us. This universe is screwed, anyway.”

  “That’s different,” I said, though it hurt to think of my parents waking up tomorrow morning to find me gone, with no idea what happened to me.

  The police would search the town, the woods, but they would find no body, no murder weapon, no motive . . . only my footsteps vanishing in the middle of the clearing, as if I had crawled through a hole in space.

  I felt a pang of guilt. The least I could have done was leave a note, but now it was too late. We needed to leave this universe tonight.

  The only solace came from knowing that out of the millions and billions of universes out there, there would be some where I died, some where I lived, some where I was never born, but in the end, there would always be some where they would be happy.

  But this was different. “Malcolm, don’t do anything you’re going to regret.”

  “This isn’t our universe,” he argued, “it doesn’t matter.”

  “But it does, Malcolm. You’re still killing someone innocent.”

  “Who cares? Those same guards are still going to be alive in our universe.”

  “I don’t care about them. I care about you. What it’s going to do to you, when you kill something innocent. Because you’re good.”

  He stared me a long time, and his Adam’s apple moved up and down a swallow. Finally, he released the clip from his gun and ejected the bullet in the chamber, making it safe again. “You’re right,” he said. “ ‘Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.’ Oprah Winfrey said that.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  “No . . . thank you.” Malcolm retrieved his handheld spotlight, and we started into the forest, weaving our way down the hill toward the distant hum of diesel generators, and the bright blaze of floodlights.

  The salmon-colored sky flickered between the branches, reassuring me we still had time. Malcolm swept his spotlight back and forth, chasing back the encroaching shadows, then held my hand across a creek.

  I didn’t want him to let go.

  We came to a chain link fence, erected haphazardly through the underbrush—the DIA’s perimeter. Hanging every few feet, reflective orange signs read, Danger: Do Not Enter.

  Malcolm tapped one and threw a smirk over his shoulder—he thought it was ironic, maybe. I missed the joke.

  Together, we crept along the fence to where it intersected an oak tree, giving us a wide enough gap to squeeze through, then ducked between two rumbling generators, darted around one of the floodlight trailers, and at last reached the edge of the clearing, which was still coned off. The smell of soot and electricity hung heavy in the air.

  Except for a scientist watching footage on a laptop near a tent—a woman with a bob haircut—the clearing was empty. Somewhere off the distance, I heard crackling radios.

  Wow, this would be easier than I thought.

  “You go first,” Malcolm whispered. “Run right between the flags. As fast as you can. I’ll be right behind you. Go now!”

  My heart gave an excited jolt, and I sprinted into the clearing.

  Malcolm tore out behind me.

  The scientist looked up, and stared, but it was too late for her to stop us. The flags were ten feet away, five feet, three feet—

  “Um”—she straightened up—“and you are . . . ?”

  Now or never.

  I made a desperate leap.

  My body left the ground, sailed between the flags, and splatted into the mud on the other side. Malcolm landed on top of me, knocking the wind out of me.

  But we were through.

  We were through!

  “Nice,” he said, pulling me to my feet. I froze.

  The scientist was still there, staring at us like we were crazy.

  Our surroundings—the blazing floodlights, the humming generators, the cones marking off the clearing—were all still there. Nothing had changed.

  But . . . but we’d gone through a wormhole, we should have been in a different universe by now.

  “Excuse me, you’re not supposed to be in here,” said the scientist with the bob. “Didn’t you see the signs?”

  “Maybe it only works one direction, come on!” Malcolm grabbed my wrist and yanked me back between the flags.

  Still, nothing happened.

  Had they moved the flags?

  I looked back at the scientist in panic. “There’s . . . there’s supposed to be a wormhole here.”

  “Ooh, if you were trying to go through it, you’re a bit late.” She checked her cell phone. “The wormhole here closed about forty minutes ago. Yeah, most everybody’s packed up and left by now.” She gestured around the abandoned clearing.

  My jaw fell open. “It’s closed?”

  No wonder no one had stopped us.

  “Wormholes are inherently unstable,” she said. “They seal up, kind of like when a cut heels. We’re just learning all this ourselves, actually.”

  “What about your rover?” I said, grasping at anything. “You sent a rover through it.”

  “We lost the feed. Clara Hopkins, by the way. High-energy physics.” She extended her hand.

  Malcolm stepped forward. “What about the one at the other site? The first site? The one way up Ridgeview Drive?”

  “Oh, we got the last readings off that one days ago.”

  My lungs deflated of breath.

  The wormholes had closed, we’d missed our chance.

  If we’d only come an hour earlier . . .

  Malcolm dropped into a crouch and dug his fingers through his hair, glaring at the ground. “We’re stuck here . . . we’re marooned in this universe.”

  “Maybe . . . maybe we can make another one?” I said encouragingly.

  He shook his head. “Not without the collider, remember?”

  Right, we’d been through this. In this universe, the collider might as well not exist.

  I plopped down next to Malcolm and leaned my head on his shoulder, my eyes tearing up. I didn’t care anymore.

  Clara’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know about all this, anyway? You guys look like high school kids.”

  I sighed. “We accidentally drove through a wormhole into this universe, and now the universe’s immune system is trying to remove us. So, we’re basically dead.”

  She frowned, squeezed her mouth, then pulled out a notebook and began to scribble, while muttering, “An immune system response . . . of course, it’s an immune system response . . .”

  “A physicist that used to work at Shasta-Trinity told us that,” I murmured. “That’s what’s causing all this.”

  “Mmm, I doubt that . . . that place closed down ten years ago.”

  “No, they’re still doing collisions on the other side . . .” I trailed off, suddenly realizing that logic took us right back to where we started, and my heart skipped a beat.

  On the other side.

  “Malcolm, the collider’s still running on the other side!” I shook him until he jerked his head up.

  For so long, I’d been stuck in the mindset that this universe had gotten derailed, I’d forgotten the two universes existed simultaneously—and that on the other side, Shasta-Trinity was still fully operational . . . and still busy making wormholes.

  “It’s still running,” I said, “which means another wormho
le is going to form on Thursday at 10:47 p.m.” I said.

  Malcolm’s eyes widened. “Tomorrow night . . .”

  “Another one’s going to form!” I said. “Just like the night we crashed, just like it did for Zoe.”

  He nodded slowly. “The question is . . . where?”

  Mrs. Ferguson greeted us at her door the next morning with a reluctant smile. “I thought you two’d be back. You know, I quit after you guys left, and I’m thinking of getting back into physics . . .” she saw our faces and trailed off. “What’s wrong?”

  Apparently, we’d managed to break through her rough exterior the day before.

  “The Glipper took Jace,” said Malcolm. “Mrs. Ferguson, we need your help.”

  Her expression turned stone-cold serious. “Come in. Quickly.”

  She hustled us through her living room into the office—the room that, in another life, had belonged to Vincent—where she threw open the blinds and flipped on all the lights.

  I brought her up to speed, explaining how we’d driven into this universe through a wormhole, how the Glipper only attacked Vincent because he’d wandered too close to one, and how it would be hunting us until we escaped back into our own universe.

  “We don’t have much time,” I said. “We think another wormhole is going to form tonight at 10:47 p.m., and when it does, the Glipper is going to be all over it. We need to beat it there—assuming it hasn’t taken us by then. The only thing is we don’t know where it’s going to form.”

  “Hmm . . .” Squeezing her jaw, she retrieved a tube of rolled up paper from the filing cabinet. “You could be right. Let’s see what we have here.”

  She cleared her desk with a sweep of her hand, making space to unroll a large map, which looked to be blueprints of some sort. Peering closer, I made out the circular accelerator ring of Shasta-Trinity and the surrounding river valley.

  “Show me where the first two wormholes formed,” she said.

  “Uh . . .” I had no idea.

  But Malcolm was already on Google maps on his phone, zooming in to Ridgeview Drive. “We crashed here . . . the wormhole would have been about here.”

  He consulted the blueprints, found the corresponding point, and tapped the sheet.

  Mabel cleared her throat and slid on a pair of reading glasses, leaning close to look.

  She marked an X with a pencil.

  “And the second one was in a clearing by a creek . . .” Again, he compared the satellite map on his phone with the topography lines on the blueprints. “Here. It was right here.”

  Mabel marked another X.

  I studied what we had. Two points about twenty miles apart, both only a few miles from the vast accelerator ring. At this large-scale, I saw what I hadn’t realized while down on the ground.

  Skirting along the edge of the lake bed, the squiggly line of Ridgeview Drive kept within a few miles of the ring for much of its circumference; the two marks’ proximity to it were obvious. Driving along that road, with the ring vanishing into the horizon, it had always seemed so far off.

  We’d been like ants, oblivious that we’d been crawling along the edges of a boot.

  “Just as I thought,” Mabel said, nodding smugly, “the wormholes formed at the Lagrangian points.”

  “At the what?” Malcolm and I said together.

  “Lagrangian points. When you’re dealing with the kinds of energies we were, this particle accelerator becomes a frightfully complex system of magnetic fields, centrifugal forces, and angular momentum in constant flux. The Lagrangian points are the theoretical spots where all the forces should cancel out. It’s been thought that much of the mass lost in collisions turns up in those spots in the form of virtual particles.”

  I pointed to the two marks. “So these two areas, where we crashed, and where Zoe vanished, these are the Lagrangian points?”

  “Exactly. Notice they’re both in low areas, at precisely the same elevation as the lake bed—they’re in the same plane as the accelerator ring. Now, if the accelerator was a perfect circle, then the third Lagrangian point would form an equilateral triangle with the first two . . . but it’s not a perfect circle.”

  I glanced uneasily at Malcolm. “So . . .”

  “So we do the math.” Looking far too excited about it, Mabel whipped out a battered wooden ruler and a compass and sketched out lines and arcs all over the accelerator ring, labeling the angles. Then she pulled out a notebook and began scribbling out incomprehensible equations, equations with more Greek letters than actual numbers.

  The sight of it all made me nauseous.

  She hesitated, and frowned at her notebook.

  “Nope, wrong, wrong, wrong.” She scratched out everything she’d written and started again, looking, if anything, even more gleeful. “Ooh, I do miss this.”

  “What, exactly, is this?” Malcolm said, peering over her shoulder.

  “Integral calculus,” she said. “I’m solving for the constant-pattern solutions.”

  “Duh, Malcolm . . . obviously.” I caught his eye playfully, and he gave me an unamused look, which I hoped was sarcastic.

  “Got it,” she said. “The third Lagrangian point should be right about”—using the ruler, she triangulated a third point on the map all the way across the river valley, and, consulting the latitude and longitude tics along the sides, scribbled the coordinates on a sticky note, which she handed to us—“here.”

  I stared at the numbers she’d written.

  “So this is . . . this is where . . . ?”

  “Where the next wormhole forms. Tonight at 10:47 p.m.”

  “I’ll drop a pin.” Malcolm marked the coordinates in Google maps so his phone could give us directions to it later.

  I glanced between the two of them, knotting my fingers nervously in front of me. “So . . . now what?”

  “Now we do whatever it takes to survive until 10:47,” said Malcolm, checking the time on his phone, “which is twelve hours from now . . . and we make damn sure we’re at that spot.”

  “You tell . . . you tell my Vincent I said hi, alright?” Mabel rolled up her map and closed her notebook, her eyes brooding.

  “You should come with us,” I blurted out.

  A spark of hope flashed in her eyes, before it fizzled out. “Thank you, but I couldn’t.”

  “No, yes, you should!” I said. “Vincent’s still alive in our universe, and you could get your job back at the collider . . .”

  But as soon as I said it, she began shaking her head. “I said goodbye to my boy ten years ago. That wouldn’t be fair to replace the version of me who has memories of him through those years. I belong here in this universe, just like you belong in yours. But I’ll sleep easier knowing he’s out there, somewhere, and that you two are taking care of him.” She gave us both pointed looks.

  “We will,” said Malcolm.

  My eyes began to tear up, and I threw my arms around her. “Bye, Mabel . . . thank you so much for your help.”

  She patted my back. “Thank you for being such a good friend to Vincent.”

  Her words brought a twinge of guilt, because for most of the last ten years, I hadn’t been a good friend to Vincent.

  “What do you think you’re going to do?” Malcolm asked, once we’d hugged it out.

  “For starters,” she said, “I’m going to get out of this dead-end town, maybe move to Berkeley or Cambridge, see if I can get back into research.” She tapped her notebook with a sly smile. “You ask me, wormholes are going to be the next big thing.”

  “She’s going to be fine,” Malcolm said once we were back in his car, seeing me wipe another tear from my eye. “She’s tough like Vincent. I think we gave her hope again.”

  I nodded, hoping he was right. We drove in silence.

  “We’re getting out of here, Remi.” He reached over and squeezed my hand, looking me dead in the eye. “We’re going home. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  For the first time since the car crash, since waking
up with that gut feeling something terrible had happened, I let myself believe it, too. We were going to be okay. We were going to survive this. I gave him a weak smile.

  But for some reason, something he’d said stuck with me.

  She’s tough like Vincent.

  It was true. Vincent was tougher than all of us—except Malcolm, maybe.

  Certainly he’d been a lot tougher than my brother.

  Of the two of them—Trevor and Vincent—Vincent had always weathered my teasing with a quiet resilience, and now I wondered . . .

  If Trevor had been tough like Vincent, would he have killed himself?

  My mood darkened instantly, the scab in my heart reopened. With all the distractions lately, I’d barely thought about Trevor, about the monster I’d once been to him, and I felt a pang of remorse for forgetting so easily.

  But why now?

  Why did my brain have to dredge that up right now, of all times, when we were this close to the finish line? Somehow, it felt deliberate. Like my guilt was making sure my hope stayed in check, reminding me I was never allowed to be happy, never allowed to forgive myself.

  Or else I would forget.

  “You okay?” said Malcolm, sensing my quietness.

  I nodded, then shook my head. “It’s just . . . it’s not going to be okay, because it wasn’t okay before. I wasn’t okay. And it’s just going to go right back to that.”

  “You talking about Trevor?”

  “Yeah.”

  He shifted gears, his jaw tensing.

  “There’s something I haven’t told you,” he said. “About Trevor. Something I figured out. I was waiting to tell you until you were ready.”

  I looked up at him, curious. “Am I ready now?”

  He caught my eye again. “Are you ready to forgive yourself?”

  “Yes . . . I mean, no. I don’t know. How do I know?”

  He eyed me for another moment—one of those looks where I felt like he was peering into my soul—then went back to driving. “You’re not ready.”

  “No, Malcolm, tell me,” I said. “I’m ready, I promise I’m ready, just tell me . . . please.” I sounded like a whiny four-year-old.

  “Nope,” he said. “Not until you prove to me you’re ready.”

  I folded my arms and slouched. “Ugh, you’re impossible.”