by Steve Berman
Asad flinched. Tarif stared at him with wide you-gonna-get-it-now eyes, then scurried past and disappeared into their room. Gam let her arm drop and studied Asad in that way she had, as if the eyes let her see not just the rifts, but all the broken places and lies and wrongdoings inside a boy. Then she folded her arms over her narrow, twig-boned chest and tossed her head toward the kitchen. “You come on, now.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Gam stalked into the kitchen. Asad shuffled after her; in his peripheral vision he caught her bony finger pointing, her pink and white lacquered press-on gleaming.
“You sit,” she commanded. “You sit and you tell me what happened.”
Asad dropped into the chair immediately. When Gam ordered, anyone with the sense God gave little green apples obeyed. Yet his tongue didn’t want to move; no use lying to Gam, and he was gonna have to tell her, but she’d be disappointed in him and he couldn’t stand that. Not when all he wanted, right now, was to bury his face in her plaid muslin apron and sob while she petted his head like she had when he was a little ’un and didn’t have to carry all this weight.
“I saw…” His mouth was dry ash, words sticking to his tongue. “I saw me. The me through the cracks.”
She clucked her tongue. “And he had something you want, that it?”
He stared at her. “How did you…?”
“Because that’s how it goes. Ignorance makes life easier.” She let out a heavy sigh and levered herself into the chair opposite his. She might have shrunk with age, but she carried herself as if her bones were densest lead, her every motion a weighted thing of momentum and kinetics. “And if you ain’t seen something you wanted out there, you’d have done your duty instead of sittin’ here trembling. You didn’t close it, did you?”
Asad’s stomach rolled over hot with shame. He bowed his head again. “I’m sorry.”
“We all got moments of weakness. You marked it?”
“I touched it. It touched me. It’s good as marked.”
“Then I’ll go do it. You best get on to bed. I’ll close it.”
“Can’t you leave it?” He scrunched his hands against his thighs and squeezed his eyes shut. “Just until tomorrow night. Please. Let me watch for a little while. I—I’ll close it after.”
“Boy, I ain’t never raised my hand to you once. Don’t make me start.” She trailed off, swearing under her breath. “I will refuse and rebuke you if you forget what the goddamn hell we here for.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“If the you on the other side got something you want, if he happy, you want to risk that happiness? Longer the cracks stay open near him, more likely he gonna fall through. Or something come through, split the worlds a little more. You leave that crack open, you put him in danger. Bet he got a grandma just like you. Brother. Maybe even still got parents. You don’t wanna take that away from him, or him away from them.”
Asad squirmed his shoulders. “No…no, I don’t.”
“Then we do what we gotta do. We close them ways. We don’t, sooner or later they gonna learn how to see, too. Mirror can’t go both ways.”
“Would it be so bad? They never hurt us.”
“They would.” She folded her hands. Her knuckles were massive, the knuckles of a man three times her size, but her finger-bones were thin and tiny as the bones left over after chicken dinner. “They might not mean to, but they would. See, people got wanting in their hearts. And it’s wanting that makes the dark. It’s wanting that made our time the way it is.” Her lips had gone loose in the way the old ones always did, soft half-full sacks without enough flesh inside them, and they pursed pillows around her words. “Maybe they see something they want over here. Maybe we see something we want over there. Maybe people get scared, and it becomes about take them before they take us, but no matter who do what it just gonna break both sides till ain’t nothing left.”
She paused, considered, then stood. Her slippers shuffled as she crossed to the sink and fished two glasses out of the dish rack, then turned the water on in the sink. She filled both glasses so full they nearly brimmed over, making curved tops barely held by a thin skin of surface tension. That skin quivered as she brought the glasses back to the table with her arthritic fingers, never quite spilling over.
“There gotta be a balance to all things, Saad,” she said. “Now I want you to listen. The books in your school, they only teach you a little of this. They don’t know nothing. They don’t know nothing but you don’t go out after dark, or you might slip through the cracks and fall away.” She set one glass down delicately. “We got a finite amount of matter and energy in the universe, and there gotta stay a finite amount. Just the right amount on both sides. Say their universe and our universe these two glasses, filled right up to the brim.” She tilted the glass in her hand. Surface tension broke, and the water spilled over, trickling down into the glass on the table. It splashed and overflowed, rivulets spilling down the sides, cutting lines in condensation, pooling across the table, but still she didn’t stop. “You pour water from the first glass into the second, the second gonna overflow. What overflows don’t go back in the first glass. It’s gonna fall out, get lost in between.”
“Is that what happened to Mom?” Asad stared at the trickle of water, caught by the tinkling sound. “She get lost in between?”
Gam cut him a stern look. “Your mother ain’t talk for a day like today, boy. You listen. I’m teaching.”
“Sorry, ma’am.”
Gam turned that penetrating witch-eye on him, then hmphed, set the half-empty glass down on the table, and dropped back into her seat. “So when you tip from one glass to the other, you got one glass full, but it done lost some of what belongs to it. And you got one glass that much closer to being empty. And what happens when a universe get empty, boy?”
“Entropy,” he recited dutifully from his lessons. “Everything dies that much faster.”
“Damn right it do. But see, that law of finite matter, that law of conservation, it’s got this idea of balance. So what’s gonna happen is some of what went into the second glass gonna come back to the first. Until they got the same amount of water in them. ’cause both universes gotta have an equal balance of matter and energy.” She tilted the full glass over the half-empty one, pouring carefully until both were roughly three-quarters full. “So maybe the first glass a little more full, but now the second one a little more empty, too. So now they both closer to dying; they just split that debt up in between.” She set the glass back down and left them both sitting there in those puddles of spilled water, of wasted energy. “You know the main difference between them and us?”
“No, ma’am.”
“They don’t have people like us. People who can see the cracks.” She tore a swath of paper towels off the roll on the table and thrust them at him. “So we not just protecting us. We protecting them. We do this to protect that goodness long before we do it for them daysiders’ wills and whims. Remember that, and don’t go wanting for what’s on the other side.”
Asad took the paper towels and, chagrined, bowed over the table to wipe up the puddles, soaking the paper towel in big wet spots. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Where was it?”
“Blue Hill. On the Roberts side. Right over. Second floor of the store with the painted front, no ladder.”
“That explains it, then. Marsha’s laid up with a bad hip, and that Jonas boy always been sloppy.” With a wheezing groan, Gam hefted to her feet again. “You go on an’ forget about it. Go to bed. I’ll close up.”
“But Gam, it’s almost morning—”
“I’m old. I ain’t slow.” She grinned fiercely, her yellowed teeth and high gums showing. “I got this. You fucked up tonight, Saad. Not gonna pretend you didn’t. You gotta learn to put yourself away when things like this happen, and do what you gotta do.” Her hand rested to the top of his head: her skin crinkly as crepe myrtle, the warmth of her living soul shining through to soak into him. “But I love you.
I love you and it don’t take a third eye to see this hurts you. I ain’t gonna make you do a thing that hurts you, boy. So you stay here and let Gam take care of things for you. When I get back, you be good and do your homework, and then we can go to the night market. Got to cash that government check, and then I’ll make them Crispy treats. Good?”
“Yeah,” Asad said, and leaned into her touch, and told himself this love and this life were enough. “Good.”
7
When he went back the next night, ducking Tarif
for half a second to sneak onto the Roberts side, the crack was gone.
He was gone, and Avondre with him.
Nothing remained but empty boxes, Gam’s mark chalked onto the wall, and the smell of old dust and ashes and burning bone.
8
The next sundown, he stole Tarif’s phone while his brother was in the shower.
Quick, furtive, he scrolled through his apps, looking for that chat room he’d told him about. He tabbed past Candy Crush and Bejeweled and some hentai thing he didn’t want to know about but couldn’t unsee, but nothing that said sundowners or nightsiders or any of the things they called themselves when the dayside world didn’t have an official name for them but them. The only thing he found that didn’t make sense, that could be a thing, was a black square icon with a string of numbers underneath, four sets separated by three periods. No name, nothing he could look up in the app store.
Those numbers looked like an IP address.
Asad scrambled for his backpack, tore a sheet of paper from his history notebook, and scribbled the numbers down. The water shut off in the bathroom; he crumpled the piece of paper, stuffed it in his pocket, dumped Tarif’s phone back on the nightstand, and skittered back to his side of the room. He needed to know something.
Something he could never ask Gam, or anyone who would call and curse his name for his blasphemy.
9
He didn’t try the IP address until he and Tarif had come back from that night’s rounds—kicking cans and kicking stones, but Asad kept drifting off and missing—and done their homework. Tarif made a mound in his bed, faint edges of daylight creeping around the blinds to make him shine gold and red, while he groaned and drowsily rubbed a belly full of Gam’s turkey drumsticks and peas. Wasn’t long until those groans turned to quiet whistling snores, and Asad leaned over to peer at him, then pulled his covers over his head to mask the glow of his own phone.
He opened the web browser and put the numbers in the address bar. It took a long time loading, like it was traveling a long long way to get from somewhere to him, and he was starting to think he was wrong and it wasn’t an IP at all. But then a page loaded: black, all black, with a beveled silver button.
INSTALL
Asad’s thumb hovered over the button. His heart beat hard, rough. What he was about to do wasn’t smart. He was inviting mess, and if Gam found out she’d kill him.
He closed his eyes and pressed the button.
He half thought his phone was gonna explode in his hand. But it only blipped, and he opened his eyes and watched the progress loader inch across the status bar, downloading 25%, 37%, 52%, 79%, 100%, and then it was done and installing and his screen went black except for a white blinking cursor.
ENTER>NAME?_
He bit the inside of his cheek. No way he’d use his real name, get pinched up by the daysiders for talking about things nobody was supposed to say, put away for saying words about the world that existed instead of the world the dayside pretended to be. He hesitated, then typed in S-A-Y-I-D and hit the Enter key.
USERNAME>ASSIGNED S3982
USERNAME>S3982 WELCOME
The message held for a hot second, then disappeared, replaced by a screen full of scrolling lines.
N3329: Ok but maybe not
D274: why not
D274: its not like they can tell
I8804: iz it really that hard to play dayside.
I8804: all you gotta do is play ignorant.
K001 (Admin, God): Hold up
K001 (Admin, God): Wait
K001 (Admin, God): Who is S
Asad swallowed, his mouth dry. The whole chat had stopped. Even as he watched, the lines disappeared, first N3329, then D274, until nothing remained but that damning question:
Who is S
If he answered, he was in this. He pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, breathing deep, and tapped his thumbs to the on-screen keyboard.
S3982: I’m new
S3982: My brother been here
I8804: dont tell us that.
I8804: no iding details.
I8804: i dont want to fucking know you even have a brother.
N3329: U don’t answer questions nobody asked
I8804: cause then if someone asks they can force us to answer.
S3982: Sorry
S3982: Sorry. I know better
S3982: I’m kinda nervous
D274: errybody nervous there first time
S3982: Yeah
S3982: Thought this was a bad idea
S3982: Still do
N3329: Then why u here
S3982: I want to know about Louisville
S3982: I want to know what happened
K001 (Admin, God): Look for yourself.
A photo flashed into the chat, breaking the lines of text. The chatter stopped, leaving only that picture standing silent and still and accusatory. Hard to see at first; at first it only looked black with a few traces of lighter shadow, like a piece of black construction paper crumpled into a ball, its corners catching the light. But slowly he picked out edges of terrain, the lines of roads, a few stubbornly clinging buildings, his eyes accustomed to finding details in the dark even when the dark was the blur of a night-locked snapshot taken at a distance. And he realized: the few buildings scattered around the outer edges of the photo cut off as if they’d been shorn, their insides exposed like dollhouses. The roads converged toward the center of the image and then disappeared into a blackness so thick it reflected nothing, as thick as the shadows he imagined on lonely nights. A blackness with substance.
A sea. A sea of the dark, so deep it couldn’t even be called a hole, swallowing everything into it.
The only way to find its edges was to find the light: a subtle crackling blue-white glow following the contours of the land, jagged at the edges as lightning, ringing the perimeter of that dark space. The edges of the crack. The edges of a hole in the universe, ripped open and swallowing an entire city into the void.
Asad’s throat clenched, knotting painfully.
Was this what happened when people got sloppy with wanting, and left the cracks open too long?
S3982: Where this from? Where you get this picture
K001 (Admin, God): Military surveillance drone
K001 (Admin, God): Fished it from the data feed before the drone went dark
K001 (Admin, God): Swallowed up
K001 (Admin, God): Fell through.
S3982: So this is real
K001 (Admin, God): Real as a hole in the head
S3982: Does it have a bottom?
K001 (Admin, God): Don’t know.
K001 (Admin, God): If the military’s gotten close again I haven’t seen it
K001 (Admin, God): But they upped their sniffers hardcore after this and it’s harder to get in
K001 (Admin, God): As soon as i crack the network encryption I get maybe 20 ms of data capture
K001 (Admin, God): and then it locks down
K001 (Admin, God): changes the algorithm.
N3329: Culd b other cities like Louisville
N3329: & we don’t even know
N3329: everyone just stops talking about them one day
N3329: And u don’t say a thing when ur people down there stop answering the phone
S3982: We didn’t hear any reports about Louisville being unstable where I’m from
I8804: not for me either but it happened.
D274: heard it wasn’t unstable
D274: and then errythin just went fuckin sideways and shit
D274: just overnight
D274: no time to fix it
D274: no time to run
No time to run.
Asad closed the chat window without answering, clutched his phone to his chest, and tried not to think about Boston swallowed into darkness, nothing but roads sheared off into nothing and Tarif and Gam gone.
Because Asad had wanted too much.
10
But he went back the next night.
He had the icon on his phone’s home screen now, like Tarif’s, but he hid it several side screens away so it wasn’t visible at first. He told himself it was in case someone got hold of his phone or glanced at it sidelong, but truth was he didn’t want the temptation.
But that question still ate at him, tearing him to bits. Like he was in goddamned mourning, and he wouldn’t stop grieving until he got some closure.
He tapped the black square, and let the darkness fill his screen.
D274: man fuuuuuuuck my bio teacher
D274: made me stay after today
N3329: Haha yeah but you probably dserved it
I8804: hey its s.
K001 (Admin, God): Hey S
S3982: Hey
K001 (Admin, God): You left kinda weird lst night
K001 (Admin, God): You okay?
S3982: Yeah
S3982: Just got a little freaked out
S3982: Got a question
K001 (Admin, God): Shoot.
S3982: You ever see yourself on the other side?
D274: don’t go lookin for yerself
S3982: I didn’t look
S3982: But I found me
N3329: don’t look again
S3982: Why?
N3329: my sister looked
N3329: and then she killed herself
Asad sucked in a sharp, hurting breath, his stomach tight.
S3982: I’m so sorry
D274: i think it makez the cracks wider