by Wendy Mass
“I’m coming with you,” Kal calls out, catching up to me on the street. Kal has transformed his legs into wheels, which was very smart of him. Even though all of us in The Realms can quickly rearrange the cells in our bodies to create new patterns, I usually don’t think of it. It takes a lot of mental effort, and I prefer to save that effort for school so I don’t fail out. Plus, with wheels, you wind up with all sorts of bruises, and you have to pick pieces of dirt and random tiny objects from your skin long after you’ve turned them back into legs.
“You should go home, Kal. My dad didn’t sound happy. You don’t want to be around when he’s not happy. Remember that time he turned you into a cow pie because you wouldn’t stop drumming with your fork and spoon when you came over for dinner?”
Kal shudders at the smelly memory but squares his shoulders and says, “It was my fault we didn’t hear the sirens sooner. You shouldn’t have to take the blame.”
“I wasn’t going to,” I reply. I’m lying and we both know it. I’ve been taking the fall for Kal since we were in diapers. As a son of the Supreme Overlord, I do get special treatment. The PTB often look the other way if one of my brothers or I bend the rules every now and then. Bren (the brother closest to my age and the one I like the best) and I once broke into the Department of Gravity to see if we could find some gravitons to take us to a neighboring universe. We’d heard rumors of other universes that waves of gravity could travel between. It didn’t matter to us that in billions of years no one had ever found these universes, supposedly full of their own stars and planets and galaxies. We got caught, of course, because there’s no way to sneak around here without everyone knowing your business.
Since everyone’s afraid of our father, all we got was a warning. (The next person who got caught breaking in there was turned into an ear mite. He was last seen living inside the ear of a particularly smelly Plumpadorus in the Cygnus Galaxy.) But what happened today will likely result in more than a slap on the wrist and a lecture.
Kal and I come to a stop in front of PTB headquarters. No longer a giant boot, the building has been transformed into a flagpole, with a black flag flying at half-mast in honor of the recently destroyed planet.
The shape of the building makes it so we have to enter single file. Kal converts his wheels back to legs, and we hurry up the elevator to the inner sanctum of the PTB. After recent events, I expect to find the place a madhouse, with committee members running to and fro, arms full of reports to file. If nothing else, the department that oversees the Afterlives must surely be gearing up for an extremely busy afternoon. Instead, the place has a quiet hush to it. The few people I do see are speaking in whispers. Kal and I exchange a worried look.
The door to my father’s office swings open to reveal the top members of the Powers That Be gathered around the huge round table, grim expressions on their faces. I notice that half of them are wearing their ceremonial robes, and are all men. If I had to guess, the female leaders were not happy with the decision to destroy the planet and stormed out in protest. My mother—an honorary member due to marrying my father—reports this happens fairly regularly.
My father glances away from the holographic view screen hovering slightly above his head. An odd look crosses his face when he sees Kal beside me. Dad’s not a huge fan. He doesn’t think Kal has enough “drive.” Kal actually has plenty of drive. It’s just usually not in the right direction.
My father waves us in. “I’m glad Kal’s here.”
Kal’s face pales and I shiver involuntarily. My father is never glad to see Kal.
I place the pie on the table, where it sits, ignored. “Don’t blame Kal, Dad. It’s my fault we didn’t get to warn Aunt Rae in time.”
“This isn’t about placing blame,” Dad says. “We have a much bigger issue to deal with.”
“That’s a relief,” Kal says, color returning to his cheeks.
“Not really,” one of the suited men around the table mutters. I can never tell the suited guys apart. Well, that’s not really true. I’ve never actually tried. This one—short, with green hair—hands Kal a holographic screen that hovers in his palm. “We saved this for you,” he says.
“For me?” Kal asks. “Why? What is it?”
“It is a log of your parents’ last report,” the green-haired guy replies. “They sent it only two days ago from a planet in the Milky Way Galaxy. From Earth. We assume they haven’t left the planet.”
Kal gives the report a quick glance. “They go to Earth pretty regularly. Am I missing something?”
“I’m sorry, Kal,” my father says, when no one else replies. “We had no choice. Earth is gone.”
[When I look up at the sky,] I think about all the things I don’t see up there.
—Kip Thorne, physicist
A deafening silence fills the room as everyone watches Kal. As virtually immortal life-forms, we don’t have to breathe unless we want to, and at this moment no one is.
My hand on his shoulder, I can feel Kal trembling. His knees are locked in place, which is probably the only thing keeping him standing. He refuses to turn away from the transparent wall of my father’s office. We are high up in The Realms here, with the whole universe spread out around us. Usually the sight of billions of galaxies swirling like glittering diamonds is mesmerizing. Today, though, we cannot see its beauty. Today the distant clusters of stars only serve to remind us how, in a universe teeming with energy and drama, one small planet in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way barely counts for anything (no matter how much fun it is to watch their football games on our view screens). We have been raised to believe that in the grand scheme of things, one planet doesn’t matter. Can’t matter.
Unless your best friend’s parents are on it when it’s destroyed.
“But I don’t understand,” Kal says, his voice sadder than I’ve ever heard it. (And I’ve heard him sing the blues—badly, but he’s sung them.) “My parents are immortal, like all of us. Wouldn’t they have survived the destruction of Earth?”
“That was our assumption, too,” my father says. “But we have not found any trace of them.”
Kal still won’t turn away from the window. It’s like he’s searching the vastness of space for some sign of his parents. Through gritted teeth, he asks, “Did you know they were there? Before?”
“Of course not,” says my father’s second-in-command, striding into the room. His name is Gluck the Yuck, a nickname my brothers and I gave him because he refuses to rearrange his facial features to be even the slightest bit pleasing. He’s not a bad guy, just a little hard to look at.
“Well, we didn’t exactly check,” admits the green-haired suit. I really should learn their names.
“There wasn’t time to check,” insists another. “The destruction has to be instantaneous. And what would be the odds of your parents working on that particular planet at the exact time someone from there would view The Realms? The odds are astronomical, that’s what they are.”
A nice try to deflect blame, but we all know that the odds of anything existing in the universe at all is astronomical, so the man’s argument falls short.
“I know!” Kal exclaims, whirling around to face the PTB. “The Afterlives will be flooded with all the new arrivals. I’m sure I’ll be called into work. My parents will still show up there with all the Earth people, right? So they’ll be back after all!”
The committee members exchange uneasy glances. They look to Gluck to reply. Gluck then looks pointedly at my father. For the first time in my (very long) memory, my father hesitates before answering. “No one will be coming to the Afterlives.”
Kal scrunches his brows. “I don’t understand. There were billions of people on that planet.”
Dad looks uncomfortable, which is not a good look on the Supreme Overlord of the Universe. “We didn’t exactly destroy the planet. Per se.”
“So my parents are still alive!” Kal shouts. He grabs my father’s arm, then immediately lets go when my father glares down
at him. In a less shouty voice Kal asks, “Why did you say they’re gone?”
My father sighs. “Perhaps I should have chosen my words more carefully. If someone never existed, you couldn’t truly say they were gone, could you?”
This is as good a time as any to admit that I’m only the sixth smartest of Dad’s seven sons. My brother Laz is generally considered the least smart, at least when it comes to school stuff. He fails Planet Building class every term. He’s always calculating pi wrong, so his planets keep straying from their orbits and crashing into everyone else’s. But even with my limited brainpower, I can tell my father isn’t making any sense. “Dad, what are you trying to say?”
He sits back down at the head of the table and places his large hands on the gleaming surface. The holograph pops back up. He pushes it toward Kal and me. All I see is a dark blob.
“The last time The Realms were spotted,” my father says, “the spotter’s planet was able to escape harm due to his being thoughtful enough to die on the spot.”
“Yes, we all know that,” I say, anxious for him to get to the point.
“And the time before that,” he continues, “the planet was far from its sun, leading to very harsh living conditions. Only a few species had evolved, and their numbers stayed small. It was fairly easy to log them into the Afterlives in an orderly fashion. But in the case of Earth, which supported such an abundance of life…” He trails off, clears his throat, and continues. “Basically, the Afterlives would have been totally overwhelmed, so the PTB came up with a better idea.” He pauses and glances at Gluck, who nods his encouragement. Dad sighs. “We ripped Earth out of the space-time continuum.”
Kal repeats the words, but slower. “You ripped Earth… out of space-time?”
“Technically we couldn’t just take Earth,” Gluck explains, “since it’s gravitationally bound up with the sun and the rest of the solar system….”
“So we took that, too,” Green-Haired Suit continues.
“You took their sun?” I ask, hoping I heard him wrong.
Green-Haired Suit nods. One of the PTB wearing a long white robe centuries out of style adds, “And the rest of the planets. And their moons and the asteroids and comets and such.”
I clutch the back of a nearby chair to steady myself. From all my years of history class, I know nothing like this ever happened before. To interfere in the universe on such a grand scale is just unheard of. Kal, too, is frozen from the shock of it.
“We didn’t have much choice, Joss,” my father says. “None of our options were good. If we had exploded the planet, gravity from the sun would have kept the pieces grouped together. A dead world, clinging to chunks of lifeless rock. No one wants to see that.”
I shudder.
Dad puts his large, steady hand on my shoulder. “Or if we simply took away the sun, Earth would have gone shooting off into space, and a rogue planet aimlessly hurtling about is simply too dangerous. We considered halting the planet’s rotation, but what a mess that would make, since everything on the surface would keep moving. This way it’s nice and neat, and we don’t have that nagging guilt at killing off a five-billion-year-old planet. Now Earth never actually existed, so no one had to die. It’s a plan we’ve had in place for a while, in case the occasion ever arose.”
Kal makes a sound that falls somewhere between a whimper and a growl. He faces my father and says, “According to your logic, my parents never existed, since they were ripped right out of time, too, right?”
“I suppose you could say that, unfortunately. Yes.”
Kal puts his hands on his hips. “Then why am I still here?”
I turn to Dad to await his answer. We all know about cause and effect. It’s one of the basic laws of the universe. The arrow of time goes in one direction only. First comes cause, then effect. Even I know you can’t have a kid without having his parents first.
But Dad only stares at Kal. Or should I say, stares at the spot where Kal had been standing. For Kal, my best friend, my childhood companion in all things, is totally, utterly gone. Gone like back in the days when we were able to wink in and out of places, but those days are far in the past. Is he hiding behind a chair? I peer under the table, but all I see are a lot of hairy legs in sensible shoes.
He’s just… gone.
“Hmm,” Gluck says thoughtfully. “I was afraid that might happen.”
Before I can question them on Kal’s sudden and utter disappearance, he’s made MORE gone by the fact that in his place now stands a tall, skinny girl wearing a big red parka, a white ski hat, and a sour expression.
“Fascinating!” exclaims my father.
“Now that,” says Gluck, “I didn’t see coming.”
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
—Arthur C. Clarke, writer
Seriously?” the girl says, looking around the room in annoyance. “First I dream about some old lady baking a pie, and now this? I totally shouldn’t have watched that Star Trek marathon last weekend. My father’s never going to let me forget it if I sleep through the closest approach of Mars in like, sixty thousand years. He’ll keep dragging me outside in the middle of the night, pointing his new telescope at the sky until I go off to college.” She starts pinching her arm. “Why am I not waking up?”
The PTB stare at one another in amazement, and it takes a lot to amaze these guys.
“Fascinating!” Dad repeats, beaming. He loves the mysterious and unexplainable. That’s why he’s so good at his job.
I just gape.
Dad walks over to the girl and touches her on the arm. They both jump back.
“So solid!” Dad exclaims. “Gluck, you have to feel this!”
Gluck makes a move toward the girl, but I step in front of him. “Wait! You can’t just go around feeling people’s arms.”
“That’s right,” she says, with only a cursory glance my way. “Don’t you people have any manners?” Then, surprisingly, she laughs and shakes her head. “Look at me, talking to people in my own dream. What are you supposed to do in nightmares again? Oh, right.” She turns to my father and shouts, “Be gone, freaky dream guy. And your freaky dream friends, too!” Then in her regular voice she says, “But I like the green hair, dude. It’s a good look for you.” She turns to Gluck and shudders. “How did I dream you up? You look like your face got caught in a garbage disposal!”
If I weren’t so traumatized by Kal’s disappearance I would chuckle at that one.
A few of the PTB rush from their seats. “You cannot talk that way to the Supreme Overlord of the Universe and the Powers That Be!” they bellow. “You are in the presence of greatness!”
The girl quickly steps back until she is inches away from the invisible wall that overlooks the cosmos. My father holds up his hand. “It is all right, gentlemen. She means no harm.”
She looks like she doesn’t know what she means right now. Her brows are furrowed in confusion. Fear alternates with indignant determination. She yanks off her hat and stuffs it into a coat pocket. She then crosses her arms in front of her. Or tries to, but her parka is so puffy her arms get stuck trying to get around her elbows. With a grunt of frustration, she unzips the coat, throws it on the floor, and begins stomping on it.
While she’s distracted with that, my father nudges me and whispers, “Go talk to her. You two look about the same age, so she won’t perceive you as a threat.”
“But what about Kal?” I whisper back. “We need to find out what happened to him and how to get him back. We have to hurry.”
“We’ll talk about the Kal situation later, I promise.” He nudges me again. “Go. And ask her how she got here.”
But I can’t seem to move. Kal is not a “situation.” He’s my best friend. The only person outside my family I really trust. I’m not even sure I trust everyone inside my family, actually. Kal is the person who understands me the best. And he’s gone. GONE. Things like this—shocking, unexpected things—don’t happen here. The
universe might be a seething, swirling, booming place. But after nearly fourteen billion years of the same sorts of things happening—a sun exploding here, a galaxy colliding there, a new species sprouting up on a new planet—life in The Realms has fallen into a sort of “been there, done that” kind of routine. I admit, I like it this way. Unlike my father, I am not at all fascinated by the unexpected. At least not when it involves losing my best friend and one of my favorite planets.
“Joss!” my dad booms. I startle and turn my attention back to the girl, who is still stomping on her coat.
After one last jump-stomp combination with her clunky black boots, she kicks the coat, and it lands a foot away from me. Aware that my father’s eyes are on my back, I bend down to pick it up. Moving slowly so as not to frighten or anger her, I hold out her coat. “You really don’t like this parka, do you?”
She looks at it but doesn’t take it. “It’s puffy and red and stupid and I hate it. Plus, it makes me look twelve years old.”
“How old are you?”
She shrugs. “Twelve.”
When I can’t think of a suitable reply, she adds, “But I’ll be thirteen really soon.”
“I just turned thirteen,” I say. It’s more like a few billion and thirteen, but she probably doesn’t want to hear that. “So… how did you, uh, get here?”
Ignoring my question, she steps closer to me, examining my face carefully. “You have really perfect skin, anyone ever tell you that? Like, no pores. My friend Lydia is obsessed with her pores and spends hours in front of her magnifying mirror. She’d hate you.”
“That’s nice to know,” I say, not really sure what pores are. To be polite, I say, “My name’s Joss. What’s your name?”
“Annika Klutzman,” she replies, then glances down at her watch. I’m shocked to see the second hand ticking the time away. Eyebrows rise all around the room. Time is measured by how long it takes a planet to revolve around its sun, and we have no sun. Her watch should not work in The Realms.