by Wendy Mass
Ignoring the question, she sticks two fingers in her mouth and pulls at the sides, giggling at her reflection. Then she abruptly turns away from the wall. “How come you didn’t tell me I have cherry pie in my teeth? What kind of friend doesn’t tell another friend when they have pie in their teeth?”
I step back. “Oh, we’re friends now?”
“I thought we were starting to be,” she says, picking out a barely visible piece of cherry skin from between two teeth. “Now I’m not so sure.”
“I am deeply, deeply sorry,” I say in an exaggerated apology. “Please find it in your heart to forgive me. I promise if you ever have food in your teeth I will tell you. Even if I can’t see it, and I can see everything.”
“That’s all I ask,” she says, sticking out her chin. “Now let’s go see my grandfather before all traces of him disappear. He died only a few years before my grandmother, so according to Aunt Rae, he won’t be around much longer.”
My recent offense apparently forgiven, she follows me alongside the wall until we get to a small, shiny knob. If you weren’t looking for it, you’d never notice it.
Up close it becomes more obvious that it isn’t one straight wall, but rather dozens of connected buildings. Ty’s office is behind the door marked SCENERY & DESIGN. I’ve only visited him here at work a couple of times ever, and never unexpectedly. The first time I came I was really young and a little confused. Were the people dead? Alive? Half-alive? Bren had to hold my hand the whole time but he never teased me about it afterward. Annika hesitates before following me inside. I don’t blame her.
We find Ty staring at his view screens, his eyes flicking from one to the next. It might look like he isn’t doing much of anything, but I know that’s not true. It’s his job to make sure everyone’s Afterlife experience is as realistic and pleasing as possible. He and his staff are in charge of weather, accessories, food, and music. With all the differences, big and small, among the intelligent species, they have to make sure nothing gets messed up. You wouldn’t want to feed a Senturon a chicken salad by mistake. All of it is generated by the holos, of course, but it’s very real to the person (the essence of the person?) experiencing it.
I tap Ty on the shoulder. “Hi, Ty. This is Annika.” He jumps out of his seat so fast the cap he always wears goes flying off. He grabs for it and glances up at Annika. “She’s wetter than I’d have expected.”
“Joss poured a bucket of water on my head,” Annika says.
“That’s not a very nice way to treat your guest, Joss,” Ty scolds. “Do I need to tell Mom?”
I glare at Annika.
“That’s for the pie in my teeth,” she whispers.
I open my mouth to remind Annika that the water is keeping her alive, but she doesn’t give me a chance. “I’d like to see my grandfather,” she tells Ty. “If he hasn’t disappeared from the Afterlives like my grandmother.”
“This is highly unusual, Joss,” Ty says sternly.
“I know.” I reach into my pocket and pull out a folded piece of paper. “And I need you to sign this.”
He takes the paper and begins to read. “I, Ty, third son of the Supreme Overlord of the Universe, do solemnly swear not to reveal anything about what I am about to hear.”
He looks up. “What is this?”
“Keep reading.”
He tosses the paper on his desk. “Joss, I don’t have time for this. Sixteen million babies are about to be born in Sector Three alone. I have to make sure all the proud parents are in place and—”
“Please,” Annika says, her voice barely restrained. “Can you just sign whatever it is so we can get a move on? I hear death isn’t as permanent as it used to be.”
Ty peers closely at Annika. He reaches out a finger and taps her on the top of the head. “Interesting.” Then he does it again, a little slower this time.
She narrows her eyes at me. “Does anyone in your family understand the concept of personal space?”
“C’mon, Ty,” I say, pushing the paper back into his hands. “Just sign this and then I’ll explain. It was Gluck’s idea.”
“Fine,” he grumbles, scribbling his name on the bottom without even questioning the punishment for breaking the agreement—cleaning my room for the next millennia.
Annika and I watch as he presses some buttons and literally millions of tiny newborn babies howl in their parents’ waiting arms. Some are pink, some brown, some orange, some have scales, some have tentacles, some are tiny, some are huge. A few even come out speaking full sentences. One begins to sing.
Apparently satisfied with his work, Ty hops back up from his desk. “So what can I help you with?”
Annika is glued to the screens. I have to call her name three times before she tears herself away.
“Well,” I begin, “you know how Earth was taken out of time?”
He glances uncertainly at Annika.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I already know.”
“Anyway, Gluck told me I have to bring it back. And I don’t have the holofilms anymore and now I have to piece it all together from scratch. We’re here to ask a famous Earth scientist how to do it.”
“And to see my grandfather,” Annika adds.
“You? You have to rebuild Earth?” Ty doesn’t bother to hide his surprise. “Why you? No offense.”
“None taken,” I reply, and really, there isn’t. “Maybe because everyone else is so busy?” I can’t tell him what Gluck said, about picking me because I care the most about Kal and his parents. The fact that they are missing is still a secret. At least I think it is. It’s getting hard to keep track!
Annika looks questioningly at me but doesn’t say anything about Kal, which I appreciate. “And you know how Dad is,” I add. “He’d never go back on his own decision, even if he wanted to.”
Ty nods.
Annika pinches my arm.
“Ow! What was that for?”
“Your father destroyed my planet? I thought Aunt Rae said it happened on its own. Something about breaking the laws of physics?”
Ty takes this moment to suddenly find some vitally important papers to shuffle through at his desk. I’m beginning to think Aunt Rae conveniently left out the most important details so I’d get stuck explaining them.
“It wasn’t my father’s decision alone,” I insist, finding myself in the odd position of having to defend him. “He’s the head of the Powers That Be. You know, the guys in the suits and robes that all kinda look alike? They’re just doing their jobs, trying to figure out what’s best for everyone.”
She takes a sharp breath. “How was making my planet disappear best for everyone who lived there? Earth was supposed to survive another five billion years before the sun burned out or the Milky Way collided with Andromeda or something. I want those five billion years back!”
I look to Ty for help but he doesn’t even look up. Nice.
“Look,” I tell her, anxious to be done with this conversation. “It’s not like I don’t agree with you. Obviously I do, or we wouldn’t be here. But these are just the rules. Even the PTB don’t make the rules. Like you said, it’s something to do with the fundamental laws of physics, and you broke them.”
“Not on purpose!” she insists.
“Look, we’re trying to fix this. Can we please focus on that part of it?”
She presses her lips together, but nods.
“Ty, can you please take us to Annika’s grandfather now?”
He stands up and pulls a small holoscreen from his pocket. “Full name and last known address?” He holds the screen out and gestures for her to speak into it.
“Morty Klutzman,” she says, louder than necessary. “Twenty West Shore Trail, apartment one C, Richford, Ohio.”
Ty takes the screen back and flips through some entries. While we’re waiting, Annika whispers, “Grandpa smelled like cigars and peppermints and soft flannel shirts. Will he still smell the same?”
“Sorry. I’ve never smelled anyone in the
Afterlives before.”
“Got him,” Ty says, snapping his holoscreen shut. “Category One. Let’s go.”
“Category One?” Annika repeats. “What does that mean?”
Ty picks up his official “I’m someone important” badge and slips it over his neck. “It means he’s still reliving his life, or his favorite parts, anyway. Once the deceased is here longer, they’re usually ready to move on to Category Two.”
“What happens in Category Two?” she asks. I’m glad she does, because I’m curious, too.
“That’s classified,” Ty says firmly. “Now let’s go.”
He walks over to a door that I always thought was a closet. Probably because of the word CLOSET written overhead in thick black letters. The “closet” turns out to be a narrow passageway, pulsing all around us with energy. The walls are so blindingly bright that I can barely see the tunnel winding endlessly ahead of us. We don’t get farther than two feet before Annika bumps right into me.
“That should have hurt,” she says, surprised, feeling her nose. “Why didn’t that hurt?”
I really don’t have the patience to explain about how we’re made of more empty space than she is. So instead I step aside and say, “Will you be less likely to collide with me if you walk ahead of me?”
“I would be less likely to collide with you if someone turned on a light!”
“What are you talking about? There’s so much light it’s practically blinding.”
Ty elbows me. “She can’t see it, Joss. We’re at the far end of the electromagnetic spectrum here, surrounded by gamma rays. I know school isn’t your favorite thing, but honestly, don’t you pay attention at all?”
“All right, all right,” I reply, rubbing my arm angrily. It might not have hurt her nose but it still hurt my arm. “I wasn’t thinking. I’ve got a lot on my mind right now.”
Ty turns away, but not before muttering, “Yeah, like how soon you can get back to Thunder Lanes to meet Kal.”
Ty has never been one of my favorite brothers. He’s always been a little curt and bossy. But I like him even less at this moment. I swallow back the many things that I really want to say, and put both hands on Annika’s shoulders. “Come on, I’ll guide you so you won’t bump into anything.”
Annika is silent as we shuffle through hallway after gleaming, shimmering hallway. It’s a little weird gripping a girl’s shoulder bones, but not entirely unpleasant.
“Is it cool?” Annika asks, over her shoulder.
“Is what cool?”
“How everything really looks, you know, if I could see it.”
I don’t want to make her feel bad, but there’s no use lying. “Yes, it’s pretty amazing. But to everyone in The Realms, it’s just the way things are. The way they’ve always been.”
“You’re so lucky.”
Ty snorts. “If you think we’re lucky, you’d be really jealous of the five-eyed Zoren from the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy. Not only can he see the whole spectrum of electromagnetic energy, he can see in four dimensions and—”
Annika stops short. This time it’s me who bumps into her. “The who from the where? Are you telling me that besides this place, there’s life on other planets? And there are four dimensions?”
At this rate we will NEVER get anywhere. “Can we focus on one thing at a—”
WOO WOO WOO WOOOOOOO!!!!
The three of us jump and cover our ears. I’ve never heard this kind of siren before. It’s different from the one that wailed when Annika witnessed Aunt Rae in the kitchen. After a few more bursts, the siren stops. Deafening shouts of “INTRUDER ALERT, INTRUDER ALERT” take its place.
“What are the odds they’re not talking about us?” I yell to Ty.
“Not good,” he yells back.
I’m about to tell Annika not to worry when a pair of large hands reach out from the wall and yank her right through it. The last thing I see is her mouth fall open in surprise before the wall swallows her up.
I rush over to the spot she was pulled through. It feels just like any other wall in The Realms, sort of softish, but not so soft you should be able to pull a human through it. Yet that’s exactly what happened.
Before I can ask Ty what’s going on, he shrugs and says, “Well, back to work, I guess. Thanks for stopping by.”
Life is eternal and love is immortal; and death is only a horizon. And a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.
—Rossiter W. Raymond, writer, engineer
Ty, wait! You have to help me find Annika! If she dries, she’ll die!” Ty continues strolling back to his office as though the first and only living human being to set foot in The Realms in the history of the universe hadn’t just been snatched away before our eyes. “Ty! Dad will be really mad at all of us if we lose her!”
He finally stops. “Listen, Joss, I commend you for trying to help the girl. But face it, this isn’t going to end well. Annika can’t live here forever. Her planet is gone. Let her go, too.”
I shake my head at him. “How can you say that? Your entire job is to take care of people—granted, they’re dead, but still, you’re so willing to just let her go?”
“I don’t expect you to understand,” Ty says. “You’re too close to the situation.”
“Can you just tell me where she is? Who took her?”
He looks both ways, then lowers his voice. “The task force that monitors the Afterlives probably took her. It wasn’t personal. I’m sure they thought she had slipped out of one of the sims. That’s short for simulations.”
“I wasn’t born yesterday, Ty. I know what the sims are.”
“Well, every now and again someone will wander unexpectedly from his or her current simulation. I’m sure they’ll return her when they realize their mistake.”
“But what if she—”
A popping noise cuts me off.
“And here she is now,” Ty says, stepping aside to allow a red-faced Annika to climb out of the wall. She’s a little drier and a lot angrier, but otherwise seems unharmed.
“Seriously?” she asks. “Did I just get pulled through a wall?”
I figure that’s a rhetorical question. “Are you okay? What happened?”
“I still can’t see you,” she says, pouting angrily.
Ty pulls out his holoscreen and holds it up. The screen provides a small circle of light. Compared with the light around us, it’s like a candle in the face of a star, but it’s enough to allow Annika to see our shapes at least.
She blinks as her eyes adjust. “Thank you. So anyway, this really big guy with really big hands and a head slightly too big for his body—no surprise there—pulled me into this empty white room, stared at me for a minute, mumbled something into one of those screens that you’re holding, then pushed me back through the wall. And now I’m here.”
“So pretty uneventful, you’d say?” Ty asks.
She stares at him. “If you call getting pulled through a wall without your permission uneventful.”
He shrugs. “Sounds like any other day to me. But if you want to see your grandfather, we better get moving. Probably not much time left.”
I can tell Annika has a lot more she’d like to say about the incident, but she presses her mouth into a firm line and nods. Ty leads us back in the direction we had been heading earlier. At least he keeps his holoscreen on so Annika can see where she’s going this time.
After what seems like a really long time, he finally stops. “We’re here.”
Annika and I turn around in a circle. The passageway looks exactly the same as it always has. “Where?” she asks.
“Here.” Ty presses his hand onto the wall, which instantly dissolves to reveal an outdoor wedding scene in the distance. The young bride and groom dance inside a circle of clapping guests. Laughter and the sound of clicking glasses fill the air, and it smells like what I’d expect summer on Earth to smell like. A mixture of wet dirt, flowers, and hot dogs. I turn around, expecting to see the now-familiar hallway behi
nd me, but instead I find a small pond with wedding guests walking along the shoreline. Above me is a perfectly blue sky. And a sun! A real sun! Or at least it looks real. Blazing low in the sky, just like I always imagined a sun would do.
“Don’t stare at it,” Ty says, shaking his head. “Honestly, I really don’t think you pay attention in school at all!”
I look away from the sun and notice I’m wearing a white suit and brown loafers. My left hand clutches a glass of dark brown liquid. I take a sip. Mmm… chocolate milk! Ty might be kind of obnoxious, but he truly is a master at his job. I’ve never been in a sim before, but everything looks and feels totally real.
Annika—now sporting a long pale blue dress and white heels and holding a paper fan—inhales sharply. “Where are we? How did we get here?”
“We haven’t gone anywhere,” Ty explains. “We’re still in the Afterlives, inside our simulation of your grandfather’s memories. If he wanted to, he could spend the rest of eternity reliving this day. Or at least that was the plan before his planet and all its inhabitants were doomed because one girl looked where she wasn’t supposed to.”
I elbow him in the side and whisper, “Not the time!”
Ty ignores me, but when he addresses Annika again his voice is kinder. “There he is now, dancing with his bride.”
Annika turns, then lifts one foot to pull out a heel that had gotten stuck in the grass. It sinks right back in. With a grunt, she yanks off both shoes, sticks the paper fan inside one, and throws them over her shoulder. They land next to a strolling violinist who deftly steps over them. I’m reminded of when she tossed her coat to the ground and stomped on it. That seems so long ago now. Look at me, thinking in terms of time. Kal would be proud.
In stocking feet, Annika takes a few steps toward the dance floor. “That’s my grandfather? He’s so… young! But if he’s the groom, then… Grandma’s the bride? But Aunt Rae said she disappeared!” Annika lifts her long skirts and starts running toward the dancers. “Grandma!” she yells. “Grandma, it’s me!”
Ty jumps in her way and holds up his hand.