PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN 978-1-4197-3687-2
eISBN 978-1-68335-644-8
Text copyright © 2020 Corinne Duyvis
Book design by Hana Anouk Nakamura
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To Joan and Maggie:
Your patience, your support, your enthusiasm,
and your wisdom mean the world to me.
Thank you for being on my team.
PROLOGUE
The rift that opened on our farm the evening I was born was like a shard of glass: sharp and angled and not quite transparent, but tilt your head a little and it might as well be invisible.
So no one could blame my parents for not noticing it that first week.
When I was six days old, my parents took me to the pediatrician for my first checkup. They were discussing nursing habits when Dad’s phone rang.
Our nearest neighbor.
There had been an earthquake, she said, or perhaps a tornado, although West Asherton, Pennsylvania, was prone to neither. She knew only this: The worst noise had come from the direction of our house.
When the three of us came home, we found our neighbor standing in our driveway and staring at a tree that’d collapsed onto one of our barns, surrounded by snow and bare winter shrubbery.
It was a palm tree.
My parents noticed the actual rift when cleaning up the grounds.
Later, they told me it was the size of our three-seater couch and ended in jagged points on either side. It hovered diagonally three feet above the ground. The grass and dirt past it were distorted as though seen through a layer of water—jittery and inconstant.
When they approached the rift with a rake extended before them, the air trembled. A second later, the rift tugged the rake from Dad’s hands and sucked it in whole. Dad almost got yanked in with it; Mom pulled him back just in time.
They approached the other side of the rift next, carrying a video camera and a large stone. They tossed the stone through. It vanished.
The government confiscated the video, of course, even before deciding to garrison the farm. My parents were urged to leave with only their week-old daughter and hastily packed suitcases. Their other belongings would be shipped to their newly gifted home posthaste.
The farther we drove from the farm, the more agitated the rift became. It crackled at the edges, sent multiple physicists and agents into the hospital, and spat out gusts of fire and chunks of ripped-out pavement.
It took the researchers a while to suspect a connection and send for us.
The rift returned to cool, broken glass the moment Mom stepped onto the grounds with me in her arms, sound asleep.
At first, they thought it was Mom whose absence would cause the rift to go haywire.
A one-and-a-half-mile radius.
That’s how far I can safely roam.
CHAPTER ONE
“Sixteen years old!” Agent Sanghani raised her hand for a high five as I passed through the gate.
I laughed and took her up on the high five. “Technically, not until eight thirty-seven tonight.”
“You enjoying your last hours as a fifteen-year-old?”
“I’m planning to! After school.”
“Your dad wouldn’t . . .? It’s your birthday!”
“I didn’t get the day free from school-school. I don’t think Dad’ll let me off homeschool-school, either, at least not until Mom and Carolyn show up.” I lingered on the path to the house. Most of the MGA’s agents and guards were friendly—Agent Sanghani especially—but when they kept me like this, I never knew whether they genuinely wanted to chat. Keeping me comfortable was probably in their job description.
“At least tell your dad it’s unfair, all right?” Sanghani said. “Say it came from me. I hear I’m very intimidating.”
I nodded at the weapon holstered on her hip. “It’s probably the gun. Anyway! I’ll tell him it’s unfair,” I pledged, “if you tell Director Facet I’d like to stay out longer than two hours tonight.”
Her grimace told me enough. I shouldn’t have said it, even as a joke. Cheerily, I went on. “Worth a try!”
The rules weren’t Sanghani’s fault; she shouldn’t feel bad. Director Facet wouldn’t loosen up on the rules, anyway, especially since he’d spent the past days tightening them. A power outage from the other day had apparently made the MGA nervous enough to install extra agents and restrictions. I wasn’t allowed in the woods even with a chaperone, wasn’t allowed to walk home before checking in with the guard unobtrusively stationed outside my school, wasn’t allowed to visit the neighbors down the road to pet their horses . . .
I trudged toward the house. With my backpack dangling from one hand, I waved at the security camera affixed above the front door, then reached for the knob. I barely touched it before it burst open.
“Sixteen!” Carolyn tossed her head back dramatically. Practically howling at the ceiling, she repeated, “Six-teen!”
“You’re here? You’re early!”
She beamed and leaped at me, wrapping her arms around my shoulders.
I dropped the backpack and squished my sister close.
Mom was already coming down the hall. I jerked a thumb back at the gate. “Agent Sanghani didn’t mention you were here already!”
Carolyn’s grin faltered. “Mom asked her to keep hush-hush. Her, and like five other agents we saw. What’s with the extra security?” She hesitated. “Anyway, we wanted to surprise you.”
“And it worked!” Mom snuggled her face in the crook of my neck and blew a raspberry. I gave the required high-pitched yelp and shoved her off, torn between embarrassment and laughter. The laughter won. I hadn’t seen them in two days. Not only that, but as I straightened my glasses from Mom knocking them askew, I finally saw the decorations they’d put up. Streamers in all colors crisscrossed the living room, and garlands hung from the paintings and cupboards. A gigantic card shaped like the number 16 stood atop the table, big enough to bump the ceiling, and I caught a whiff of something sweet in the oven.
“Wow.” I guessed I was free from homeschooling after all. “I—Wow. This is awesome. I didn’t know they made cards that big!”
“Happy sweet sixteen.” Mom squeezed my arm. “Your dad’s on the phone with Grandma Yeo, helping set up her webcam. Grandma and Grandpa Stanczak will want to be next.”
“And Aunt Lina cleared some time for tonight,” Dad said from behind us. He leaned out from the office, holding the doorframe.
Webcam chats were the name of the game on birthdays. Only the MGA and the four people inside this house knew about the rift. Director Facet, the head of the MGA, insisted we kept it that way
.
We’d stuck close-ish to the truth for the story we’d told the wider world, explaining the government had set up a base on the farm and no one was allowed on-site without clearance. Supposedly, we’d spent years entangled in legal battles, with my parents determined to keep the house and the government determined to relocate us, but in the end, we’d compromised: The base screened the hell out of the family, hired Dad for his (nonexistent) skills as an analyst, and let us stay.
That covered why no one could visit us at home.
Why I never visited anyone was harder to explain. At first, family members had tried to work around our excuses, but we’d turned them down so often they’d stopped asking.
The Stanczaks eventually settled for occasionally meeting me at the diner where we were holding tonight’s birthday party (one-point-three miles down the road), or spending afternoons at the mini-golf course (point-eight miles down the road—the staff probably saw more of me than their own families). Dad’s parents had taken longer to warm up: They’d barely even spoken to Dad the first years he was with Mom. They weren’t thrilled about his decision to move in with his pregnant girlfriend of a few months, raise a baby not his own, and live in a house that didn’t allow visitors. They’d turned around when my parents finally had Carolyn and married, although they weren’t shy about dropping hints about how we ought to change our names from Stanczak to Yeo.
Dad had stayed back while Carolyn and Mom pounced, and simply winked at me. We’d already gone through the birthday routine that morning. “Guess we’ll make up for today’s classes tomorrow.”
“Yes! But!” I said. “We could also not do that?”
Dad made a Nice try face, his smile wry. He’d been of the opinion that if normal kids didn’t get to skip school on their birthdays, I shouldn’t get to, either—so I should probably be glad he’d relented in the first place.
I gave in with a dramatic sigh. “Fiiine.” I took off my coat and rubbed my face warm.
“Grandma Yeo is almost ready,” Dad said. “Check the windows?”
Mom and I adjusted the curtains and the plants on the windowsills to hide the observation tower, fence, and a tank that’d arrived yesterday. (Tanks weren’t common. That kind of thing tended to upset Grandma Yeo.) I jogged outside to let the agents know to stay out of sight—especially since there were more people on-site than usual.
“Can I help?” Carolyn asked when I returned. She sounded lost. She came over from Philadelphia several times a week and every other weekend, but wasn’t normally around when we called family.
“Nah, we’re ready.”
“You do this when we video chat, too, right? I never see any MGA stuff in the background.”
“It’s just a security measure.” People knew we shared a home with a government base, but the less visual proof, the better.
Especially in the hands of teenagers with social media accounts, I thought with a pang of guilt. Carolyn knew the MGA didn’t trust her—there was a reason she no longer lived at the house—but she didn’t need it rubbed in.
“Sorry.” I felt my cheeks turn red.
It’d been two years since Carolyn moved into the Philadelphia townhouse the government bought us. She lived there full-time, while my parents rotated every two weeks. I was used to life with the MGA, but to Carolyn, all these precautions might’ve become alien by now. So much hassle, just to visit her sister.
Luckily, I could sweeten the deal.
“You want to play the Xbox after this? I have early access to the next Elder Signs.”
Caro’s eyes lit up, lifting a weight off my shoulders. “Heck yeah.”
CHAPTER TWO
The diner one-point-three miles down the road might be a nice diner—quality food, minimal grease smell, clean—but it was a diner nonetheless.
I’d invited a few friends and hadn’t missed the puzzlement in their expressions when I mentioned the party’s location was Franny’s Food. Still, they were used to worse from me, and we were friends—or at least friend-ly.
Maybe they wanted free food, maybe they wanted to pry for information about the government base, or maybe they were simply bored since West Asherton, PA, population 1,704, wasn’t exactly an entertainment hub. Whatever the case, they came.
There was Neil, Imani, Amber-Lynn, Marybeth (Marybeth!), and Carolyn. Dad had gone into town after dropping us off, and I knew two agents were sitting in a nearby van, hooked into the diner’s hidden-camera feed.
Normally only one agent accompanied me. Maybe it was because of that power outage. I wanted things back to normal; these changes were putting me on edge.
“I wasn’t sure what you wanted.” Neil pushed a wrapped package my way. It turned out to be the first book in that rich-girl spy series that’d been turned into a movie last summer. “I hope you haven’t read it yet?”
“I haven’t!” I grinned wide. “I wanted books for winter break. And this looks great! Thanks!”
Imani gave me a set of soft purple gloves, which she seemed embarrassed about but which I loved; Amber-Lynn, a fifteen-dollar gift card to Zara that I hoped was redeemable online since the nearest brick-and-mortar store was twenty miles away; and Marybeth, a massive bag of sour belts, which must’ve made me blush like a traffic light.
Marybeth McKellan was way too cool to be at my birthday party, and Marybeth McKellan knew my favorite candy. I managed to be semi-smooth about thanking her, which was a relief, because since her dance performance at school last September, I apparently could no longer talk to her without stammering. I had that in common with half the guys in our class, but Marybeth probably knew it wasn’t the same thing.
(I hoped she knew.)
(I didn’t always know.)
I passed the sour belts around and was happy for the distraction when Carolyn handed me her gift. A framed original drawing by my favorite comics artist. I squealed loudly enough to make patrons across the diner look up, which turned my face beet red a second time.
I normally didn’t celebrate birthdays with friends; you could only have so many birthdays at the mini-golf course before becoming That Weird Mini-Golf Girl. An evening at Franny’s seemed like a good option, except, crap, maybe now they’d be expecting me to come to their birthday parties, far outside of my radius. My mouth suddenly felt dry. I grabbed my milkshake, sucking down a large gulp. Maybe I should’ve ditched the idea of a party. Sixteenth or not.
“Food!” Carolyn cried as our waitress approached.
We stuffed our bellies with burgers and fries that were just the right kind of juicy and crispy, and I urged everyone to order more. Maybe it’d somehow make up for me not attending their parties in return. Afterward, Franny put on a thumb drive with music Caro and I had selected, but no one did more than nod along.
A real birthday party had dancing, didn’t it? I mean, not my parents’ parties, but they were old, and not Carolyn’s West Asherton birthday parties, but I bet her real parties in Philadelphia with her friends were different. Parties always had dancing in the movies. Characters our age were always slung over couches or flirting in the kitchen or passing around illicit beer; the six of us having burgers at a diner, wrapping paper strewed all around, might as well have been a ten-year-old’s party. I doubted anyone was impressed. Marybeth spent more time talking to Neil than to me.
I’d dressed up in my tightest jeans and a new shirt, bringing out whatever slight curves I had. I’d even put on lip gloss. All of a sudden that effort felt like I was embarrassing myself.
I looked at the clock. Eight forty-one.
“We missed it!” I blurted out. “Four minutes ago. That’s when I was born.” I smiled sheepishly. It was dorky to care about the exact minute, but still. Sixteen.
“Happy birthday!” Imani and Amber-Lynn shouted as one, then laughed. “Well, again,” Imani added.
“For real this time,” Amber-Lynn clarified.
“Will you get your license?” Neil asked. “Man, I’d love to drive down to Philly whenever I wan
ted.”
“Or even just to school!” Carolyn said, which I was grateful for.
“I’d love to get my license,” I lied. “I still need to convince my parents. You know how parents are.”
“I know, right?” Marybeth said. “Mine—”
I never found out about Marybeth’s parents, as two things happened then.
One, Franny butted out of the kitchen, carrying a sorbet with a lit sparkler. Two, the doors of the diner slid open and Agent Anne Valk entered, her suit entirely out of place beneath the fluorescent diner lights.
I froze.
MGA agents never interfered with my life outside the grounds. Never. It was one of the cardinal rules, both theirs and ours. Ours, because we wanted to protect my small imitation of normalcy, and theirs because they didn’t want anyone wondering why suspicious adults were always following me around town.
But Agent Valk stood right there, flanked by huge cardboard Coke bottles. She gave a nod, indicating the parking lot.
Now? I mouthed. I still had at least twenty minutes before my time was up! And my friends were just starting to relax! It’d been hard enough figuring out what to talk about that wasn’t the base.
Valk nodded. Now.
The rift occasionally rumbled even when I stayed within my radius, but rarely so badly that I needed to return home. So much for my birthday. I nodded back to let her know I understood—that way, she could go wait in the van before my friends noticed her. I’d need a minute to disentangle myself without raising questions.
Why hadn’t Valk texted me? We had a protocol.
“Happy biiiirthday,” Franny sang, approaching the table with the lit sorbet. Two waitresses joined in, and so did my friends, Amber-Lynn loudest of all. My mind churned with possible excuses. Maybe I could fake cramps?
Right as Franny put down the sorbet, Valk stood by my side. I jolted upright. “What—?”
“Now.”
Everyone stared at Valk. The woman embodied the concept of “government agent”: the suit, the furrowed brow, the efficient cut of her black hair. If they looked closer, they could see the gun bulge under her jacket, too. It was an oddly impressive combination, but Valk’s personality had long destroyed my admiration.
The Art of Saving the World Page 1