by Barry Lyga
Tommy? Tommy, can you hear me?
Faintly: Zak! You—
Gone.
Then back, strong: Go! Go now!
There was nothing to push against, nothing to use for propulsion, but Zak nevertheless found himself moving toward the hole. As he approached it, his scalp buzzed with static, and his skin crawled.
And then he was through and
TWENTY-ONE
flailing in the water, floundering and writhing. He was fully submerged and at first couldn’t tell which direction was up. He struggled against the force of the water, ready for it to vanish again, figuring that if he could tread long enough, the subway station would return.
But a burn settled into his lungs.
The water wasn’t going away.
He kicked, lurching up and to the side. He hadn’t had time to inhale and hold a proper breath before being plunged into the water; his vision blurred and he longed to gasp in, but he knew that would be death.
Instead, he kicked again and karate-chopped with his hands, pulling himself along and upward. After a few moments he broke the surface, and his chest inflated with a desperate, instinctive breath. He hacked out some water and phlegmy crud from his throat, spitting it into the foamy green water surrounding him.
And above him …
Not the steel girders, pipes, and cables of the World Trade Center subway station. No.
A black, star-speckled sky, stretching in every dimension to infinity.
What?
“Hey!” a familiar voice shouted. “What the hell?”
It was Khalid, a few yards to Zak’s right. (No, starboard—you’re in the water now.) Khalid’s sunglasses hung comically askew from one ear.
“Khalid! What happened?”
“The flood must have washed us through the tunnels and out through a vent or something into the river.”
Moira cut cleanly across the water toward him, her stroke smooth and sure. Zak actually could swim quite well, but the shock of the transition had caught him off guard. He treaded water until Moira reached him. Her glasses ran with trickling speckles of water; she looked at him over the top of the lenses.
“Are you okay?” she asked, now treading as well and flipping her sodden hair back from her forehead.
“I think so. What happened? Are we in the…?” He thought about Manhattan’s geography. “The East River? The Hudson Bay?”
Khalid had swum over by then. “Can we figure that out later? I can’t keep this up forever, and who knows what’s in this water.”
True. The waterways around New York weren’t renowned for their cleanliness.
“Think you can make it?” Moira asked.
Zak nodded. His answer didn’t really matter. Either he could swim or he couldn’t. If he couldn’t, there was no way Moira and Khalid could tow him to …
To …
To where?
“I see something over there,” Khalid said, hooking a thumb.
Zak peered in that direction. It was dark out, with only a little glow from the buildings ahead, but he could make out what looked like a seawall or a bulwark. It was long and dirty white, with a sketch of vertical lines straight before them. A ladder.
Moira outpaced the boys easily. Zak struggled to keep up with Khalid, his breath coming only with great difficulty, his strokes weak. You can do this, he thought calmly. You can do this. He didn’t know if he was talking to himself generally or to his heart specifically, but he settled into a rhythm of words and actions, encouraging himself as he kicked and stroked. Soon he was at the ladder.
Moira was halfway up already. Khalid grabbed a stringer and drifted off to one side, too exhausted to speak. He nodded, urging Zak toward the ladder. Zak decided not to argue; he wanted out of the water.
He ascended the ladder as quickly as he could, his weight returning, magnified by his sodden clothes. Hauling hand over hand, he eventually reached the top and collapsed to the ground next to Moira, who lay on her back, breathing heavily.
Zak shivered. The night was cooler and drier than he remembered it being before their mad dash into the subway station. Darker, too—twilight had suddenly become late night.
He caught his breath, coughed up some more water and phlegm. Khalid’s head poked up over the lip of the seawall, his sunglasses still hanging from one ear. There was a hum in the distance, and the sound of Moira’s breath and the rasp of his own lungs. And then Khalid groaned in complaint as he levered himself off the ladder.
How long they lay sprawled there, catching their breath, he had no idea. He counted the irregular beats of his heart and waited until his chest returned to something like normal (would it ever truly be normal again, though?) before sitting up. Next to him, Moira sat cross-legged on the ground, frowning and squinting as she tried, without luck, to clean her glasses with her soaking-wet T-shirt.
“Where are we?” Khalid asked. He’d tucked his shades into the collar of his shirt and was peering around.
Zak couldn’t get his bearings. The skyline was unfamiliar from this angle—he was used to seeing Manhattan from Brooklyn. But then he looked out into the water and caught a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. He sighed in relief.
“Okay, guys, it’s all good. We’re probably somewhere near Battery Park. I can see—”
“Guys?” Khalid’s voice wavered like sand nudged along by the tide. “Uh, what happened to the Brooklyn Bridge?”
Zak looked in the direction Khalid was pointing. The Brooklyn Bridge was gone.
TWENTY-TWO
They all stared. The familiar lighted span of the Brooklyn Bridge was nowhere to be seen. It should have been easily visible from the southern edge of Manhattan, but instead there was nothing.
“Wait,” Zak said after a moment of silent horror. “Wait. I think I see the Manhattan Bridge way up there, but there’s no … This doesn’t make any sense.”
“You think?” Khalid exploded.
Zak waved both hands, trying to silence his friend and pump more blood into his brain at the same time. It was right on the tip of his tongue.…
“Where are we?” he asked. “Look around. This doesn’t make any sense. The Brooklyn Bridge should be over there.” He pointed. “But there’s just water.”
“No kidding!” Khalid stomped a foot. “What happened to the bridge?”
“It’s not just the bridge!” Zak told him. “Look around.”
And they did.
They stood on a concrete walkway that formed a smooth arc above the water they’d swum through. The walkway transitioned into a carpet of grass, cut with cobblestone paths, heading off to what Zak presumed was the north. To the south and east was nothing but a railing and water. They were at the very tip of the island of Manhattan.
But given the position of the Manhattan Bridge in the distance, they should have been farther uptown. Somewhere around the World Trade Center.
“It’s like the island…” Zak trailed off, not wanting to say the word shrank.
“It’s like someone cut off the end of it,” Khalid said, which was just as likely an answer. “What the…?”
He and Zak turned slow circles. The skyline of Manhattan rose up to the north, but it had changed. Gone were the familiar Freedom Tower and the distant spire of the Empire State Building. Instead, even in a city renowned for its tall buildings, the skyline was now replete with megaskyscrapers—a phalanx of one-hundred-plus-story towers arrayed beyond the park in which the three of them now stood. More baffling, in and among the skyscrapers, tubes—roughly fifty stories up—connected various buildings in a zigzag pattern. The buildings and the connecting tubes were lit as though by neon, though not as garish. The light was simple, off-white, and it seemed to fluoresce more than shine.
The entire cityscape had transformed into a gently glowing series of impossibly tall towers, and the island itself had shriveled.
In a panic, Zak spun around, looking east across the river toward Brooklyn. It was still there, hazy in a light offshore fog. Th
rough the mist, he could make out a vaguely familiar skyline, interrupted by more clusters of too-tall buildings, luminous with that odd sort of light.
“It’s been washed away,” Khalid choked, pacing the edge of the walkway, glaring down into the water as though he could surface the rest of the island through sheer willpower. “We did something. When we jumped into that water, we did something—”
“Stop it,” Zak said, grabbing him by the elbow. “We didn’t—”
“You don’t know!” Khalid shook Zak off and rounded on him, his throat working, his neck straining. Zak had never, ever seen Khalid so angry. He’d never even imagined his friend could get this angry.
“You don’t know what happened!” Khalid went on. “We just ran off and hopped into the water, and when we came out, everything was screwed up! The whole southern part of the city is gone, man! You think it’s just a coincidence? We did something!”
Zak opened his mouth to speak … and his heart thrummed once in an extra-special way he’d never experienced before. It felt like it was trying to crawl up his throat.
“We didn’t do anything.” He could only manage a whisper.
“Are you kidding me?” Khalid grabbed Zak and shoved him toward the railing. “Look!” He pointed. “That’s the Statue of Liberty, way out there. How far is it supposed to be?”
Khalid was right. Zak’s earlier glimpse had been fooled by his exhaustion and surprise. Now that he really paid attention, he could tell: Liberty Island was so far in the distance that he could barely see it through the late-night gloom. A huge chunk of lower Manhattan was gone. Either that or …
“The island moved?” He couldn’t believe he was actually saying it, but it was somehow more comforting that the alternative. Even his heart relaxed a little bit at the idea. “Maybe all of Manhattan is still here. The island just moved.”
“Just moved?” Khalid howled. “Do you realize how insane this all is? Do you have any idea—”
“Guys!”
“—how big a freakin’ deal this is, no matter what happened—”
“Khalid, I don’t know what to—”
“—because we did something, Zak! We wiped out a whole—”
“—say, but come on, man, we just got in the water—”
“—mess of people. They’re dead because of something we did—”
“No, no—”
“Guys!” Moira screamed the word this time, and both Zak and Khalid broke off. Zak hadn’t realized it, but they’d gotten so close that their noses almost touched, leaning in toward each other, yelling into each other’s faces, not even hearing each other. Now, panting, they turned as one to Moira, standing a few yards away.
“Come. Over. Here,” Moira said firmly, gesturing.
She waited for them along the railing that prevented people from falling into the water, on the far side of the gap for the ladder they’d climbed. Some sort of granite pedestal stood there. As they drew closer, Zak saw that a bronze plaque had been bolted into the face of the pedestal.
“Read it,” she ordered them, and they both leaned in to scrutinize the embossed text.
* * *
HOUSTON CONFLUX
You are standing at the spot of the world-famous Houston Conflux, where the East and Houston Rivers meet at the Atlantic Ocean. First sailed by Captain Henry Hudson in 1609, the Houston Conflux …
* * *
It went on, but Zak had seen enough. “Houston Conflux?” he asked. “There’s no such thing. And it’s not the Houston River—it’s the Hudson River. What is this?”
“It says here,” Khalid said, peering closely at the plaque, “that the Conflux was one of the continent’s busiest seaports until 1805, when a fire on the docks wiped out most of the shipping facilities. Shipping moved up the Houston River while repairs were under way, but the War of 1807 interrupted the rebuilding, and eventually plans were scrapped.…” Khalid cleared his throat. “Okay, so I’m not the best student of history, but I have never heard of the War of 1807.”
“That’s because there’s no such thing,” Zak said. If there was one thing he knew, it was history. It came from having a history professor as a father. “There was a War of 1812, but not 1807. And there was a big fire in lower Manhattan that wiped out a lot of stuff, but it was in 1776, back when the British occupied the city during the Revolutionary War. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“None of this makes sense,” Khalid complained.
“Makes perfect sense,” Moira said, her voice clipped. “Alternate universe.”
Khalid and Zak exchanged a glance of mutual confusion before looking over at Moira. She wasn’t paying any attention to them, focused on trying to peel her T-shirt away from her body and wave it dry in spots.
“Earth to Moira,” Khalid said. “Mind explaining?”
She didn’t even look at them. “An alternate universe. A parallel earth.”
“A what?”
Moira gave up her attempt to dry even the hem of her shirt, but she still wouldn’t meet their eyes, instead scrutinizing her water-speckled lenses. “Basic physics. Universes in superposition. This place exists in a different dimensional space than ours, but otherwise is nearly identical.”
“This isn’t one of your sci-fi books, Moira!” Zak was surprised by the outrage in his voice. Outrage and fear, if he was being honest. Because if this was true …
He didn’t want it to be true.
“It’s not science fiction.” If she was upset or scared by his tone, she didn’t show it. She sniffed. “There’s a whole branch of physics and there’s something called brane theory, but I’m not going to bore you guys with it.” Her expression said, You wouldn’t get it anyway. “Physicists have been theorizing multiple universes for decades. The ‘many worlds interpretation’ of quantum physics.”
“Not buying it,” Khalid said. “Makes more sense that we did something to flood lower Manhattan.”
“Then explain the different skyline.” Moira pointed north, to the too-tall buildings with their crisscross of tubes. “Explain what is obviously some kind of subway in the sky. Explain the War of 1807 and the Houston River.”
Khalid opened his mouth to answer, then gave up, shaking his head. He turned away from the two of them and stared out across what was at least still called the East River. Zak stood between them, not sure what to do. Comfort Khalid? Challenge Moira?
But there was no challenging her. His gut knew what his brain had been denying.
They were in an entirely different universe. A different version of the New York City they’d grown up in, superficially similar, but with enough changes to make it an alien landscape.
No Freedom Tower. And from where he stood, it seemed that the water came up to what would have been Fulton Street in what he now thought of as “their world.”
“That’s why it’s called the Houston Conflux,” he muttered. “Different landmark, but named after the same guy.”
He glanced over at Khalid, but his best friend had taken a couple of steps away, arms folded over his chest, back ramrod stiff. He clearly did not want to be bothered right now.
“You’re the science expert,” Zak said to Moira. “How do we get back to our world?”
Moira blinked. Her expression—passive and calm—did not change as she said, “Home? I don’t have the slightest idea.”
TWENTY-THREE
“You’re joking, right?” Zak peered closely at Moira, looking for a hint of a smile or a grin. “There has to be a way home. There’s always a way home, right?”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Zak. I don’t even know how we got here in the first place—how am I supposed to know how to get us home?”
She seemed nonchalant, but Zak had known her long enough that he could detect the slight tremor in her voice, the quirk of her lips, the crinkle of her eyes. And the way she’d been talking since her discovery of the plaque—clipped, brusque.
Moira was terrified and doing her best not to show it.
/> Happy-go-lucky Khalid was sulking, and supergenius Moira was baffled. It was the perfect time to panic.
Zak ran a hand through his still-wet hair. There had to be some kind of explanation. And if there was an explanation, then there had to be a solution. Right?
Right?
“You have to think,” he told Moira. “You have to think harder than you’ve ever thought before, Moira. We have to figure out how to get home.”
She wouldn’t look at him, staring instead at the plaque celebrating the Houston Conflux. “There’s nothing we can do about it right now,” she said, her voice tightly controlled. “So there’s no point in panicking.”
“Don’t you want to go home?”
“Yes,” she said, stiff and emotionless, still staring. “But panicking isn’t going to get me there any sooner.”
Zak clenched his fists. Why did she have to be so infuriatingly rational?
“Well, think, at least!” he barked at her, then went to check on Khalid, who was still staring across the river. Great. One friend was shutting down, and the other was shutting him out.
Khalid spoke quietly, without looking over at him, still staring out at the alien version of Brooklyn. “You think maybe there are versions of us in this world? Living across the river in Brooklyn, no clue that we’re standing here. Hanging out with their families, just chilling?”
Family … Zak shivered as a breeze found him. The air was warm, but as it blew through his sodden clothing, it chilled him. Family. Tommy. In the shock of their arrival in this other universe, he’d entirely forgotten. This wasn’t just about getting home; it was about family. Family that had left him, family that had lied to him, family that was gone.
Tommy? He hurled the thought with all his concentration. Tommy? Can you hear me? Is this what you wanted when you told me to go into the water? Did you want me to come here?
Nothing. No answer.
Just great. As if the situation weren’t bad enough: His best friends wouldn’t look at him or even at each other. He was trapped in another universe. And he couldn’t sense his twin brother.