by Barry Lyga
He would be dead.
* * *
Moira wanted to grab Zak’s hand as they entered the skyscraper at Eighth and Seventeenth. Up high, they’d spied the sleek matte-gray tube of the superway. Or, as the sign said, the A.R.T.: Aero Rail Transit.
She wanted to grab his hand, and she hated herself for that. She’d never been one to need comfort, or even much in the way of help. To her mother’s endless astonishment, she’d taught herself to read at a young age, from then on forgoing nightly parental story time for her own reading. But being out in public, so exposed through her poor disguise, made her feel vulnerable and nearly naked, and holding a friend’s hand would make at least some of that go away.
But the two of them holding hands would just draw even more attention to her. So she balled her hands into fists in her pockets instead, biting into her palms with her nails.
Inside, the building’s lobby was ornate, with gilded statuary throughout and a grand piano in one corner, where a woman played languid and sad and beautiful music under the watchful eye of one of the three security guards poised near the entrances. It made Moira think of songbirds and cages and the Dutchmen.
A bank of elevators stood at one end of the lobby, with a sign that read GUEST USE ONLY. A hotel. They were in a hotel.
“Over there,” Zak said, pointing.
Off to one side, a narrow corridor wended deeper into the building. A sign there read A.R.T. ACCESS.
At the end of the corridor was an elevator. There was an app on Dr. Bookman’s Wonder Glass that, when held to a scanner, paid for them and let them in. They wanted to wait for an empty elevator, but they had no luck, so they rode in silence. Moira squeezed herself into a corner and tried to turn invisible, imagining a voice suddenly exclaiming, “Hey, frau!” Followed by another. And another. And another. And then hands on her and then—
When the doors opened, they spilled out into another short corridor, this one leading them past floor-to-ceiling windows that showed Eighth Avenue in all its glory. Moira recognized the outline of the Flatiron Building in the distance, as well as the Chrysler Building. It was nice to know that some things didn’t change. Or were eternal. Or maybe fated. Whatever.
She wondered again how this world could so closely resemble her own without the free input of women … but realized that there was really no way to know. And at this moment, she didn’t care. Survival was so much more important than history right now.
They entered the superway station, which reminded her of photos and videos she’d seen of Japanese subway stops. The walls were curved and polished, lit by electroleum; the tracks were clean. After a few moments a train glided into the station, nearly silent. It was low and sleek, not boxy like the subway trains back home. It looked almost like a bullet-headed earthworm plated with ceramic, its undercarriage lit with electroleum.
Zak and Moira hung back, watching people exit and enter the train. This wasn’t the one they wanted. They had to watch for—
“There,” Zak mumbled, and jerked his head.
Moira followed his direction and saw. Yes. That was what they needed. The next train, then.
The station nearly emptied out. Moira was keenly aware of security cameras mounted on the ceiling, and she did her best to stand like a boy … whatever that meant. She observed Zak’s posture and tried to imitate it.
“Relax,” he said.
“Easy for you to say, chap.”
He grinned. “Whatever happened to laddie?”
“Maybe while we wait, you can tell me how you plan to get in and out of the electroleum plant without getting us killed or captured?”
“I’m still working it out.” He saw the dismay flit across her face. “Don’t worry—I’m almost there.” He flashed her a grin.
She bit back a retort. She would just have to trust him, as he’d trusted her so many times before.
A second train arrived. Zak and Moira boarded the very front car. They’d noticed with the first train that the operator was up front, not toward the back, as on some subways back home.
The superway train tilted and shifted, then slowly began to pull out of the station. According to what they’d read online, the superway trains moved very slowly when entering or exiting a station, so that track noise wouldn’t disturb the people on the upper floors of the surrounding buildings. Once away from the building, a series of sound bafflers and vibration dampeners allowed the trains to accelerate to thirty or forty miles an hour. Not as fast as a subway, but plenty quick.
There were only a few people in the car, and plenty of seats, but Zak and Moira chose to stand at the front of the car.
Just like back home, there was a door here.
A door that led into the operator’s cabin.
PART THREE
ZAK
KHALID
MOIRA
TOMMY
FIFTY-ONE
Hey, Tommy, you there? Zak asked.
He waited.
Nothing.
Well, I think you can hear me. Even if I can’t hear you. I think that’s how it works. I think you’ve always been around, ever since you died, and sometimes I could see you and sometimes I couldn’t. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for you, being there all the time, trying to communicate with me.
And I just thought I’d made you up. I thought you were my imaginary friend. So I just dismissed you and forgot you when I was done with you. And I am so, so sorry about that.
But then everything changed. After so long, after trying for so long, you and Godfrey were able to break through to me. Break through the invisible walls between us.
Mom and Dad should have told me. Maybe then I would have figured it out sooner. Maybe then we wouldn’t be in this mess.
But they didn’t, so I couldn’t. And now here we are. But I’m going to fix it. I am.
Listen:
You probably already know what I’m planning. And maybe you’re thinking I shouldn’t do it. But here’s the thing: I have to. Because I was the one siphoning all that blood from you when we were in the womb. I killed you. Indirectly and unintentionally, yeah, but I killed you. And I don’t care, can’t bring myself to care, that it was indirect and unintentional. I did it anyway.
And then I brought Moira and Khalid here. Khalid apologized for what he said, but he was right. This is all my fault. My fault that he’s stuck here. But even worse: Moira’s stuck here. Khalid could eventually get along, but Moira will always be miserable here.
So, here’s how it’ll go, Tommy. I’m going to give you your life. Just like in the experiment in the aquarium. I’m going to use the electroleum, the pure stuff, and we’re going to switch places like the roaches did. When we first got here, you told us we needed the electroleum to bring you back. And now I see how it works. It takes life from one of us and gives it to the other. Works for me. One twin comes in; one twin goes out. An even swap.
That’s the plan. I can’t tell Moira. Not yet. But that’s the plan.
I’m going to hope you’ll be there for Moira and Khalid. They’re going to need a friend in this world, and maybe having someone who looks and sounds like me will help.
Because when I look up, I know there are worlds waiting. When I look down, I know that this earth, this soil, is not a conclusion. And when I look around, I know there are people beyond people.
There’s something else. Something extra.
I’m so close, Tommy.…
And maybe … maybe on my way out and your way in, we’ll get a second to say hi.
That would be great.
FIFTY-TWO
Khalid paced Dr. Bookman’s office in a futile fury. He had to do something, but there was nothing he could think of, nothing within his grasp. He stuttered between the door and the sofa, wanting to chase after his friends, wanting to stay to take care of Dr. Bookman. Life wasn’t fair.
Life, right now, sucked. Big-time.
There has to be something I can do. Anything. Zak and Moira are just go
nna end up getting caught, and that’ll be bad enough for Zak, but Moira’s going to wind up as someone’s housemaid or something. And when they start asking tough questions, what’s Zak going to say? “Sorry, we’re from an alternate universe; we didn’t know the rules?”
He clenched his fists and planted his feet and screamed to the ceiling, through the ceiling, aiming his frustration at the sky and beyond, out to the moon and the stars and the rest of the galaxy.
“Not … so … loud…,” a voice pleaded.
Khalid spun around. Dr. Bookman had pushed himself to his elbows and was struggling to sit up. Khalid ran over to help him. “You’re up! Are you okay? We got problems, and you’re not gonna believe what I have to tell you. First, it was—”
“Slowly,” Dr. Bookman begged. “And some water?”
Khalid scrambled off to the smallish bathroom. He filled a waxed-paper cup with water and dashed back to the main room. Dr. Bookman had moved to the edge of the sofa, where he could lean and peer at the aquarium.
“Yeah, that’s weird,” Khalid said. “Totally. But—”
“Water, please?”
He handed it over and watched with mounting impatience as Dr. Bookman painstakingly sipped at it. Khalid bounced from foot to foot as the water level in the cup dropped excruciatingly slowly.
Finally, Dr. Bookman finished, sighed, and leaned back on the sofa. “Well, I believe you and I may have quite inadvertently put research into electroleum and psychic phenomena on a whole new path.”
“I’m sure your cockroach thing is really important, but honestly, Dr. Bookman, we—”
“You’ve seen the roaches, yes?” Bookman asked, interrupting. “The dead ones have returned to life.”
“Some of them. And are you sure they were really dead? Because…” He caught himself. “No, look, we don’t have time for this. Things are happening. Fast.”
“But … but this shouldn’t have happened!” Bookman spluttered. “There’s nothing in the literature to explain it. It could be a temporary phenomenon, or it could even simply be that the electroleum altered the color of the dye I used. Don’t you see?”
“Hey!” Khalid wanted the slap the guy back to the present but settled for shaking him by the shoulders. “The roaches don’t matter, man! Zak and Moira, remember?”
Bookman nodded slowly. “Of course. Yes,” he said, speaking with the measured tones of one who has just woken suddenly.
“Let me bring you up to speed first,” Khalid said, and proceeded to fill him in on what had happened with Zak and Moira and their plan to use—somehow—the raw electroleum at the recycling facility.
Dr. Bookman groaned and held his head in his hands. “No, no, no! That’s not … That’s very nearly the worst thing they can possibly do!”
“You said before, back in the alley, that if you had enough energy, it could be possible to bring Tommy back to life. I remember that part. And, hey, look, it worked for the roaches, right?”
“This will be a disaster!” He stood shakily and closed in on the aquarium, staring into it. “You simply cannot extrapolate from what is now a woefully uncontrolled experiment. Electroleum is, by its very nature, an unstable substance. M-hydrogen, infused with quantum foam from the Secret Sea itself. We only use it in small amounts for experiments, or in larger amounts when it has been carefully altered to control its shifts. This”—he gestured to the aquarium—“proves only how unpredictable it truly is. In the hands of laymen, in the hands of amateurs … They could detonate … Good Lord, they could detonate it all. The explosion…” He drifted off, lost in the horror of it.
“Well,” Khalid said after a moment of uncomfortable silence, “I’m sure they’ll be careful. I mean, they don’t want to kill a bunch of people—”
“A ‘bunch of people’?” Dr. Bookman studied the aquarium for another moment, then shivered. “A ‘bunch of people.’ Dear Tesla. Tell me, Khalid—how many people live in your version of Manhattan?”
“In my Manhattan?” Khalid shrugged. “A few million. Like, seven or eight. Why? What does that have to do with—”
“Because if your friends do as they plan, then they will be directly responsible for that many deaths.”
“Say what?”
“If they blow up that electroleum, they could possibly kill everyone in your version of Manhattan!”
FIFTY-THREE
Zak tested the lever; the door to the operator’s cabin was unlocked, which amused Zak. He wondered if the subway doors back home were similarly unlocked—he’d never tried one. He suspected not. Terrorist fears would keep such doors heavily secured. Maybe this world hadn’t suffered terrorist attacks. Maybe there was no such thing as terrorism here.
No terrorists. Less crime. Cool tech. Magic, or something close enough. Not a bad place.
He caught Moira’s eye. She was turned away from the rest of the superway car, huddled against the bulkhead.
Okay, so maybe not a bad place, but not a great place, either.
They were high up in the air, so Bookman’s Wonder Glass worked. A GPS app showed them as a pulsating blue dot moving along a gray line over the city. Zak counted the stops ahead of them. Only two more and then they were out over the open water.
Fortunately, the train’s occupancy did not increase much. Some newcomers boarded at each stop, but others left at the same time, keeping the riders in equilibrium. The fewer people on board, the better.
“Now?” Moira muttered.
Zak consulted the GPS again. They were closing in on Battery Landing. He waited a heartbeat; the train began to decelerate.
“Yeah.” He tossed glances over each shoulder—no one was paying attention to them. He hoped that would remain the case.
He opened the door to the operator’s cabin and let Moira slip in. Now they were committed.
* * *
As Moira entered the tiny control cabin, the superway operator startled and swiveled in his chair away from his control panel. He grinned lazily as Zak came in behind her.
“Hey, kids, look, you can’t just barge in—”
She heard Zak close the door behind her and reached into her pocket for the stun stick they’d stolen from Officer Cheong. Zak had handed it off to her on their walk to the superway, reasoning that it was better concealed under her baggy coverall. It was waterlogged from their dip in the Broadway Canal, but the operator didn’t know that. His eyes widened at the sight of the stick, and he gulped.
“Hands where I can see them,” she said. “Don’t touch the control board.”
“If I don’t—”
“Don’t touch it,” Zak threatened, deepening his voice. “We’ve modified this stick to be lethal.”
Was that even possible? It didn’t matter—the operator believed it. He held his hands in the air. “We’ll hit the air cushion at the Battery Landing station if I don’t signal for anticollision.”
He might as well have offered his mother’s recipe for stewed wombat, for all the sense that made. “Let us worry about that. Keep your hands up,” Moira said. “We’ll tell you what to do.”
Zak took the stick from her and kept an eye on the operator as Moira approached the control panel. It was a flat touch screen with a series of blinking lights and touch controls. She thought it made sense—readouts for acceleration, a GPS window, pretty much what you’d expect. This whole universe seemed to be designed by someone with exceptionally good taste.
She whipped off her hat to fan herself. The operator gasped. “You’re a frau!”
“Damn right,” she muttered, slapping the cap back on. The board had lit up with a flashing icon that showed a cloud morphing into a crushed puff of air. Air cushion? Is that what he was talking about?
She scanned the rest of the board. Off in one corner was a red touch target with a lightning bolt in the shape of an exclamation point within. That’s the alarm.
“Signal for anticollision,” she told him, as if she knew what she meant. “But keep away from that alarm. Unless yo
u want my chap here to fry you with a million snapping volts of electricity.”
The operator’s fingers fluttered over the board, and soon the cloud icon melted away into the background.
“We’re on approach to Battery Landing now,” he told her. He seemed frightened enough to be telling the truth. Plus, if he did anything stupid to the train, he would be one of the first to die. He was well incentivized to play this honestly.
Zak jabbed at the back of the operator’s neck with the prongs of the unpowered stick, eliciting an anxious hiss of indrawn breath.
“Now we’re going to ask you some questions,” Zak said, “and you’re going to answer them. Aren’t you?”
The operator hesitated, and Moira leaned in close to him. “There’s a saying I’ll bet you’ve never heard before,” she said in a tone as menacing as she could muster. “It’s this: ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ Want to find out for sure?”
The operator hiccuped in fear. “What do you want to know?”
* * *
Moments later, as the superway decelerated inbound to Battery Landing, Moira finished tying up the operator while Zak watched over him to make sure he didn’t try to escape. They had no rope or cord, so they used Zak’s belt and shoelaces to bind the man’s wrists and ankles.
Through the windshield, Battery Landing was coming up fast. “Is he secure?” Zak asked.
Moira checked the bonds once more. She wouldn’t bet her life on it, but … Well, she actually didn’t have a choice. “He’s good.” She stuffed a wad of fabric into his mouth.
Zak settled into the operator’s chair. “Microphone?”
“Third tab.”
Zak’s fingers splayed out on the control board, and he grunted in annoyance. Moira sidled up to him and skimmed the board. “Let me,” she said, and found the right icon. A burst of static like a throat-clearing sounded through the superway’s PA system.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said sweetly into a small microphone bud positioned at head height, “this is your new operator. Hi! Bee-tee-dub, this superway has been hijacked in the name of the Feminist Liberation Army.”