Jadie in Five Dimensions

by Dianne K. Salerni

Alia’s mission was to destroy that computer, but I didn’t do it. So the Seers sent Ty, whose good deed resulted in another attack on the computer, which I prevented—again.

  I’ve thwarted the Seers twice.

  “Thanks for the catch.” Sam looks at me again. His brow crumples, and his eyes—the same color and shape as mine—examine my face. “Do I know you?”

  I clap a hand over the birthmark on my arm and back away. “Nope. Glad you’re okay, but I gotta go.”

  Then I run.

  Away from Sam.

  Away from Ty, who stares at me with his mouth hanging open.

  If I could, I’d run away from myself.

  12. JADIE

  The Transporter takes me back to the platform when I call for it, like Ty promised. I switch which arm is in the bracelet to unreverse myself and punch the button marked Return.

  Ty is waiting in the playground with his arms crossed. “You undid my course correction,” he says as soon as I appear.

  “You don’t know that,” I snap. “You have no idea what putting a quarter in that meter was supposed to accomplish.”

  “Seems clear it was to get that kid knocked down the stairs and make his laptop smash on the ground. Nice catch, by the way.”

  My heart thumps. I don’t like the glint of curiosity in his eyes, and I know I should act casual, like I don’t care what happened and plan on never thinking about it again. Instead, I blurt out, “I’ll fix it. Gimme that thing you use to call the Transporter, and I’ll go back and fix what I did wrong.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “I can…” Damn. Catching the laptop was a stupid thing to do. Interacting with Sam, even more stupid. I’m handling this badly.

  “What was your last course correction?” Ty asks. “The one you messed up. Did it have to do with that boy? Do you know him?”

  “How could I? He lives in Philadelphia. And I never said I messed up my course correction.” Ty squints at me like he wants to know what makes me tick—which makes me think of the dismantled robot dog in his room and the bracelet he ran over with the lawn mower. I shiver and hold out my hand. “Give me that signaling device and the coordinates—”

  “No. Not unless you tell me everything.”

  Why does he want to know? To have something to hold over me? Shoving my hands in my pockets, I walk away from him. It’s not exactly another bluff, but I am hoping he’ll call me back and offer a different deal.

  He doesn’t.

  Kidnappers. Amber Alerts. Important laptops.

  Lies and more lies.

  My life has turned into a conspiracy theory. And that’s saying something, considering I was already a thirteen-year-old operative for beings from a higher dimension. But I’ve known about the Seers, the Transporter, and course corrections since I was little. That’s normal for me.

  Defying the Seers isn’t.

  It seems like the Lowells have been targeted for more than their fair share of course corrections. J.D. Lowell was lost, kidnapped, or otherwise separated from her family. Seers intervened to save her but didn’t return her. Now they seem determined to wreck Sam’s computer. What else have they done?

  Miss Rose claims the Seers have a plan to benefit the human race. How do the Lowells fit in? Are they bad people? Russian spies pretending to be a normal American family?

  I obsess about it the next day. Teachers reprimand me for not paying attention in class. Even Alia notices, and she’s not the most observant person in the world. “What’s wrong with you?” she asks at lunch. Her eyes never leave her handheld video game, but when I don’t answer right away, she presses harder. “Spill it, Jadie. You’re freaking me out. Your parents don’t have cancer or something, do they?”

  She’s not freaked out enough to put the game down. “My parents are fine, thanks for asking.” And then, because I don’t know what to do, I tell her my problem. “I need information from Ty, and he won’t give it to me.”

  I wait for her to ask what kind of information, but like the day I covered her course correction, she’s not that curious. Her thumbs rapidly press keys. “You know the saying, When they go low, you go high?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That won’t work on Ty. You have to go lower.”

  I blink. “Lower than Ty?”

  “Go subterranean. You wouldn’t use the Staff of Harmony against Malnoz the Poisonous Gas Bag, would you?” When I stare blankly at her, she lifts her eyes to me long enough to say, “Trust me. You wouldn’t.”

  Go low. Well, I can’t imagine going lower than involving Ty’s dad. I’ve never liked Dr. Rivers, even though he’s one of Dad’s college friends. So after soccer practice, I head straight for the Rivers house without changing my clothes. When you’ve decided to do something distasteful, you want to get it over with as quickly as possible. They say snitches get stitches, but if I’m confronting a Poisonous Gas Bag (and I am), I’ll have to hit him over the head with the Staff of Telling Your Dad.

  Mrs. Rivers answers the door and looks delighted. “Nice to see you again! I’ll let Ty know you’re here… or did you come for Marius?” Her face falls a little.

  Oh no. This is my second time asking to see Ty in a week after—well, never visiting him before. Does Mrs. Rivers think I like him?

  And Marius is here? Bad enough I’m going to make Ty give me what I want by threatening to tattle on him—now Marius will end up involved.

  Mrs. Rivers leads me upstairs. “I have a question about homework,” I explain, not wanting to give the poor woman the wrong idea.

  “Boys!” Mrs. Rivers calls ahead. “Jadie is here. To see Ty.”

  I groan silently. No wonder Ty wanted to meet at the playground last night.

  “Boys?” Ty’s mother pushes on his bedroom door, and it swings open. “Are you in there?” His mother glances back at me with embarrassment. “I guess they went out.”

  I peer past Mrs. Rivers, and what I see makes me straighten up like a trained hunting dog. That signal injector thingy is lying on Ty’s desk next to his shark-in-a-jar. “There’s the book I want,” I say, pointing randomly. “If it’s okay, I’ll copy the questions I need.”

  “Sure.” Mrs. Rivers looks disappointed that I won’t be seeing her son.

  “Thanks.” I walk into the room and sit down at Ty’s desk. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  “Take your time,” she says, backing away.

  I don’t think I have much time. Ty and Marius have probably gone off on an unauthorized 4-space adventure and might be back any second. The computer screen is awake; they haven’t been gone long. I grab the signaling device, but that isn’t all I need.

  Calling up the start menu on Ty’s laptop, I click on Recent Items and select an Excel spreadsheet. It isn’t the one listing his course correction numbers, so I close it and try another. While this one opens, I glance around uneasily. Besides the fact that Ty and Marius could show up without warning, I’m worried about the Seers. Ty claims they aren’t monitoring Agents closely, but they knew enough to calculate another way to destroy Sam’s laptop, even after I reported Alia’s course correction complete.

  I look over my shoulder at Ty’s closed closet door. The center is made of slatted wooden planks, and for some reason, the door gives off a creepy vibe. I’m tempted to cross the room and throw it open. But that’s silly. If the Seers are spying on me, they’re doing it somewhere kata from Earth, not from inside Ty’s closet.

  I turn back to the computer. This time, I’ve got the right file. Ty has the coordinates labeled in his spreadsheet next to the address of the Philadelphia sandwich shop and the note: approx 30 feet from here, in an alley. He’s a precise evil mastermind, I’ll give him that. Taking out my phone, I snap a picture of the whole sheet.

  Go subterranean, huh? Thank you, Alia! This is much better than my blackmail plan. Mrs. Rivers will tell Ty I was here and he’ll guess what I’ve done, but there’s nothing he can do about it.

  I bolt from his chair and ou
t of the room. Honestly, it was almost too easy.

  13. TY

  As soon as Jadie is gone, Ty slides open the closet door. Before he can step out, Marius pushes past him and sucks in a lungful of air. “Don’t you ever do your laundry?”

  “Quit overreacting.”

  “No, seriously. What’s in there? A hundred unwashed gym socks?”

  Ty sniffs discreetly. It is a bit ripe. But he shuts the closet door, leaving his dirty laundry for another day. “I never would’ve guessed your sister had the guts.”

  “For a second, I thought she was gonna catch us. It looked like she knew we were in the closet.”

  Hiding had been an impulse when Ty’s mother called out that Jadie was here. He dragged a protesting Marius into the closet, and together they watched Jadie search his computer and steal the signal injector.

  A lucky break. Now Ty doesn’t have to figure out a way to give her the device without rousing her suspicions.

  “What do we do next?” Marius asks.

  “I put a radio transmitter inside that signal injector that’ll alert us whenever the optics code is activated.” Seeing the lack of comprehension on his friend’s face, Ty elaborates. “We’ll be able to tell when she calls the Transporter. It’ll light up the button on this receiver.” Opening a drawer in his desk, Ty removes a black box with one LED light and hands it to Marius. “Then we follow her.”

  “How?”

  Ty digs into the drawer again and locates another signal injector. “I have more than one.”

  “No,” says Marius. “I mean, how will we know where she goes?”

  “She’ll go back to the apartment where she had her course correction, or the street where I had mine. She’s got some connection to that place—and that boy.” For Jadie to defy the Seers, it has to be important… or personal. “Jadie was an abandoned baby. Could she have been from Philadelphia?”

  “I dunno,” Marius says with a shrug. “Nobody knows.”

  “Your parents didn’t check where they found her?”

  “Or me either.”

  Ty rolls his eyes. “The first thing I do on any course correction is find out where I am. I don’t understand why nobody else is curious.”

  “Maybe my parents were too busy saving babies at the time. Geez, Ty.”

  In the case of rescuing Marius from a burning building, he has a point, but picking baby Jadie out of a snowbank wouldn’t have required an urgent departure. Even twelve years ago, the Martins should have had cell phones with a basic map function. It would have taken seconds to determine where they were. The adult Agents seem to be so in love with “saving the world” they never deviate from their training: Plug in the coordinates. Complete your mission. Leave immediately.

  Marius turns the receiver over in his hands, but he’s not really looking at it. “What if Jadie did come from Philadelphia? What does that mean?”

  “She’s probably trying to figure out who she really is. Maybe that boy is related to her.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Something made her defy my course correction, and she’s fixated on one of hers, in the same location. Maybe she thinks she’s found her family. She doesn’t have to be right.”

  “She’s searching for her birth family?” Marius looks like he’s been sucker-punched in the stomach. “Why would she do that, after what they did to her? Why would she want to when she has us?”

  Ha, a crack in the Wonderful Martin Family! Ty stifles his selfish glee for an even more selfish reason. He’s always viewed the Martins’ happiness with both disdain and envy, but he doesn’t want Marius to know that. Marius is his friend, his partner in crime, the Watson to his Sherlock. Everyone knows Sherlock Holmes was a miserable, unpleasant old fart. It’s only Dr. Watson who makes the stories tolerable.

  Instead of stoking the fire, Ty placates him. “She’s curious. We’ll follow her and find out more.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” Ty repeats. “You’re the one who was so worried about your sister. She’s acting weird. Something’s wrong. We have to figure out what it is. That’s what you said.”

  “That’s why I want to keep track of her. But why do you? You don’t even like her.”

  The dislike started on Jadie’s side, but Ty doesn’t argue the point. “Something strange is going on, and I want to know what it is. If Jadie traced her birth family, it’s because of a course correction. She had the Transporter coordinates for their apartment. If that kid is her brother—we don’t know he is, but she might think so—what’s important about his computer? I’m sure that was the point of the mission. You should have seen her dive for it.”

  Marius frowns. “I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

  “I’ve always suspected the Seers are up to something. They aren’t ‘guiding the human race toward a better future.’ Nobody goes to this much trouble just to help people.”

  “Well, you probably wouldn’t. But my dad says nobody goes to this much trouble without a good reason.”

  “Yeah, a good reason for themselves. This whole setup with the Agents and the Transporter benefits them somehow. And Jadie meeting her brother thanks to their course correction is weird and suspicious.”

  Marius scowls. “You just said we don’t know if he is her brother.”

  Ty has a gut feeling he is. “Don’t you want to know if the Seers are up to something different from what they’re telling us?”

  “Nah,” Marius says. “I thought we were going to use the Transporter to travel wherever we wanted. Like the Super Bowl. Or the World Series. And, um, the Olympics…”

  Ty rolls his eyes. Even with the miracle of instant transportation at his disposal, Marius can’t think beyond his favorite sporting events. Ty is more interested in places like Fort Knox, although his research suggests that gold bullion is not very portable and would be difficult to exchange for spendable currency. Recently, he’s concluded that he should stick to cash and jewelry, at least until he’s amassed enough of a fortune to…

  To what?

  He hasn’t decided yet. He has a recurring fantasy where his father dangles over a shark tank in the hollowed-out interior of a volcano on a private island. Dr. Rivers is saying, “Okay, son. Now I respect you.”

  In his imagination, Ty is pressing the button to drop Dear Old Dad in the tank. Meanwhile Marius comes up with a few non-sports-related destinations. “The Eiffel Tower… the pyramids in Egypt… the Great Wall of China—”

  “Sure,” Ty interrupts. “We can tour the Seven Wonders of the World. Let’s forget about Jadie and concentrate on cracking the Transporter code.” He holds out a hand. “Give me the receiver back.”

  Marius clutches the box to his chest. “Well, I didn’t mean that. It’s my job to look out for her. I’m her brother, not some kid in Philadelphia. But I don’t think this has anything to do with the Seers.”

  Even though it was a course correction that sent Jadie on a collision path with her possible family member and, it seems, his computer? Even though it was because of the Seers that Jadie survived as a baby and ended up becoming an Agent?

  Ty sighs. If Marius wants to stick his head in the sand like an ostrich, fine. For now. But Ty intends to find out everything he can about the Seers and how they might be manipulating Jadie. Not for Jadie’s sake, but his own. If he ever gets caught using the Transporter illicitly, he’ll have a bargaining chip in his back pocket.

  To Marius, Ty says, “Sure. We’ll find out what Jadie’s up to, make sure she’s okay, and go back to working on the Transporter’s coordinate system.”

  Marius visibly relaxes, and Ty marvels at his gullibility.

  14. JADIE

  It doesn’t take me long to figure out how to use Ty’s device. I research on the internet what a signal injector does, then fire the thing into my bracelet until I hit the right spot.

  Every day for almost a week, I travel to that alley in Philadelphia and stand on that street, staring at the apartment buildin
g next to the sandwich shop and hoping to see one of the Lowells. I go at different times—times when I won’t be missed at home—but I don’t see anyone who looks familiar.

  That week, I get no course corrections. With no explanation.

  We usually get one every day. The silence of my bracelet haunts me. What do the Seers know? If they’re angry with me, why hasn’t Miss Rose said something?

  The stress gets to me. I forget to turn in an important science paper. I screw up in soccer practice and miss an easy pass during a game. Coach pulls me aside to ask if there are problems at home. I deny it, but I’m not sure she believes me.

  When my secret trips to Philadelphia fail one after the other, I consider using the original set of coordinates, the ones for Sam’s room. If I do it in the middle of the night, I can sneak out to the living room and look for more information about the family. If Sam wakes up, or if one of the parents is up late, I can hit the button and be extracted immediately. They’d get only the briefest glimpse of me. A ghost.

  But I can’t do that. It would be horrible to haunt the Lowells with the “ghost” of J.D.

  Spring break starts, for school and soccer, leaving me more time to sneak off. Mom has to work, and so does Dad, because his college has its break on a different week. Alia’s family leaves on vacation, so I can’t get any more “gaming” advice from her. My other friends are either away or busy with their families, not that I can ask for their help anyway. Even Marius makes himself scarce—which probably means he and Ty are up to something.

  Ty must know I stole his signal injector. But he hasn’t said anything. Every time he sees me, he gives me a thin, unfriendly smile. I think that means he knows what I’ve done but can’t do anything about it, just like I counted on.

  Good. You do your secret stuff, and I’ll do mine.

  It isn’t until one week after the day I took the Transporter with Ty that I see Sam again. It’s around quarter to eight in Philadelphia, like before, and he’s carrying his laptop again. I want to pull out my hair when I see it. I never take my laptop out of my house. Why doesn’t he carry a thumb drive instead?