by James Riley
“Did he mention he separated the worlds?” she asked. “Not just them, but me, too. Now I’m solely fictional, and my annoying, horrible nonfictional self is probably reciting rules to Owen right now on their world.”
Kiel stared at her, his mouth dropping open. “You’re kidding. Are you okay? Beth, that’s terrible!”
She laughed at the worry in his eyes. “It’s not, really! I kind of love it, actually. I mean, I’m sure we’ll have to go back eventually. . . .” She rolled her eyes. “But for now, it’s the best. I’m not always worrying about pointless things, and I get to see my dad. . . .” She trailed off, remembering the state she’d left her father in. The memory hit her like a brick, and she sat back on the ground. How could she let herself get so distracted? She had to focus here! Her father was in danger!
“You found your father?” Kiel said. “That’s great! Where was he?”
“Well, Nobody had him, too,” Bethany said quickly. “But he’s in danger of turning into this possibility stuff too, if I don’t figure out a way to stop it. I tracked a guy here from Jupiter City, someone with weapons that did this to people,” she said, pointing at the possibility wave in the sky. “And my dad got hit by one. He’s okay for now, but I need to find that guy and figure out a way to reverse it.”
“Right,” Kiel said, slowly pushing himself up to a sitting position. “I’m ready. We’ll save your dad, the entire fictional universe, and reunite you with your nonfictional self. Shouldn’t be long now that I’m back to set things right.” He grinned, then almost fell back over as a wave of dizziness hit again.
“Slow down,” she told him. “I can carry you using my superpowers. But we need to find the man I chased here. Nobody didn’t sound like he knew what the guy was doing, so maybe we can use that. But first we need to find him. He came through a portal here only a few seconds before me, but once I got here, he was gone.”
“Maybe he had an invisibility quilt,” Kiel said, picking his up.
“If he does, we’re never going to find him without help,” she said, helping him to his feet. “Let’s try to find some Quanterians, or at least a building that’s still standing. Maybe we can contact Charm somehow and she can help!”
Kiel winced at that. “She’s not exactly my biggest fan right now. I might have missed a few scheduled meet-ups.”
“Oh, that’s okay, she thinks you’re Owen anyway,” Bethany told her.
Kiel blinked. “I’m sorry, she thinks I’m who?”
CHAPTER 11
The first thing Owen saw when he pulled the hood off his head was a poster of one of the black-helmeted soldiers standing with his arms around a smiling family. Below them were the words, If you see something impossible, alert the PFFIA! A little boy in the picture was giving the black helmet a thumbs-up.
Owen groaned, and his muscles screamed as he tried to move. After security had put a hood on him, someone had handcuffed his hands behind him and thrown him into some kind of vehicle, where he’d lain facedown for a few minutes before it had stopped. Then they’d dragged him out again and set him to walking, letting him trip over and over, completely blind.
He’d ended up in an unfamiliar building, riding up in an elevator, then pushed into a room, where he landed on a bed. The handcuffs were removed, the door closed, and for a moment, everything had gone silent. Owen waited for three long, deep breaths before pulling the hood off, but he found himself alone.
Where was he? He rubbed his forehead, trying to clear the fog in his head. The room had just one door and no windows, the bed he sat on, a few posters, a toilet, and a sink.
Was this some kind of jail cell?
He winced, this time not from the pain in his muscles. The first time he’d been locked up, it’d taken Moira, a criminal genius, to rescue him and Kiel. Then he’d managed to escape from a time prison, but that took the help of fictional readers. This time, no one would be coming to rescue him. Only two people even knew where he was in this future: One was in a hospital unconscious, and the other was as trapped as he was.
You don’t have a choice, his older self had said. You need to be captured. But that wasn’t true! He could have done something, anything to try to escape, or at least to fight off the security guards in the hospital.
But no, instead he had to decide to go off on some crazy adventure, trying to save the future and regain his imagination. What had he been thinking? This was the nonfictional world, and things didn’t work that way here. Why hadn’t he listened to his logic?
After all, what could a normal person even do against something like this? Black-helmeted soldiers and weird propaganda posters from insane government agencies asking you to look out for anything impossible?
Not knowing what else to do, Owen glanced at the next poster. Books are dangerous, it said. Burn all copies today to keep us safe! Another smiling family and black helmet, this time in front of a burning book bonfire.
He turned away, sickened. What had happened here in the future? Why were books considered so dangerous? Without an imagination, no one could even read them.
The door opened abruptly, and Owen jumped in surprise as a black helmet entered the room. “Come with me,” the man said in that monotone voice they all used. Owen nodded, unable to think of anything else to do, and followed the soldier outside.
His room turned out to be at the end of a long hallway filled with doors. Next to a bank of elevators, a sign claimed this was floor nineteen of the PFFIA, whatever that was. Was it some new police force in the future? Something like the CIA or FBI? Or just a place for black-helmeted soldiers to imprison anyone who did something even slightly suspicious?
The man in the black helmet stopped in front of a door with a sign that said INTERROGATION ROOM 84, and Owen winced. That didn’t sound promising. Not that he or Kara had really done anything wrong, beyond Kara making up a story about their identities back in the hospital. Did that really deserve an interrogation?
The man opened the door and gestured for Owen to enter, so he did. The black helmet didn’t follow, though, and instead closed the door behind Owen. A lock clicked, and Owen took a seat at a small table in the middle of the room, directly in front of a glass wall. It was hard to tell if the wall was a mirror or window, given how dark the room was. The only light in the room shone down directly into Owen’s eyes, now that he was seated.
He looked around for a moment, wondering if he was just supposed to start talking. “Hello?” he whispered, but no one responded. Finally, he started to stand back up, only for an image to appear on the glass in front of him.
It was his older self, lying in a hospital bed connected to tubes.
Owen frowned, not sure what was going on. Maybe this was about lying to the hospital staff? He slowly stood and began to move around the table to get closer to the image to see better.
“SIT DOWN OR YOU WILL BE TASERED,” said a loud, emotionless voice over a speaker from somewhere above him. “DO NOT TOUCH THE WALL OF TRUTH.”
Owen immediately jumped back into his seat, his eyes wide. “Who are you?” he asked softly.
“DO NOT ASK QUESTIONS. ANSWER THEM ONLY.”
Owen swallowed hard, then nodded, waiting for the next question.
The voice, though, went silent.
On the wall before him, a doctor entered the hospital room (oh, this was a video, not a photo) and checked the machines, then frowned, shaking her head, and left.
Another few seconds went by, and then Kara appeared out of thin air in the hospital room.
What? Owen jumped to his feet, both worried and excited that she had escaped. But why had she gone back—
“SIT DOWN.”
Owen took his seat again as Kara looked around, almost as if she were surprised. “Owen?” she said, her voice coming over the same speaker above him. “Owen, are you okay? What happened to you? Did Nobody do this?”
Nobody? Why would she . . . wait, this wasn’t happening live, was it? This was Kara before she’d come back to
the past. This was when she learned that future Owen’s heart wasn’t working.
“Owen?” she said, touching his cheek, then looked at the machines. “Oh no, Owen, your heartbeat. It’s barely there. Owen? What happened here?”
Owen’s older self whispered something to her, too quiet for the video to pick up. She leaned in and listened to him for a moment, her face running through multiple emotions as he spoke. Abruptly, older Owen gasped in pain, and alarms began sounding on the machines.
The doctor appeared back on-screen, looking surprised. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” the woman demanded, and Kara backed away.
“I’m his friend, and I was worried—”
“His heart just stopped,” the doctor said, pushing past Kara. “Get out of here. I need to try to start it again!”
Kara stepped out of the image, but he could still hear her voice. “Owen! It’s going to be okay! I’ll do what you said, and—”
“Get out of here!” the doctor repeated, and brought some paddles to Owen’s chest. “Clear!” She hit the button, and future Owen’s body jumped. A second time, and the alarms stopped as the machines showed a steady, if weak, heartbeat.
“Is he okay?” Owen could hear Kara ask from off-screen.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” the doctor told her. “I’m going to have to take you to security. Come here and—”
And then she stopped, glancing around. “Where did she go? Security! We’ve got an intruder in here. I need—”
The image disappeared.
“WE’VE TESTED YOUR DNA,” the voice over the speakers said. “YOU MATCH THAT OF OWEN CONNERS, THE TEENAGER CURRENTLY IN THAT VERY SAME HOSPITAL BED RIGHT NOW. THAT VIDEO WAS TAKEN THREE HOURS AGO. YOU THEREFORE CANNOT BE HIM. HOW DID YOU CHANGE OFFICIAL PFFIA RECORDS?”
Uh-oh. “I didn’t change the records,” Owen said quietly. “They must be wrong somehow.”
“WHO WAS THAT GIRL? WE HAVE NO RECORDS FOR HER, AND NO EXPLANATION AS TO HOW SHE APPEARED AND DISAPPEARED IN THE HOSPITAL ROOM.”
Owen bit his lip. He couldn’t tell the truth, that she was fictional and had traveled in time. That wasn’t exactly the kind of thing a nonfictional person would believe. But how could he lie? He literally couldn’t think of anything except the truth!
Ugh. Now would be a really good time for his imagination to start working again.
He fell back on Kara’s story. “She’s a friend of mine,” he said slowly, concentrating on each word to make sure he didn’t mess it up. “And a friend of my brother. That was him on-screen, my older brother Owen. That must be why our records were mixed up. She was going to check on him—”
“YOU ARE LYING.”
Owen shook his head. “This is the truth!” he shouted, though it felt painful to even say. “You have to listen to me, that’s my brother, and—”
“YOUR VITAL SIGNS SHOW THAT YOU ARE LYING. YOU WILL HAVE ONE MORE CHANCE TO TRUTHFULLY ANSWER THE QUESTION. IF NOT, YOU WILL BE SENT TO REPROGRAMMING.”
Owen sighed. “I can’t . . . I don’t know how—”
An image flashed on-screen again, this time showing the broken time bracelet.
“WHAT IS THIS DEVICE, AND WHAT DOES IT DO?”
Owen dropped his head, out of stories, out of lies. If they knew when he wasn’t telling the truth, then it didn’t matter anyway. “It’s a time bracelet, okay?” he whispered. “It lets people travel in time.”
There. Let his vital signs show that he wasn’t making this up, and see what they did with that.
The voice was silent for a moment. “INSTRUMENTS SHOW YOU ARE TELLING THE TRUTH. THEREFORE, IT IS CLEAR THAT YOU HAVE HAD ILLEGAL CONTACT WITH FICTIONAL ENTITIES, SOMETHING THE PROTECTION FROM FICTIONAL INVADERS AGENCY CANNOT TOLERATE. YOU WILL NOW BE SENT TO TESTING TO DETERMINE IF YOU ARE FICTIONAL YOURSELF, OR MERELY A TRAITOR TO YOUR WORLD.”
Owen blinked several times. Um . . . what, now? The protection from fictional who?
And he was going to be tested to see if he was fictional ? How did they even know that fictional people were real to begin with?!
“I’m not fictional!” Owen shouted up at the speaker as two black helmets burst into the room, grabbing both his arms. “I’m nonfictional! This is my world! I didn’t do anything wrong! Let me go—”
But they didn’t listen. Instead, one of the black helmets pulled out a small black box and stuck it into Owen’s arm. Electricity zapped through him, and he fell to the ground, muscles twitching uncontrollably. Another hood came out, and again, the world fell into darkness.
CHAPTER 12
Wow, a lot really has happened,” Kiel said as Bethany drove him around the destroyed streets of Quanterium in car form, his invisibility quilt draped over her to keep hidden. She’d morphed into an electric car too, in an effort to keep her noise to a minimum, but there was only so much her superpowers could do about that. “So what did you say your superhero name was again?”
“Twilight Girl,” Bethany growled through the car’s radio.
Kiel snorted. “Twilight Girl? Really?”
“You’re saying it wrong. Twilight Girl,” she growled.
“Ah, I get it now,” Kiel said. “And that explains the purple cape, because that’s the color of the setting sun?” He reached around and pulled his black cape forward. “I mean, purple’s okay, but isn’t black much cooler?”
“It runs in the family, so don’t push it,” Bethany said, avoiding an enormous hole that seemed to go down several thousand feet right in the middle of the road.
“And Owen’s a superhero now too?”
“My dad says so,” Bethany told him. “I’m just glad he’s not trapped anymore. At least he’s safe in the nonfictional world. What could go wrong there?”
“Let’s hope he isn’t bored, at least,” Kiel said, patting her dashboard. “Have I mentioned how incredible your power is?”
Her hood grew warm, which she took for blushing. “Only a few hundred times. Are you seeing anything? We’re supposed to be watching for Quanterians and my suspect.”
“The whole city is empty,” Kiel said, looking out through the shimmering invisibility quilt as they drove by houses, stores, and government buildings, all destroyed in weird and terrifying manners. On one block, a localized black hole seemed to have eaten half of the houses. And on the next, a backward fire rebuilt a few homes in slow motion, unburning remnants of the buildings as it rose into the air. “Wait,” Kiel said, slamming on Bethany’s brakes, which was rude. “There. The Quanterian Center for Scientific Studies. It looks like it’s intact, not all weird like the rest of the city.”
Bethany shoved her brake pedal back toward him, throwing his foot backward and off of her. “I’m the one driving here,” she said, then slowly turned in the direction he pointed. The enormous complex that was the Center for Scientific Studies didn’t look damaged, which made sense. Since Quanterians practically worshipped science, these buildings were probably better protected than the rest of the city, especially considering the experiments that happened within.
“If there’s a working computer, I might be able to log into the Nalwork,” Kiel said. “I guessed Charm’s password a while back. If we can access the system, we can search the city for your guy and see if anyone else is around. At the very least, maybe there’s a record of what happened here.”
Bethany parked in front of the center’s stairs and let Kiel out before morphing back into her human self. “The Nalwork?”
“Yeah, basically like your Internet in the nonfictional world, just with more virtual reality,” Kiel told her, walking slowly up the stairs. She moved to support him, and together they made better time. “But we won’t need to get into that, not for a few searches like this.”
There wasn’t any electricity running through the building’s walls like there used to be, which didn’t bode well for the lights inside. As they approached the massive unbroken entrance doors, Bethany grabbed her Twilight flashlight from her utility belt, turned it on, and
quietly pushed the door on the right open.
Just like the outside, the interior of the science center seemed to have escaped any surreal changes. A tall, beautiful lobby opened into massive hallways that led off in various directions in a sort of half circle radiating out from the entrance. Down each hallway, she could just make out doors on either side, which she knew led to various types of laboratories.
“All the labs are open to the public,” Kiel whispered. “That’s why they all have windows, so you can walk by, see something you like, and jump into an experiment. Charm and I once tried forming a miniature galaxy while in disguise, but they kicked us out when I innocently suggested that the new species that showed up worship us.”
Bethany grinned, then quickly fixed her Twilight glare back in place. Her father was in danger, and this was no time for jokes!
Bethany led Kiel down the central hallway, her eyes constantly moving, looking for any signs of life or at least a working computer. Each laboratory they passed seemed to have been abandoned in a hurry. While not as chaotic as the destruction outside, the labs still had overturned chairs, and desks covered with broken glass and cracked tablet screens. Three different labs were filled with some sort of gas, which was a good reminder that the labs were all airtight, thankfully, as there was no telling what those gases might do, or how poisonous they were.
Just as they were about to give up, Bethany spotted a soft light at the end of the hall, which turned out to be a small computer still running, probably on an internal battery. “Will this work?” she asked Kiel, carefully watching the door just in case anyone had heard their entrance.
“Let’s try it,” he said, and began typing on the computer. “Any guesses as to what Charm’s password is? It’s something that reminded her of why she was fighting.”
“Is it ‘Kiel Gnomenfoot’?” Bethany asked, pushing him gently on the shoulder.
Kiel snorted. “Unfortunately, no. It’s the date of the accident that took her parents’ lives.” He typed it in, and the screen changed briefly, though Bethany couldn’t read it from a distance. “Looks like the Nalwork is down for the most part, which makes sense. We won’t be able to search the city, unfortunately.” He paused, the screen flashing as he went from page to page. “There is something here, though, in the science center files. Something sent to Charm’s personal account. It showed up as a notification as soon as I logged in.”
