“Hang on!” Dev shouted as they were pulled toward the opening.
The kids tumbled, spiraling, screaming for help.
There was a static roar, the deep bass of an earth-rending explosion.
Then nothing but deafening silence.
17
STATION LIMINUS
The spinning slowed. The crushing pressure relented. The air popped and crackled. The cadets stumbled to their feet, dizzy and nauseous, ears ringing, eyes red-rimmed. Pinpricks of warm light flickered at the edges of their vision.
“What happened?” Tessa rasped, her throat raw from screaming.
“I don’t know, but I feel like someone put us inside a blender and made a smoothie,” Dev moaned.
Isaiah looked down at his hands. They were shaking, but he was relieved to see they were back to normal. Well, mostly. His skin had an odd coppery sheen, but maybe that was the reflection from the walls around them, which gleamed like a shined penny. “Wait, where are we?” he asked.
Maeve touched the sides of the copper pod they were encased within. There were no control panels or screens. No visible seams, no doors, windows, or escape hatches.
Lewis shook his head. “We’re not in Kansas anymore, and we’re not inside the DJ booth either.”
“We were never in Kansas or a DJ booth,” Maeve replied.
“The good news is I can confirm our spacesuits do have fully functioning pee-eradication systems.” Lewis grinned sheepishly.
“Ew.” Maeve stuck out her tongue. “That is definitely TMI.”
A voice thundered, “Greetings, Earthlings!”
“Phew!” Isaiah let out a strained laugh. “For a minute, I thought we were actually doomed! But it’s just your dad, playing a prank on us.”
“I knew it. I totally called it.” Lewis thumped Dev on the back.
“You did not.”
“Did so. I just didn’t say it out loud.”
Maeve rolled her eyes.
Just then, the copper capsule peeled open, unfolding like a lotus blossom, floating in pure white nothingness. A crooked concrete path appeared at their feet, leading to a door partially obscured by thick fog. The capsule trembled, sparking and fizzing at the edges.
“What’s happening now?” Tessa said, steadying herself.
“I don’t know, but we’d better get moving.” Maeve stepped forward, testing the stability of the path. It creaked but seemed stable enough to cross. “Come on. Single file. Aten-hut.”
The others followed, moving quickly but carefully.
“How are you so chill right now?” Tessa asked Maeve, wishing there was a railing to hold on to.
“One of us needs to keep a clear head,” Maeve said, gingerly putting one foot in front of the other. “And you know what I have to put up with at home. In some ways, this is easier.”
Tessa wasn’t sure how to respond. There was a lot more to Maeve than she’d realized. She felt bad about all the times she’d teased her behind her back.
Isaiah was the last one to step out of the capsule. No sooner did his feet touch the walkway than it began to shake and crumble.
“Uh, guys?” Isaiah called out, nudging Dev in front of him. “I’m not trying to exaggerate or anything, but if you don’t speed it up a little, we’re doomed. Like, for real this time.”
Dev looked back and saw the path disintegrating behind them. “You heard the man! Move! Move!” he shouted.
One by one, the kids ran and dove through the open door, just as the walkway gave out, crashing soundlessly into the white oblivion. Lewis kicked the door shut behind them. The second it closed, it carbonized and cracked down the middle. A blackened rot spread outward from the crack, swallowing up the door and the surrounding wall.
“Maybe this isn’t a prank after all,” Lewis said, rising to his feet.
“Ya think?” Tessa snorted.
“It’s more like a nightmare.” Isaiah had experienced that sensation before—the terror of diving through a door in the nick of time as your world collapses around you. He had been dreaming it, night after night, ever since his uncle’s funeral.
Dev was about to offer his hand to help Tessa, but she was already up, dusting off her silver suit. In spite of back-to-back near-death experiences, her hazel eyes were bright, her dark skin radiant. “Where to from here?” she asked, giving him a tentative smile that weakened his already wobbly knees.
“Um, that way?” Dev pointed. To the left stretched a seemingly endless hallway, adorned with every sort of door imaginable. None of them were black and smoldering like the one the cadets had just exited, however.
Suddenly two figures swept into view, gliding along the hall. From a distance, they appeared to be a woman and a teenager, but as they got closer it was clear they were not fully human. One towered nearly seven feet tall and had two small horns protruding from her temples. The other was about Lewis’s height with green-tinged hair and frilled ears.
The tall woman regarded the kids with piercing violet eyes. Her silver hair moved like water, plaited in elaborate whorls and eddies, framing her angular face. She wore dramatic indigo robes. Fashion-obsessed Tessa gawked; the luminous cloth looked as though it was woven from actual galaxies, with glimmering starlight captured between the folds.
Lewis’s jaw dropped. Maeve delivered a discreet elbow to his ribs, and he clamped his mouth shut and swallowed hard.
“Welcome,” the woman said, extending her arms ceremoniously. “You have successfully crossed the Threshold and reached Station Liminus, the official Multiverse Allied Council headquarters and critical nexus point within the fabric of our great multiverse. I am Ignatia Leapkeene, Secretary of the—”
A wave of nausea hit Isaiah. He gripped his stomach. “I don’t feel so good,” he said, falling to his knees.
18
EARTH
Dr. Khatri burst through the doors. Sprinklers doused the halls with a spray of water, tamping out any chance of fire. Emergency lights strobed, illuminating a path through the empty corridors of the Gwen Research Center. Everyone else had evacuated and was awaiting further instruction at the muster point on the perimeter of the complex.
In spite of whatever hazards the earlier energy disruption may have unleashed, Dr. Khatri refused to leave the building. He wasn’t exactly athletic, but now he ran faster than he ever had. Dr. Scopes followed, her perfectly coiffed chignon disheveled.
“The children are in there?” she asked, panic rising in her voice as she realized where they were headed. All the other field trippers were safely aboard the school bus with Benni and the other teachers, preparing to depart. “You left a group of middle schoolers alone with an antigravity simulator?”
“Of course not! I’m no fool, Dr. Scopes. I secured them within the adjacent equipment room.”
“Which room exactly?” she panted, trying to keep up. Running in heels was harder than it looked.
“The one that connects to the defunct collider lab.”
Her face blanched. “There are valuable assets and documents stored in there. We need to make sure the equipment is intact!”
Dr. Khatri wheeled around and leveled a look at his colleague. “Equipment and files can be replaced, Dr. Scopes. The children are irreplaceable.”
“Absolutely. That’s what I meant.” She nodded, looking frazzled. “I’m sorry. Of course the safety and well-being of your son and his friends are our top priority.” She smoothed her hair, damp from the spitting sprinklers. “They must be terrified, poor things.”
Across town, Zoey and her classmates crouched under their desks at Conroy Middle School. The lights flicked off and on a few times. The ground shook. A few books fell from the shelves. No one was really freaking out; they were all pretty used to the quiver drills at this point, although this particular quiver felt a lot stronger than recent ones. Some kids used the time under their desks to pass notes back and forth, others used it as a chance to nab a quick nap or play games on their phones, which were normally forbidd
en during class.
Zoey tapped her smartwatch and typed a text message to Isaiah. Feel that quiver over at NASA? It was a big one this time, right?! Make sure you note it in your journal! she typed. Is it just me, or does Conroy seem more, I don’t know, weird lately? But then she quickly deleted the entire text before hitting send, remembering that she was pretending to be her sister, and that “Zoey” was currently at NASA with Isaiah.
Instead, she typed a quick message to Tessa to see if she was okay, but Tessa didn’t respond. Typical. She was the queen of ghosting lately—too cool for everyone, her own sister especially. Zoey hated to admit how much this actually stung. She pushed the feeling away.
She wondered if Isaiah had figured out Tessa’s true identity yet. He probably had. Not much got past him. She liked that he saw connections between things that other people missed. He’d been like that ever since she could remember, and they’d been friends since kindergarten. Maybe that’s why his uncle had left him all those cryptic notes? She just wished she could help him put the pieces together somehow. Whatever Ming was trying to tell Isaiah before he disappeared seemed important, but neither she nor Isaiah could figure out what it was all about.
The floor beneath her jolted. The furniture vibrated. The room went dark. Zoey looked down at her watch, hoping a message from Tessa would illuminate its screen, but it remained blank.
After a few seconds, the shaking ground stilled, the lights and overhead fans turned back on, and everything returned to normal. The school’s emergency alert system instructed them that it was safe to return to regular activities. Mr. Kimpton told everyone to put their phones away and return to their seats.
Zoey crawled out from beneath her desk and straightened Tessa’s jean jacket, the one that apparently complemented the purple leopard print skirt and embellished V-neck tank she was wearing. She couldn’t wait to shed the whole ensemble and return to her own comfortable clothing and her own normal identity.
19
STATION LIMINUS
“We need a medic!” Maeve said, kneeling beside Isaiah. “Something’s wrong with him.”
Isaiah retched and gagged, convulsing in pain. His friends tried to comfort him, but he waved them away. He knelt and closed his eyes, hoping the waves of nausea would subside.
The secretary pressed some sort of device on her wrist and a scuttling team of small, spherical robots collected around the kids. They cleaned up the vomit on the floor and circled the cadets, scanning them with ticklish orange laser beams.
“What are these things?” Tessa said, trying not to giggle. This was most definitely not a time to giggle.
“They are called biobots,” the younger figure with greenish hair replied brightly. “Semi-sentient devices that help keep our Station running shipshape.”
Lewis turned to Maeve and whispered, “Do you have any idea what is happening right now?”
She shook her head, trying to hide her shock, but her game face was failing her. The commotion of their arrival had attracted a crowd, each newcomer more curious-looking than the next. There were short, furry creatures walking upright in white lab coats; armored, beetle-like creatures as tall as Lewis; round, amorphous creatures with ancient-looking faces; and a variety of human-esque figures with a rainbow of hair and skin tones. The cadets gaped and blinked and rubbed their eyes.
Isaiah, beginning to feel better, slowly stood up, only to find himself face-to-face with a caterpillar the size of a bathtub. He wobbled woozily again. Dev reached out to grab his arm and steady his friend. Dev pushed a button on his silver mesh suit that had a blue droplet icon. A small packet of fresh water emerged from the sleeve. He offered it to Isaiah, who accepted the water gratefully, taking slow sips.
The caterpillar creature continued to slide past, its lime green underbelly dotted with hundreds of tiny suction cups, which it used to scale the curved wall nearby. It stopped halfway up, its dozens of eyes watching the kids from above.
Maeve, channeling her inner performer, forced a cheery smile onto her face. She tapped Lewis gently on the shoulder. “It’s rude to stare, you know.”
“He’s staring at us! They all are.”
She huffed. “You act like you’ve never seen a gigantic alien caterpillar before, or a …” She didn’t even know what to call the others.
Lewis’s eyes grew wide. “I never have! Have you?”
“Well, um, no,” she stammered. “But I have manners. We only have one shot to make a good first impression.”
Isaiah moaned, doubling over again. The biobots buzzed with irritation and continued mopping.
“Too late for that,” Lewis mumbled.
“All of you, please give us some privacy!” the tall, authoritative secretary commanded. The creatures dashed, scurried, and slid away. She turned and looked down at Isaiah, who was wearing a Conroy Cadets T-shirt, black zip-up hoodie, and jeans instead of a NASA Zero-Grav suit like the others. “Minor bodily trauma and cellular disruptions are normal side effects of interdimensional travel,” she assured him. “Your innards should be mostly fine … once you finish rearranging them.”
“Did she say mostly fine?” Tessa asked, horrified, touching her own stomach, wondering what sort of invisible damage their journey may have caused, and hoping her suit may have protected her in some way.
“Uh, did she say interdimensional travel?” Lewis sputtered. “Because I’m positive my parents did not sign a per-mission slip for that.”
Isaiah looked up. His eyes were bloodshot, his voice barely above a whisper. “What did you do to us?” he asked. His head felt like it had been crushed in a vise.
A doughy, four-armed creature appeared beside the secretary. “What did we do to you? What did you do to your Transfer portal?” He gestured angrily at the wall behind the cadets, which had corroded into a smoldering hole. “The entire Gate collapsed in your wake! The adjacent openings are damaged as well!”
He barked orders in an alien language. A squad of larger biobots arrived and immediately began cordoning off the area with a combination of high-tech electrode ropes and rudimentary orange traffic cones. A separate squad attempted to board up the damaged doorway with thick metal sheets and welding torches.
“Earthlings of Dim14, this is Quirg,” explained Secretary Leapkeene. “He is a delegate in our council, hailing from Quomo in Dim5. He also serves as custodian of the gates, which is why your rather dramatic arrival is causing him consternation.”
“Dramatic? More like destructive!” Quirg grumbled.
The secretary craned her neck and peered down the hall. “Ah, yes, and here comes General Shro.”
A broad-backed man marched down the hall, his gait purposeful, his sliver-tipped boots clicking loudly on the polished moonstone floor. He wore a rust-colored jacket made from the tanned hides of some sort of spacebeast. “I came as soon as I could. So nice to finally meet—” He stopped, staring at the children, sizing them up with slate-gray eyes. His carmine skin was pulled taut across his angular jaw. “Where is—?” He stopped before saying more.
Isaiah’s stomach churned.
A thousand questions hung in the air.
20
EARTH
“Kids!” Dr. Khatri shouted. “We’re coming. Don’t worry!” He wrenched the simulator door open, coughing as he inhaled a plume of acrid fumes. “Dev? Lewis? Answer me! Please.”
Inside the storage room, smoke dissipated, revealing a mess of toppled bins and shelves. Cardboard boxes were singed, their contents scattered across the floor, blackened with an oily residue. Broken machine parts and tools glowed an angry shade of orange, the metal molten hot.
Dr. Khatri called out again, his voice frantic. “Dev?” He pushed aside crates and stepped over debris. It looked as though a bomb had exploded. “Maeve? Zoey?” His heart pounded, fearing what he might see as he slid a half-melted plastene panel aside.
Dr. Scopes followed, covering her mouth and nose with the collar of her lab coat. The children were nowhere to be fou
nd. A cracked crystal globe dangled from the ceiling, slashing the room with beams of red light.
“Is this … the quantum collider?” Dr. Khatri stepped closer. “Our designs never advanced beyond basic calculations and rudimentary models. The construction was too costly, plus the team agreed the apparatus was too dangerous. All research was halted.” He rubbed his temples where an intense headache was brewing. “Has someone been building this behind our backs?”
Dr. Scopes swallowed solemnly. “It appears our colleague Professor McGillum is not who he seems.”
He wheeled around. “What do you mean?”
“I received the manifest from the muster point. Ian McGillum never checked in. The rescue squad is sweeping the other buildings, but so far, no sign of him.” She placed a gentle hand on Dr. Khatri’s elbow. “I’m so sorry, Mohan. I believe he was secretly working on the collider and activated it somehow. He’s either with the children, or he fled the scene after causing today’s energy disruption.”
“With the children? But where? Where could they have gone?” He eyed the destroyed control console. “Do you really suppose they broke through a dimensional membrane?”
She sighed. “I know I’ve been a skeptic about your many worlds theories in the past, but I don’t know how else to describe whatever happened here. I suppose it’s possible the children crossed into an alternate universe.” Dr. Scopes gestured forlornly to the damaged equipment. “If only we could fix the collider, we could follow them … wherever the collider may have transported them, that is.”
“We can!” Dr. Khatri said, struck with a lightning bolt of an idea. “We could use the Syntropitron, my reverse dynamite invention! It was specifically designed to repair catastrophic damage. With a few modifications, I bet it could realign and restore the dispersed collider particles and reconstruct the machine. It could work!”
Mission Multiverse Page 9
