Mend (Rift Walkers #2)

by Elana Johnson

  I grip the coffee cup in tense fingers. “I’m Heath Stonesman.” My voice is a fraction of the volume of hers, but the energy she’s conjured diminishes until only the lamps in the city center shine on us.

  She strides forward and I make out her glittering eyes, the strength in her shoulders and jaw, the absolute power she radiates. She’s intimidating with a capital I.

  “You need to come with me.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Orville wants to see you.”

  “Orville.” I smile at her, but she doesn’t return it. “Perfect.” I lift my cup to my lips like I’m sipping cider, but I don’t swallow any liquid.

  I follow her through the city center, past the fountains, and across the street to the Global Initiative. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get into Orville’s office, but now that problem seems to be solved.

  When we enter, I sprint away from her to the guard station. “Hey,” I pant. “I have a couple of friends coming. Can you send them to Orville’s office when they get—?”

  A cruel hand pulls me away from the guard. “Send anyone asking for him to Orville’s office,” the woman commands.

  The guard nods and blinks, his fear obvious and rampant on his face. I yank my arm out of her grip and follow her through the lobby and around the corner to the huge doors. She announces us and opens the doors. She leads me in.

  “Is Orville here?” I ask.

  “He’s in a meeting,” she barks. “He’ll be down when he’s finished.”

  “So I just have to sit down here and wait for him?”

  “Yes.” She reaches the corner and turns to the left. I distinctly remember the last time I was here, with Cascade’s full weight leaning on mine and the fear of the unknown lodged in my throat.

  Now, the coffee cup I carry feels like it weighs twenty pounds.

  She pauses as the room opens up into Orville’s office. “It shouldn’t be too long.” She turns back to me, and I launch the hot coffee into her face.

  She screams, gasps, covers her face with her hands. I unplug the lamp and rip the cord from the base before the sound of her shriek dies. I lunge at her, driving her backward to Orville’s recliner, where she falls. I use the cord to tie her to the chair while liquid drips from her face.

  Two more lamps get dismembered before her hands and feet are secure and I’m sure she can’t get free. I have no idea how she produced the electricity in the city center, but she hasn’t done it again, and Greg should be here any minute.

  I stand to the side of her, just out of her line of sight, and stare down the hall. I have time to wonder what lays to the right before Greg’s voice fills the room.

  I sprint down the hall, make the turn, and heave my weight against the doors. “Hurry,” I tell him and Iris when I’ve got the doors open enough to see them. They slip in and we move down the hall together.

  “We only have a few minutes,” I say. “Are you ready?”

  “We’re ready,” Iris answers, and her voice sounds much stronger than the last time I heard her speak.

  We enter Orville’s office, and Greg scans the room, his eyes landing on the woman tied to the chair—his eyebrows go up—and the frame housing the dormant rift. He moves in that direction, extracting something from a pocket in his backpack as he goes.

  I follow him, every nerve buzzing with anticipation. “Can we travel through time and dimension at the same time?”

  “I never have before,” he says, smoothing out his panel at the end of the table. “Iris?”

  “No time like the present to try.” She puts an identical panel next to his and they link them together to make one long screen they can both touch.

  Tap here, tap there, and the rift crackles to life. I face it, my heart exploding in my chest. This is it. I’m leaving this Verse.

  Leaving Cascade, a voice nags in the back of my head. I silence it, because I don’t know where she is. I’ve asked. I tried to find her. She’s untraceable right now.

  “Hooked to the dimensional bridge,” Iris says with clinical coolness.

  “What year?” Greg asks.

  “Twenty seventy-three.”

  He swallows and punches at the panel. I can’t tell if it’s nervous or angry. Probably both. But he and Iris are both wearing black pants and dark jackets. They both carry backpacks. They’ll be fine in the future.

  A clank behind me makes me spin. “A door.” I dart to the corner and peer around it. At the far end of the hall—the branch to the right I’ve never taken—a door is opening. A man steps through it, with another right behind him.

  Orville and Cascade’s father.

  “We have to go now!” I hiss as I race back to Iris and Greg. “You guys go first. Go! Now!”

  “One more second!” Iris insists, jamming her finger against a button. The rift ripples with purple light before stabilizing again. “Now.”

  Greg takes her hand and ushers her into the frame. He follows behind her without a backward glance for me.

  I cast a look over my shoulder just as Orville enters the room. He takes in me standing before the active rift and the woman tied in the chair all in the same sweeping glance.

  “Cassie! What’s going on?”

  “She opened the rift!” I shout over whatever she’s about to say. “She said I should go through it!” I don’t wait for her to refute my story. I duck my head, lift my foot, and enter the blazing rift light.

  Price

  BY THE TIME MY PARENTS ENTER THE HOOD arena, I’m ready to tear my hair out. They’d been notified at the same time as me, and I’d seen them when I was first brought in. But they had to endure a round of questioning too, and when I make eye contact with my dad, I see his displeasure, his anger, his disappointment all over his face.

  “Sorry,” I say automatically, though I’m not sure what he knows about my arrest. I’d been told by the arresting Hood that I’d been breaking and entering. Nothing was said about my use of the rift, but Hoods are time cops, not your average authorities making mundane arrests for entering unlocked houses.

  “Probation,” he says. “We’ll talk at home.” He dwarfs me with his arm around my shoulder, claiming me, and guides me outside. We hail a pedicab and endure a painfully cold and silent ride back to our building. The cheery elevator music makes me want to punch something, so by the time we step through our front door, I’m already on edge.

  “Breaking and entering?” Mom starts.

  “At our—” Dad cuts himself off. “What were you doing there, Price?”

  “Nothing,” I say automatically, shrugging out of my jacket. “And I didn’t break in. Those people left their door unlocked.”

  Mom throws her hands into the air like she can’t believe I’d say something so asinine. She has a point. “I need a glass of wine.” Her high heels click against the marble as she heads for the kitchen.

  I try to follow her, but Dad’s vice grip cinches around my bicep. “You’re not going anywhere,” he says through clenched teeth. “This rift thing is behind us, you hear me? Over. Done. You mess any more with it, and I will end you.”

  I’ve never heard such finality in my father’s tone. Never witnessed such malice, even when I threatened to expose him for using the rift illegally and saying I’d pin the wanted Black Hat identity on him.

  “Dad, it’s Heath. And Cascade. I was just—”

  “I know what you were just doing, and I’m telling you not to.” He releases me and steps back, schooling his anger and softening his face. “If they get back on their own, fine. But we cannot help them. Am I clear?”

  “Why not, Dad?”

  “Because if we do, we’ll lose everything we have. This business. Our lives. This apartment. Everything. Are you willing to risk everything for Heath and Cascade?” He sighs and turns away. “Remember, not everything is about you, son. Everything of mine? Everything of Moms? Everything for everyone in our family for the past sixty years?”

  He faces me again, and anguish has r
eplaced his anger. “I know your life is different. Mine is too—drastically. Only you and I remember that other life, that old house, what really happened six months ago.” He points toward the kitchen, where Mom’s put on some low music. “I realized a lot of things when I woke up in that downtown apartment. I love her more than money. I can be happy without that. But I want to provide a stable life for her, and for you. And I have that, without having to do anything illegal to get it.”

  “Providing stolen information for people from another dimension is legal?”

  “It isn’t stolen information.” He shakes his head. “Come to work with me in the morning. I’ll show you that everything is on the up and up.” He steps away. “Now, I have to go answer to Kelly Openshaw about why an unauthorized rift walker showed up on her radar.”

  “Wait, what? She can monitor the rifts from another Verse?”

  “Of course she can. She controls them. She knows everything that happens with each one of them.”

  I want to ask how many there are, but I shelve the question for now. “Dad, Saige opened the rift in 2013. She just had it open, waiting, hoping someone would come through and tell her where her sister is.”

  Dad frowns. “So you didn’t open the rift.”

  “I don’t even know how to do that. She had it open, and I went through for like, two minutes. It was no big deal.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  I shake my head. “Nothing. She said she doesn’t believe Cas is dead, and I said she was in another Verse. She was going to talk to her dad and drop a note through the rift if she learned anything.”

  Dad stalks a step closer. “And how were you going to retrieve the note?”

  I shrug. “Knock on the door and ask to see their basement?” I can’t help the twitching of my lips. Dad can’t either.

  He sobers. “You can’t go back there.”

  “I won’t.”

  He accepts my vow and heads down the hall to talk to Mom. I don’t even consider going back to the house in the suburbs. I have two arrests on my record now, and I can’t get a third strike. Thick fear coats my throat as I slink past the kitchen and head for my bedroom.

  I spend the next day at work with Dad. It’s boring. He sits at a desk and sends messages to people he’s helped assimilate into our society.

  “I have sixteen people on the six-month monitoring schedule right now,” Dad says. “That’s a lot. Sometimes we only have five. Sometimes a dozen. This is the most we’ve had in a while.”

  “Mm,” I say, just to make him think I care. I suppose I should. But watching him, I realize this will be my life in just a couple of years. I glance at the desk I’m sitting at. It seems like it already was, as Dad claimed this was my “workstation” and I regularly came down to the first floor office suite and worked with him.

  “So you just…make sure they’re going to work and school? Not getting into trouble?”

  “That,” Dad says. “We make sure they’re making relationships with people here, that they have friends, hobbies. When they get grounded here, make connections, they tend to stay.”

  “Why do we care if they stay?”

  “I don’t care if they stay,” he says. “Kelly does. A cross-over is a one-way ticket, and sometimes we have people who want a return pass.”

  I sit up straighter. “And why is that bad?”

  “The Global Verse is overpopulated, with a terrible economy. The opportunities for enterprises are not what they are here. Everyone profits from the system we have.” He leans away from his computer. “But people leave behind siblings, friends. Think of Heath and Cascade. It’s only natural to want to visit them, or bring them here. Kelly doesn’t allow either.” He exhales. “So we try to make sure they’re adjusting, forming new bonds, finding new relationships.”

  A realization comes to me. “This is a management company. Instead of managing property or crops, you’re managing people.”

  Dad grins. “Exactly.”

  “And how is giving these people all these fake identities not illegal?”

  “We’re not using stolen information, or identification numbers from people who have died,” he says. “We simply manufacture new identities. New numbers. New licenses and cards.”

  “But how is that legal?”

  He clicks and types, hums to himself as he peers at the screen. He turns his flatpanel toward me. “We own the database. When we need more, we just add them.”

  The next evening, I tell Dad to go up to the apartment without me. I’ve had a couple of the busiest and most boring days of my life, and I need time to absorb it all. At least that’s what I tell him. It’s mostly true.

  Today, I monitored a woman in Philadelphia. We’d given her a nice house in one of the ritziest suburbs, a shih tzu, a midsize income for a Circuit start-up that she could take to the next level. That she could make serious cash with—and thus, so could we and so could Kelly Openshaw.

  A green leaf floating on water drifts across my dad’s slumbering flatpanel. The company we work for is called the Global Initiative, but it’s really Openshaw Enterprises. Bitterness crowds my mouth and I reach for my water bottle. It’s empty.

  I sigh as I get up and head down the hall, past the conference room, to the drinking fountain for a refill.

  On my way back—I think I’ll cue up a fantasy realm on my flatpanel and lose myself in virtual reality for a while—a blue light pulses under the door leading into the conference room.

  I freeze.

  My water bottle slips from my grasp.

  I know that type of light.

  Rift light.

  As fast as the earth froze, it thaws.

  I scramble toward the doors and heave one open to find a woman standing in the dark conference room. The purple and blue rift bathes the room in light, flashing light lightning as a man emerges from the picture frame on the wall.

  They link hands and stare at me, their faces grim, their stance combative.

  “Who are you?” I ask just as a third bolt fills the room. A tall guy steps through the frame, and though the light is blue and purple and purple and blue, I know who he is.

  “Heath?” I stride around the table to where he stands. “Heath!” Shock travels from my heel to my head with every step. Heath’s back! My heart double-flips in my chest, catapulting to my throat. Heath’s back!

  I watch the rift, waiting waiting waiting for Cas to come through, the happiness at seeing my best friend fading the longer time stretches. “Where’s Cascade?”

  He glances at the rift and back to me. “She’s not coming,” he says. “We need to close this. Now.”

  He turns to the couple standing a few feet away. “How do we shut this down? Permanently.”

  “Wait a second,” I say as the guy pulls out what looks like an early version of my flatpanel. “We can’t shut it down permanently. Cas needs to come through.”

  Heath puts his hand on my shoulder. “Price, she can’t. She’s too sick to enter another rift.”

  I stare up at him, trying to make sense of what he’s said. “Heath—”

  “She’s not coming, bro. If she tries to rift-walk again, she’ll die.”

  Die die die echoes in my head long after the man Heath brought with him closes the rift.

  Heath

  SEEING PRICE AGAIN STITCHES TOGETHER a part of me that had been broken. But he’s not quite the same Price—this guy’s in total shock.

  I managed to get him to take us to his house—except it wasn’t the swankified version of suburbia I remember. It was the blinged out top floor of the building I stepped into.

  The similarities between Orville forty years ago in another Verse and the Ryerson’s now is a little freaky. I sit on a plush couch in a room that feels made of gold. Greg and Iris perch next to me, taking in the grandeur of this room like snakes will start leaping out of vases at any moment.

  I sort of feel the same way. I want to go home, see my mom, tell her I’m sorry. She’ll make me si
t at the kitchen counter and tell her everything while she whips up something to eat. My mouth waters just thinking about her tacos and homemade salsa. The bottled sodas and other dimension food have soured my stomach.

  Then I have plans to escape my mom and chat Soda. My Receiver glows blue in my palm as if I never left, and I fist my fingers around it when I catch Greg staring at my hand. I have over a hundred messages, and a half dozen chats from Soda. My heart flips, but I don’t chat her back. I want to do that in private, when we can’t be interrupted.

  “Heath.” Price’s dad finally comes into the room and holds out his hand for me to shake. I stand and comply, wondering what took him so long. Price had managed to tell me that his dad could help Greg and Iris get settled into their new lives here before he turned into comatose.

  But Guy doesn’t seem that excited to see me, or the two people I’ve brought. He releases my hand and squints at them. “Why don’t you two come with me?”

  They stand and follow him down the hall, turning into the first room on the right. “What’s he doing with them?” I ask Price, who’s still staring straight ahead, barely blinking.

  “He’ll process them. Get them new names and ID cards.” He leans his head back and closes his eyes. “Boring stuff like that. He’ll probably send them to Maine or somewhere really cold.”

  “Is that a punishment?” I ask.

  “Do people live in Maine by choice?”

  I chuckle for the first time in too many days. “Look, I gotta go, bro. My mom is probably freaking.”

  “Not probably.”

  “You seen her?”

  “Yeah.” Price scrubs his hands through his hair and looks at me. His eyes are bleary and weary. “Chat me later.”

  “Sure.” I hear part of the sentence he doesn’t say. Chat me later so we can figure out how to rescue Cascade. I leave his apartment and ride the lift to the lobby, stewing over how I can get myself out of the rescue mission.

  My mom won’t be keen on me leaving the house for a few weeks. Soda will make me promise to keep out of trouble until my senior thesis gets accepted and I can come visit her. And there’s the whole business of my cells and bones disintegrating into dust.