Before I Disappear

by Danielle Stinson

  Ian leans against the door, effectively blocking the only exit. “Your uncle sounds like a crackpot.”

  “Funny,” Blaine says, displaying a glimmer of nerve. “People said the same thing about Aristotle. Copernicus. Einstein. Perhaps you’ve heard of them.”

  “The people who funded the DARC obviously thought it was possible, or they wouldn’t have put up the money,” I say.

  Blaine nods. “Like I said, the idea of extra dimensions isn’t new. It’s not that physicists don’t believe these dimensions exist. It’s that they’ve never been able to prove it.”

  Ian studies the clippings on the wall. “And this is what he’s been doing since the DARC went back online last month?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which is exactly how long things have been going haywire in Fort Glory?” I follow up.

  “The last time I saw my uncle was on Monday at his office. He was practically giddy.” Blaine shakes his head. “I’d never seen him like that before. He told me their sensors had detected a pulse during the DARC’s last run. He was sure it was a signature of an extra dimension. A small trace that had slipped through before the cracks closed. It was proof that they were getting close.”

  Can you hear the music, Rosie?

  The hairs on my arms stand up straight. “What kind of pulse?”

  “He called it a dark pulse. Dark as in they didn’t know where it was coming from.” Blaine runs a hand through his hair, standing it on end. “I wanted to be happy for him, but it was too coincidental. I asked if it could have something to do with the way people were losing it.”

  I lean forward. “What did he say?”

  “He shut down. Told me not to give in to the superstition and hysteria.”

  “But you didn’t believe him?” I ask.

  “I believe in following the evidence to its logical conclusion.”

  “And what conclusion is that?” Ian presses.

  “That my uncle was doing exactly what he set out to do. That for weeks he’s been successfully chipping away at the wall between the dimensions we see and the ones we don’t.” Blaine swallows. “Only he was so focused on getting that door open, he didn’t ask himself the most important question of all: What would be waiting on the other side?”

  “None of this explains what happened to the town,” Ian says when the silence becomes unbearable.

  “I know.” Blaine’s shoulders droop. “All I know is that everything is so messed up.” He tosses the book, and it falls open on the floor. Ian’s face takes on a strange intensity as he picks it up. I glance down at the open pages in his hands. One depicts a simple black-and-white diagram resembling an hourglass. A funnel with two open mouths and a bottleneck. The other is a three-dimensional, full-color rendering of what looks like the same thing.

  Ian doesn’t raise his eyes from the pages. “What’s this?”

  Blaine looks over his shoulder. “An Einstein-Rosen bridge. Aka white hole or wormhole.” When neither Ian nor I show any sign of understanding, Blaine sighs. “Basically, it’s a black hole with an entrance and an exit. It’s a stellar version of the submicroscopic hole my uncle was trying to punch with the DARC.”

  Ian looks up at me. “The thing I told you about, hovering over the town. This is what it looks like.”

  For the first time all evening, Blaine forgets to be afraid. “Say what?”

  “I was climbing when everything went to hell,” Ian explains. “I saw something where the town should’ve been. It looked a lot like that thing right there.”

  “You saw a wormhole?” Blaine’s voice reaches a painful octave. “Over the town?”

  Ian rubs the back of his neck. “The effect was a little different in person, but yeah. Maybe.”

  “Oh God.” Blaine stands up so fast, he upsets a stack of notebooks on the desk. “Don’t you see what this means? It explains everything. Where we are. What happened to the town. Everything.”

  “Slow down, Blaine,” I plead. “Help us understand.”

  “The DARC!” Blaine cries. “It succeeded in punching a hole to another dimension. Only, that opening didn’t stay on a quantum scale as planned. Somehow, it must’ve inflated out of control, growing into the wormhole you saw. One that leads to the source of the dark pulse.” His hands drop to his sides. “It shouldn’t be possible.”

  “Tell that to the town,” Ian says.

  Blaine blanches. His sorrow fills the cabin. It’s real and it’s suffocating, and it reminds me that I’m not the only one who lost someone when the town disappeared. He turns to the wall, but not before I see the tears on his cheeks.

  I take a few steps toward him. Blaine draws a shuddering breath that freezes me in place. Suddenly, I’m not sure how to close the distance between us, or even if he’d want me to. So I wait for him to pull himself back together, and when he does I say, “There has to be something we can do.”

  “There isn’t.” He wipes his eyes with his sleeve. “We can’t help anybody, and nobody can help us.”

  Fingernails bite into my palms. “I don’t accept that.”

  “Doesn’t change anything. Our town will still be gone, and we’ll still be stuck here at the edge of the greatest achievement and, simultaneously, the worst disaster in recorded human history.” Blaine slides down to the floor to hug his knees.

  “Stuck where? What is this place?” Ian asks.

  Grimly, Blaine holds up the diagram of the wormhole. “The world we know may seem solid, but it isn’t. It’s actually flexible—like this paper.” Blaine folds the piece of paper, tucking the edge back into the binding so that the page forms a balloon in the middle of the book. “When the wormhole inflated out of control, it must’ve created a Fold in the fabric of space-time. Think of it as a bite-sized pocket of reality around the wormhole containing it—a safety mechanism put in place by the universe to protect itself. The three of us had the bad luck to be in the woods when it happened. Too far away from town to be sucked into the wormhole itself, but close enough to get caught up in the Fold around it. That’s where we are.”

  “You’re saying we’re stuck in some weird bubble dimension with the wormhole that ate the town?” Ian asks for clarification.

  Blaine nods miserably. “It’s a piece of our universe that’s bent out of shape. The rules will be different here. The environment more unstable. If you haven’t picked up on that already. And it’ll just keep getting worse.”

  His words leave me reeling. It’s not just what he says but how he says it. Totally defeated. Like there’s no way out of this. For any of us.

  The cabin walls close in around me, and I sit down hard on the floor beside him. All this time, I’ve had a plan. Get to Fort Glory. Find Mom and Charlie. Get out again. But if Blaine is right, even if I find my family, there’ll be nowhere safe to take them. It means that I can’t chart my way out of this. No matter how hard I try, I can’t fix it.

  My hands drop uselessly to my sides. “There has to be a way out.” I say it like I could make it true.

  “There isn’t. We’re stuck in a loop with no entrance or exit.” Blaine rests his head against the wall like it’s become too heavy to hold up without assistance. “I’m guessing the wormhole over Fort Glory will keep pushing out until it takes over the Fold, and then the whole thing will just sort of … collapse in on itself. Theoretically,” he adds, as if it in any way softens the blow.

  His words buzz through my brain. Half of what he’s saying goes right over my head, but one point I heard loud and clear.

  My heart pounds in my chest as I rise to my feet. “You’re wrong,” I say. “There is a way into the Fold.”

  “And you know this because you’ve got a doctorate in theoretical physics you’ve conveniently failed to mention.” One look at my face, and Blaine’s instantly falls. “Sorry. I wasn’t … I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “No,” I say slowly. “I know because it’s how I got here.”

  SIXTEEN

  “Do you feel that?” you
asked, turning away from the window. We had pulled off the road, behind a low rise in Yellowstone National Park. The sky stretched out above us in every direction. It was beautiful and so vast, it made me feel small, but not in the way I hated.

  I wanted to lie in the grass until the dark fell around us and the stars danced over our heads. Instead, I continued plotting a course west.

  “Do you feel it, Rosie?” you asked again.

  “Feel what?” I kept my eyes glued to the map in my lap. The map didn’t need me or say things I didn’t understand. The map didn’t fill the trailer with strangled night sounds or bleed as a reminder of all the ways I’d failed.

  A groan rose from the front seat. We’d pulled over an hour ago so Mom could sleep while I came up with a plan.

  It hurt to leave. Even when there was nobody left to say goodbye to. Even when bad things happened and staying was worse than running, I still wanted for something I couldn’t quite name. I broke a little more each time. Pieces of me littered the highways from here to North Carolina.

  It wasn’t all bad, I told myself as I studied the squiggles, and numbers, and names of places I wanted to know. Running away also meant running toward. New roads. New signs. New people we could become.

  “Listen,” you said in that way of yours that gave me no choice.

  I strained my ears, but whatever music was playing for you wasn’t meant for me. “I don’t—”

  You reached out and placed your hand on my throat. I could feel our pulses marching together through a thin layer of skin. “Close your eyes.”

  I did. Because I loved you and because you asked me to. And because, deep down, I wanted to hear whatever it was you heard. For just one moment, I wanted some of the light that filled you to spill into me and chase away the darkness.

  The sounds came to me slowly. Wind and deep breathing and distant highway music. And then everything faded away, because I finally knew what you were trying to tell me.

  The air caught in my lungs. I was afraid to move. Afraid to shatter the peace that had fallen over us.

  You smiled at me, your gift complete.

  We looked up at the exact moment the snow started to fall. It danced from the clouds, light as feathers. We sat like that for hours, watching it purify the world outside our window until everything was new and clean.

  Slowly, quietly, you reached for my hand, and the song inside of you poured into me.

  I cried, tears of joy, not sadness, because for one moment, I too was beautiful.

  * * *

  “This changes things.” Blaine stares at Deputy Miller’s jacket like it’s the most fascinating thing he’s ever seen. He’s been like this since I told him about hiking to Devil’s Tooth with Rowena. About hearing Charlie’s voice, the hook of fire in my chest, and the feeling of being yanked sideways.

  “How?” I ask.

  “I’m not sure.”

  It’s not what I want to hear. “But if I fell into the Fold, there must be an opening between here and our world, right? If we could find it, couldn’t we try to, I don’t know, fall back out again?”

  A deep trench cuts across his brow. “That would be like trying to find a needle in a universe-size haystack. The opening between the Fold and our world, if it exists, might not even lie in any of the four dimensions we have physical access to.”

  I’m about to ask what the hell that means when something moves in my peripheral vision.

  A shadow. Streaking across the window.

  I’m across the cabin floor in two seconds flat.

  “What is it?” Ian asks, joining me at the window.

  “There’s someone out there.”

  “Are you sure?”

  It’s dark, and we’re all on edge, but I know what I saw. “I’m sure.”

  “Rose is right. We’re not alone.” Blaine is wound so tight he’s practically humming. “I’ve been hearing noises, outside. Like, voices. But whenever I look, there’s nobody there.”

  Ian and I lock gazes. “Someone’s been messing with us too,” he says. “They ran in front of our tent last night and shoved Rose into the river earlier today.”

  Blaine pales. “So we should probably assume they don’t come in peace.”

  “There could be more than one other person trapped in the Fold with us. It could be Charlie,” I say, even though I don’t really believe it. Charlie wouldn’t haunt our steps like a ghost or try to spy on us. He wouldn’t hide.

  Not from me.

  “That wormhole is an open door that swings two ways,” Blaine says. “The dark pulse is only going to get stronger as it floods in. It could’ve sent whoever’s out there over the edge. We could be dealing with some suburban housewife turned psycho killer.”

  I meet Ian’s eyes, and for once, I know exactly what he’s thinking.

  Becca.

  Ian bolts for the door. Blaine opens his mouth, but I push past him before he can ask for an explanation.

  Outside, it takes my eyes a moment to find Ian in the darkness. He’s sprinting full out toward a spot of pulsing brightness up ahead. Orange firelight bleeding around the cracked door of the cabin where we left Becca.

  We didn’t we leave it like that.

  I sprint into the cabin and grind to a halt. Air leaves my lungs in a rush when I see Ian kneeling at the hearth beside Becca.

  Footsteps pound the floorboard behind me

  Blaine bursts in. “A little. Warning. Next time?” He bends over at the waist.

  I block out the sound of his wheezing and walk over to the others. “I’ll sit with her,” I tell Ian, sinking down beside him. “Go. Make sure whoever’s out there stays out.” I need Ian focused on the threat outside. Not the one inside Becca’s head.

  With a lingering glance at Becca, Ian moves to do a quick sweep of the cabin while Blaine stands watch at the window.

  Becca moans and rolls toward me. The covers twist around her legs. I lean over and pull the blankets back up.

  My hands freeze in midair.

  Becca’s face. It’s scary pale. But that’s not what has my stomach twisting into a pretzel.

  Bones protrude over hollow cheeks. Dark bruises form circles around her closed eyes. She looks frail. Sick.

  She looks how Charlie looked before the town disappeared.

  The realization sets my thoughts racing. A thousand questions bang around inside my head as I finish covering Becca up. There’s something there. Some epiphany lurking just under the surface of my mind. If I could just quiet down the noise in my head long enough to think.

  “Any sign of them?” I ask when I join the others at the window.

  Ian shakes his head. “Whoever they are, they don’t want to be seen.”

  The clouds move past the moon, flooding the clearing with light.

  There’s a flash of movement in the dark to our left. A shadow streaking from the edge of the woods to the shack we just left.

  The wind blows. Something crashes in the dark behind the shack.

  I go rigid. I can’t help it. Whoever’s out there, every instinct in my body is screaming we don’t want to mess with them.

  “I told you we weren’t alone,” Blaine whines, every trace of smugness gone. “I’ve been hearing them all day. Whoever they are, they’re clearly deranged.”

  This time, I don’t argue with him. Anyone in their right mind would’ve shown themselves by now. They wouldn’t be taking every available opportunity to terrorize a bunch of kids.

  “We have a bigger problem,” I say. I don’t try to explain. Instead, I lead them over to the hearth. Ian’s shoulders stiffen when I pull back the blanket covering Becca.

  “She’s lost ten pounds since this morning,” I say.

  “You did fish her out of a river,” Blaine says.

  “Hypothermia wouldn’t make her waste away. It also wouldn’t do this.” I pull back one of Becca’s eyelids, displaying the dilated pupil.

  “It’s the dark pulse, isn’t it?” Ian’s question is directed at Blai
ne. For once, there’s no ready answer on the tip of his tongue.

  “We need to head for the outer edge of the Fold,” I say, gaining both of their undivided attention. “As far away from the wormhole and the source of the dark pulse as we can get. It might be the only way to help Becca.”

  It’s not a total lie. If the dark pulse is more concentrated near the town, its effects will probably be stronger there too. Getting Becca farther away may be the only way to save her. But that’s not the real reason I want to go there.

  I study Becca sleeping by the fire. The thinness of her body. The occasional grimaces that wrinkle her smooth brow.

  Flashes of pain like the ones that had been crossing Charlie’s face ever since we moved here.

  Can you hear the music, Rosie?

  Charlie can hear the dark pulse. He could hear it all along. Which means, all this time, I’ve been looking for him in the wrong place.

  If the dark pulse is stronger near the wormhole, the noise for Charlie could be almost deafening. However Charlie escaped the wormhole, he wouldn’t stay right near the source of the chaos. He’s too smart for that. He’d head to the outer edge of the Fold.

  Just like we need to do.

  I lift my chin. “We have to leave. The sooner the better.”

  Ian’s eyes stay locked on Becca. “Will heading farther out slow down what’s happening to her?”

  “Maybe.” Blaine hesitates. “Maybe not.”

  Ian’s hands hang uselessly at his sides for a moment before they reach up and grip the bill of his cap. “There are a few sleds in the closet. We can pack them up with supplies and haul out at first light.”

  “And risk running into the psycho stalking us?” Blaine asks.

  “We don’t have a choice,” I say. “Not if getting out of here is the only way to help Becca.”

  “What about Charlie?” Ian asks me.

  “You were right about the town,” I tell him. “It’s been taken over by the wormhole. Charlie would’ve had to run from it.” I draw a breath to steady myself, but when I close my eyes, the image is there. The one of Charlie in the dark.

  Blaine looks between us. “Your brother was in the town when the wormhole opened up?” When I nod, Blaine assumes an expression I don’t like one bit. It’s like his face is apologizing in advance for his mouth. “This wormhole isn’t some elevator ride to an alternate, hospitable reality. Wherever it leads isn’t pleasant.” His eyes slide away from mine. “If Charlie was in Fort Glory, he’s gone. I’m sorry.”