ARC: The Almost Girl

by Amalie Howard

  June is calm. “It’s true. Caden’s mother was from this world. She never returned, because of her children. It was only when Caden was in danger that she came back, but she couldn’t survive. Her immune system had become too weakened to protect her. And that is the sole reason I stopped being one of them. Caden was an innocent child. And Leila, too…” She trails off.

  “I don’t get it. Why do you care about either of them?”

  After another searching look, June sighs. “We grew up together. She was like my sister. My first mistake was to tell her what I was, and from then on, she couldn’t let it go. We were barely your age, but it consumed her to the point of obsession. My second mistake was that she everted there because of me… all because I was careless and told her in the first place.

  “She went so far as to major in quantum mechanics at school, and even though I wouldn’t tell her anything I knew – I was terrified of the consequences – she was determined to find a way. And she did. That was the night she almost got herself killed trying to evert using some home-designed calculation that she must have stolen from my notes somehow. She almost succeeded too, but in the end, her body couldn’t take the force and started to collapse on itself, half stuck in this world, half of it in yours. I panicked, and instead of going to my father as I should have for help, I everted us both to Neospes.” She glances at me, breaking off to place a cold compress on Shae’s head after cleaning off the remaining blood on her face. I keep my face composed despite my racing thoughts.

  “Your father saved her. Her injuries were too great for us to return, and by the time she was well enough to make the jump back, it was too late. The Lord King was fascinated by her, and then she got pregnant. That was the last time I saw her until she came to me ten years ago with Caden.” June shrugs. “How could I say no to what she was asking? For help. For protection. It was my fault she went there in the first place. I broke the law, and she was the one who paid the price. I owed her.”

  “But she’s from here,” I say.

  “The Lord King of Neospes doesn’t answer to the law. He forbade her to return.”

  I frown to cover my sense of shock at what she is telling me about Cale, about Cale’s father… about who his mother is. I can’t get my mind around it.

  “That’s a large debt,” I say for lack of anything else. June shrugs again, her lips twisting in a sad, wry smile.

  “It is what it is.”

  Despite my shock, her story rings true as I think back to all of the times I’d seen Cale’s mother. She always seemed so odd to me, as if her mind was always somewhere else, like she didn’t quite fit in with everyone else in Neospes. She used to wear these long, flowing, brightly colored dresses – custom-tailored, Cale had once told me – instead of the standard black or gray tunic and leggings that most of us wore. I’d always thought the dresses fanciful and strange. And now I know – she had never belonged there at all.

  “Did Shae tell you anything about me?” I ask June abruptly.

  “No,” she says, checking Shae’s eyes with a thin instrument. “She didn’t have to. I realized what you were after the clinic.”

  My eyes narrow. I voice the words pounding in my head. “What I was?”

  “A soldier of Neospes.”

  “And yet you still trusted me with Caden?” I couldn’t help the derision in my voice.

  “Not at first – I wanted to keep you close – but then I saw something there… something about the way you were with him. And he with you. I thought you cared about him. But I was wrong, wasn’t I?”

  My teeth grind together, and what escapes my lips is little more than a snarl despite the unfamiliar tug in my chest her words provoke. “You are wrong. I don’t give a damn about him. Caden is a target, nothing more.”

  “Riven?”

  We both turn at the quiet voice behind us. The betrayal on Caden’s face hits me like a slap. I meet his eyes and drop them just as quickly. I don’t know how long he’s been standing there, but I know it’s been long enough for him to hear my last few words. I sling my backpack across my chest as if it’s some kind of shield, a distraction maybe, and rifle through its contents until I find what I am looking for. I slide the silver case toward June. I won’t need it anymore – when I return to Neospes, I won’t be coming back.

  “Give her this. It will help.” I stand, slowly stretching my legs. I nod toward the stairs and grab the bags of gear I’ve piled together before leaning over the gas stove in the middle of the kitchen island to tuck one of the metal golf balls that I’d found on one of the dead Vectors in the middle of the grate. I’m business now, emotion tucked deep. “More of them will come, if they’re not here already. We need to move and seal the door. Either you come down with me or you can stay here to greet them. One way or another, there’s not going to be much left up here. It’s your call.”

  I don’t look at Caden as I push past him to the trapdoor above the basement stairs. Truth is, I can’t even look at him. My curiously burning eyes won’t allow it.

  UNDERGROUND

  By the time I’ve carried Shae down the stairs along with a few extra supplies that June’s thrown in, I’ve almost forgotten that Caden’s even there. But I feel him staring at me, with heavy thoughtful glances that make me far more unsettled than if they were filled with anger. June has gone quiet as well, but I expected that. Knowing what she knows, I’d be the last person she would ever fully trust, but still, there’s an uneasy understanding between us that at the moment we both need each other.

  “Where does this lead?” I ask her, noticing another steel door that opens to a dark tunnel behind it.

  She stares at me before answering and throwing me a ratty map. “Couple miles underground. This tunnel forks to the hospital and to an abandoned building near Horrow.” She jabs at the map I’ve opened. “See all the tunnels? There’s an entire web of them down here, most of them collapsed and unusable. Used to be a safe-house for an old underground military base back in the Forties,” June adds, noticing my expression as I peruse the piece of paper. “It’s why Shae chose it.” She moves over to check on Shae. “She’s looking better,” she murmurs more to herself than to me.

  “It won’t last,” I blurt out before I can stop myself. I tuck the map into my back pocket. “She’s everted too much already. Her brain can’t take the pressure.”

  “What pressure?” The low voice belongs to Caden. He’s sitting on the cot I was lying on earlier, pretending to sort through the gear in his fencing bag. “What does ‘everted’ mean?”

  I pause for a beat before answering him. “Ever heard of the bends?”

  “Decompression sickness? Like when you come up too fast from a deep depth and pressurized gases are released into the body too quickly?”

  I have to fight the instant urge to eyeroll. Caden’s so technical even with the little things. “Exactly. Well, it’s like the bends, only it starts in the brain. Then it becomes physical because humans aren’t built to evert” – I spare a glance at Shae’s twitching form, knowing she can still hear me – “to jump between universes. Our bodies are too frail, and when they start to break down, they become susceptible to infection and disease.” June’s fists are clenched at her side, her eyes unreadable. “It’s why the Guardians were put in place. To stop any contamination.”

  “That makes no sense. Guardians? Contamination?” Caden says, lurching to his feet, interrupting my quiet words. “Listen to yourself. People don’t jump between universes!”

  I shake my head and amend my earlier thought. He may be good with the little things, but when it comes to the big picture, he can be pretty obtuse. “Where did you think those things came from, Caden? From the zoo? They’re from somewhere else, a world just like this one, only far, far worse.”

  “No,” he says. “How is that even possible?”

  “A lot of things are possible.” I glare at June. “Didn’t you tell him anything?”

  “We didn’t have to,” June says. “Until you
got here.”

  I stiffen at her tone, but Caden moves to stand in front of me. “What are you talking about? What haven’t they told me, Riven?”

  “Get out of my face, Caden. I mean it.” I can hear the desperation in his voice even in the face of his bravado, but there’s nothing I can say. Telling him anything at all means that I’d have to tell him why I’m there in the first place… that I’m as bad as the Vectors… that June is right about me. I push past him, pretending to study the crates of food along the wall. “I thought you were into all of this scifi stuff? All those DVDs in your room about stargates and whatnot? You’re the genius; you figure it out.”

  “Those are movies.” Caden’s words are slow and deliberate. “They’re made up, you know. Science fiction?”

  “More like science fact.”

  The only sound in the room is the shallow hiss of Shae’s breathing. Caden is staring at me, disbelief, confusion, and anger written all over his face. I’m not surprised. When Cale first told me about the existence of this world, I thought he was been playing me. But in the end, I understood that technology and physics theory had made it not only plausible, but also possible. And the universe was far wider than any of us really knew. Cale speculated that hundreds of other universes existed, but ours was one of the few to come into parallel contact with another.

  I throw my palms into the air and raise an eyebrow. Caden faces my challenge with narrowed eyes, and I can see his mind ticking through the probabilities. “Even if it were possible,” he says grudgingly, “are you saying that Shae – my cousin – is sick because she jumped from this world to another universe and back?”

  “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.” I gesture at myself. “She everted, just as I did. And just like June, once upon a time.” Caden rocks back onto his heels, his face as white as a sheet, staring from June back to me as if we’re ghosts. I know I’m being blunt, but I don’t have time to sugarcoat secrets that Shae and June had concealed from him. “And she’s not your cousin. She’s your warden. Your word, not mine.”

  “Are you serious, right now? I was kidding when I said that.”

  “Well, I’m not. Look, I don’t care if you believe me, or think we’re on the USS Enterprise, or think you’re dreaming. More of those things are going to come, and I need to think for a second without having to explain the nuts and bolts of quantum physics theory to you. Think about it for half a second and you’ll see that it’s not as improbable as it seems.” I open the duffel bag and lay out all of the devices I took off the Vectors. I’m so rattled that I can’t help myself when I pick up one of the golf balls and thrust it into Caden’s face. “Does this look like any technology you’ve ever seen? No? It’s not from here. None of us are, except for June.” I stare him in the eyes, my words like bullets.

  “What are you saying? That I’m not?”

  I turn to June, who’s staring at me with a clenched jaw. “Tell him.”

  June sighs but doesn’t shy away from the task. “She’s right, Caden. What she says is true.”

  “No. No, that’s impossible.”

  “It’s true, Caden,” June says. “Shae would tell you the same.”

  “So you lied to me? All this time?” Caden hisses to her before spinning to walk away and then twisting back around in the same step. “Were you ever going to tell me?” June doesn’t answer, but her expression clearly says that they haven’t planned to. “I don’t believe this,” Caden mutters. “This is insane.”

  “Believe it,” I say flatly just as Shae turns heavily on the bed to face us, gasping. June was right. She’s looking better after the injector, but she’s clearly still in a lot of pain.

  “I’m sorry, Cade,” she wheezes, “…my fault.”

  Caden turns toward me, with a measured glance at Shae’s tortured expression. His eyes are gentle. “Still, it doesn’t make sense. Even if I believed you, then why would Shae endanger herself, knowing the risks of doing it over and over? That she’d… die?”

  I can’t help the twist of my lips nor the snarl that slips from them. “To protect you.”

  June is already on her feet at my tone, her body bridling and ready to defend Caden. I unclench my jaw and try to breathe the spiraling rage out of my body. June feels no such self-control and she’s in my face before I take two breaths.

  “It’s not his fault! That was Shae’s cho–”

  The explosion takes us by surprise, even though I was the one who’d left the gas stove burning in the kitchen, and we’re all slammed to the ground in different directions. Pain rockets through my head and along my sides as I thump against the steel door I’ve been standing next to. Despite the intense throbbing in my head, I jump to shaky feet. Years of training force me to do an automatic check of myself for injuries.

  The Vectors are back.

  They’d be the only things that could have triggered the gas. Everting generates minute pockets of electricity, but for some reason when the Vectors do it, the electrical fields are bigger… big enough to ignite a gas-filled room. The golf balls would have done the rest, and no doubt there won’t be much left of the bodies, or anything else above ground, for that matter.

  A hazy memory drifts through my head – now I remember why the golf balls are called cleaners. Hot enough to incinerate bones and liquefy metal, such that anything in their path would be completely vaporized. The heat from the fire diffuses through the heavy trapdoor despite its thickness.

  “What the hell was that?” Caden grunts, following my lead to stand on shaky legs.

  “A cleaner. One of those silver balls.” I dust the grit from my clothes and blink the soreness from my eyes. A glance in Shae’s direction confirms that she’s unhurt; I can hear her labored breathing over the ringing in my ears. “We need to move. It won’t be long before they find that door. And they will. Murek won’t stop now.”

  “Who’s Murek?” Caden says.

  “A dictator.” I toss a pack toward him, hard. “Get this on. Take only what you need.”

  “Where are we going? We can’t leave. What about school?” The inane question throws me for a second and I stare at him. He reddens and adds, “Shae said–”

  “School’s out, Caden. And I’m in charge, not Shae.”

  I know he’s confused, but school is probably a comforting constant. I bring myself back to the task at hand, a part of my brain belatedly realizing that June hasn’t gotten up.

  “June, you OK?” In the seconds that it takes to turn around, the quiet sense of knowing is already like a shiver across my neck. Shae, for her part, is sitting up and staring at June’s inert body a few feet from where she’s now sitting. The antidote injector has done its job – despite her bloody clothing and the unexpected force of the explosion, she looks nearly back to normal.

  “June’s dead,” she says.

  Her voice breaks the silence and my sudden inability to move. Within seconds, I am at June’s side with Caden not far behind me, and I gently pull her inert body toward me. She’s been thrown against something sharp and her death was instant. The gash on her head is bloody, her sightless eyes wide open and looking right through me. Questioning… judging even in death. Hastily, I close them and turn to Shae with a deep breath.

  “Are you OK? OK to go?” I ask her, not hiding the urgency in my voice. We don’t have a lot of time.

  She nods, distracted, and I can see that her attention is on Caden. The broken look in his eyes reminds me of someone with little experience with death, but my words fade before I can speak them. In my world, death is an expected companion – whether in our brutal history or a foray gone wrong outside the city wall – and I’ve seen more than my fair share of it. Instead, my fingers find Caden’s and I squeeze them, suddenly conscious of Shae’s stare that is fluttering like a moth between our hands and my face. I wrench my hand away as if his fingers are on fire.

  “We need to go,” I growl, removing June’s map from my pocket and opening it next to Shae on a small crate beside t
he bed. “Have you been down all of these?”

  Shae ignores me with a glare to pull the blanket off her bed and tuck it carefully over June. I watch as she and Caden lift the body up to place it gently on the bed. Apart from the blood, June looks like she could be sleeping. Caden stands next to the cot as if he’s in some kind of trance, and doesn’t move until Shae grasps his shoulders with both hands, turning him to face her and shaking him.

  “Caden, remember what I taught you – we take them with us in our hearts. Let her go, OK? There’s nothing you could have done; it was just her time.” Her voice is thready but grows stronger by the second as she pulls him into a tight hug. “We will always carry her with us.”

  The pressure behind my nose and eyes is sudden, like a blow to the head at the sound of Shae’s words, so achingly familiar. She told me the same thing when our mother died. The emotion flooding my body is hot and eviscerating. I swallow past the solid lump in my throat and meet Caden’s wet eyes. He’s staring at me over Shae’s shoulder, and the moment is unending, the mirrored empathy in them acting like a salve on my ridiculous emotions. It is all I can do to tear myself away, grateful for the moment when Shae moves to break the silent and unexpected raw connection stretching between us.

  I compose myself, digging my nails into clammy palms so hard that it stings. “Moving on,” I repeat stonily. “The tunnels?”

  “Haven’t changed a bit, have you, Riv? Still as cold as ice.”

  “Occupational hazard,” I toss back, smoothing the map on the crate. I’m clenching my teeth so tightly, it feels like they will shatter at any moment. I can’t look at Caden even though I know he, unlike Shae, is looking at me and seeing right through my bluster. Thankfully, he says nothing.

  Shae kneels beside me and jabs at a spot on the map. “We’re here.” She traces her finger along a faded brown line. “We need to get to here. It’s a long way, about twenty miles.”