Fair Coin

by E. C. Myers

  “Shit,” Ephraim said.

  He turned away from Jena's lifeless body, but he could still see her drifting in front of him, even through the tears blinding his vision. He wiped his eyes with the palm of his hand, pressing so hard he saw bright spots flare. But he still saw Jena.

  Ephraim crouched with his back to Nathan and pressed his hands to the fountain's bottom with renewed urgency. The water was so hot in this spot he was surprised it wasn't boiling. He patted around as if he were looking for a lost contact lens. He must be close.

  He squinted through the dark water. George Washington's head wavered before him like a mirage, luminous in the moonlight. The coin had landed on heads after his last toss. Ephraim smiled.

  “I have it,” he said.

  “Bring it here,” Nathan said.

  “I don't think so.” Ephraim picked up the coin, wincing as he closed his hand around the burning metal. He stood and turned to face Nathan.

  Ephraim felt a twinge in his stomach. The air rippled around him.

  “What's—?” Nathan started. He launched himself at Ephraim. They collided and fell backward in a tangle of limbs.

  And slammed into hard concrete.

  In an instant everything was different. Ephraim was lying on the now dry bottom of the fountain, his back screaming with pain. He was too winded to move.

  Nathan groaned and dragged himself to his feet beside Ephraim. “Ow,” he said. “Fuck.” He retrieved his gun and kicked Ephraim in the side. Ephraim twisted over and curled to protect himself.

  Nathan pulled out a cell phone and flipped it open as he stumbled out of the fountain.

  Ephraim lay there for a while, trying to force air back into his lungs. Finally he sat up painfully. Water dripped from Ephraim's wet clothes, forming a brackish puddle around him. His face was wet too, but not from fountain water.

  The granite bottom of the fountain was cracked and pitted; instead of coins it was filled with garbage, crushed soda cans, cigarette butts, and broken glass. The statue of Atlas was nearly black with tarnish.

  Nathan was gone. So was Jena's body.

  Ephraim stood shakily and leaned on the rim of the fountain for support.

  “Ephraim!” A voice shouted behind him. It was a very familiar voice, the one he wanted to hear more than anything in the world. But it couldn't be. He turned and saw Jena running toward the fountain with a wide grin on her face. She was alive!

  “I knew you'd be back,” she said. Before he could speak, she planted her lips against his, and he didn't think about anything else.

  She pushed him away and put her hand against her mouth. “You're not him.” She had been on the verge of tears, but now anger flashed across her face.

  “Jena, it's me,” he said.

  She scowled. “Jena? Shit.”

  “What? What's wrong?”

  “My name is Zoe. Zoe Kim.”

  She wasn't Jena. Her hair was long, loose around her shoulders. She wore dark red lipstick and a white tank top. She had a tiny silver stud in her nose, but even more striking than that was seeing her for the first time without glasses. He suddenly noticed her eyes were blue, not brown. She must be Jena's doppelganger in this universe.

  Ephraim was in a different universe.

  “What happened to my Ephraim?” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “If you're here, where did you leave him?”

  “It's a long story.” Ephraim glanced around the park, suddenly paranoid. Every shadow seemed menacing. An image flashed in his mind of Nathan watching them from the bushes. “Can we discuss this somewhere else?”

  “Not until you tell me what happened.” She crossed her arms.

  “Nathan's probably not far from here, and he's armed.”

  “Nate.” She spit the word out then actually spit onto the dirty and cracked cobblestones. “He came back? Ephraim was going to ditch him in another universe.”

  “He hitched a ride on the wish that brought me here.” She looked puzzled. “He's trying to get the coin, to get me to use it for him. He just killed…” He choked on the words and sat on the edge of the fountain. He couldn't tell Zoe that he'd just seen her, or even someone who looked like her, die right in front of him while he did nothing. He stared at the puddle of water forming around his feet. Surely he was imagining that it had a reddish tint. He shuddered.

  Zoe's face sobered. “You can tell me about it on the way to my place,” she said.

  Ephraim dropped the coin into the fountain, crossed his arms over his knees and doubled over. He couldn't move, he was exhausted of all this. He kept seeing Jena's body. He shouldn't have brought her along with him. He should have listened to her when she told him not to go after the coin. He'd been trying to help Nathan, and he'd ended up losing two friends.

  “Hey.” Zoe crouched and picked up the coin. She brushed it off and looked at it with a concerned frown. “I know you're confused. You've obviously been through a lot.”

  “You have no idea,” he said.

  “But you really don't have time for a breakdown.”

  “Just give me a minute.”

  “You're stronger than this, Ephraim.” She pressed the coin into his palm and closed her hand over his. Her grip was firm and reassuring. She gave him a tender look then stood, pulling him up with her.

  He looked her in the eyes. Her blue eyes, reminding him that she wasn't Jena no matter how much she resembled her. “How do you know? We don't even know each other.”

  “I know because my Ephraim wouldn't take all of this sitting down. Now let's go.” She looked down at his still bare feet. “Don't people wear shoes where you come from?”

  Ephraim followed Jena—no, Zoe—in a daze. She seemed to be sticking to darkened side streets. It was only ten at night, and downtown Summerside was completely deserted.

  “Where is everyone?”

  “It's after curfew,” Zoe said.

  He stared at her blankly.

  “Kids here aren't allowed out after sundown.” She stopped him on a street corner, and they waited for the light to change. “We have to be careful.”

  “That seems a little extreme.”

  “We're at war. They say it's for our own safety.”

  “Um. Who are we fighting?”

  “Iraq, Iran, North Korea. The USSR is getting in on it, too.”

  “You mean Russia?”

  “And the rest of the Soviet Union. Which means China probably won't be far behind.” That sounded like the beginning of a third World War.

  Ephraim stepped off the curb into the street—

  Zoe grabbed his arm and pulled him back just as a car sped past from his right, barely a foot in front of him. Its horn blared, and it squealed to a stop half a block away, its brake lights glowing like red eyes.

  “Are you trying to get yourself killed?” Zoe said. The car door opened, and someone shouted after them.

  “Hell. Come on!” Zoe said.

  She grabbed his hand, and they ran across the street to duck into the shadowed entranceway of a building. Ephraim grunted as he stepped on broken concrete. Running in bare feet on pavement hurt.

  “That car came out of nowhere!” he said.

  “Didn't your mother teach you to look both ways before crossing the street?” Zoe asked.

  “I did look, but that car was on the wrong side of the street,” he replied.

  “You still don't get it? This isn't your universe. Things are different here,” Zoe said. She sighed. “Just be more careful.”

  She started moving again, and Ephraim followed her down the sidewalk, nervously darting looks to his left and right. He saw another car pass them, also on the wrong side of the street. The driver was behind a wheel on the passenger side of the car, like in Europe.

  Ephraim tagged along silently, chewing her words over and over in his mind. This isn't your universe. Jena's multi-world theory was right, then. He was in a parallel universe where cars drove on the other side of the street, and there was a cit
y-wide curfew, and the United States was stuck on the losing side of a war. And Jena called herself Zoe.

  He stared at her as they walked, wondering what else was different here. This universe had another Nathan—Nate. And there'd been another Ephraim, too.

  “Here we are,” Zoe said.

  Zoe's house looked more or less like he remembered it, perhaps a bit more weather-worn. The front lawn was parched and dead, her mother's prized flowers long overrun by weeds. Zoe pulled out a key ring and started unlocking the door. It looked like there were four separate sets of locks.

  Zoe put a hand on Ephraim's chest. Her fingernails were short and unpainted. “You have to be quiet. My dad's girlfriend is over tonight.” The silver stud in her nose flashed in the porchlight. It was kind of sexy.

  “His girlfriend? What happened to your mother?”

  Zoe's face crumpled.

  “Oh no. I shouldn't have said—”

  “Never mind. You didn't know. We'll sort all of this out in a minute. Just be quiet. We're going up to my room, and my dad doesn't like it when I bring boys home.”

  “How often does that happen?” Ephraim asked.

  “Well. He doesn't like it when I bring you home. Ever since he caught us…” Zoe looked away.

  “Um.” Ephraim clamped his mouth shut and followed Zoe upstairs. He felt so lost in this universe.

  Ephraim halted at the bottom of the steps, struck by a disturbing thought. If the coin was powerful enough to transport him to a parallel universe, maybe it had done it before.

  Maybe it had done it every time he made a wish.

  That's what Jena had been trying to tell him just before she was killed.

  “Crap,” Ephraim said. He felt a bit dizzy.

  “Shhh,” Zoe said, her hand on his arm.

  As they crept around the landing on the second floor, Ephraim heard a woman giggling in a room by the stairs. Zoe rolled her eyes and pushed him past the door to her bedroom at the end of the hall. She closed and locked her bedroom door behind them.

  “I've only seen his new girlfriend once,” Zoe said. “I think she teaches art classes at a community college in the city. Or maybe she takes classes there. She doesn't look much older than me.” She wrinkled her nose in disgust.

  Zoe flopped down on the bed, and Ephraim stood, wondering what he should do. She stuck her foot out and pointed at the desk chair with her toes.

  He looked around the room, wondering if it was any different from Jena's room, since he'd never seen it before. From the books piled up on every available surface, most of the stacks almost as tall as him, he saw that Zoe had something in common with her counterpart.

  “Have you read all of these?” Ephraim said.

  “Not yet. But I'm working my way through them.” She pointed to one stack and smiled. “That's August.” She pointed to the one next to it. “September.” Her hand swept around the room in an arc. “October, November, December. Not much else to do around here these days, especially since Eph took off.” She cleared her throat.

  “Did you rob a bookstore?” Ephraim said.

  “The Summerside Public Library ran out of funding. I rescued those before they closed. Like an extended loan.” She looked at him soberly. “I know you have a lot of questions, but I have to ask one first. It's important.”

  Ephraim nodded.

  “Do you know what happened to my Ephraim? If you're here, he must have come to your world and given you the coin.”

  Ephraim lowered his eyes. “I never actually saw him in person, but…I'm sorry.”

  Zoe closed her eyes and tears welled up under her long eyelashes.

  “He was hit by a bus,” Ephraim said.

  “That's so stupid,” she said. “He'd been to so many different worlds. He knew how to survive.”

  “I guess you two were…close.”

  She only nodded.

  “Jena, I—”

  “It's Zoe.” Her voice was hard. She swiped the back of her hand across her face and with one last sniffle she composed herself. “Don't call me that again.”

  “You just look so much like her. I have to remind myself you're a different person.”

  “I know what you mean.” She scratched her nose, just above the tiny silver piercing. “My dad was going to name me Jena, but my mom preferred Zoe. She died during labor, so.”

  “I didn't know.” Maybe he should stop talking. Everything he said only seemed to make her more upset.

  “You're going to have to get used to a lot of new things in this universe.”

  “I don't plan to be here long enough for that.”

  Ephraim pulled out the coin. He was shocked to see that the metal surface of it was blank. He turned it over. It was smooth on both sides. It wasn't a coin anymore, just a thin metal disc, though it retained its reeding, the grooved lines along the edge.

  He felt like his heart had stopped. “It's game over,” he said.

  “What?”

  He showed her the coin.

  “Oh, right,” she said. “I noticed that when you appeared in the fountain.”

  “So it's gone blank like this before?”

  “Not that I've ever seen.”

  Ephraim squeezed the coin. Maybe it didn't have unlimited wishes after all. If he'd used the last one, he was stuck here.

  “But I only got a good look at it a couple of times,” Zoe said. “My Ephraim…” Her voice caught and she swallowed. “Ephraim and Nate never let me into their little boys-only club. It was always a coin when I saw it.”

  “So why does it look like this now?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. It could be out of juice. They used to talk about charging it up.”

  He turned it over in his hand. Maybe a better question was why it had looked like a quarter in the first place. “Is Puerto Rico a state here?” he asked.

  Zoe shook her head. “Just a territory. We don't even have quarters like that, with the war going on and all.”

  That meant the coin probably didn't originate in this universe either. But then why did it bring him here when he wished for it to go back where it had come from?

  “I wish I were back home,” Ephraim said, wishing harder than he ever had before. The coin didn't even heat up. He flipped the coin and caught it, but as he expected, nothing happened except for Zoe gaping at him.

  “Out of power,” he said. “Or broken.” He didn't even want to think about that. Maybe it had been underwater for too long, or been damaged when he and Nate crashed into the fountain.

  “Why did you flip the coin?” Zoe asked.

  “That's how I was told to use it. To make my wish come true.”

  Zoe laughed. “You thought it was granting wishes?”

  The coin wasn't heating up, but his face was getting warm from embarrassment. “I found a note…” Even though he'd figured out that Nate had left it in his locker, he didn't know why Nate would want him to learn how to use the coin. And he obviously couldn't trust anything Nate told him. “Forget it,” Ephraim said.

  “You really have no idea what you have there,” Zoe said.

  “Now I know the coin—or whatever it really is—was bumping me into parallel universes.” Only because Jena had figured it out, of course, but he wasn't about to admit that to Zoe. “But at first I thought it was magic. That's how it was advertised.”

  Zoe laughed. “I'm sorry. I shouldn't be laughing. There's a popular saying, that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ At least, to simple minds.” She cast him a sly glance.

  “If you know so much about it, why don't you enlighten me?” he asked.

  “I only know stuff I picked up here and there, when the guys let something slip. I didn't even realize you could activate the coin without the controller,” Zoe said. “But I suppose my Ephraim must have figured that out.”

  “There's a controller too? What does that do?”

  She rolled her eyes. “What do you think the ‘controller’ does?” />
  Ephraim bit his lip in annoyance.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It's a small device.” She held her hands up and connected her index fingers and thumbs in a rectangle. “It could be mistaken for a cell phone, but it stores numbers for different universes, wherever the coin has been. Like quantum GPS coordinates, I suppose. And it controls where the coin takes you. It must charge it, too. It's been a while since the coin was plugged in, and you've been using it a lot, I assume.”

  Ephraim groaned. Every wish he made must have taken him to a random parallel universe, since the coin hadn't received specific coordinates. He'd been using it blindly and draining its battery, if it had one.

  “How am I supposed to get home?” he asked.

  “I'm sure the controller still has the coordinates for your universe. And I bet it can recharge the coin, too.”

  It seemed Ephraim needed the controller to leave this universe, but he doubted Nate would jump at the chance to help him unless Ephraim helped him first.

  “So how did your Ephraim work the coin?” he asked.

  “I saw them leave once. They didn't know I was watching. Ephraim slid the coin into the controller, then Nate did something to it. Then Ephraim took the coin back and they disappeared. I didn't quite buy that they were visiting other realities until I saw it for myself.”

  “But the coin shifted me to other universes without the controller, and Nate followed me to them without the coin. How?”

  “No idea. They always worked as a team.” Zoe arched her back and stretched, causing Ephraim to lose his train of thought. She sat up and crossed her legs Indian style, curling her toes toward herself. “But I know who would know more about all this,” she said.

  “I don't think Nate's going to volunteer any info.”

  “Not him. He and Ephraim got the device from someone else: some man approached them in the park. And yes, I thought that was skeevy too.”