BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller

by Dan Rix

  Both my proximity to Damian and the fact that we were locked in a small, sound-proof room together heightened my awareness. Every crinkle of my shirt, every gasp for breath, every thump of my heart resounded right inside my ear drum.

  I eyed the mirror, itching to stick my hand through, to test it out—

  “Blaire.”

  “I’m listening.” My attention snapped back to him, and his hardened stare made me flinch.

  “What we do is dangerous,” he said.

  “I know that. Obviously.”

  “No you don’t,” he said. “Listen to me. Every time you crossover, you go to a place that isn’t real. You will begin to question what is real . . . and you will lose yourself. Do you understand me?”

  I nodded.

  “This is the source,” he said, gesturing around us. “This is real. This is our home . . . this is where we belong.” He pointed to the mirror. “That’s a reflection. It’s not real. It exists only when you break symmetry—and only until you destroy the mirror. Do you understand?”

  Again, I nodded.

  “You will only use the mirror in this room or room A to crossover. Once you break symmetry, it will be your only entry into the reflection and your only exit. Should you try to reenter the source through any other mirror, you will only break symmetry again. You’ll create a reflection of a reflection. Two levels down. Blaire, do you understand me?”

  I swallowed. “Yes.”

  “If you go through a mirror, and the mirror breaks before you come back—while you’re still on the other side—do you know what happens?”

  I shook my head.

  “We call it being orphaned. It’s the worst fate imaginable. You’re trapped inside the reflection . . . forever. Got it?”

  A chill surfaced under my skin. I nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now let’s go over the rules.”

  “What the hell were those?”

  “Tips.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Okay, Damian. I get it, it’s dangerous.”

  He chuckled. “You have no idea, Blaire. No idea.”

  “If it’s so freaking dangerous, why do it?”

  “You’re right,” he said. “There’s very little in this world that justifies using crossover. Most carriers lose themselves after discovering their ability. They get lost down there. They vanish. There’s a reason Charles is so fussy about everything; he’s meticulous, he’s careful, he’s professional . . . that’s how he’s survived so long. He’s earned my trust and that’s why I do this for him. That’s all you have as a carrier. Trust.”

  He didn’t answer my question. “Well I don’t trust you, Damian.”

  He smirked. “I already know you do. Rule number one: after every walk, you destroy the mirror. The symmetry’s broken and it no longer functions as a mirror. It’s a portal now between two parallel universes, and it has to be destroyed.” He stared at me. “Got it?”

  I nodded, feeling my eyes glaze over.

  “Blaire, I’m not kidding around.” The intensity of his eyes made me want to shrink.

  But the last few hours had frazzled my brain, I couldn’t muster more attention. “I’m trying,” I mumbled.

  “Do you know how to break the mirror when you come back?”

  I raised my fist. He raised his eyebrow.

  “No good?” I said.

  “Try it.”

  “Now?”

  “Punch it as hard as you can. Try it.”

  “But that would hurt,” I stepped up to the mirror and assessed the glass. “I could kick it.”

  “Go on, try it.”

  “No, Damian, I’m not going to kick the mirror.”

  “Kick it, Blaire,” he ordered.

  “Stop talking to me like that,” I said. “You’re scaring me.”

  “Good. I was worried you didn’t feel fear,” he said. “When you’re back in this room and there’s something chasing you, you won’t have time to think. Break the mirror, Blaire.”

  Tentatively, I tapped the mirror with my foot, half expecting my foot to pass right through the glass. It didn’t. Still a normal mirror.

  His hardened expression melted and he actually laughed. “Come on. Seriously. Pretend it’s my face.”

  I kicked it harder. The mirror wobbled.

  “Right, I forgot,” he said with a smirk. “I’m too pretty. Pretend it’s Amy’s face.”

  I glared at him, lip curled. My foot slammed into the mirror, and the whole frame shook. I thought he would jump in and stop me, but he just stood there.

  The mirror hung intact, unblemished.

  “Move over,” Damian pushed me out of the way and lined himself up with the mirror in a Karate stance. He lunged, and his boot hammered into the mirror. The impact echoed like a gunshot, and the walls of room B trembled in the aftermath. The lights flickered.

  The mirror quivered to rest, unbroken.

  Huh? My jaw slackened. I couldn’t believe it—he should have kicked a hole right through the wall.

  Damian eased his leg down and swiveled to face me. “These mirrors are our only way back,” he said. “We don’t take chances. So how do you break the mirror?”

  I glanced around the room, and then I saw it. Duh, Blaire, the axe.

  I stepped up to the wall and coiled my fingers around the handle. With superhuman effort, I hoisted the axe above my head, my whole body straining. I took a deep breath, averted my eyes, and let the steel edge plummet toward the mirror.

  Damian caught the hilt just inches from the mirror’s surface. “Good, Blaire. But this is your backup plan.” He relieved me of the axe, and remounted it on the wall. “There’s an easier way. You’ve done it before.”

  Ah . . . my eyes flicked to the red button. Sometimes I can be so dense.

  “Right,” he said. “The red button. When you come back from a crossover, your first thought should only be to press the red button. Do nothing else. Just press the red button, and everything will be okay again.”

  “Question. What’s the point of all this?” I said. “I mean, isn’t a reflection just going to be exactly the same as here, as the . . . uh—”

  “Source?” he said.

  “Yeah. Why bother crossing over if we can just do the same thing in the source?”

  “After you break symmetry the reflection starts to diverge from the source.”

  “Yeah, but why?” I said. “Wouldn’t my reflection just step out of the mirror and do exactly what I was doing but in the source, cancelling out the effect?”

  Damian nodded his head. “You’re starting to get it. That doesn’t happen because you crossover into your reflection. She doesn’t come out. You go in. That means anything you do in the reflection stays in the reflection. If you wanted to you could rob a bank in a reflection, kill a dozen cops, and make it back to the source before they caught you. It would be like it never happened. The money wouldn’t even be missing.”

  I searched his black eyes. “You’ve done that, haven’t you?”

  “A reflection isn’t real, Blaire.”

  “What happens when a mirror breaks?” I said. “What happens to everything on the other side?”

  “It disappears. It vanishes. It no longer exists.”

  “So the universe is destroyed?”

  “I’m sure it stays out there somewhere, but it can never connect to ours again, so it’s as good as nonexistent. Didn’t you learn that in your philosophy class?”

  “Right. Like if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it doesn’t really make a sound,” I said. “Okay, so break the mirror when I’m done. Got it.”

  “Number two,” he said. “Never, ever, ever, ever, ever nest crossovers. No crossovers within crossovers.
”

  I needed a moment to think about this one. So that would be like crossing over into a reflection, finding another mirror, and crossing over again. “What’s wrong with that?” I said.

  “Three reasons. One—you’re guaranteed to get lost. You’ll lose your way and you won’t be able to find your way back to the source . . . the true source. Two—each time you go down a level, that’s one more mirror that could break. You’re twice as likely to get orphaned.”

  I waited, but his explanation had ended. “The third reason?”

  He hesitated before answering. “It’s not clear exactly what happens to us when we go through one mirror, what the side effects are. The effects are cumulative each time you crossover. But nesting trips would multiply the effects. My guess is you wouldn’t make it very deep.”

  An uneasy fog filled my mind. “What does it do to us?”

  “Crossing over . . . it hurts a little. It does something to our bodies.”

  “You mean it causes damage?” I thought of my father’s MRI, the lesions inside his body, the internal bleeding. “Am I at risk?”

  “Not at first,” he said. “Only if you do it too much. Okay, are you ready for rule number three?”

  Though I still wanted to voice my questions about crossover side effects, I nodded. This was all too much.

  “The last rule is the most important.” His gaze held me prisoner. “Blaire, I mean this one. I really mean this one—make sure nothing living comes back out with you that didn’t go in with you.”

  ***

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, alarmed.

  “Reflections,” he said. “Of people. When you crossover, you won’t have to contend with your own reflection, but you’ll have to contend with ours. It’s best if you don’t run into our reflections down there, otherwise we’ll start asking questions. We’ll want to come back up with you. That’s why each of these rooms has a private exit, which you use in the reflection. Only when you’re back in the source can you use the door we came in through.”

  I nodded. “I think I’m getting the hang of this.”

  “No, you’re not, Blaire. Trust me, you’re not. This stuff is going to mess with your mind. You’re going to stay up at night thinking of the permutations. You’re going to have nightmares about getting stuck in a mirror, nightmares about not being in the true source. Believe me, you do not have the hang of this.”

  “So far, all you’ve said about crossing over is that it’s crazy unsafe, it screws with my mind, and it’s most likely going to permanently damage my body. It sounds like suicide. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t walk out right now.”

  “That would be smart. The door’s right here.” He stepped out of the way.

  Just go, Blaire. While you still have the chance. “You won’t chase me or haunt my dreams?” To test his proposition, I edged toward the exit, away from the mirror.

  He shrugged and stuck his hands in his pockets. “I promise.”

  I reached for the handle, doubting he would let me just walk away after all he’d told me. Doubting I would let myself—

  “But if you leave, you leave behind the truth,” he said. “You leave behind your father.”

  There it was.

  My hand froze on the steel, and my eyes darted to the mirror, a doorway to answers. He was right. Everything else—clues, leads, my dad’s entire case—led to a dead end; I knew because I had reached it. This internship was all I had left of him.

  If I wanted answers, I had to follow in his footsteps and carry this internship through to the end. No matter what they asked of me.

  They were asking me to walk through a mirror.

  I mean, I could at least stick my hand through, right? It couldn’t hurt that much . . .

  “He wouldn’t ask me to do this for him,” I blurted out, cranking the handle another inch. “He just . . . wouldn’t.”

  “You’re right. He didn’t,” said Damian. “He never wanted you involved. That’s why we didn’t recruit you until now.”

  “And now that he’s dead, I’m fair game.”

  “Blaire, have you ever seen your whole world shimmer?” he said. “Just for a second, like it’s not even real.”

  I studied his expression, a mask of conflicted emotion. “Like I’m dreaming.”

  “Like you’re going to wake up any second. Like you’re only watching things take place from somewhere far away. Like it’s all a mirage, one endless déjà vu.”

  I bit my lip, trying to keep my composure. He had just described my life. “So what? Everyone feels that way.”

  “Are you sure?” He raised an eyebrow. “Because that’s who we are, Blaire. That’s why we crossover . . . it’s in our genetics. We’re constantly searching for what’s real. Walk out that door and you stay ignorant, and you live with that for the rest of your life. Stay and you learn the truth—but with a burden you can’t imagine. It’s your choice.”

  I wanted to argue with him, but knew he was right. I eased my hand off the door handle. “I’ll do it.”

  “If I were you, I would have walked out the door,” he said.

  “Just shut up and teach me how to crossover.”

  ***

  A lazy smile crossed his face. “If you insist.”

  “But one more question,” I said. “Why the quarantine zone?”

  “I take it you’ve figured out it’s not a drill.”

  “Yeah, but what is it?”

  “Hopefully, you’ll know after tonight,” he said. “Oh, and before we crossover, you have to take off your clothes. Clothes won’t go through a mirror.”

  I nodded solemnly. That made sense. I waited, but he just stood there, watching me.

  “Aren’t you going to look away?”

  He smirked and tilted his head to the side.

  “And don’t watch me in the mirror, either,” I said. Feeling exposed, confused, and nervous, I pulled off my T-shirt.

  From the side, his smirk transformed into a grin. I kept my eyes trained on him to make sure he wasn’t peeking and unbuttoned my jeans. My face burned. My second piece of clothing crumpled to the floor.

  “Can I at least keep my underwear on?” I pleaded.

  “I was kidding,” he said, barely stifling his laughter. “You don’t have to take off your clothes. Anything that’s touching you goes through.”

  My jaw fell. I jerked my jeans back on, yanked on my shirt, and punched him. Might as well have punched the mirror. I wrung out my hand afterward, trying to ease the sting in my knuckles.

  “Just wanted to loosen you up.” He pulled out two rolls of painter’s tape, one red and one blue. “Are you familiar with the story of Hansel and Gretel?”

  “Yeah, they get boiled alive.”

  “Uh, not sure what fairytale you’re talking about, but in Hansel and Gretel they find their way home by leaving a trail of white pebbles.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Can we please just do this already?”

  He held up the tape. “These are your pebbles. Never go through a mirror unless you’ve marked it. And never leave the mirror on the other side unless you mark it on the back.”

  “Okay, Mom.” I crossed my arms.

  Damian made a neat frame of red tape all the way around the mirror. “A red mirror leads to a reflection. Once we’re on the other side, we’re going to put up blue tape. A blue mirror leads to the source. When you’re getting out of a mission, head towards a blue mirror. Blue equals safety. That’s why we never use both rooms at once, because if you go into the wrong room, the other mirror won’t lead back to the source.”

  “I get it, Damian,” I said, still miffed at the clothing joke.

  He shook his head. “I’m getting Charles and telling him you’re not ready
.”

  “I’m not ready? You’re the one telling me to take off my clothes and acting like a four-year-old.”

  “I didn’t look, Blaire.”

  “You wanted to.”

  Another infuriating smirk. “Maybe.”

  I uncrossed my arms. “Okay, red tape equals source—”

  “Wrong. Try again.”

  “Blue tape equals source.”

  “Now etch that into your brain,” he said, “because it’s going to save your life.”

  ***

  Damian booted up a laptop on a stool in front of the mirror. A laminated warning flyer hung off the seat: Cell phones and identification only. Carry your key with you at ALL TIMES. Do not set your key down here.

  “Data gets screwed up if you bring electronics through a mirror, so we transmit infra-red,” he explained. “Leave your cell phone and personal effects here. Once we crossover, we’ll pick up their reflections.”

  “What . . . how?” I was still getting used to all this.

  “Like this.” He set his smart phone on the stool next to the laptop. He pointed to the cell phone on the stool in front of me. “This is the source. If we bring it through the mirror, all the data gets reversed and garbled.” He pointed at the mirror, at the reflection of the cell phone. “That is the reflection. We use that one.”

  “Aren’t they the same phone?”

  “You’ll get used to it,” he said. “Once we break the symmetry, the phone’s reflection will be able to move independently of the phone’s source.”

  His laptop beeped, and the nervousness hit me in a sudden hot rush. We were about to crossover.

  “Hold my hand,” he said. “We have to break the symmetry together, while we’re touching each other.”

  I stared at his outstretched hand, and the boy who cried wolf came to mind. “If this is just a ploy to get me to hold your hand—”

  “It’s not,” he said quickly. “If I break the symmetry alone, your reflection will suddenly start acting of her own free will. Then when you enter, there will be two of you.”