BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller

by Dan Rix

  My heart jittered, momentarily weightless. No way could my face conceal the previous night from him. My eyes dropped.

  “I had a great dream last night,” he said, plopping down next to me with two plates heaped with scrambled eggs, three bagels, muffins, waffles, bacon, sausage, and a stack of eight or nine pancakes. “You’d never guess what it was.”

  I caught his eyes only briefly, and felt all the blood in my body rush to my face. How? How did he know?

  The answer hit me.

  Overlap.

  I had forgotten about overlap.

  “You . . . you overlap too?” I asked, mortified.

  “Even more than you.” He grinned. “I remember everything.”

  “Damian is one of those rare cases who overlaps completely,” said Charles, folding his newspaper in half and laying it down. “He can remember every broken symmetry.”

  The kiss.

  Now everyone knew.

  Damian had told them all. Heat surged to my cheeks, burned my face. Three pairs of eyes drilled into me. Trapped. I was trapped inside the booth, no escape. I thought of climbing onto the table, trampling Damian’s breakfast, and fleeing.

  “Blaire, we know you had fun last night,” said Charles, “but that doesn’t change the fact that you disobeyed protocol. You deliberately engaged one of our reflections.”

  “More like took advantage of,” said Amy.

  “Who cares?” I said. “Nothing happened. That’s why we crossover, right? There’s no consequences.”

  “There are rules, Blaire,” said Charles. “This time you got lucky.”

  “She wishes,” Amy muttered.

  “Will you shut it,” I said, glaring at her.

  “Had he been coherent,” said Charles, raising his voice over our bickering, “it might have occurred to him you were acting out of character, Blaire. That you were still in crossover and that his world was a reflection.”

  “Oh, please,” I sneered, “he’s always coherent.” I nailed Damian with a dagger stare, for telling them.

  “He might have tried to come back with you into the source,” said Charles.

  “He knows better. None of us would do that.” I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation with him right next to me, smirking at my expense.

  “Easy for you to say when you’re the one who gets to go back to the source,” said Charles. “Try having someone tell you you’re only a reflection, you don’t matter, that you’re going to be orphaned in a broken world. See how you react.”

  “It was my fault,” said Damian, the first words out of him since he first sat down; my eyebrows peaked. He raised his gaze to Charles. “The office was really hot, I know . . . it wasn’t professional.” He glanced sideways at me, a teasing glint in his eyes. “I’ll sleep with my shirt on next time so she doesn’t get distracted.”

  And for a moment there, I thought he was about to defend me. I reached for the nearest object, a syrup dispenser, and emptied it into his lap.

  “Mature, Blaire.” He held his plate of pancakes under the maple stream and grabbed a handful of napkins from the table to dab off his jeans.

  “You kissed back,” I said.

  “I never said I didn’t.”

  I held the dispenser over his head, doled out a sticky globule, and smeared it into his irritatingly perfect gelled hair, ruining it. He flinched, and swatted my hand away. “Enough, okay?”

  I giggled at his new wet-cat look as he stomped away to the bathroom, frantically repairing his hairdo.

  “Well, now that we’ve discussed that,” said Charles, laying his palms flat on the table, his tone calm again. “I’ve sent the vial Blaire collected to Doctor Johnson. She’s going to get the DNA sequenced for us and hopefully give us an idea of what we’re dealing with here.”

  ***

  Despite my embarrassment that everyone knew I kissed Damian in a reflection, I had to somehow make it through the week.

  I holed myself up at my desk—determined to ignore Amy’s piercing and overly delighted cackles at every single word, joke or not, that Damian murmured from the couch—and focused on my work, the next level security systems for the Immunology building. The actual security protecting the artifact chamber itself.

  Of course Damian would overlap. He lived and breathed crossover.

  But I overlapped too, so why couldn’t I remember any dreams where he experimented with my reflection?

  To be fair, I didn’t always overlap . . .

  Forget him, Blaire. I forced my mind back to the artifact. To the DNA the army collected off the artifact, which I had pinched yesterday. What was it Dr. Anderson had said? Not quite human.

  A new species?

  The questions only fueled my curiosity about the quarantine, the frantic military research, and what, exactly, they could possibly have hidden under the Immunology building, two hundred feet below grade.

  “Blaire, can I talk to you?” said Charles from the foot of the stairs, his eyes once again crossed with foreboding.

  What now?

  I sighed and pushed off my desk, grateful at least to escape the room of horrors. Amy’s bladelike stare followed me up the stairs.

  In his office, Charles ushered me into the chair across from his desk.

  He circled to the other side and picked up a piece of paper. He remained standing. “This was just faxed to me from Doctor Johnson. Those DNA samples you collected from the genomics lab, we were able to have them analyzed.”

  “So . . . what are they?”

  Charles removed his glasses and massaged his forehead. “It’s human DNA,” he said. “We’re sure of that.”

  In other words, not an alien life form. I wasn’t sure whether to feel disappointed the news wasn’t more interesting or relieved. “Well, whose is it?”

  “Usually it’s not possible to identify anyone from DNA alone,” he said. “Not unless you can match it with a sample already on file, which narrows the pool considerably since we’re working with a private lab.”

  Something in his tone made me pause. “You said usually?”

  “It turns out the very same lab we sent the sample to had recently run tests on an identical strain of DNA.”

  I studied his face, waiting, my heart making shallow thuds.

  “You see,” he continued, “they got an electropherogram with uniform peaks, which rules out sample cross-contamination. There was only one person’s DNA in that sample.”

  “And they had a record of that person?”

  Charles nodded and glanced up at me. “That sample you stole from the genomics lab, the sample that was taken from the artifact—it’s your DNA, Blaire.”

  Chapter 16

  It registered somewhere south of my sternum, a lump, almost pain—what Charles Donovan had just said. In a quarantined “hot zone” guarded by half the Army, USAMRIID was studying my DNA, sequencing it with Illumina HiSeq 2000s, and getting nowhere.

  They had swabbed it off an artifact they’d found in the ground, where it had been for a decade. Now they were replicating it in vials and bringing in top scientists from around the country to decipher the organism it belonged to—me.

  The extra two chromosomes I possessed. The crossover gene. That’s what Dr. Anderson had meant.

  I wasn’t quite human.

  I was an aneuploid.

  Word got to Damian. He marched into Charles’s office and slammed the door behind him. Trembling in the hallway, I overheard their argument.

  “How’d they get it?” said Damian, his voice menacingly quiet through the door. “How’d they get her DNA, Charles?”

  “You heard. She was all over that artifact,” he said. “And don’t even start with this crap. You knew we had a breach. Blaire’s fa
ther proved it; there’s a mirror out there someone forgot to close.”

  “Last I checked,” said Damian, “the U.S. Army doesn’t walk through mirrors. Even if there is a breach, they couldn’t use it.”

  “You have a better theory?”

  Silence. “You,” he said finally. “You were in contact with Doctor Benjamin. I think you gave it to them—I think you’ve been going behind our backs.”

  “Oh, please,” said Charles. “That was basic reconnaissance, like we all should be doing. Not everything needs to be done in crossover.”

  “How’d they get her DNA, Charles?”

  “It could have been one of us. One of our own reflections wandering up.”

  “Who?” Damian sneered. “You? Blaire? Amy?”

  “Oh, get off your pedestal,” said Charles. “It could have been you.”

  “Don’t insult me.”

  “Or Blaire’s father. That’s where they picked him up, wasn’t it? Look, my point is it could have been anyone. I don’t know any more than you do right now.”

  “You do realize what you’re saying, don’t you? Think of how many times we’ve crossed over, how many times I’ve ruined yours and Amy’s lives in a reflection, or you’ve ruined mine. Think of all the permutations. And you’re saying one of us is out there right now, one step ahead of us? That’s not good.”

  “I don’t know what’s out there any more than you do. We’re all just guessing at this now.”

  There was a long pause before Damian said, “then why do I get the feeling there’s something you’re not telling me?”

  ***

  Because he was asking the wrong question. Charles assumed they’d gotten my DNA from a reflection; Damian wanted to know how.

  I wanted to know why.

  He was right about one thing, though. There was too much Charles wasn’t telling us about the artifact, about what it was—or did—and why he wanted it.

  I could guess, though.

  Only carriers of the 47th chromosome could crossover. Without an active carrier gene, the Army never could have accessed a reflection to collect my DNA in the first place. Either they had gotten it from Charles or someone else in the source, as Damian thought, or one of us . . . Charles, him, or Amy—or my dad—had wandered up from a reflection we had forgotten to close and given it to them. But maybe the culprit wasn’t a carrier at all.

  Maybe it was the artifact itself.

  ***

  At two in the morning on Saturday night, the floor to ceiling mirror on my sliding closet door reflected all five feet eight inches of my skinny, sleep-deprived body.

  Saturday night. ISDI would be empty. Charles’s office would be empty.

  The ceiling bulb cast my face into shadow and hollowed out my cheeks. Sweat gleaned on my skin. I tore my gaze off myself and scanned my brightly lit bedroom.

  Not good enough.

  For the second time, I went through the house to check that all the blinds were drawn, all the doors locked, the phone cords yanked loose.

  Still not good enough.

  I switched off all the lights, unplugged the stove, the refrigerator, my alarm clock. Everything. Then I stood in the pitch black foyer, listening, my eyes circling, darting.

  Only a single red-orange gleam splashed on the hardwood floor—a streetlamp, through the semicircular door lite. I taped it over with butcher paper.

  I didn’t even want the walls to witness what I was about to do.

  I was violating my last sanctuary, opening the floodgates, and allowing the nightmare into the place where I slept. I was about to crossover in my own bedroom.

  To learn the truth.

  It was a horrible idea, and that I was even capable of it terrified me. I pocketed the tape, which I would need later.

  Still one more thing.

  Outside, the night bit into my skin, chilled me. I crossed the backyard and slipped into my dad’s old tool shed, which I hadn’t explored for months.

  A silken thread trailed across my face, and I screamed. My arms flailed out.

  Just a spider web. I yanked the light cord, my pulse still racing, and a yellow light illuminated dusty shelves of tools laced with cobwebs. Saws, rakes, and hammers.

  I hefted one of the hammers and was about to leave when a better option caught my eye.

  An axe.

  Might as well do this the right way. Feeling like an axe murderer, I lugged the tool inside and down the hall to my bedroom.

  I leaned the axe against the wall next to the mirror, then killed the ceiling light and my bedside lamp. Darkness swallowed me, and I could almost pretend I was asleep. Almost.

  My eyes adjusted, and I took up position in front of the reflection of my black silhouette in the mirror, which I would soon crossover into.

  The idea of it twisted my stomach into a knot. In rooms A and B at the office, crossing over felt safe, clinical. Not here.

  But I had to know what my DNA had to do with an artifact buried in the ground.

  I pressed my palm against the glass. Nothing happened. For an instant, I doubted we could even crossover through normal mirrors. Maybe ISDI ordered special mirrors.

  No, Damian had stuck his hand through a normal makeup mirror. Recalling how easily he’d done it, my own hand suddenly plunged through.

  My stomach caught in my throat, and the urge to shatter the mirror was overwhelming. To undo what I had just done.

  Now the nightmare was here.

  I had broken symmetry. I reached my hand the rest of the way through what now felt like a film of honey.

  There was no going back.

  ***

  With a deep breath, I stepped all the way through the mirror and braced myself for the surge of prickles that cut through my body.

  I knelt on the ground and curled into a fetal position, but managed to keep from vomiting. Either my body was getting used to it, or there was nothing left inside me for the crossovers to take out.

  I glanced up, still wincing a little, and saw the axe propped against the wall, just like it was in the source. If I accidentally swung it from this side, I would orphan myself. Damian had taught me how easy it was to make mistakes, to never take shortcuts, to follow protocol.

  Which I had already broken.

  But not all his caution was lost on me. I flipped on my bedroom light and used the axe blade to cut open one of my pillows, then buried the steel head inside the down feathers. The mirror remained a dark doorway into the source.

  I pulled the tape from my pocket and ran foot after foot of it around the pillow, sealing it shut over the axe head. The result looked like an oversized lollipop, but if I tried to swing it, the pillow would dampen the blow; it wouldn’t break the mirror.

  Don’t even give yourself the option of making a mistake, Damian had said—something I was sure I had also heard from my father. I was beginning to understand the importance of all his mottos.

  The axe in the source still leaned against the wall, deadly as ever. The correct axe to swing.

  I wasn’t being paranoid, I was being careful. I used up the rest of the tape and made a perimeter around the mirror, then colored it blue with a magic marker.

  Like Damian had taught me. Inside this fragile reflection, which could shatter any second, those lessons comforted me. He comforted me.

  Even though he infuriated me.

  Finally, I grabbed my keys from my reflected nightstand, flipped the lights off again to match the source, and stumbled out to the car.

  Not a star shone in the black sky. Amazing how the simple action of breaking symmetry could instantly duplicate burning balls of fire a billion billion miles away.

  Maybe it didn’t.

  Maybe that was why the sky was so empty. Those s
tars had been deleted, and what was left of the cosmos fused with the rust colored stain of city lights into a gaping hole.

  One step farther from heaven.

  Once in my car, a wave of shivers sliced through me. Why was I so scared?

  Because I had chosen to break my world into two pieces, and this time, no else had told me to do it.

  ***

  Driving eight miles to ISDI should have been simple. I drove slowly, weaving between the lines, the hood of my Jeep swallowing the black asphalt.

  I recalled that Damian had been with me throughout my first crossover, distracting me; I had been in shock, anyways. During my second, I was too focused on breaking him out of jail. It didn’t process. Again in my third crossover, I was too focused on my mission to think about what I was actually doing.

  Now, nothing fended off the deep unease seeping into my skin. I loathed what we were capable of, what it did to us, where on the planet or off it it actually took us. Crossover.

  I only saw a few other drivers, pricks of headlights in the distance. I pulled up to a stop sign, and as soon as my car stopped, I noticed the sensation of buzzing all over my skin. Like each of my cells was letting out a continuous blood-curdling scream.

  Only I couldn’t hear them.

  Nobody to my left. Nobody to my right. I inched forward, again scrutinizing the road to my left, sensing a car could speed toward me any moment.

  I took a shortcut which wound through the hills and settled into autopilot. A green light glowed far ahead. I needed music.

  My fingers fumbled with radio presets and got country. Yuck. A glance at the road confirmed the car was still going straight and the light was still green, so I took my eyes off the road and busied myself with the dial. I looked up just before the stop light, just in time to see it turn red.

  Another car had entered the intersection, oblivious that I was barreling toward it.

  I slammed on the breaks, my heart rising into my throat. Too late. My Jeep rammed the other car, and we both skidded to a stop.