BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller

by Dan Rix

  Damian rubbed his forehead and let out a long, pained sigh. “Shit.”

  ***

  “But how do we track him?” I said. “There must be a million mirrors in La Jolla.”

  Damian paced back and forth in the tiny storage unit, shaking his head. “No, he may be crafty, but he’s predictable. He wouldn’t just pick a random mirror. He’d use one that was safe, one he was comfortable with. He always does.”

  “A safe mirror,” I muttered. “Like his house?”

  “Possibly,” said Damian. “Either his house, or the mirrors at ISDI.”

  I thought back to my crossover through my bedroom mirror, and a wave of chills propagated down my body. “If I were him, I’d use the mirrors at ISDI.”

  “ISDI,” Damian confirmed. “They’re as safe as you get. They’re stronger than normal mirrors, and he’s spent years mistake-proofing those rooms. Those are the mirrors he trusts.”

  “You think that’s where he went?”

  “I know that’s where he went.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  Around one in the morning, we pulled up to our office building. Nothing out of the ordinary struck us. Not a single light shone inside the black windows. Empty.

  I killed the Jeep’s ignition, and we crept inside.

  “Jesus,” said Damian, plugging his nose in the doorway. “It’s worse.”

  I caught a whiff as I stepped past him, and nearly gagged. Decay soaked my lungs, and the coppery odor of fresh blood burned my sinuses.

  “The body?” I said.

  “Not just the body,” he said, hitting the lights. The ceiling panels flickered on, illuminating in increments a scene that made me gasp. I recoiled, backing into him.

  The blue tarp lay open on the floor. In a sea of blood, Charles’s body sprawled at its center. His shirt had been removed and draped over the back of my chair, and someone had used it to wipe their bloody hands.

  A line of open cases lined the tarp—what looked like every toolbox at ISDI’s disposal. Everything had been gathered for an operation of some sort.

  “He looks smaller,” said Damian.

  I stepped closer, and my hand shot to my mouth. He was smaller.

  At their widest point, both of his shoulders had been hacked off. Now a sawed-off cross section of bone jutted out from the lacerated flesh. From Human Anatomy, I recognized the knobby structure as the humeral head.

  I turned away and took a few deep breaths before returning my attention to the body. The severed pieces of his shoulder slumped in a pile off to the side, discarded.

  My gaze fell to a series of marks above his pecs, just under his collar bone. “What’s that on his chest?” I said.

  “Looks like he wrote something.”

  I peered closer, unable to calm my drumming heart. A line of ink ran from shoulder to shoulder segmented by smaller, evenly spaced vertical lines. “It’s a ruler. He drew a ruler.”

  “From the looks of it,” said Damian. “I’d say he was cutting this body down to size.”

  “Trying to hide it somewhere?”

  “Most likely. He gave up, though.”

  “Hide it from what?” I said.

  “I don’t know. The police. Us.”

  “He already knows we’re following him.”

  “I know.” Damian stooped and rummaged through the toolboxes. “The saws are missing. He took the saws with him . . . and the rulers and tape measures.”

  “Know what else is missing?” I said.

  Damian dug through the tools, scooping a handful of wrenches onto the floor. He came up empty handed. “What?”

  “The yellow case. The one he had right before our mission. It’s the only one not here.”

  He nodded. “Those weren’t drills.”

  I grasped his meaning. The artifact. “God, he sent us down here to get it and it was right there in his hand.”

  “Get ready to crossover, Blaire. It’s time to ferret this bastard out.”

  ***

  First we raided the emergency supplies. In the doorway to the garage, spider webs brushed my face.

  Organic matter “decayed” in deep reflections, so we stocked a backpack with rations of food: snack crackers, cereal bars, dried fruit, and instant oatmeal. Damian tossed in a few tins of cod. I hefted the backpack onto my shoulder, knowing it was pointless.

  We would be taking food down through multiple nested crossovers; it would be subject to the exact same decay.

  Damian pressed a flashlight into my palm and pocketed one of his own.

  “What’s the point? Crossover shorts out electronics,” I said.

  “These are bottom crawlers. Heavy gauge wires and solid state LEDs. They’ll go pretty deep.”

  I slipped my flashlight into the backpack’s side mesh. “Ready?”

  “Ready,” he said.

  We ascended the stairs and paused in the dark hallway, the light from downstairs straying past us. Damian clicked on his flashlight and trained the blue beam on the light switch. A smudge of blood told us Charles had been here.

  He shined the flashlight up the hall, illuminating the door to room A, then the door to room B. Both shut. Both spotless.

  “Well, there’s only two mirrors he could have used,” I said.

  “I hope so,” said Damian. He stepped up to the opposite wall and opened the recessed cabinet containing the tranquilizer gun.

  Empty.

  Charles had removed it.

  “Come on.” I tugged his sleeve, not wanting to dwell on that detail. “Let’s get this over with.”

  We unlocked room A and stepped into what felt like a tomb. The smell of blood lingered in the air, salty and pungent.

  Damian surveyed the room with his flashlight, and the pitch black mirror swallowed the beam, giving no reflection.

  Broken symmetry.

  “This one’s split,” he said.

  “So he went through room A first. I guess that makes sense.”

  “Let’s check B, just in case.”

  We filed back into the hallway and unlocked room B. It smelled sterile, and the glare of Damian’s flashlight reflected off the mirror and blinded us.

  “A it is,” I said.

  We went back to room A, where we stood in silence, staring at the gaping back hole. Damian picked up the roll of red tape and slapped a single foot long piece to the mirror’s frame.

  “Three levels down,” I muttered. “Have you ever been that deep?”

  “I’m not suicidal.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t hurt as much.”

  My heart clanged. I took a deep breath and plunged through the mirror. Into darkness.

  ***

  It actually didn’t hurt as much.

  The plane of the mirror passed through my body like always, only this time there was nothing in the way, nothing left inside me to hurt—everything just felt numb and tingly.

  Crossing over had deadened my insides. The word necrosis flashed through my mind, and I wondered if deep down my flesh was already dead, my organs decaying with gangrene.

  My limbs trembled after the crossover, and I sank to the floor, shivering. Cold. Just really cold.

  A dancing flashlight beam indicated Damian had stepped through behind me. He winced and clutched his forehead. “Ooh.”

  “I thought it felt good for you?” I said.

  “Not that time.” He lowered his hand, and his flashlight illuminated a red spot on his shoulder.

  “Damian—” my breath caught in my throat, “you’re bleeding!”

  “Where?” He shined the flashlight at his arms, his wrist, then felt for blood along his upper lip below his nose.

  “No . . .” I rose s
hakily to my feet and took the flashlight from his hand, and tilted his head to the side. I traced the droplets of blood from his shoulder to his cheek, to its source—and a fist tightened around my heart. A thin stream of blood trickled out of his ear and dribbled off his earlobe.

  “It’s your ear,” I whispered.

  “Like a cut?” he said.

  “No, it’s . . . it’s coming out of your ear.”

  Intracranial hemorrhaging.

  I swung the beam to his face, onto a spiderweb of black, swollen blood veins around his eyes just before they faded. Caught in the light, the discoloration shrank back into his skin, vanished . . . and I was certain it had been a trick of the light.

  ***

  Fear flashed in Damian’s eyes, but his gaze steeled so quickly I wasn’t even sure I saw it. He spoke calmly. “It’s just a ruptured eardrum. I’m fine.”

  “We have to go back up. You can’t survive down here.”

  “Neither can Charles,” said Damian, “and I’m stronger than him. If he can go down, I can go down.”

  “I’m going alone—”

  “No, Blaire. We need each other right now. You’ve never nested before; you’ll get lost.”

  I stared at him. “It’s going to tear you apart.”

  “Really? What else is new?” He held the cuff of his shirt to his ear to stop the bleeding and swung his flashlight around room A, indicating the discussion was over.

  His flashlight honed in on the doorknob, on a black smear which someone had carelessly wiped clean. Blood. “There.”

  “Is that from the corpse he dissected, or him?”

  “Probably both. At least we know he went this way. Put up some tape and let’s move on.”

  “Don’t need to,” I said. “Look.” I pointed down at the bottom left corner of the mirror, where a tiny piece of blue tape was stuck to the glass.

  “He’s leaving clues for himself should he ever need to come back up,” said Damian. “Put up something bigger.”

  I leaned closer. He had also written something on the tape.

  S2

  A code, easily deciphered. The mirror led sourceward, back to a reflection only two levels deep.

  While I plastered a much more visible blue X at eye level, Damian typed in the door override, then let us into the hallway. The sudden brightness blinded me. Every light in the office had been switched on.

  “Now what?” I said, but I knew the answer.

  “Room B.”

  I nodded, dreading what another crossover would do to him.

  We unlocked room B and stepped inside. This time, the mirror’s symmetry was broken.

  “So he went through A, then he went through B,” I said. “Easy enough.”

  He smirked. “Just you wait.”

  Damian went through first, and I followed. After the crossover, my ears started ringing—screaming really—and for an agonizing minute I clutched at my skull, wincing, before it faded. Damian, his expression hard, showed no signs of further damage.

  Four levels down.

  A reflection of a reflection of a reflection of a reflection. We had nested four crossovers.

  The lights were on in the hallway again, mirroring the level above us.

  “Back to room A,” said Damian.

  We went back up the hall and entered room A again. The mirror reflected neither us nor the flashlight, swallowing the cone of bluish light whole.

  “Broken symmetry,” said Damian.

  “So he went through,” I said, stepping toward the mirror.

  Damian grabbed my hand. “Not necessarily, Blaire. Now it gets complicated.”

  “Now?” I said “What the hell have we been doing, playing tic-tac-toe?”

  I could see the muscles working in his temples as he thought something through. “Actually, I don’t think we’ve even started playing.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He crossed over A first, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “B was still intact though. We saw it was still intact, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Which means B’s reflection should have been intact too. But it wasn’t. So we knew he crossed over through B next.”

  “And then A,” I said, peering into the mirror, “He went through A, otherwise I’d be staring at my reflection right now.”

  He pointed to the bottom left corner of the mirror. “Then how do you explain that?”

  I followed his finger to a tiny piece of blue tape, marked with the message S2, this time backwards.

  A chill prickled up my spine.

  Damian smiled and rubbed his forehead, an expression that was just as much amused as exhausted.

  “Wait,” I said, “this mirror leads up?”

  “No. That’s an illusion. It leads to a reflection of the source that’s even deeper.”

  “But it has blue tape.”

  “Charles broke B’s symmetry after A’s was already broken. B would have reflected mirror A as is, broken symmetry, blue tape and all.”

  I looked between him and the mirror, now an open doorway. A portal to the next level down, where the nightmare thickened. And then I understood. “This mirror’s symmetry would be broken regardless of whether or not he crossed over it, so we have no idea where he went.”

  Damian eyed me cryptically, with just a hint of a smirk. “Welcome to the first branch in Charles’s maze.”

  ***

  “We have to assume he took it,” I said, finally. “These are the only two mirrors. He’s probably just going back and forth.”

  “If not, it’ll lead to a dead end,” he said. “Only one way to find out.” He blew me a kiss and stepped into the mirror.

  “Damian, wait!”

  But he was already through. I had no choice but to follow him. My body passed through the glass and another wave of nausea coursed through me.

  Five levels down.

  We found the hallway dark again, mirroring the state of the office at the top level.

  Damian flipped on the lights, filling the corridor with a dim yellow hue.

  “It doesn’t look right,” I said.

  “Like there’s a film over your eyes. I know.”

  “Because we’re five levels down?”

  “It’s going to get worse.” Damian fumbled with the keys, his fingers trembling, and unlocked room B.

  “So he went A, B, A, then B—”

  The door to room B swung open, and Damian aimed his flashlight into the musty room. The beam bounced back, reflected by the still intact mirror. “Dead end,” he said.

  “How is it intact again?” I asked. “Mirror B was already split; we just walked through it.”

  “Remember how the lights were off,” he said, “even though they were on in the two levels above us? And remember the blue sticker, saying we were going back up to the top of the maze?”

  “You said that was an illusion.”

  “It was, but it also means this reflection perfectly mirrors the top level, where the lights were off and B was still intact.”

  “But it’s not the top level,” I said.

  “No. It just mirrors it.”

  “So if he didn’t take B, where’d he go? Did he get off at this level?”

  “I don’t know,” said Damian, backing into the hall. “I don’t know.”

  Something at the end of the hall pulled my gaze past Damian.

  The bathroom.

  Seeing the surprise on my face, he swiveled and following my gaze to the bathroom door, now wide open, spilling flickering white light into the hallway.

  “That door was closed,” I said.

  Damian’s expr
ession hardened. “Rooms A and B aren’t the only mirrors in this building.”

  “The bathroom mirror,” I whispered. “He crossed over through the bathroom mirror. Where the hell is he going?”

  “As deep as he can.”

  We tiptoed back down the hallway, and the hairs rose on my forearms. Damian poised his hand on his gun and leaned into the bathroom. I peered over his shoulder.

  Bloody handprints dotted the sink, the basin plugged and filled with a pool of pink water, but otherwise the bathroom appeared intact.

  “Maybe he just came in here to wash his hands?” I offered.

  “It’s possible,” he said.

  We stepped farther into the bathroom, and immediately noticed the discrepancy. On the other side of the mirror, the door to the hallway remained empty. Where our reflections should have stood in the mirror, we stared into an empty room.

  Broken symmetry.

  ***

  “So he crossed over through the bathroom,” I said. “So that’s A, B, A, then C.”

  “C?”

  “We already have a B.”

  Damian rubbed his jaw, eyebrows scrunched together. “He broke the symmetry, but I’m not sure he crossed over here.”

  I sighed. “What now?”

  “It’s too easy,” he said. “He left the door open and planted blood on the sink to mislead us.”

  “We’re five levels down, Damian. He probably figured he’d lost us.”

  “Not Charles.”

  “Well, if he didn’t go through B and he didn’t go through the bathroom mirror, then he must have used a different mirror.”

  “Or gone back up through A.”

  “But we checked all the mirrors on that level.”

  “Not the bathroom . . . not C,” he said. “We need to check it just in case this is a dead end.”

  I nodded, hating how much each crossover might be damaging him, how much more of his body we destroyed with every wrong turn. I couldn’t let him go any deeper.