BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller

by Dan Rix

  Out in the hall, one level deeper, Charles had left another message for us between rooms A and B, this one in silver spray paint.

  I’m impressed

  Damian stared at the message, his mouth tight. “I’m impressed?” he said. “Isn’t that why you hired us, asshole.” Damian kicked the wall under the writing. “Isn’t that why?” He turned away, then rushed back and kicked the wall again, harder this time, jaw clenched. “Huh, Charles? Isn’t that why you hired us?”

  “Damian, stop,” I pleaded.

  He ignored me, torqued back his arm and slammed his fist into the acoustic paneling. The walls shook, and dust rained from the ceiling. He did it again, and again, the impacts dislodging the framed pictures of office interiors, which shattered one by one on the floor. Half yelling, half sobbing, he slumped against the wall and unleashed his anger into Charles’s message—into the only part of him he could reach.

  “Damian, please,” I said.

  He dropped to his knees, his strength spent, and cradled his face in his hands. Then he screamed at the top of his lungs, and his voice echoing long after.

  I rushed to his side and flung my arms around him. “Stop it, Damian . . . we need to be strong,” I said, on the verge of tears myself. “I need you to be strong.”

  “I thought this would be it . . . I thought this would be the end of the maze.” His voice wavered, and I could hear the guilt.

  He took blame for it all.

  “Damian, I’d rather be here with you right now than anywhere else in the world,” I confessed.

  “Why Blaire?” He stared at me, black veins pulsing around his eyes. “Why would you rather be down here in this shithole than up in the source?”

  “Because . . .” I lowered my eyes, and whispered, “I love you.”

  Damian said nothing, and I peeked at his face. His eyes—eroded like dark, extinguished cinders—broke my heart all over again. But I couldn’t look away. I was forever weightless, forever falling into them, his prisoner.

  Eventually, he leaned forward and kissed me, and his lips lingered on mine, then brushed my cheek, cranking my pulse into overdrive.

  “Blaire, I want you to do something for me,” he whispered, his breath tickling the skin behind my ear.

  “Anything,” I breathed, putty in his hands.

  “I want you to bury my body in the source.” Without another word, he released me and climbed to his feet.

  I rose after him, tears stinging my eyes. “Bury yourself, Damian. You’re not leaving me down here alone.”

  “I already have,” he said, letting himself into room A—our next crossover. He stepped toward the mirror, raised his right arm to the surface. Only his trembling hand betrayed his fear.

  “Damian, don’t,” I warned.

  He reached through the mirror, up to his elbow, and stopped. On the other side, his arm raised and tilted to the side, and he inspecting it through the glass. Flakes of skin floated off his arm and swirled in the room beyond the mirror. No, not skin—ash.

  His forearm blistered, the skin decaying and dissolving into ash. A single drop of blood trickled out from under his wrist brace, tracing the contour of a vein. The liquid bubbled. He swiveled his arm, his eyes tearing up as his flesh broke apart before his eyes.

  “Damian, come back—” I moaned.

  “I’m sorry, Blaire. I’m sorry it couldn’t be me too.” In a single, slow motion stride, he went all the way through.

  He crossed over.

  On the other side, he fell to his knees.

  “Damian!” I leapt through the mirror after him.

  ***

  He clutched his stomach and made a choking sound, coughed. Bits of vomit and blood splattered the wall, dribbled down his chin, and he toppled to the ground.

  “No!” I rushed forward to hold him, to save him. For a moment he gazed past me, straining his eyes as if trying to recognize someone in the distance. Then his eyes glazed over, and he went limp in my arms.

  “Damian, no . . .” I cried, my tears now striking the floor. “You can’t!”

  He slumped in my arms, his body motionless, his heart still. I laid him on the ground, hands shaking violently, and pressed my lips to his mouth, emptied my lungs into his. I tasted smoke.

  I pounded on his chest, squeezed his body, blew into his mouth again. His body remained inert. Lifeless.

  I needed to get him back up through the mirror. Up high . . . as high as we could go. All the way back to the top of the maze. I lugged his body back through the mirror and laid him out on the floor of room A, gasping for breath.

  “Damian, please . . . I love you.” My voice sounded hollow, like it was still on the other side of the glass. I shook his body and leaned over his mouth again to breathe for him, and that’s when I smelled it. Slithering out his throat and worming into my sinuses—the putrid smell of decay and ash, tinged with sweetness.

  The smell of someone who hasn’t been alive for a long time.

  I prodded his neck, unable to steady my finger through my shivering. But I already knew he didn’t have a pulse. I screamed, and collapsed sobbing onto his chest.

  He was gone.

  Like the rest of him, crossover had corroded his heart and left only a burnt out shell. I fell away from him, curled up beside him and shivered uncontrollably. Inexorably, the horror seeped into my blood. In the utter quiet, my mind hissed with static. Nothing but static. Shadows oozed out of the mirror and suffocated the light, and as if on cue, the flickering bulb above us, barely hanging on at this depth, gave a final zap and blinked out.

  Then darkness.

  Just cold, quiet, pitch black darkness.

  Chapter 27

  I did as he asked.

  I went deeper into the maze, following the letters of my own DNA, all the while hauling his body behind me—now wrapped in the blue tarp from downstairs.

  Bury my body in the source.

  His dying wish.

  I suspected it was only for my benefit. He knew I wouldn’t have pressed on otherwise. He knew I would have given up right there—stuck my finger down my throat and barfed up the potassium iodide in my stomach and let crossover claim me. It would have been easy to die next to him, like falling asleep in his arms.

  Instead, he gave me this one last mission knowing it was the only thing that would give me the will to finish the maze, even in death trying to save my life—and I loathed him for it.

  I loathed him for forcing me against my will to live out my entire life . . . without him.

  My parents were dead. Amy was dead. Charles had crossover sickness and would soon be dead. Now Damian was dead too.

  The only other person like me.

  I shone my flashlight ahead of me, scaring back shadows—some of them humanoid. The lights had long since shorted out, their filaments eroded by the depth. It had been a dozen crossovers since I’d last seen ceiling lights. Soon the “bottom crawler” flashlight would go too.

  In the hallway, the beam flashed on silver. No doubt a reflection of the same message Charles left earlier. No, a different one. I scanned the spray painted message.

  18 inches. You little brat.

  It made no sense. I yawned. God, what time was it? Surely the sun had risen by now . . . or was physics so degraded this deep it no longer allowed for nuclear fusion? I imagined the sun floating through space, a giant extinguished lump of coal.

  Fatigue weighed down my eyelids, and I released Damian’s tarp and leaned against the wall. Only my hand went right through it.

  But I didn’t have time to lose my balance. Before I could blink, the entire hallway shifted to the left, literally teleported half a foot to account for my new position, and then—except for my elevated heart rate—I was leaning against the wall just
like normal.

  As if nothing had happened.

  Either I hallucinated, or I had just experienced some kind of lag time in the universe’s calculation of my position.

  Not good.

  I trained the flashlight on Charles’s message again, and this time it jogged a memory. 18 inches.

  The toolboxes at the top level . . . the rulers and tape measures were missing—suddenly, the scene replayed in my mind, and I heard the sound of Damian’s voice, saw his beautiful face. The jolt of my heart made me wince, and I slid down the wall into a fetal position, gritting my teeth.

  When the storm of emotions subsided, I crawled over to him and kissed his cheek—now ice cold. At least now he was immune to crossover.

  “I still love you,” I whispered. As I stood up, though, the flashlight raked across the floor, briefly illuminating a dark object near the wall before the cone of light darted away.

  Heart pounding, I jerked the beam back to where I had seen it, and found it again—and my hairs stood on end.

  My father’s diary.

  ***

  I could guess what had happened. Charles was carrying the yellow equipment case, which left only one hand for rulers, tape measures, saws, a can of spray paint, and my father’s diary; he had to be wearing a tool belt.

  When he pulled out the spray paint to write the message, he must have dislodged the diary.

  To get my hands on that thing, I had broken into a police station, crashed a high school prom, utterly shamed myself, and nearly broken up a marriage—not to mention my own reflection’s budding relationship—and after all this time, Charles had just dropped it.

  The irony stung.

  Flashlight in hand, I sat with my back against the wall and opened the diary. The text was no longer reversed, meaning Charles must have plucked the book’s reflection out of a mirror and discarded the original. Fine by me.

  I doubted I had enough brain cells left to decipher my father’s backwards handwriting anyway.

  I read the first page—an entry dated fourteen years ago.

  Blaire was on her tummy playing with something under the bench, poking at something with that adorable, confused look she always wore. I bent down to remove the loafers. When I looked up again, she was gone.

  The entry ended. I flipped to the next page.

  Blaire was on her tummy playing with something under the bench, poking at something . . .

  Wait, what? It was the exact same entry, dated a week later. I flipped to another page, frantic now. Again, the same exact words jumped out at me. I thumbed halfway through the diary and read the exact same thirty-seven words, this time dated years later. I turned the book over and read my father’s last entry, this one dated only a few months ago.

  The same paragraph, not a letter changed—no, not quite true. The last entry was longer by a sentence. I read it.

  As of today, I have not seen my daughter in twelve years.

  The diary slipped out of my hands and plopped onto the tarp, where I left it. So much for answers.

  The cold bit into my skin, and my lungs rose and fell, already throbbing from lack of air. Despite overdosing on potassium iodide, the effects of crossover were creeping back in. I was too deep.

  I dug through the backpack for the pill bottle, uncapped it, and raised it to my mouth. A whisper of salt sifted onto my tongue, but no pill. I shook the bottle.

  Empty.

  I flicked it to the side and climbed to my feet, then slung the backpack over one shoulder, the tarp over the other, and trudged up the hallway to my next crossover.

  A single question plagued my mind. How the hell did Charles get this deep?

  ***

  I needed water.

  Our canteen had long since run dry. My tongue made endless circles inside of my dry mouth, scraping its salty, sandpaper texture. How long had it been? Hours? Days? Crossover was screwing with my sense of time, blending the whole maze into an endless nightmare that seemed to stretch on for years.

  Before a bathroom crossover, I paused to catch my breath, psyching myself up to hoist Damian’s body onto the sink and through the mirror.

  In the darkness, my flashlight beam fell to the faucet. I cranked the handle, and the brittle metal crumbled off in my hand. A stream of something slimy—not water—leaked into the basin. I ran my palm under the liquid, rubbed it between my fingers. A mucousy strand stretched between my thumb and index finger.

  Nuh-uh. That stuff was not allowed inside my body. To distract myself from the stinging inside my parched mouth, I busied myself at our next crossover—and tried again to ponder the significance of my dad’s diary entries. Thoughts came and went in a haze, though, and I gave up.

  With Damian’s body cinched inside the tarp and propped up, I squatted and wrapped my arms around his waist, lugged him off the ground, and dragged him halfway onto the sink.

  My arms burned, and I wheezed for air. In a superhuman effort, I hauled him the rest of the way through, and he rolled off the sink on the other side. The tarp softened his fall.

  I went back for the flashlight and backpack, then crouched next to him on the tiled bathroom floor, panting. I tugged the DNA printout out of the mesh pocket and trained my flashlight on the next sequence of crossovers.

  The flashlight made a clicking sound, and then the bulb flared and died. Everything—the tile floor, the blue tarp, the sink, and the letters of my DNA—vanished into blackness.

  My heart jittered.

  Without light, I couldn’t read the printout.

  ***

  Hands shaking, I felt through the backpack and pulled out the other flashlight, which hadn’t been used as much. It might still work.

  I hesitated, though.

  The bottom crawlers were from the top level of the maze; we had brought them with us. Any copies of the flashlights that existed this deep would be degraded to mush. Unrecognizable.

  And how many crossovers had it been since I’d last seen light coming from anything other than my flashlight? The ceiling lights, the flicker of the computer monitor, street lights from outside—those had all gone dark ages ago. Fifty levels up? A hundred? I had lost count.

  Only now did I understand just how screwed I was. We had been in this maze for days, and the sun had not once risen; nothing emitted light this deep. The second flashlight, if it worked, would be the only source of light left. Maybe the only source of light that existed.

  I clicked it on.

  The printout blazed under a blue-white cone of glare, and the surge of relief made me dizzy. But how much time did I have?

  I read the letters out loud.

  “G, A, A, T, T, C, A, A, A, A . . .” I gulped, and cancelled the pairs. “G, C.” I read the next ten. “T, T, T, G, C, C, A—”

  The bulb fizzed and went dark.

  I gaped, horrified, into pitch blackness, now completely blind. The cone of light lingered in my retinas, stamped with the letters I had just read, before those two dissolved into nothingness.

  Never in my entire life had I experienced darkness so complete. In the whole universe, not a single photon stirred.

  “T, G, A,” I repeated aloud, cancelling the last pairs in my head. The night swallowed my voice. “G, C, T, G, A.”

  Five letters.

  I had five letters.

  Five letters that would lead me down, not up. Deeper. Without being able to see the printout, I didn’t have a chance in hell of backtracking, not with the labyrinth that loomed above me.

  If I didn’t find Charles within five crossovers, I would be trapped in this black tomb, blind and out of breath. The odds against me feeling my way back to the surface were a billion to one. That was the nature of a fractal maze.

  G, C, T, G, A.

  �
��Charles, you better be there . . .” I muttered, feeling around for the tarp, “you better fucking be there.”

  ***

  The locks on the doors had all fused shut, so I just kicked them open.

  One crossover.

  I felt along the walls between the rooms, my eyes darting helplessly. Nowhere did the black recede from my vision.

  Two crossovers.

  In the bathroom, my lungs writhed for air. I couldn’t get enough, and my gag reflex kicked in, then nausea. I keeled over and dry heaved. A concentrated solution of stomach bile and potassium iodide dribbled down my chin. Wasted.

  I lay there panting, and a cold sweat broke out on my skin, flushing even more potassium iodide through my pores. I touched my tongue to my lips and tasted salt; maybe I could get some of it back. Desperate for the ability to breathe again, I licked every inch of both arms, and the parts of my legs I could reach, craving the sting of salt on my taste buds. The relief was short-lived.

  Feeling my way along, I lugged Damian into Charles’s office, laid the T mirror flat on the floor, and pushed his body through. Like when I broke him out of jail.

  Three crossovers.

  No sign of Charles. I paused in the hallway, willing my body to relax, and pressed on. The printout of my DNA stayed uselessly folded in my bra. Without light, I could never read it again.

  Four crossovers.

  The darkness pressed in on my eardrums. The last letter I had memorized was A. Beyond that, I would be guessing at Charles’s path.

  I had a one in three chance of getting the first crossover right. A one in nine chance of getting the first and second right. To guess ten in a row correctly, my odds were one in sixty-thousand. It was like rolling a dice ten times and praying for nothing but sixes.

  Five crossovers.

  I dragged the tarp out of room A into what had to be the hallway and stood perfectly still, listening. Prickles crept down my spine, but only my hoarse breathing cut the silence.