by C. T. Aaron
He looks at me, but speaks to Mae. “You haven’t shown her yet?”
I say, “Shown me what?” just as Maebry answers, “I didn’t think it was important.”
“Mae! Dammit, what is going on, what’re you talking about? I mean first I find out about someone you dated but never told me about, also leaving out the fact that he’s a—”
Oscar smiles fully now, not quite looking like an asshole but not quite not. He holds up his hands again.
“Sorry. I should go. Didn’t mean to cause a thing. But, Mae? You should probably tell her. She deserves to know.”
Maebry nods quickly, eyes averted. Oscar leans closer to her, and I want to punch his throat.
“And, listen. That . . . one . . . we used to go to? It’s still open. If you ever change your mind.”
Mae straightens her spine, her face stoic, voice formal, arms folded on the table top. “It was nice to see you again, Oscar. Bye.”
He laughs and taps the table near her elbow. “Right. See ya. Nice to meet you, Briar.”
I grunt something back. Oscar swaggers out of the coffee shop alone. Something about his exit bugs me, but I can’t place it.
Once he’s out the doors, I face Mae, whose sudden burst of confidence is totally gone. She looks miserable.
“Okay,” I say. “So. Hi. Where do you want to start? Or should I just jump in?”
“Briar . . .”
“Who, me? Okay, I’ll start. So, you had a boyfriend. Somehow that never came up.”
Her eyes close and she rubs her temples with two fingers. “It didn’t seem important.”
“That you date guys?” My voice sounds like a clenched fist, squeezing out from between my closed teeth. “What else have you not told me?”
Maebry takes a deep breath and lets it go. Says nothing.
“What’re you, bi? Because I mean—”
She suddenly slaps the table. A massive display of emotion for her. “Why does everything have to be black or white? Why does everything have to have a label?”
“Because labels let you know between something that’s safe and something that’s poison.”
Her gaze bounces up into mine, and oh shit was that a unkind thing to say.
“So I might be poisonous?” I can’t read her tone.
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Fuckity fucksticks, this went elsewhere than I intended and I don’t want it to. All the same, I have to know what the hell just happened here with Oscar.
“Okay,” I say, and put the edges of my hands on the table like I’m measuring for a box. “I just want to know . . . are we for real?”
Mae leans in closer. I move to meet her halfway, like we’re about to share a malted or some other old-timey thing like that.
“When I first saw you at school, I felt something, B. And it wasn’t that you were a Counterpart, either. This was before I knew that.”
“Okay?” I’m liking where this is headed, I think.
“So please trust me when I tell you that first of all, I am sorry about not telling you about Oscar. It wasn’t for very long, and I’m not particularly proud of it. And secondly, you are the one who matters to me. Okay?”
“. . . Okay.”
“Good.” She kisses me once, quick, and we both sit back.
I glance around to see if anyone’s paying attention to us, because this next part isn’t something that we can risk people overhearing. I notice one guy, maybe in college, leering at us. Must’ve seen the kiss and gotten off on it.
People suck.
I stand. “Let’s go. We’re not done yet. He mentioned a ‘place’?”
Maebry joins me. “Yeah. That’s going to take some explaining.”
I walk out ahead of her, keeping my free hand in my pocket. We instinctively veer in the direction of her house, following a long strip of grass alongside the sidewalk. Traffic isn’t too busy at the moment, maybe one car every thirty seconds or so.
“So now explain to me,” I say as we walk, “what all that code-talk was. He said there was some place you guys like to hang out?”
Mae grins. “It’s not like how you’re making it sound.”
“No? What’s it like?”
Maebry stops and pulls out her phone. I see her tapping the Uber app. “Have you ever been walking around and felt, like, a tug? Something calling to you?”
“Like a Counterpart?”
“Similar, but not quite. That’s more of an awareness, the way you and I can sense each other right now. This is more like . . . like if you could smell something but couldn’t quite place it, and you wanted to follow the scent until you found it.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
She takes a deep breath. “Briar . . . where do you think Ezzy and Aison go when they’re not here?”
“Definitely don’t know that. I try not to think about it. The science is just kablooey.”
“Yeah, well, it’s about to get a lot more kablooey-er.”
She laughs suddenly at the absurd word, and I even giggle back. Then she looks into my eyes. Her’s are shiny in the dark.
“Oscar might have been right. There’s something you need to see. Some place. Since you never brought it up, I thought maybe it was best to just let it go, but . . . maybe it’s time you knew. I haven't said anything because I wasn’t sure if you didn't really know, or if you didn’t want me to know, so now I have to ask you.”
“I have no idea what you just said.”
“Have you ever been to their world?”
“Who's world? You mean Ezzy? Where the Familiars come from? No! Of course not. How's that even possible?”
She takes my hand. “Nothing’s impossible.”
“Maebry, honestly? You’re scaring me.”
Headlights wash over us and an old Sedan pulls up. Mae opens the back door.
“Good,” she says. “It’ll be safer that way.”
THREE
“Are you sure you want to get out here?” our driver says as he pulls off the freeway and onto a dirt road.
We’re about thirty miles outside of town by that point, and no amount of pestering has gotten Maebry to open up about where we’re going. Frankly, I agree with our driver; is Mae sure we ought to be getting out here in the middle of nowhere?
“It’s okay,” Mae says confidently. “Just a little boondocker. We’ll be fine, thanks.”
The driver sighs and rolls to a stop. “Whatever you say. Better not see you on the news later.”
“You won’t, we’ll be fine,” Mae says. “Thanks for the ride.”
We climb out, and I raise my shoulders as the car drives off, kicking up dust.
I feel cold, even though it’s got to be at least eighty out tonight. “If you ever wondered how much I trust you.”
“I’ve never wondered that,” Mae says with a smile. She leads me to a massive concrete building that reminds me of a Roman coliseum.
The building is a landmark for anyone who’s ever driven on the I-10 leading west out of Phoenix toward Los Angeles. It used to be a racetrack—horses, I think—but was left to fall apart decades ago, way before either one of us was born. It rises three stories or more into the air, and is surrounded for maybe a mile on all sides by flat desert and scrub brush. It’s as dark as the night sky above us, crumbling concrete pillars struggling to stay upright through the years of disuse. Further out, south of this relic, I can see a bunch of cars parked haphazardly in the desert.
Something about them makes me nervous. Why so many cars in the middle of nowhere? Is it really a party? Because we are not party chicks.
“What the hell are we doing here, Mae? Come on.”
“Just follow my lead, and don’t freak out. It’s going to be hard not to, but just don’t.”
While I trust my girlfriend, I still have a bad feeling about this. “No promises, Mae.”
She walks us through the dirt to a concrete patio, and I notice the dirt on it
s surface has been disturbed. Not swept, but definitely walked though, presumably recently.
“Mae, seriously . . .”
She stops in front of a dark archway. The darkness feels supernatural, though; like a living ink curtain, so black it’s much more than a shadow.
And there’s something more—something like my ability to sense other Counterparts, but it’s not the same brain-tickle. It’s almost a scent, some kind of exotic spice I can’t place that either tastes so good it’s bad, or vice versa.
“Briar,” Mae says as I instinctively brush at my nose, “not every Counterpart knows about the doorways, much less about the Meets, or even that they can go to the Familiar’s world—”
I have never heard this before. “What?”
Mae runs right over me. “—and it’s not the kind of thing you can un-see. But I need for you to see for yourself. You need to know why I come here, and about the parts of it that are bad. Okay?”
“Uh, no, not okay, you’re talking in riddles. Mae, how could anyone—”
Maebry takes my hand and steps through the darkness beyond the arch.
And then, as her Bible would say, there was light.
I blink against the suddenness of it more than the intensity, because it’s not bright. And then, even as my body tries to assimilate the light, the sounds hit my ears.
The sounds of a crowd cheering.
The sounds of two semi-trucks colliding.
The sounds of inhuman, unearthly screaming.
I cover my ears and try to hide in plain sight, but it’s no good. Maebry slips an arm over my shoulders and pulls me close.
“Stay by me!” she shouts over the raucous roar of a crowd.
My eyes, which had automatically shut against the noise, slowly peel open, and I start to make out what it is that’s happening. Once I process it, my body takes an involuntary inhale and then I can’t let it out.
It is a fight. But not between trucks, and not between people.
We’re standing on the top row of a series of bleachers that are maybe no higher than those on either side of our school gym, but these bleachers fully encircle the arena we are in. Below us, a flat, dirt field about as big as a football gridiron is laid out. Nets form a barrier between the field and the bleachers, which are half filled with people.
And on the field, in a display I could only have imagined playing out in a movie, are two Familiars, beating the absolute God-almighty holy crap out of each other.
My inhale coughs out and I grab my stomach. “Mae—”
She doesn’t reply. Instead she pulls me over to an empty bench. Only as I sit do I realize the bleachers are made of wood, not aluminum like in our gym.
I can’t take my eyes off the spectacle in the arena. Inside the cage, two monsters are tearing into each other’s flesh with horns and fangs, hooves and claws.
“Whatever you do, do not summon Ezzy,” Mae says, leaning close. “All hell will break loose. Try to stay calm, B.”
The creatures fighting in the ring are both glorious—and hideous. One has the body of an enormous lion, but is a shimmering shade of iridescent blue, with curved claws extending from its paws. The claws are covered in the blood of the lion’s opponent, a bear-like monstrosity whipping around a pair of tentacles where its arms should be. Something in the dichotomy, the unnatural mutation of it, makes my throat swell up and my stomach somersault. It’s like the automatic revulsion that comes from an online video you knew you shouldn’t click on but do anyway because everyone else has done it too.
The tentacle arms whirl around like snakes, lashing out at the blue lion and leaving wickedly jagged gashes in the lion’s flesh whenever they make contact. The lion roars, a sound I can only describe as bass-feedback, and responds in kind, plunging its claws into the bear creature over and over again. Blood flies and glistens on the lion’s paws.
But glistening how? I can see just fine; the arena is lit, but it suddenly occurs to me I have no idea where the source of the light is coming from.
That’s when I realize the light in the arena is sourceless.
There are no floodlights on tall poles like at our high school field, no torches in sconces like you’d see in a fantasy movie. There’s just—light. Like ten thousand invisible glow sticks hover around the entire room, unseen and intangible but casting a dim aura all around. Once my brain figures this out, it starts to revolt, sending signals to my stomach that something is wrong and I should probably throw up.
“I don’t feel so—” I start to say to Maebry, but she interrupts, like she knows what’s happening.
“Close your eyes. It helps. You’ll get used to it.”
I shut my eyes and force a deep breath like when I’m recovering from a run. “It happened to you, too?”
“Yes. Happens to everyone their first time here.”
“Where is ‘here,’ Mae? Where the hell are we?”
She scratches my back. “Just breathe. I’ll show you more in a couple minutes.”
I’m not sure I want to be shown more in a couple minutes. Or, you know, ever. But I make myself breathe deeply and trust Mae. My stomach settles and I slowly open my eyes.
The lion wins. The tentacled bear falls to the dirt floor of the ring, the lion astride it with its forelegs. Then the bear is gone—vanished. It shouldn’t catch me off guard so much, since it’s exactly how Ezzy comes and goes when I pop him to my side, but somehow it’s still a surprise.
About half the people in the arena start to cheer and the other half boo. Glancing around at the crowd, I realize most of them are men, and that they are dressed and grouped along apparent financial lines; guys in full-on suits sit closer to one another, while guys in Dickies and work shirts are sitting closer to each other than not. Most of the white guys are loosely grouped in one portion of the bleachers, mostly black guys in another, and mostly brown guys in yet another.
One thing they have in common: they’re all exchanging cash now, some just a few bills, some big wads or rolls.
I sense only a few other Counterparts, though. Very few.
I whirl on Maebry. “They were betting?”
“Yes.” She sounds like a snake. “It’s a big business, bigger than you might think.”
“I’ve never thought of it, what the holy hell is happening here?”
Maebry turns to face me, genuine anger and sorrow mixing on her face. “Come on, let’s get you out of here.”
She takes my hand and leads me not toward the arch where we came in, but to another exit that isn’t cloaked in inky blackness. I follow Mae through it.
What lies on the other side should not exist.
“Mae?” I whisper.
She puts her arm around my waist and pulls me into a side-hug. “Crazy, isn’t it?”
We’re standing basically where we got out of the Uber, in the same type of flat desert as before. I can see the same mountains in the distance that you can see from I-10, and the abandoned racetrack building is still right behind us . . .
But this is not Earth. No Earth I’ve ever known.
It’s dark, for one thing. Dark like a bedroom lit by only a lamp or a few Yankee Candles. There are no stars overhead, and a reddish cast coming from nowhere and everywhere at once provides the only means of sight. The air feels heavier, like it’s getting ready to rain, but there are no clouds. Looking into the vaguely crimson sky—if it is a sky—makes me think of being inside a fishbowl or snow globe. There is nothing to orient to, and the effect, like inside the arena, is unsettling at best.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay. Okay. Where are we?”
Maebry gazes all around us, her previous expression softening with the hint of a smile on her face. “Their world. Where our Familiars come from. It’s sort of a mirror of home. Analogous. Stay close, okay? We won’t go far but it’s not super-safe for humans. Not even Counterparts.”
I squeeze her closer to me. “That’s not filling me with confidence. When’s the sun come up?”
“It
doesn’t. There is no sun. Not that I’ve ever seen.”
“Then where’s the light coming from? And how do plants grow? I mean, what’s the freaking ecosystem?”
Maebry squints an eye at me. “You . . . do know this is, um . . . magic, right? Not everything is answerable to physics.”
“For an alternate dimension, it looks an awful lot like Phoenix.”
“I know, right? But no one knows how it works. Whatever happens on Earth has some kind of counterpart here. We build buildings, they show up here. We tear them down on Earth, they crumble here. It’s not the kind of thing anyone’s had time or resources to devote scientific experiments to. But Oscar said it has something to do with multiple dimensions. Um . . . a multiverse, I think? Come on, let’s take a walk.”
I follow, more from muscle memory to be close to her than desire to actually explore. “I thought it wasn’t safe.”
“It can be unsafe. But we can call our Fams just as easy as at home. This is where they live, after all.”
So I almost do it, almost call Ezzy right then and there, because having him walking along beside me would be really, really nice. But I hold off, deciding to trust Maebry’s apparent experience here. Wherever here is.
It’s funny—not the exact right word—but I never asked Ezzy where he came from. Where he lived when he wasn’t by my side on Earth. His entire existence felt so natural to me I never stopped to consider anything beyond what might happen if someone ever saw him. Where does your imaginary friend go when you grow out her? Just, there. Some Neil Gaimanesque Otherwhere. Plus, I mean, he couldn’t answer me anyway.
“How did I not know about this?”
“You have to be introduced to it. Like, acclimated, I guess. Normal people can’t even see the doorways, or sense them. Imagine if you didn't know what gasoline was, but you could smell it from time to time. You would definitely notice it, but then it would go away, no big deal. Then one day someone shows you a gallon of gas and you smell it. Now you know what it is, and you’ll never mistake that smell for anything else.”
Makes sense. Relatively speaking, of course. I take my phone out to start capturing video of this nut-basket of a place, but when I turn it on, the screen jitters and scrambles all over, and the time—when I can see it clearly enough—appears to be 73 o’clock.
