by C. T. Aaron
Uh-oh. Over my shoulder, I say, “Dunno. See ya later!”
And head out the door as fast as I can without it looking like it’s as fast as I can.
Mae’s bedroom window faces the street, and I stare at it as my feet automatically direct me up her front walk. I wait—or hope—for her curtains to flutter, but they don’t. The repurposed, patchwork denim remains still. Maebry made them herself months ago out of old jeans and stuff, both to recycle them and to do a better job of keeping the morning sun out of her room.
I march to the front door and impatiently slam my thumb on the bell. I can hear the chimes inside, but that’s it. The garage door is closed, but I can already feel somehow that no one is home.
But I try the button again and again. Nothing.
“Mae!” I shout. “Maebry! Where are you?”
For the first time, it occurs to me she might be avoiding me on purpose.
That sucks the afternoon sun right into a black hole. Did I do something? And if I did, what the hell was it?
No . . . nothing that I remember. Maybe she had a church thing and didn’t tell me, or that I forgot?
I’m pulled in about a hundred different directions, standing there on Maebry’s concrete driveway. It’s like my head is a big wheel of fortune with different feelings and reactions on each stop, but it keeps spinning and landing on different ones every few moments.
You think I’m ugly, Ballcap? Screw you!
Mom is cool.
Mae—why can’t we just attack them the way they attacked us?
What if Mom’s faking and she’s not really cool with us after all?
Mae—where are you?
That one sticks. Where the hell could she—
Hell.
The mirror world?
Did she never come back? No, I tell myself. No, that doesn’t make any sense. Mae said she goes to the one by school, and that it’s safe, and that she never wanders far from the doorway. Mae doesn’t lie, so she must have come back by now.
She doesn’t lie but she doesn’t tell you everything, some other Briar in my head points out.
“Shut up,” I say out loud.
I’m getting a headache. Frowning—or maybe pouting—I head for Papago Junior High and hike over the chain link fence surrounding the school fields, keeping a sharp eye out for anyone. It’s dark now, finally—barely—and the school is deserted. I go to the center of the soccer field, the darkest place, and take one more look around.
Empty. Good.
Ezzy pops beside me, and I smile. But even before I can take a step closer to hug his broad chest, he barks.
I flinch back. “Ezzy! What the hell?”
My wolf growls and flips his head one direction, like he’s trying to get hair out of his eyes.
I become still, gazing into his eyes. Neither of us blink. I don’t know if I’m trying to read his mind or just what, but . . . he has something to tell me.
I rub his chin with both hands. “What is it? Are you okay?”
Ezzy chuffs and takes a prancing step backward, jerking his head again.
“You want me to go somewhere. Where do you—”
Clarity slaps me in the face with that one word. Where.
As in, where is Maebry? Not at school, not at home, not at church. Went to the mirror world, but hasn’t made a peep since then.
Some . . . other . . . where.
“It’s Mae. She’s still there, she’s in the mirror world.”
Ezzy barks, soft.
“Oh, God. Okay. Okay . . . I’ll meet you there!”
I pop Ezzy away and for the second time today, I run as fast as I possibly can.
SIX
I want to ask Ezzy a million and twelve questions about what he knows about Mae, but I don’t have time to stand around and play Did Timmy Fall Down The Well with a giant black Lassie.
Dammit, I knew something was wrong! But then what was I supposed to do, tell Mom? Call the cops? Trying to convince someone we could jump in and out of another dimension wasn’t exactly going to win me any medals in the Sanity category for my weight class. Even if I showed the doorway to someone, dragged them inside, who knows what kind of reaction they’d have?
No, the only person who can help Maebry right now is me.
Of course, I’m not really prepared for anything; I’m wearing high-tops, black shorts, and a tank. Not quite dragon-slaying apparel, but I don’t care. Ezzy’s imaginary voice rumbles in my heart.
Her life is in danger.
By the time I reach the school, my legs are cashed. I’d covered at least two miles at a dead sprint, another two at a quick march, two more walking, and now my legs feel like water balloons and my lungs feel like they’ve been barbequed. Running a 5K under competition conditions is one thing. This is totally another.
It’s mostly houses around our school, and I start squinting into the darkness, looking for the telltale darkness of the doorway, but at first I can’t tell the shadows apart from the black hole. Then I spot it, still on the side of the preschool building—
And two people I don’t recognize are coming out of it.
One of them looks dead.
Instinctively, I step behind a row of tall oleander bushes and watch. The portal sits half a soccer field away, against that preschool wall. Two guys are stepping out of it, and at this distance, I can just barely sense their auras or whatever it is that marks them as Counterparts. One of them, a muscular African American in jeans and a T-shirt, is half carrying a white guy wearing camouflage pants and a leather jacket. The white guy looks like a puppet with no strings in the arms of the other guy.
The hero—at least, I hope that’s what he is—carries the guy in the jacket to a gray sports car and lays him across the hood. I can’t tell if the white guy is breathing or not, but it really looks like he isn’t. The black guy gets the car started before easing the other man into the back. Then he takes off fast out of the parking lot, away from my position. On this mostly residential street, he must be going twice if not three times the speed limit.
Obviously I don’t know for sure, but I get a very clear instinct they’re going to the closest hospital. What the hell happened in there? I didn’t see any blood, but still . . .
Wishing I’d had the sense to stop for water someplace, I walk toward the preschool wall. I keep looking around, waiting for a cop or someone to yell at me, but no one does. The street is deserted at the moment.
I stop when I reach the doorway. It’s cold somehow, like I’m standing in front of a walk-in freezer. What I can’t honestly tell is if my body is right and there really is a coldness coming from the portal, or if it’s all in my head and I’m just scared to freaking death.
“Maebry,” I say out loud, just to hear it. “Come on, B, go in there, and get your girl back. Go.”
I step through.
It takes a second for me to realize I’ve held my breath and closed my eyes. I wasn’t wrong about the cold; stepping through the darkness, it cuts through my clothes and my skin. Then the cold is past, and I open my eyes and let out my breath.
The mirror world.
The odd red light hasn’t changed in any way I can measure, and it again makes me a little queasy, although that could be my six-mile jaunt. The ground is desert dirt, hard-packed and studded with pebbles. Behind me sits a one-story building the approximate dimensions of the preschool, but it’s no preschool in this place; the jaunty multicolored sign on the front of the building back home is missing here. Instead the whole building looks drawn in shades of red and beige and could be any old building in the world.
As for the neighborhood . . . it’s gone.
Mostly gone, anyway. There were houses here once. Square-ish slabs of concrete dot the landscape floor. On top of several, lumber skeletons rise as if waiting for drywall installers to come finish the job. Other houses are fully constructed but damaged by massive holes, like a wrecking ball was taken to them.
Not a welcoming sight.
&nb
sp; Another odor hangs in the air, motionless, like I’m walking through it, and it takes me surprise: car exhaust. Or something a lot like it. And the ground is disturbed in the immediate area around the doorway.
Whatever. No time to play detective.
I pop Ezzy.
My wolf blows air at me through his nose as appears beside me.
“Where is she, Ez?”
Ezzy drops his body to the ground like a sphinx and looks at me.
I’ve never ridden on Ezzy, but right now, I’m not going to argue with him. I throw one exhausted leg over his back and lean over to grab his scruff. “Where are we going, bud?”
I don’t know why I asked, but I can’t help but talk to him. I’ll have to trust him.
Ezzy stands. I’ve never ridden a horse, but holy crap, this Familiar of mine feels like a stallion. He starts off at a trot, his mouth closed.
“Take me to Maebry, all right?”
Ezzy picks up speed, fast enough that my hair flaps behind me. All around us, the city looks like a decaying version of home, a place where maybe a nuclear weapon got dropped. And it’s eerily silent, the way I’d imagine a place is before a tornado. I can see creatures, large and extra-large, flying in the distance all around us. Based on their shapes, I don’t want them flying any closer.
We continue through the sick mockery of my home town, cast in shades of crimson. Ezzy runs nonstop for what I can only assume is about an hour. My cell doesn’t work here, of course, because this is a place beyond cellphone towers, beyond electricity. There are no lights anywhere, no power lines, and this time, my cell won’t even turn on.
If we were home, we’d be in a smaller city next door to Phoenix called Scottsdale, but that’s just a mirage of the real world, too. Back home, Scottsdale is a fancy town where rich or almost-rich people live. Ezzy takes us to the base of Camelback, a small mountain that sits sort of in the center of the Phoenix metro area. In my world, there are huge mansions crawling up the side of the mountain. The nice homes that still exist in the mirror world are dingy and dark, and appear—like everywhere else in the mirror world—to be uninhabited.
My Familiar stops at a dirt road, one that is paved in my world. He drops, so I climb off.
“She’s somewhere up there?”
Ezzy stretches his neck, pointing with his nose. There’s only one place he can be talking about.
Back home, this side of the mountain is dotted with ostentatious homes built by millionaires. There aren’t any millionaires here, I don’t think; there’s just the one intact mansion, complete with whiteish columns and a broad second-floor balcony. The entire house, top to bottom and side to side, is swathed in some kind of lacy curtains which, if there were a sun in this place, would probably shimmer beautifully on a spring day. But not here. Here, the strange drapes hang still and lifeless, reflecting the same dim red glow as the rest of the world.
The dirt road leads right up to the house, but at a steep angle. It won’t be hard to climb, but it won’t be fun, either. We start walking. I keep looking all around me, anxious about what kind of wild Familiars might be running around out here. So far, it’s pretty quiet. I want to run to the house, find Mae fast. But I can’t. My legs are cashed.
“So what’s she doing up there?” I ask, just to hear something out loud as my calves sting from the hike. Ezzy just keeps his nose lifted.
We are about the half the length of a football field away from the house when Ezzy stops and rears back just a little, a low growl rumbling in his throat. I stop too when I sense a Counterpart nearby. It’s not Maebry.
“What is it? Ez? What do you—”
My breath catches when I see what it is that’s made him stop.
I dearly love Maebry, but I don’t think I can walk up to that house when a Familiar makes itself known.
One leg shows itself first, a pure white appendage about the thickness of a street light pole. It peeks over the back of the house and comes to rest on the balcony. Then another leg shows up, about twenty feet apart from the first. Even though the odd red environment of the mirror world gives both legs a reddish appearance, they also gleam more white than should be possible.
Then the third leg shows up. Then the fourth.
And finally all eight.
I hear myself make some kind of sick sound as a white spider the size of two city buses creeps onto the roof of the mansion and sits waiting. Even from this distance, I can see its eight eyes staring down at us. Hatefully, I think. I’m not generally afraid of bugs and whatnot—it’s hard to be when you live in the desert. But the sheer size of this gleaming white arachnid is about to make a trip to the bathroom unnecessary.
Ezzy woofs, but softly. He gives my arm a little bump, urging me forward.
“I can’t go up there, Ez. No way.”
Ezzy stands to his full height and shakes his big body and head. He takes a few steps forward before stopping and looking back at me.
“It’s safe?”
He takes another step.
“I’m not sure I can do this.” I feel like crying. Crying from fear, crying from failure. Dammit, I have to move, Maebry’s life is on the line.
I clench my fists. “Okay. You got my back, right?”
My wolf circles around me and stops by my side. I clutch a handful of his fur in my right hand and take a step.
“Okay. Then let’s go.”
This walk is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. It feels like I’m wading through hip-deep water and my chest starts to hurt from how fast my heart is beating. I was not cut out for this kind of thing.
The giant spider remains still. Because its black eyes are just big, blank circles, I can’t tell if it’s watching us or not, but it sure as hell feels like it. Huge goosebumps erupt all along my arms and back as the spider slowly lifts one leg, as if to let us know that yeah, it’s got its eyes on us. I remember how fast I’ve seen wolf and grapefruit spiders move along walls and ceilings back home, and the thought of this monstrosity doing that—scuttling down to block our way, bite us, to suck our insides out—makes me freeze again.
Ezzy chuffs softly and keep walking, letting me hang on to his long hair for strength and will.
Maebry, I think. Yes, Maebry. For her. Just walk. Keep walking, B, keep walking.
I feel a tiny, tiny, tiny bit better as we pass under the edge of the balcony and onto a porch running the length of the house. As I follow a set of stairs toward a grandiose wooden double door, I realize the drapery I’d admired so much a minute ago is actually spider web. It is still pretty, somehow, despite the hulking arachnid on the roof above us.
I reach the front doors with Ezzy behind me, his front paws on the porch, his rear legs on the ground.
“Just knock?”
Ezzy sets his chin down on his paws. He’s not trying to stop me, so, here it goes:
One, two, three. The wood sounds normal enough under my knuckles, and I notice the doors are polished and cared for, not like the dusty and broken-down houses we’ve seen so far.
Something moves behind the door. It’s not anything I can see, because there are no windows in the door itself, but it just feels like there’s movement. I can sense the presence of a Counterpart more strongly now.
“Hello?” I say.
The door cracks open one inch, allowing a dark-skinned young man to peep out at me. His hair grows straight up for several inches, and he wears a thick beard and moustache. He’s bare chested, bare footed, and wears jeans that were once more expensive than every piece of clothing I own.
“Do I know you?” His voice is deep, reminding me of Ezzy’s growl.
“No. I need help. I’m here to find my girlfriend? Maebry Rosado?”
Because obviously knowing her full name will help; he probably has to look it up on his internet-connected computer database. Good God, Briar.
“Is she here?”
“No. Why would she be?”
“I don’t know, I . . . this is the last place I knew s
he was. This world, I mean, this mirror world place, she came here this morning and I haven’t seen her since.”
The guy opens the door fully. A small black pistol dangles from his right hand. The sight of it stuns me for a second, but not nearly for as long as I would have thought. Maybe because next to a giant spider, a pistol ain’t no thing.
“You’re new here, aren’t you. To this world.”
“Yes! I’ve only been here once before, and that was just yesterday at one of those meets.”
“You fought in a meet.”
“No! Maebry was just showing them to me and . . . please, can you just tell me where she is? My Fam brought me here, but I don’t know why, I thought she’d be here but I can’t sense her at all. Please.”
The guy studies Ezzy, who lifts his head and licks his lips, once.
“Yeah, okay. Come in. No room for the dog, though.”
I turn to Ezzy, who dips his head like a nod.
I nod in return and turn back to the guy, who is holding the door open. Trying desperately not to think about Stranger Danger, loaded guns, and the giant freaking spider on the roof of a mansion in an impossibly lit mirror world of our own . . .
Totally not thinking about any of that, I step inside.
The foyer is largely empty except for a couple of folding lawn chairs and a collapsible table, on top of which is a green glass ashtray and cigarettes in a red and white package. I guess I’d been expecting leather furniture and ornate artwork on the walls or something. Instead the only art is a library READ poster with Stephen Hawking holding a Marilyn Monroe book.
The guy shuts the door behind me. “What’s your name?”
He doesn’t lock it, I’m glad to see. “Briar.”
“Like the fairy tale.” He shoves the gun into the back waistband of his jeans and puts his hand out. “Spark.”
I shake his hand. His is rough. He works with them.
Spark crosses his arms so his muscles flex. He doesn’t try to go deeper into the house or sit down, he only takes a slightly wider stance. “Tell me about your girl?”
“She comes here sometimes just to, you know, get away from people?”
