Jadie in Five Dimensions

by Dianne K. Salerni

  Please, Miss Rose, don’t become a huge helpless slug that needs drones to clean its poop.

  I don’t say that. My opinions are unimportant in the fourth dimension. Maybe completely wrong. “You’ll make a brilliant Seer, Miss Rose. But I hope you’ll do a better job of standing up to the rest of them on our behalf.”

  One of her eyes pivots in my direction. “What do you mean?”

  It’s daring to get this critical, but she brought me here to confide in me, so I plunge on. “My father shouldn’t have had to lose his daughter to become a brilliant physicist. It was cruel.”

  “If I had not arranged for you to be kidnapped, you would not have the Martins and Marius in your life. Would you rather that be the case?”

  My head swims with the tangled memories from the wormhole—every past I could have had. It’s not fair to ask me to choose between them. “I think you can do better.”

  “I certainly intend to try.” She makes a low noise like a laugh, although I don’t see how it’s a laughing matter.

  “You can have this back.” I hold up the viewing crystal. I’ve seen enough of Miss Rose’s hive, her Seers, and her future.

  “Keep it,” she says. “It is a gift. You will not want to miss seeing your braneworld through it when I take you home.”

  39. JADIE

  An ocean. That’s what it looks like. An ocean of stars and darkness and swirling nebula clouds. It seems to go on forever in every direction, but that’s true of real oceans too. When you’re in the middle of them, it’s hard to imagine they’ll end.

  My universe is vast, but just a membrane in 4-space—and it’s covered in Drones. Their job, according to Miss Rose, is to observe and report back to the Seers. For the first time, I understand why Miss Rose was worried about identifying the infiltrators from Darkness and Storm. There are thousands of Drones here.

  I also remember what Ty told me when we were using the Transporter without permission. Nobody’s watching. He was wrong.

  Miss Rose takes what she calls the scenic route home, passing planets covered by scaffolding. These are other Transporters, she explains, moving Agents to their destinations on other worlds. Nonhuman Agents. Aliens on planets across the Milky Way Galaxy and beyond. I should be stunned by this proof of other intelligent life in my universe, but it feels anticlimactic after meeting SHE.

  “Ty said our bracelets are attached to the Transporter by fishing wire. You reel us in and out. Is that true?” I ask.

  Miss Rose chuckles. “It is more complicated than that, but he is surprisingly accurate on the basic principle.”

  Earth, when I finally see it, is covered by more Drones than anywhere else. “They are repairing the damage done when Steve took you the wrong way out of your braneworld. We are not supposed to push all the way through a membrane.”

  “What kind of damage?”

  “Luckily for you, the effect is minimal where the tear begins—at the Rivers house. Your neighborhood suffered a severe storm. People on the opposite side of your planet were not as fortunate. Typhoons. Earthquakes. Drones took immediate action to reduce the impact on human lives, but on the other side of your galaxy, an entire star system was destroyed. Correcting these events will take years, perhaps centuries.”

  An entire star system? Were there living beings in that system? Were there casualties on Earth? I open my mouth to ask how many people died so that I could save my father, but Miss Rose speaks first. “The agent from Storm and Darkness is responsible for this. Not you. Remember that you helped save your three-dimensional universe from a worse fate.”

  I close my mouth, not altogether comforted. Even if I did what she said, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the unintended consequences of hurling a glass jar at Ty.

  We close in on eastern North America and the city of Philadelphia. Miss Rose’s fingers insert me through the structure of the Transporter.

  “Good luck with your four parents, Jadie. You have the coordinates for the Lowell home and my permission to use the Transporter. Your bracelet, and those belonging to Marius, Ty, and your adoptive parents, are now permanently set in an active state.”

  “No more pushing me off the Transporter and letting meekers gnaw on my legs?”

  “You were never in real danger. I reward those who help me.”

  Then I plunge ana into the Lowell apartment, landing among a group of agitated people.

  “Here she is!”

  “Where have you been?”

  “What took so long?”

  They hug me and turn me around and hug me some more and check me for injuries until I’m dizzy. Only two people stand apart.

  One is Ty, who seems to be sulking in a corner.

  The other is a tall, thin woman who watches me from across the room, one hand clasped over her mouth. Her hair is shorter than it was in the photographs, and there are more lines around her eyes.

  With trembling hands, I tighten my ponytail and straighten my shirt. “Um. Hi. I’m Jadie.”

  She lowers her hand. “I always knew you were alive. I never gave up.”

  I know that voice.

  Before I realize I’ve moved, I’m in her arms and crying—a wet, snotty, I-can’t-catch-my-breath kind of sobbing, the kind I hate. She holds me, rocking back and forth.

  “It’s okay, baby. My darling J.D.”

  My parents tell the Lowells the story of how they were sent to rescue me from the snowbank. Mrs. Lowell asks how the Martins missed the nationwide news coverage of the carjacking and my kidnapping. Mom and Dad wrack their memories and eventually recall a mysterious cable outage in our Kansas neighborhood around the time I arrived in their home. The news blackout must have been arranged so the Martins would never see the story and put two and two together.

  I don’t know how long the rehashing of my kidnapping would’ve gone on, but I bring it to a stop when the rumbling inside me can no longer be ignored. “Is there anything to eat?”

  Everyone stops their explaining and apologizing and looks at me.

  “I missed breakfast. And lunch—and maybe dinner. I don’t know what time it is.” Then, guiltily, I turn to my birth father. “And, um, you.” I don’t know what to call him now. “You must’ve missed more than that.”

  He has that black cat in his arms, and she’s rubbing her head against his chin like she’s as happy to have him home as everyone else is. “Dave fed me. But the cuisine was subpar.”

  My birth mother cups my face with her hands. “I’ve been waiting years to feed you.”

  All four parents launch into action, and they won’t let me help. Marius and Sam are busy gleefully busting Sam’s crutch into pieces, so I sit down next to the only miserable person in the apartment.

  Mom has bandaged the cut on his back, and he’s wearing one of Sam’s T-shirts, which hangs to his knees. “I’m surprised you haven’t gone home yet,” I say. “Marius has the coordinates for your room.”

  Ty stiffens. “Sorry to intrude on your family reunion. I’ll leave.”

  When he shifts forward to stand up, I elbow him back in place. “That’s not what I meant.” Because I do know why he hasn’t gone home. “My dad called your dad and made up a story about an emergency course correction that involved multiple Agents.”

  “I’m sure my father was pleasant to yours on the phone. Doesn’t mean he’s going to be pleasant to me.”

  Feeling sorry for Ty Rivers is an uncomfortable thing. I prefer despising him.

  With a sigh, I pick up the viewing crystal from the table where I set it down. No one asked me why I came from 4-space carrying a rock, and now I hand it to Ty. “This is for you.”

  Ty hefts it. “More mass than it looks like it should have. I assume it’s four-dimensional?”

  “Yes, and when you’re in 4-space, you can see reflections in its facets from all directions. It’s like looking through a kaleidoscope, but it’s better than nothing. Miss Rose gave it to me. You can have it.” Ty gives me a funny look, and I scowl. “Don’t jum
p to any wrong conclusions. It doesn’t mean I like you.”

  “It’s not that,” Ty says as if that is a stupid idea. “I’m wondering why Miss Rose wants me to have it.”

  “She gave it to me. She didn’t know I was going to pass it on to you.”

  “That’s what you think. But what if we’ve been doing what Miss Rose and the Seers wanted all along? You think finding the Lowells was an accident. But what’s the end result? Sam and your father and I create the product they wanted. What if everything that happened was planned?”

  “Including the part where you helped spies from an enemy clan kidnap my father?”

  “Who says they were enemies? What if Dave and Steve were actors? How would we know any different?”

  I shake my head. “I wasn’t supposed to find the Lowells. Miss Rose tried to scare me away from visiting them.”

  Ty snorts. “How well did that work? Were you scared off?”

  For a minute, I consider his point. You were never in real danger, Miss Rose said. Did she mean the meeker incident—or the rest of it?

  And what about the thousands of Drones crawling over the surface of our braneworld? How come none of them reported Ty’s experiments with the Transporter? Was it because I wouldn’t have been able to spy on my birth family without his help?

  Then I come to my senses. “I know what I saw in 5-space. Miss Rose and Dave weren’t acting. They were trying to kill each other.”

  “What was it like?” Suddenly, Ty’s gaze is intense.

  What was it like, melding with a being vast enough to be a planet? After that horrible sensation of worms crawling through my flesh and hijacking my body, the link between my mind and SHE felt like stepping into sunlight from out of a dark basement. Seeing in five dimensions… using senses I can’t explain in a body with parts I have no name for… It made me aware that any human individual, including one named Jocelyn Dakota Lowell Martin, is very, very small by comparison.

  None of this do I want to share with Ty. They’re not secrets. They’re… personal. But I almost got him eaten, so I owe him something.

  “You know how humans are like paper dolls in 4-space? Well, in 5-space, we were made of cobwebs. Miss Rose and Dave were like cardboard cutouts, but Dave had an awful lot of insides, which I saw and wish I hadn’t. SHE didn’t mean to kill him. SHE was just knocking him away from my father, and he went tumbling in a bad direction.” I shudder. Reversal in 4-space is a minor inconvenience by comparison. “What 5-space can do to you… Let’s say that Miss Rose’s clan will need a seriously secure port-lock system to prevent accidental inside-outage if they plan to colonize there.”

  Ty stares at me like I haven’t given him the answer he wants. Does he expect me to say that being part of SHE was the most exhilarating experience of my life? Because it was and it wasn’t. It’s something I’ll never forget. But I hope it won’t be the last amazing thing I do.

  Finally, he looks away. “So, Dave wasn’t acting when he got killed.”

  “Or when he was fighting Miss Rose,” I agree. “I saw her bleeding.”

  “That doesn’t prove the rest of it wasn’t planned by the Seers.”

  My jaw clenches and my fists curl. Leave it to Ty to complicate what should be an end to the story. But watching him obsessively turn that crystal over and over in his hands, I realize he needs the story not to be over.

  “Get up,” I say.

  “What?”

  I grab his arm, and he lets me drag him off the sofa. “Get something to eat.”

  He scowls. “I’m not hungry.”

  I push him toward the kitchen. “I’d fuel up if I were you. If Miss Rose wants you to have that crystal, you need to figure out why and what she’s up to.”

  Ty narrows his eyes in suspicion. “I thought you didn’t believe it.”

  I don’t believe everything that happened was a complex plot orchestrated by the Seers, but I understand why Ty Rivers does.

  Thanks to today’s events, I have double everything: two mothers, two fathers, two brothers. I don’t know how it will work—getting to know the Lowells, adapting to two families—just that it will. The details won’t matter, and the distance between Kansas and Pennsylvania won’t matter, thanks to the Transporter.

  Meanwhile, Ty has nothing but conspiracy theories and his evil-genius schemes.

  Then again, that’s what makes him happy.

  So I put on my most serious face and offer my next-door nemesis a gift, just because I can. “You convinced me. Now, go get ’em.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many years ago when I was in middle school, a teacher handed me the Victorian classic Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott. (That’s not an error; that’s really his name.) In Flatland, a two-dimensional being, a Square, is visited by a three-dimensional Sphere and introduced to the concept of up and down, two directions the Square cannot perceive. My favorite part was when the Sphere flipped and reversed a “dog” owned by the Square’s daughter, changing it from a mongrel to a pedigree, but my mind was really blown when the Sphere was visited by an Over-Sphere from the fourth dimension!

  Years later, when I was an elementary school teacher myself, I discovered the works of YA horror and science fiction author William Sleator. His novel The Boy Who Reversed Himself reminded me of my earlier fascination with spatial dimensions and introduced me to the terms ana and kata. As a salute to the genius of Sleator, I modeled Alia Malik’s favorite game, Cosmic Knight, on Sleator’s Interstellar Pig.

  In addition to acknowledging the works of Edwin A. Abbott and William Sleator as my inspiration, I want to thank my brilliant agent, Sara Crowe, and my equally brilliant editor, Sally Morgridge, for riding this multidimensional merry-go-round of conspiracy theories and plot twists—and for lending their talents to make this the best book it could be. Thanks also to everyone at Holiday House for their commitment to the project and the beautiful design of the book, inside and out. The ana and kata extensions are stunning, but you’ll have to take my word for that, since your three-dimensional eyes aren’t built to see them.

  Originally titled Braneworld and started in 2014, this book has undergone too many versions and drafts to count. I owe a great deal of thanks to my critique partners and beta readers, some of whom have read more than one version over the years. Thank you, Marcy Hatch, Krystalyn Drown, Tiana Smith, Joanne Fritz, Karla Valenti, Julie Dao, Christine Danek, Maria Mainero, Brayden Orpello-McCoy, and Pj McIlvaine.

  Finally, I want to express my love and gratitude to my daughters, Gabbey and Gina, for their unwavering support, and to my husband, Bob, for late-night brainstorming sessions in the hot tub under the stars.

  “My story is stuck,” I said.

  “Why not take it to the fifth dimension?” he suggested.