Glenn paused, her finger hovering over the glass of the screen.
Downstairs she heard her father close the basement door and then leave the house, heading out to the workshop.
The house went quiet. Glenn touched one fingertip to the glass and sent the form flying away.
Her new life had begun.
4
“Glenn! Glenny! Wake up!”
Glenn bolted upright, twisted in her sheets. A dark figure stood over her bed.
“Dad?”
“It works, Glenny,” he said. “It actually works.”
Glenn rubbed her eyes. “What are you talking about? What
works? What time is it?”
“Get dressed and come see.”
Her father leaned into a shaft of moonlight. Glenn jerked away without thinking and gasped. His hair was disheveled and his clothes were stained with oil and soot. There was a long gash on his arm that oozed blood. Hopkins reared back and hissed as Dad reached down and grabbed Glenn by her shoulders.
“We’re really going to do it, Glenn.”
“Do what? What happened to you?”
He knelt down beside Glenn’s bed. His skin was sweaty and pale, ghastly as melting plastic.
“We’re going to get her back,” he said. “We’re going to march right over there and bring her back.”
“Go where? Get who back?”
“Your mom,” he said, his voice trembling. “We’re going to
rescue her, Glenn.”
It was like a fist slammed into Glenn’s chest. Her breath stopped.
Suddenly it seemed like he was too close to her, kneeling there on the floor. Glenn could feel the fevered heat radiating off of him.
“Rescue her from what?”
“It’s not something I can just — you have to come see!”
Before she could respond, he had leapt up and was running out of the room. Glenn stumbled out of her bed and followed, Hopkins trailing behind.
“Everything you’ve been told is a lie,” Dad said as they
descended the stairs and went out into the yard. “The Rift wasn’t an accident. And it’s not some kind of wasteland over there. Ha! I can’t believe they’ve gotten away with this for so long!”
“What are you talking about? What does this have to do with Mom?”
Dad tore into the workshop. He drew a stool from the corner and sat down between Glenn and The Project.
“Okay,” he said, one hand tugging nervously at the other. “Now, how to … yes. There’s a set of rules — physical rules — that govern cause and effect, gravity, nuclear and chemical reactions, time, momentum. All of those rules come together and we call the result reality. Is that right?”
The workshop was more of a wreck than usual. Tools lay
everywhere. Half of The Project lay in pieces on the floor, and the other half had been radically altered. The generator was now directly hooked into it, and the whole thing glowed a livid blue as if it were alive.
“Glenn?”
“Of course. But what does that — ”
“Think of a set of playing cards. The cards are always the same
— King, Queen, Ace, Jack — but the game you play changes
depending on what set of rules you decide to invoke. Use one set of rules and you’re playing poker. Choose another and you have solitaire.
What we think of as reality is no different. It’s a card game. Change the rules and you change reality.”
“Dad, that’s not possible. You can’t — ”
“Yes you can. That’s just … that’s the thing: It is, Glenn.
Possible. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. The rules can change. They were changed. That’s what the Rift was. They’ve been so good about keeping it all under wraps. The border. The stories. The fake satellite pictures! They’ve made us so afraid of what’s on the other side that no one even thinks about going over and actually looking to see what’s there.”
“Who are you talking about?”
Dad leaned closer into Glenn. She could smell sweat and the blood from his arm.
“Authority. They’ve been lying to us for a hundred years. But that’s not important, what’s important is this” — he took a rattling breath — “on the other side of the border there are people like us, except for one thing — they live in a reality based on an entirely different set of rules.”
Something clicked into place as soon as he said it. Glenn had heard these words before. Read them before. She could see the web pages in her head as clear as day. The “divergent models” theory, if something so ridiculous could even be called a theory, was one of the most popular on Rifter websites. Glenn’s stomach turned. How could such nonsense be coming out of her own father’s mouth?
“Dad, wait — ”
“No, listen. I never told you this because … because it’s
complicated. Your mother didn’t leave us. Not like you think. She came here from the other side of the border and she had to go back.
That’s where she is now. That’s where she’s always been! I think she intended to go for just a little while, that’s why she didn’t say anything to us, but she … well, things are different there. She’s different there, and she was captured. Or trapped somehow. I know how it sounds, but”
— he turned to The Project — “none of that matters now. We can get her back. You and me, Glenny, we can rescue her. That’s what this project has always been about. She didn’t want to leave. She loved us more than anything and she wants to come home, but she can’t. She needs us to rescue her. And once we do, everything will be back the way it was. We’ll be back the way we were.”
Before Glenn could say anything, Dad was at The Project,
rummaging through clanking bits of metal.
“This is what I’ve been building. It finally works. This will allow us to go over to the other side but bring a bit of our reality — our rules — with us. Like … like a space suit.”
He grabbed Glenn’s arm and pushed a heavy band around her
wrist. Glenn lifted it up. It was a flat gray piece of metal with a glowing red jewel in the center.
“All we have to do is find her,” Dad said. “It won’t be easy. I know that. But once we bring her into our reality, she’ll be like she was when she was here and she’ll be able to leave with us. Then everything will be like it was. We’ll have her back, Glenn. Glenn? What are you doing?”
Glenn hissed as her fingernails scraped the skin underneath the bracelet. She ripped it off and threw it into the corner of the shed, where it landed with a crash. Icy air flooded the room as Glenn threw the bolt and opened the workshop door.
“No. Wait!”
Glenn whirled around. “There’s nothing there, Dad! Nothing!”
“Glenny — ”
“She’s not on the other side and she doesn’t need to be rescued!”
Glenn screamed. “She left because she didn’t want to be with us anymore. That’s all!”
Dad called after Glenn as she stormed out of the workshop, but she ignored him. She strode across the yard and back to the house, slamming doors all the way until she made it up to her room and shut herself inside.
The silence was awful. Glenn felt sick. She fell onto her bed and her body curled around the massive emptiness inside her. Glenn listened as her father stomped up the stairs and pounded on her door, but she didn’t move.
“Glenn?” he said, his voice shaking. She could tell he was crying.
“Glenny, please.”
Her father stood at her door for a time, his feet breaking the sliver of light beneath the door into three bars.
Glenn’s breath caught in her throat, but she said nothing. She didn’t move. After a while, there was a small sound, like a sigh, and her father’s footsteps shushed down the carpeted hall.
Glenn turned onto her back and stared at the blank ceiling.
Hopkins jumped up onto the bed and began to purr. Glenn snatched him up and pressed her fingertips into the soft white patch at his throat and then traced the angle of his face. She found the arrow-shaped nick in his right ear, the last vestige of the day they found him.