Tether

All Unquiet Things

The Opposite of Hallelujah

Tandem

Everything repeats.

It’s one of the fundamental axioms of the multiverse. Everything repeats, over and over, again and again; throughout the universes, atoms assemble according to predetermined patterns.

Everything repeats, and so does every
one.
You. Me. Your best friend. The boy at school you’ve had a crush on for ages. We are all one of many, connected by a tether—a strand of dark energy finer than the most delicate silk thread—to the others who wear our faces. If everything proceeds as it should, you’ll never meet your analogs, your doubles in those other worlds. The universes are meant to be separate. You’re meant to believe that you are the only you there is. So go ahead. Believe it. You might as well; there’s a 99.9 percent chance you’ll never be proven wrong.

But I know better. I’ve seen it with my own eyes: another world, not much different from mine, but at the same time more different than I have words to explain. I’ve seen
her,
too—my analog, my double. I looked into her eyes—my eyes—as she betrayed me, as she tried to steal my life. So maybe you get it now, why I want you to think you’re the only one. It’s better that way. If you don’t know the truth, you can take comfort in the lies.

“You see that?” The man grabbed Thomas by his hair and yanked his head so far back he thought his neck was going to snap. There was a clock on the wall, four bloodred numbers: 11:38. As he watched, one minute ticked away.

“Eleven hours, thirty-seven minutes till you’re in front of the firing squad,” the man hissed, digging his fingers into Thomas’s scalp. When Thomas didn’t respond, the man back-handed him across the face. Thomas’s head rolled to one side. He didn’t flinch. The pain seemed very far away now.

The past couple weeks were nothing but a smudge of memory in the back of his brain, a sickening blur of blinding lights and deafening noises. The worst had been the sound of human screaming, piped like music into his tiny cell. Sometime during those long, dark hours, he’d fallen into a waking dream in which it was Sasha screaming, as if she were being torn apart. He’d seen her as if she were really there, curled up on the floor in agony, begging him to make it stop. He tried to go to her, but his broken body wouldn’t move; he tried to say something to comfort her, but his throat was so sore and dry he couldn’t speak. He couldn’t even cry, as if his body couldn’t spare the water for tears.

Just when it felt as if it would never end, they hauled him from the cell. His knees scraped the rough concrete floor as they dragged him to another room and flung him down on a cot. He got a few hours of fevered sleep and woke up wearing chains. Shackles bit into his wrists and ankles. His lip was split and bloody, his right eye so swollen he couldn’t open it. Never before had he felt so hopeless, not even when he was a little boy staring at a box of ashes—all that remained of his parents—on some faceless neighbor’s kitchen table. At least back then he was too young to understand; he still believed that better things awaited him.

But the best moments in his life had come and gone. He remembered them all so clearly. His favorite was prom night, after the dance. Standing on the shore of the lake with Sasha, he’d marveled not only at the size of the universe but at the size of the space that had opened up inside of him, the realization that everything he’d always wanted—a normal life, someone who cared about him, a future of infinite possibility—was so close and yet so out of reach. He held on tight to the memory, but it cut as deep as it comforted, and very soon it would be lost forever, gone as if it had never been.