Tether (8 page)

“I know what you mean.” Just going on after that kind of loss was hard enough.

“They were very important to me, your parents. Together we made great leaps.” Dr. March stood suddenly. “But this … this I built long before I met them, just me and Moss. It was supposed to be the future of interuniversal travel.”

He walked to a dark back corner of the room and tore down a dusty drop cloth I’d assumed was hiding another enormous stack of boxes. When I saw what was under it, I was so surprised that for a second I forgot to breathe.

“Do you know what this is?” Dr. March asked, surprised by my expression.

“No,” I said, drawing closer. “But I recognize it.”

The object was a freestanding metal doorframe, just like Callum’s door to nowhere. I took the drawing out of my pocket and held it up for comparison. Dr. March’s door had a control panel affixed to the right side, and there was no light shining
out of it, but other than that, it was a perfect match. I looked through the door, for some reason expecting to see Aurora on the other side, but all I saw was more of Dr. March’s junk.

“We call it a portal,” Dr. March explained. “There’s one on Earth and one in Aurora. If they’re both activated, you can use them to pass through the tandem. You walk through one, and you come out the other. Once we figured out that going through the tandem makes you sick, we modified it with a buffer.”

I touched the portal tentatively. “So where do I end up? Where’s Dr. Moss’s portal?”

Dr. March’s face darkened, as if a cloud had passed over it. “I don’t know. They can be broken down and reassembled, so it could be anywhere. It might not even be in his possession anymore. You said you were willing to take risks. Here’s your chance.”

I nodded. “How does it work?”

Dr. March paused, then said, “Are you absolutely
sure
you want to do this?”

“Yes,” I said firmly. I’d spent the whole night and all morning weighing the options, and in the end I’d decided: I was going back to Aurora. Everything was waiting for me there: Thomas, my analogs, and something else I couldn’t put into words. I didn’t know where my path would lead, but I was determined to find out, determined enough to accept the fact that I might not come home again. I hoped to, but I understood that there were no guarantees, and I was resigned to that truth. “I’m absolutely sure.”

He sighed, then began flipping switches and punching in codes on the portal’s console until it shuddered to life. Light filled the room. It was like a message from the universe itself, saying
Welcome.
Aurora was calling me home.

cell when she felt it: a tug on the bond so hard and urgent that it woke her. The sensation was so real, so physical, that it nearly knocked her out of the cot they’d brought in after releasing her from her shackles. She sat up, breathing hard. An otherworldly energy coursed through her veins, stronger and more potent than adrenaline, and she knew Sasha was getting close. The power surged, and in the darkness of that dark, dark room, her hands began to glow.

She closed her eyes and listened for Sasha. It wouldn’t be long now.

At first the room was as dark as a cave except for the glow of the portal; then lights flickered on, illuminating a large brass seal in the floor.
King’s Elite Service,
read the banner across the top, and at the bottom, the motto
Surpass to outlast.
Well, crap.

I took a step forward, and alarms began to shriek. The noise was so shrill it was like a needle to the brain, so loud I couldn’t even think. A door slid open and guards stormed in, training their guns on me. Terror trilled up my spine, and I turned back to the portal in panicked reflex, but then I noticed a familiar face in the sea of armed strangers. I moved toward him instinctively, as though the floor had tipped and propelled me forward, but the expression on his face was grim, and the look in his eyes was a warning:
Stay away.
The alarms died, and silence blanketed the room.

“Put your hands up,” Thomas commanded. The tone of his voice was like a slap to the face, so impersonal and empty, it almost didn’t belong to him at all. If anything, he sounded like Grant in one of his darkest moods, impenetrable and distant. I was relieved to see him standing there, alive and in one piece, but I couldn’t get over the way he was looking at me, like I was a stranger. What had they done to him?

“Stay right where you are,” he said. He jerked his chin at the portal. “Meyers, shut that thing down. Farrow, Krueger—grab her.”

They twisted my hands behind my back, and no amount of struggling was going to free me. The portal shivered as it shut down; I’d lost my only escape route, and Thomas, whom I’d crossed the multiverse to find, was looking through me like I was made of glass. The boy from the beach suddenly seemed very far away.

Sasha.
I closed my eyes. The voice in my head sounded like my own, but it didn’t belong to me, and it didn’t belong to Juliana. Another vision tugged at me, and I slipped into it as easily as diving into water. I was lying on my back in a hard bed, staring up at a concrete ceiling, and then I was back again. The sound of her saying my name echoed along the tether. Her presence was more than just a feeling now; it was a bright green light at the back of my brain, one I had never seen before. I had to know who she was. At the moment, it felt like the most important thing in the world, even more important than Thomas. I opened my eyes and found him staring at me. He was standing so close, I could hear him breathing.

“I’m taking you to the General,” Thomas said. If he’d noticed me blink out for a moment, he didn’t acknowledge it. “He’ll want to question you himself.”

I stared at Thomas’s back as he and the other agents led me down a series of curved corridors.
He’s alive,
I kept thinking.
He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive.
It felt more like my mantra than
Everything is fine
and
It was real
ever had. I wished I could figure out what he was thinking. The General wasn’t capable of making Thomas forget me, no matter how all-powerful he sometimes seemed, which meant one of two things: either what Thomas felt for me before hadn’t lasted through whatever he’d
been through since we parted, or else this display of indifference was an act. For the moment, I was choosing to believe the latter, but it didn’t change the facts of our circumstances. Back on Earth, I kept hoping he’d escaped, gotten as far away from the General and the KES as he could. But here he was, and here I was, captor and captive once again.

We stopped in front of a door marked
PRIVATE: AUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY
. The guards held me in the hall while Thomas entered.

“You asked me to tell you if anything came through the portal,” I heard him say. Any
thing.
Not even any
one. He’s faking,
I reminded myself sternly. It didn’t make me feel any better, though.

“Bring her in,” the General replied. I tensed. It was impossible to take the General by surprise, and I had the terrible feeling I’d just walked into another of his traps.

The guards dragged me inside. The General sat behind a long glass desk, reading some kind of report. We all stood silent and unmoving, waiting for him to speak.

“Hello, Miss Lawson,” he said finally, glancing up. “I thought we might be seeing you again. It’s useful to know that the portals still work.” He paused for my response, but I stayed quiet. I’d learned from experience that when it came to the General, it was best not to say anything at all if I could help it. “Do you want to tell me
why
you’re here?”

“Not really.” I resisted the urge to look over at Thomas.

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” the General said. “You’re here, and you’ll do what I tell you. Much has changed since you were last here, but one thing has not: this is my world. I command it and control it. Don’t make an enemy of me, Miss Lawson, I warn you. I declared war on Farnham to find you, and I’m willing to do much more than that to keep this country safe.”

“Safe from what?” Farnham and the UCC had been at war for two hundred years, but from what I understood of their history, it had been a long time since Farnham had posed a real threat to the military might of the UCC.

The General slid a large, dark piece of paper across the desk. At first I thought it was a photograph, but when I looked closer, my throat tightened. It was a copy of the map Callum and I had found in the king’s study, the same one I had in my back pocket. “I believe you’ve seen this before. Do you know what it is?”

I shook my head.

“I suspected not. Operation Angel Eyes is a satellite we launched about fifteen years ago, around the time that Dr. Moss’s many-worlds project was starting to yield results. I wanted a way to keep track of movement through the tandem.”

“Disruptions.” I’d been staring at the map multiple times a day for the last month, and the thought had never even crossed my mind, but now it seemed obvious. “That’s what these are.”

“Yes, disruptions caused by travel through the tandem. As you can imagine, crossings are strictly regulated; I have to sign off on every single one, and for more than a decade Angel Eyes showed no unauthorized passage. Until, one day, it did.”

“When?” I wondered which of the disruptions belonged to Thomas, and which of them belonged to me. I still had no idea why the king would have wanted me to have the map so badly. And Juliana had used it to barter with the rebel group Libertas for her freedom, but what possible value could it have to them? The more answers I got, the more confused I was.

“About two years ago,” the General said. “It started with a few anomalies, which we assumed were glitches. But over the following months, there were more and more disruption
events we could not account for, and we had to conclude that what we were seeing was a calculated penetration of our universe by another.”

“Which universe?” I demanded. “Earth?”

“No. It’s been years since any Earth governments or corporations have done productive work on many-worlds technology, and we knew Dr. March’s portal wasn’t being used because its twin was here.”

“You’re saying Aurora is being invaded by a
third
universe?”