Resonance (31 page)

CH
APTER FORTY-NINE

S
IMON WAS WAITING FOR ME
at the cemetery, as we'd planned. The gate protested as I shoved it open.

Instead of sitting along the stone wall, he was studying one of the headstones, a marble angel, her features weathered to solemn grace.

“How did it go?”

I tried to shrug, but the world weighed too heavily to pull it off. “They think I'm throwing my life away.”

He brushed my hair back. “And what do you think? What do you want your life to be?”

Snowflakes dusted his hair, and I caught one on the tip of my finger. It melted instantly, as fleeting as the moments of quiet Simon and I stole lately.

“I want it to matter,” I said, remembering the feel of Park World, how it disappeared at a touch, the price of my carelessness. “I can't make worlds, but I can change them. I want it to be for the better.”

He tucked my hand in his and led me out of the cemetery, stopping to close the gate behind us, checking the latch. “Eliot says we should be able to put a headstone in without too much trouble. Laurel's handling the . . . other logistics.”

The logistics of recovering Original Simon's body, he meant. I couldn't let him stay in the morgue. He deserved better, and so he'd be buried here, where Amelia could visit him. We couldn't bury him as Simon Lane, so the headstone would read, fittingly, “Gilman Bradley.”

“How did she take it?” I asked.

He ran a hand over his face. “Hard. I think she was expecting it—expecting to lose one of us, anyway. She just didn't know which one of us it would be.”

Grief was sneaky, impossible to guard against all the time, the way it ebbed and flowed, a tide that receded, leaving behind bits of memories as polished as glass, and then rushed back in to steal your breath.

I touched the button I kept in my pocket, turning it over in my fingers.

We stopped outside the house, the snow drifting down around us, and his eyes were serious as he spoke, halting and bewildered. “She knew, didn't she? About the swap. Why didn't she hate me?”

“People believe what they need to,” I said carefully. “And sometimes, if they believe in something hard enough, it becomes true.”

“What do you believe in, Delancey Sullivan?”

I reached up on tiptoe, brought his mouth to mine. “Us.”

“Funny,” he said. “So do I.”

We entered through the back door. Addie and Laurel were there, arms around each others' waists, Addie's head on Laurel's shoulder. Eliot sat at the kitchen table, fingers flying over the keyboard while Amelia, eyes swollen but face composed, sipped a cup of tea opposite him. Iggy whuffed in greeting, raced over to Simon for a rough and loving pat on the head, and returned to Amelia, who rubbed his ears between her fingers. Simon crossed the room and stood next to her, his hand on her shoulder, and she clasped his fingers tightly. I swallowed against the tears clogging my throat.

“You ready?” Eliot said.

“Yeah.” I tugged off my coat and draped it over the back of the chair.

“I spliced together the footage from your interrogation and the parking garage, closed-captioned everything, and put your introduction up front. It's uploaded to four different servers already, so even if the Consort takes it down at one location, we'll be able to bring it back online without trouble.”

Laurel shook her head, curls dancing. “Once it goes viral, there's nothing the Consort will be able to do.”

“You're sure about this, Del? The Free Walkers aren't going to be happy. They wanted to protect the Echoes, not expose the Walkers.”

The power of secrets lies in misdirection—in drawing the eye to what it wants to see, while hiding the truth away. There had been too many secrets, corroding lives and worlds in equal measure, so deeply buried that we didn't see the extent of the damage until it was nearly too late.

It was time for the truth. The light was only blinding until your eyes adjusted, and we would adjust.

I looked at Simon—half-Walker, half-Echo, woven into the Key World as strongly as his Original. The Walkers' hope and my future.

We would evolve, and be the stronger for it.

“I'm sure.”

Simon left Amelia's side and stood behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist and resting his chin atop my head.

“Do it,” I told Eliot, and he clicked a button.

The screen filled with a girl's face: reddish-brown hair pulled back in a messy braid, wisps falling into eyes ringed with exhaustion, cheeks hollowed with hunger, mouth tight with resolve.

Me. Not the girl of three months ago, but a new girl, rooted in the old one but grown beyond what she'd dreamed possible. A girl who had touched infinity and loved in particular and seen the fragility and resilience of the world. A girl with a purpose, and a future, and a calling all her own.

CHA
PTER FIFTY

R
EALITY IS BIGGER THAN YOU THINK
.

Every time you make a choice, the universe splits in two. You continue on, and the choice you didn't make creates an entirely new world. Every person. Every choice. It's been happening since time began, and it will never end, and there are more worlds than grains of sand in the ocean or stars in the sky or drops of rain.

There are people whose job it is to keep the worlds in harmony. We Walk between worlds, fighting off entropy. Protecting you. And you'd never know, because we've done it in secret.

I am done with secrets.

My name is Delancey Sullivan. I was born to fight entropy.

I lost.

I am not done fighting.

Neither are you.

•   •   •

The video rolled on, images of my interrogation. Of Simon, bleeding on the ground. Of my Simon, gasping back to life. But I didn't look at the past, at the battles we'd fought.

I looked at the counter at the bottom of the screen. At the page views, ticking steadily upward.

1

2

4

5

8

12

24

33

47

76

108

I looked at the truth, unfurling like the leaves of a tree, growing stronger every second, and our future along with it. The world we had shaped and the world we would tend, as carefully as we did each other.

Also by Erica O'Rourke

Dissonance series

Dissonance

Torn trilogy

Torn

Tangled

Bound

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2015 by Erica O'Rourke

Jacket photograph copyright © 2015 by Ali Smith

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The text for this book is set in Granjon.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

O'Rourke, Erica.

Resonance / Erica O'Rourke. — First edition.

pages cm. —  (Dissonance ; [2])

Summary: “The Free Walkers make Del the ultimate promise: if Del joins their fight, she will be reunited with Simon. The fate of the multiverse depends on her choice”—Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4424-6027-0 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-4424-6029-4 (eBook)

[1. Choice—Fiction. 2. Love—Fiction. 3. Science fiction.]  I. Title.

PZ7.O649Re 2015

[Fic]—dc23

2014038589