The Secret Sea (13 page)

Khalid opened his mouth to answer, then gave up, shaking his head. He turned away from the two of them and stared out across what was at least still called the East River. Zak stood between them, not sure what to do. Comfort Khalid? Challenge Moira?

But there was no challenging her. His gut knew what his brain had been denying.

They were in an entirely different universe. A different version of the New York City they'd grown up in, superficially similar, but with enough changes to make it an alien landscape.

No Freedom Tower. And from where he stood, it seemed that the water came up to what would have been Fulton Street in what he now thought of as “their world.”

“That's why it's called the Houston Conflux,” he muttered. “Different landmark, but named after the same guy.”

He glanced over at Khalid, but his best friend had taken a couple of steps away, arms folded over his chest, back ramrod stiff. He clearly did not want to be bothered right now.

“You're the science expert,” Zak said to Moira. “How do we get back to our world?”

Moira blinked. Her expression—passive and calm—did not change as she said, “Home? I don't have the slightest idea.”

 

TWENTY-THREE

“You're joking, right?” Zak peered closely at Moira, looking for a hint of a smile or a grin. “There has to be a way home. There's always a way home, right?”

“I don't know what to tell you, Zak. I don't even know how we got here in the first place—how am I supposed to know how to get us home?”

She seemed nonchalant, but Zak had known her long enough that he could detect the slight tremor in her voice, the quirk of her lips, the crinkle of her eyes. And the way she'd been talking since her discovery of the plaque—clipped, brusque.

Moira was terrified and doing her best not to show it.

Happy-go-lucky Khalid was sulking, and supergenius Moira was baffled. It was the perfect time to panic.

Zak ran a hand through his still-wet hair. There had to be some kind of explanation. And if there was an explanation, then there had to be a solution. Right?

Right?

“You have to think,” he told Moira. “You have to think harder than you've ever thought before, Moira. We have to figure out how to get home.”

She wouldn't look at him, staring instead at the plaque celebrating the Houston Conflux. “There's nothing we can do about it right now,” she said, her voice tightly controlled. “So there's no point in panicking.”

“Don't you want to go home?”

“Yes,” she said, stiff and emotionless, still staring. “But panicking isn't going to get me there any sooner.”

Zak clenched his fists. Why did she have to be so infuriatingly rational?

“Well, think, at least!” he barked at her, then went to check on Khalid, who was still staring across the river. Great. One friend was shutting down, and the other was shutting him out.

Khalid spoke quietly, without looking over at him, still staring out at the alien version of Brooklyn. “You think maybe there are versions of
us
in this world? Living across the river in Brooklyn, no clue that we're standing here. Hanging out with their families, just chilling?”

Family
 … Zak shivered as a breeze found him. The air was warm, but as it blew through his sodden clothing, it chilled him. Family. Tommy. In the shock of their arrival in this other universe, he'd entirely forgotten. This wasn't just about getting home; it was about family. Family that had left him, family that had lied to him, family that was gone.

Tommy?
He hurled the thought with all his concentration.
Tommy? Can you hear me? Is this what you wanted when you told me to go into the water? Did you want me to come here?

Nothing. No answer.

Just great. As if the situation weren't bad enough: His best friends wouldn't look at him or even at each other. He was trapped in another universe. And he couldn't sense his twin brother.

He'd never felt more alone in his life. Which was saying something.

He put a hand on Khalid's shoulder. “Hey, man. You okay?”

“Oh, sure,” Khalid said with a scarily calm sarcasm. “I'm just wondering if my parents had a boy in this universe. Or if they ever met at all. Maybe my dad never got out of Iran. Or, hey—maybe there
is
no Iran! Who knows, right? What fun!”

“Well, there's a city here, where there's one in our world. So it seems like this universe is pretty similar to ours. I'm sure there's an Iran.”

Khalid grunted as he absorbed that.

“I'm sorry I yelled at you before,” Zak said. It wasn't much, but it was all he had to offer. He couldn't go through all this alone. And he couldn't let the Three Basketeers break up. Not now. They needed each other too badly.

Khalid groaned. “Yeah. Me too. Crap!” He threw his hands up and turned around for the first time since being captivated by the sight across the river. “My parents were right—I should have stayed home today.”

“We should have hung out in my hospital room and watched TV,” Zak agreed.

They bumped fists and grinned at each other. “Now we have to get Science Girl to come around.”

They stood on either side of Moira, who now sat cross-legged on the ground, manipulating some rocks and twigs she'd arrayed before her, staring down at them as though they held the answers to all the mysteries of the universe (whichever one).

“Hey, Moira,” Zak said, “maybe you want to join us here in the real world?”

“One of them, at least,” Khalid joked weakly.

Moira said nothing.

“Moira, come on. We can't just stand here all night. We need to figure out what happened.”

Moira gathered up the rocks and twigs and stood. She handed Zak a small rock. “Stand like this,” she said, positioning him so that he held the rock out at chest height, an arm's length from his body.

Without a pause, she handed Khalid a larger rock and arranged him so that he held his at head height, hovering over Zak's by a foot or two.

“Khalid, the rock you're holding represents our world, our New York City. Zak, you've got this world.”

“What are we doing?” Zak asked.

“You said we need to figure out what happened,” she told him. “This is what happened.”

She took a twig and stretched to balance it atop Khalid's. “This is us.”

“Looks just like us.”

Moira ignored Khalid's barb. “I can't explain the science behind it. Just trust me on this. Physics tells us that universes exist in great numbers, side by side. Imagine an apartment building with an infinite number of units next to one another, with thick walls so that you can't hear the people next door. You don't even know they're there.”

“What's the deal with the rocks?” Zak asked. His arm was getting tired.

“Just trying to illustrate a point, and I don't have anything to draw with. Imagine that apartment building. And one day, you knock down the wall.”

“How?” Khalid asked. “Why?”

“Doesn't matter. You knock it down, and you discover another apartment next door, similar to yours but a little different. Like, maybe some of the rooms are positioned differently.”

At this point, she reached up to drag the twig along Khalid's rock. “So, this is us, in New York. And we're going along just fine until …
something
happens.” She knocked the twig off the rock. It dropped and skimmed past Zak's rock, hitting the ground.

“New York is different here,” she said. “In our world, there was land. Here, water. So we came through and ended up in the drink. Just like if you knocked down the apartment wall from your bedroom and found yourself in someone else's living room instead. Get it?”

Zak wasn't completely sure he understood, but he got enough of it. As he dropped the rock, he realized Moira was shaking. Just the tiniest bit. She turned back to the pedestal and leaned on it, her hands gripping the edges so hard that her fingers turned even paler than usual. Her face had blanched; her spray of freckles stood out in stark relief. Her body vibrated with some barely contained emotion, and if she'd had the strength, Zak knew, she would have ripped the pedestal right out of the ground.

She whispered something. Zak couldn't hear it, so he said, “What was that?”

“I
am
thinking,” she said through gritted teeth. “You told me to think, and I'm thinking so hard, Zak, and I've been thinking this whole time, but I can't figure it out. I can't figure out how to get us home. I'm not smart enough. I can't figure it out. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry, guys. I can't. I'm not—”

Zak pried her right hand from the plaque and held it tightly. “Stop apologizing. It's not your fault. I shouldn't have yelled at you like that. It's not your job to figure out how to get us home.”

She finally turned to him. Tears swam in her eyes behind the smeared lenses of her glasses. “Then whose job
is
it?”

“All of ours,” Khalid said, and put his hand on top of theirs. “Three Basketeers all the way.”

Moira sniffled and nodded. “Three Basketeers.”

“Three Basketeers,” Zak said. And then, in his mind,
Tommy? You want to be the fourth?

Again, there was nothing.

Almost
nothing.

“Zak?”

Tommy's voice.

In his ears this time, not his mind.

*   *   *

Zak spun around at the sound of his name, seeking something in the enfolding purple dark. He was surprised to realize that Khalid and Moira were glancing around, too.

“Who said that?” Khalid demanded, panicked. “Who
said
that?”

“You heard it?” Zak asked. “You heard it this time?”

“Is that the voice?” Moira asked. “Is that what you've been hearing all along?”

“I think so—”

“Zak!” the voice called again, and they all startled. It seemed even closer, as if it had emerged from the air between them. They stared at each other, then at the ground, then at the sky, but still nothing.

“I'm trying…,” it said, and faded.

“What is going
on
here?” Khalid asked. Moira—who had no doubt read of circumstances eerier and more terrifying in her library of creepy sci-fi and fantasy novels—looked thoroughly freaked out. Zak understood—he'd been living with this voice in his head as long as he could remember. He'd become accustomed to it, and even though it had now transferred itself into the open air, it was still the same voice. He had no fear of it, and it did not surprise him.

“Guys,” he said, “calm down and be quiet—”

“I think it was from over here,” Khalid said, pointing.

“No. It's this way,” Moira insisted.

“Guys, just settle down and listen, okay?” He took Moira's hand and grabbed Khalid by the shoulder. “You can't find it, and you can't force it. Just let—”

“ZAK!”

This time the voice doubled in on itself as its volume spiked; it echoed in Zak's mind at the same time as it rang in the air. He hissed in a pained breath and released his friends, clapping his hands to his ears. But that couldn't keep the voice out, as it repeated his name over and over. It was like having nails driven one by one into his skull. He flinched with each repetition of his name, driven to his knees with the pain.

Someone touched him, hands on his shoulders, and a voice shouted, but he couldn't hear it over the voice in his head. Feet padded near him, back and forth, moving as though in desperation, but he couldn't open his eyes to see which of his friends was in motion. The pain was too intense.

“—see it, Zak!” Khalid's voice finally broke through, tinny and small, as if from a great distance. “You have to see it!”

Zak forced his eyes open. Khalid crouched near him, steadying them both with hands on Zak's shoulders. Moira was running a jagged, zigzagging path from the pedestal to the two of them and back, breathless, staring.

There, in the space between them all, a mist had gathered. Wispy and translucent, it purled and gathered and spread and regathered as if with a mind of its own, floating and grasping from a foot above the ground to six or seven feet straight up. It was a dirty-white color, a sort of grayish pearl, climbing and drifting down over and over as it pulsed in and out.

“What
is
it?” Moira was jogging its perimeter, watching it from all angles, her eyes wide and her expression one of sheer bafflement.

Khalid shook Zak. “What is it, man? What's going on here?”

“I don't—”

But then he did. He did know.

The voice in his head stopped saying his name.

Almost!
it cried.
I'm almost there!

“Tommy!” Zak screamed, and launched himself to his feet. He would have thrown himself at the mist, which had now coalesced into a cloud of writhing, snakelike tendrils of vapor that seemed to boil in the very air, but for Khalid, who held him back.

“We don't know what it is,” Khalid cautioned.

Almost there! Don't go! So close!

And then the cloud collapsed in on itself with a strangely soft hissing sound. There was an instant of silence—nothing but Zak's own breath and his heartbeat in his ears—and then the cloud flowered back from its pinpoint of collapse, only this time it had color to it—gold and red and blue.

The eruption of light stunned them all, and they froze there, staring at a silent, contained explosion of fireworks. Its colors washed over them, harmless, until the finale, when a burst of powerful white light forced them all to flinch away and cover their eyes.

“I'm here! I did it!” said the voice.

“It's him,” Zak shouted, blinking spots out of his eyes. Fumbling, he managed to grab both Moira's and Khalid's hands, and he squeezed them tightly. “It's Tommy!”