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CAIN
THERE WAS NO FUNERAL for the girl whose death saved the world.
My sister that isn't dead? Yes, we mourned for her. We mourn for her. Her name's been immortalized on the monument built out of remembrance for the victims. But Thea? Thea was just a single spark illuminating a dust of smoke, and that's all we have left of her. Her smoke, our memory of her.
My hand rests against the monument. Despite the warm spring day, it's cold to the touch. It's a head shorter than I am, a pyramid of white marble resting just at the edge of the woods where the rift formed and collapsed. One side displays the names of the victims in a hideous bold font that makes Comic Sans look reasonable. The other two sides are blank.
Pasithea Mendoza. Avani Nagarkar. Rachel Terranova.
My head swirls.
"Cain," my dad rests his hand on my shoulder. "You don't need to see this."
The monumentâof course they wouldn't want me looking at it. We really should get going, anyways. The rift starts getting dangerous if you linger long enough. It's like Five Guys in that regard.
"I'm sorry," I mumble, pulling my hand away and shaking myself off. "Let's go, then."
"He means you don't need to see any of this. You can go wait in the car," Bianca corrects.
See what? I wonder. The rift? It's nothing I haven't seen before. And even if the rift did open itself back up again like Bianca thinks, it's not like the woods are all that eager to tell us. Everything seems completely normal. Birds flit around in the sky up above, singing like the cheery motherfuckers they are. Bugs buzz in the breeze and sunlight drips into the leaves like honey, casting an eery golden-green aura into the air. It's a beautiful spring day peppered with the beautiful sounds of all the birds and the bees either fucking or murdering each other or both, if they're a little bit freaky like that.
For some reason, a shock of anger shoots through me. It must be the ugly white marble. Or maybe the hideous font. "You aren't my mom. You can't tell me what to do."
"Cain, I am your father," Dad insists, placing himself in a power stance. "And I say go wait in the car."
"Fine." I sigh. Push my lips into a pout. Cross my arms over my chest. Kick a pebble on the ground so hard I knock myself over. "Whatever."
My dad and Bianca share a worried look.
(Well, it wasn't exactly a worried look, per ce. It was more of a here goes this bitch again kind of look.)
I sulk back over to my dad's stupid beat-up gray Malibu and throw myself in the backseat like the discarded piece of garbage I am.
"Oh, woe is me," I moan.
What, do you think they've defeated me? Do you think I'm just gonna sit in this dumb car in the burning sun with the stupid leather seats lighting my ass on fire while they go check to see if an interdimensional rift has torn itself open again? Think again, thotty. I can never be defeated. I am darkness. I am death. I really have to pee.
I roll the window down, watching as Dad and Bianca turn their backs on me and head off, her walk a step ahead of his. I watch them until the trees swallow them whole.
Then I crawl out of the car like a young chick bursting out of the egg. After shutting the door as gently as I can, I start off to the woods, humming.
When I cross the tree line, the temperature noticeably drops as the shade falls onto my back. I can hear my dad and Bianca talking casually up ahead of me. With the spring rain, the leaves have melted into the trail, so my steps are silent. They won't hear me or see me until they start to head back, and by then, it'll be too late for them to be able to do anything about it. Everything will be fine.
And then I trip over a tree root and face-plant in the mud. I fall with a graceful sound, like the entire forest has vomited up a Hot Pocket.
"What was that?" I hear Bianca ask.
"Fuck!" I yelp.
Hoping they don't see me, I stay flat on the ground. Slowly, their footsteps amplify, until I see them standing in front of meâBianca's beige Tom's, my dad's black hunting boots.
"Cain." Dad sighs. "What the hell?"
"I fell," I explain.
"I told you to wait in the car."
Uh-huh, hunty. Pulling out the receipts on me. Typical thot behavior. I sit up, brushing the mud off my shirt and picking the twigs out of my palms. "I can handle it. It's not going to kill me to see."
"Are you sure?" he asks.
"Positive."
"Then get up," Bianca orders. "We need to hurry. Spend too long in here, and . . . We need to block off this area. Make sure no one gets hurt."
"Right." I stand, making a show out of pushing the branch out of the way of the trail. "Well, in that case, after you."
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THE RIFT IS SO SMALL I can't see it.
I can feel it pulsating like some sort of overgrown wart. It's harrowingly familiar and offputting, like the clean, medicinal scent of a hospital. It's a tugging in my gut, a metallic tinge to the air. It's the way the air itself seems to flicker like ripples on yellowed water, as if reality here isn't quite the same as reality there. It's the taste of blood on the back of my tongue, the way my skin tingles and burns as if I'm being smothered in thousands of tiny paper-cuts.
Mainly, though, it's the way reality works here: like thousands of layers of the universe exist one on top of another, like you can peel your world back and step into a new one. This little sect of the forest exists in the same plane of reality that Waffle Houses and gas stations at midnight and rest-stops on long road trips and snowy airports at midnight all do: a space between a start and an end, a space you should never stay too long at, out of fear that it might stay that way forever.
Speaking of Waffle House: my dad thinks they're controlling the government. Like, seriously. Immigrant parents have a tendency to believe in crazy conspiracy theories; mainly, they're just trying to protect us from any possible threats in this foreign land. The whole Waffle House conspiracy came from a Tumblr post. He also believes that the government is hiding the cure for cancer from us and that you can get an STD from sitting on hot pavement.
The rift is just a fleck in the forest, smaller than a speck of dust in the grand scheme of things. Something so tiny, and yet it's powerful enough to destroy the fabric of not just our universe, but every universe. This holeâthis fleck, this speck of dustâcould destroy existence at the core sense of the word.
Bianca kneels beside the rift, brushing the dirt away from it. Her fingers begin to twitch as her hand hovers over it. Her eyebrows zero in on her eyes like a fuckboy going after the booty. Her lips part likeâwell, I think you can imagine.
"This is bad," she says.
"How bad?" Dad asks.
"I don't know." Bianca shakes her head, sitting back on her calves, brushing the dirt off her palms and onto her jeans. "Bad bad. If the rift opens itself back up again, completely, then it's going to collapse again. It's going to turn innocent people into hosts again. It's going to ruin lives again. You saw what happened last time, only . . . " she trails off.
But I'm not hearing bad bad. I'm hearing this as an opportunity.
I lean over her shoulder to get a better look at it. It just looks like a small black pebble wedged into the dirt, like I could pick it up and take it home with me, keep it as a pet rock. Some part of me wonders what would happen if I tried. "Only what?"
"This time, we won't have a way to stop it. My institute: gone. Thea: gone. Our research: gone. We don't have anything."
Dad joins us on Bianca's other side. "What are you going to do?"
"Hope." Bianca shrugs, desperate. "Maybe it won't get as bad as it did last time. Maybe it'll collapse when it's only this small, or maybe someone in the billions of other dimensions will realize something's wrong and try to stop it . . . " She trails off. "Until then, I'll get in touch with all of my surviving doctors. I'll set up a new lab somewhere and get back to work. Not doing enough is better than doing nothing at all."
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"YOU KNOW"âAtlas grins mischievously and digs his fork into a pollution-gray Swedish meatballâ"Swiss meatballs are my second favorite kind."
I vomit a little in my mouth. The quote unquote "meatballs" he willingly puts inside his body are a disgrace to mankind and meatkind. They're flat out treason of his Italian blood. Even his African blood probably would rather starve then consume another ball.
Me, I'm perfectly fine with my sensible and delicious plate of fries and chicken tenders.
"For someone as smart as you are," I tell him, swirling a couple fries through my ketchup, "you're really fucking dumb."
Really. He's practically the nerdiest person EVER. Like, he's the kind of nerdy that goes to cons dressed as weird fictional characters and reads books and consistently gets good grades, but he lacks any lick of common sense. He can tell you a hundred Viking facts at the drop of a hat, or explain in vivid detail every one of Shakespeare's plays, but just last week he forgot that New Hampshire was a state.
We live in New Hampshire.
While we're on the subject of Atlas Villa: I'm maybe a little bit in love with him. He's always kind of reminded me of a poodle puppyâadorable as all-hell, tiny and soft but likes to think he can take on a full-grown Doberman. He's only, like, 5'4, and he has these soft amber eyes and this dark poofy-curly hair. He's half-black/half-Italian (so, of couse, my father approves) and broad-shouldered, his skin a warm, light shade of brown. He always dresses in flannels and jeans and wears these blocky nerdy-ass glasses that are always sliding off his nose. He drives me absolutely crazy.
Glad we had this talk.
Atlas, my beautiful love, shoves the greasy, gravy-drenched meatball into his open mouth. "Why am I so dumb?"
"They're Swedish meatballs," I explain. "IKEA is literally a Swedish company. There's a sign right over there"âI gesture towards it with a fryâ"advertising Swedish meatballs."
An important question you might be asking: did we go on a date to IKEA?
An equally important answer: of course we did. It's an experience you only want to live through with the ones you love the most.
"Oh." Atlas pops another ball right on into his mouth. "I thought that's what I said."
"You said Swiss meatballs, genius." I throw a fry at him. "The Swiss are only good for chocolate and neutrality. The Swedish are good for neither those nor meatballs."
He tries to catch the fry in his mouth, but it hits him in the nose and falls into his lap. "Can you at least let me finish my joke without bullying me?"
"Continue."
"So, anyhow, I was trying to say that my favorite meatballs are Italian." Atlas tries to wink, but the fact that he's waving around a fork stabbed into a gray ball of Swedish meat really cancels it out.
I gag. "Please never try to flirt with me while you're eating those nasty balls."
"Oh, what balls?" Atlas grins, waving his nasty fork in my face. "These balls?"
"Stop," I plead.
He makes a show of licking the entire surface of the meatball before shoving it in his mouth, making direct eye contact with me the entire time. Because I'm not a coward, I refuse to break it and stare him down.
"I'm breaking up with you," I threaten.
"What?" Half-chewed meatball crumbs dribble out of his mouth. "Why?"
"You eat gross meatballs and I don't like it."
"If you really loved me," he prompts, "you wouldn't make me chose between you and my balls."
"Do you really love your balls more than you love me?"
"How dare you ask me such a question? That would be like me making you chose between me and pasta."
Suddenly I understand. "You're right, I'm sorry."
He turns away from me, his arms crossed.
"Babe?" I ask.
"I don't think I can ever forgive you," he mumbles. "Except, maybe, if you . . . "
"If I what?" I ask.
"If you kiss me . . . "
"Really?" That's easy. I lean across the table, inches from his lips. "Like this?"
Atlas closes his eyes. "Hm-mh."
"Oh, Atlas . . . if only there was someone out there who loved you."
"You motherfucker!" His eyes snap open. "Why don't you love me?"
"How could I ever loved someone whose lips have been touched by those disgusting-ass meatballs?"
"That's the only reason you don't want to kiss me?"
"One of many, but yeah."
For a second, Atlas just stares at me. Then, quick as a frog catching a fly, he shoots forwards, kissing me on the lips.
I'm so startled I fall out of my chair, shrieking. But it's better here on the ground. No meat-lips can assault me here. And Atlas just laughs and laughs, pleased with himself.
"You absolute fuckass," I declare, picking myself back up like the strong, independent boy I am, only to plop myself back down on the hard, plastic IKEA chair of my dreams.
"Dickweed," Atlas counters, like it's supposed to hurt me.
I frown. "You can't insult me by forcing my two favorite things to have sex with each other."
Atlas pouts, sinking down in his chair. "I thought I was your favorite thing."
"Please." I roll my eyes. "You're, like, my fifty-seventh favorite thing. On a good day. Today"âI add, gesturing in his general direction, hoping to showcase what just happened in a single motionâ"is not a good day."
"What's your fifty-sixth?" he questions. "Cerberus?"
"Precisely." I nod, taking a swig of my Pepsi and deciding it's time to change the topic. "Oh, by the way, I set our school on fire."
Atlas chokes on a ball. "You what?"
"Set our school on fire," I clarify, in case he missed it. Which would be nearly impossible. I'm very loud.
Atlas spends several minutes coughing and choking and gagging before he can finally speak again. "Why?" he wonders. "It only took them, like, two days to find some old buildings to rent out to finish the year in. It's not like last time when we got an entire week off. You didn't even get our exams postponed. If anything, you made it harder on us, since now we missed two entire days of review!" He finishes his last thought with an accusatory tone, as if anyone actually reviews for exams.
"It was an accident!"
"How do you 'accidentally'"âhis fingers curl around a set of air quotesâ"set your school on fire?"
"IâI panicked." Suddenly, I'm at a loss for words. I don't know how to explain it to himâhow to explain it to myself. "After Meredith and I got suspendedâ"
"You and Meredith got suspended?"
"Yeah, 'cause I put Joey Whitman's grandma into a coma and broke both of her hips. Anywho, after we left the principal's office, something happened. I don't knowâit was kind of like I was having a seizure. And then my power just . . . malfunctioned. I don't know."
"Your power?" Atlas looks incredulous. "Didn't it stop working after the rift collapsed?"
"It did! But it's back and now seven people are dead."
Nervously, Atlas starts cleaning his glasses with his nerdy-ass monogrammed cloth. "Did you tell Bianca?"
"Yeah. I told her and my dad, and so we went out to the rift to check it out in case something happened, and guess the fuck what."
"Is it back?"
"Like a pimple you thought you popped."
"What are we gonna do?"
"We're gonna leave it to the adults that actually know what the fuck they're doing. Bianca said she's gonna figure out something to do to keep it from getting like it did." I dip my last chicken tender into my ketchup. "But we're also gonna do something."
Atlas tilts his head, sliding his glasses back on. "Uhhhhh, no correlation."
"Oh, my God, do you speak Latin? That's so hot. Exorcise me, baby!"
"It's literally an English word."
"Nuh-uh."
"Yah-huh. It's basic algebra, Cain."
"No the fuck it isn't."
"It literally is!"
"I flunked algebra twice and had to retake it three times, do you think I don't know my algebraic terminology?"
Atlas puts his head in his hands. "Can you just please explain what you meant? It didn't make any sense. How are we both gonna do something and nothing?"
"So we're gonna leave the whole Keeping The Rift From Collapsing shebang to Bianca and her squad. But we're gonna go inside of it."
"And why the fuck would we do that?"
"Don't you want to do a little interdimensional sightseeing?"
"Hell yeah I do, but it's not practicalâ"
There he goes, always going off about practicalities and legalities.
"And maybe we can save Rachel and Avani. Even though the rift's opened itself back up again, do you really think Bianca will do anything to save them and all the others trapped inside? No. They'll be so focused on saving our world they'll leave all of them in there to die. But maybe we can save them. Maybe we can actually do something."
"Oh." Atlas goes quiet. Real quiet. "Cain, I don't think that's a good idea."
"Name one bad idea I've ever had."
Atlas begins to count on his fingers. "Putting Joey Whitman's grandma into a coma, bringing me to IKEA just to judge me for my meatballs, the first time you set our school on fire, lacing your dad's PTA fundraiser brownies, telling Anna Schmidt thatâ"
I raise my hands in a frantic gesture to quiet him. "Okay, okay, I get it. I have a lot of bad ideas. But I swear this is a good one."
"You sure about that?"
"Look, if you don't wanna go, that's fine. I understand. But I'm going in after them and nothing you can say will stop me."
He reaches across the table, his hand closing around mine. "I just want you to stay safe, okay?"
I grin. "Safety is my middle name."
"If something were to happen to you . . . "
"It won't!"
Atlas shuts his eyes, taking a deep breath. "I'm going with you."
Suddenly I realize why he didn't want me to go. But I can't be a fucking hypocrite and tell him that he can't join me.
"Okay." I raise his hand to my lips and kiss it. "We'll go together."
"But it shouldn't just be the two of us."
"Silas and Meredith?" I ask. Because who else?
"Silas and Meredith," he answers.
"Stop copying me," I whine.
"Stop copying me," he mocks.
I flip him off. "We should FaceTime them and tell them."
"I'll FaceTime Mer. You get Silas."
I nod, pulling my phone out and clicking on the green FaceTime app. I type in Silas's name, and he answers after a couple of rings. His grinning face appears onscreen, his two sisters, Emily and Ella, beside him.
Emily and Ella are so close in age and appearance, it's nearly impossible to tell them apart. On the other hand, although he looks a lot like them, Silas is easily able to distinguish out of the threeâmainly because he's older than them by at least ten years and because he's a masculine-presenting he. He's black and dark-skinned, his curly dark hair cut close to his head. His eyes are the rich brown of earth, and they always seem to sparkle and shine with his easy smile. Kind people are never ugly, and he's the shining exampleâhe's seriously the sweetest person I know, and it shows. You just look at him and it seems like light is gushing out of him, like you're looking at a walking ray of sunshine. His smile is as pure as a summer sky.
"CAIN!" the three siblings chorus, like they rehearsed it. Knowing them, they probably did.
"What's up at the nerd house?" I ask them.
Meanwhile, on Atlas's end of the conversation, Meredith has picked up.
"Atlas, you bitch!" I hear her whine. "What the fuck is up?"
Silas looks completely horrified.
"Hey, uh, Silas?" I ask. "Can you get away from Emily and Ella? I need to tell you something."
"Sure!" says Silas, looking a bit too excited to be getting rid of his sisters.
Emily looks me straight in the eye and, a loose tooth waving dangerously as the words are pushed past her lips, declares that, "You're going to hell."
"Emily!" Silas yelps. "Oh, my God, I'm sorry! Someone in some movie she watched said that and now she can't stop saying it. Mom put such restrictive parental controls on our TV that we can't watch, like, anything other than Disney JR."
He shoos the two of them out of his room, and Atlas and I lean our phones against ketchup bottles placed strategically on opposite ends of the table so we can both see the screens and Meredith and Silas can see each other. Meredith is wrapped in a fluffy white towel, her hair hanging down past her shoulders in dripping wet waves. She's sitting leaned against her bathroom counter.
"Hi, Meredith!" Silas excitedly waves.
"Nice outfit," I tell her.
"Shut the fuck up! There are strangers all over my house so I'm locked in my bathroom and stuck like this 'til I die."
Atlas frowns, concerned. "Why are there strangers all over your house?"
She shrugs. "I dunno. I think my grandparents threw a party WITHOUT TELLING ME! Anywho, I'm just praying they don't need to use the bathroom 'cause I might stab someone if they try to come in here. I have a knife," she calmly says. And then she shows us her knife.
"Why do you have a knife in your bathroom?" Silas questions.
"In case there's a murderer in my shower." Meredith rolls her eyes. "Duh."
"Okay," Atlas says, unconvinced. "So, Cain. Tell them."
"Awwwwwwwwwww!" Meredith squeals. "Are you two getting married? I fucking called it! Silas, you owe me ten bucks!"
"I never agreed to that bet." Silas squints and leans closer to his screen. "Are you guys at IKEA?"
I ignore both of them. They're dumb. "I set our school on fire."
Silas and Meredith both burst out laughing.
"What's so funny?" I ask.
"Nothing's funny!" Silas explains between peals of laughter. "It's just the way that you said it."
"Yeah! 'Oh, hohoho, I set our school on fire.'" Meredith mimics me, making the two of them laugh even harder.
"I'm gonna pee," Silas warns.
Meredith laughs so hard she snorts.
"It's not funny!" I yell at them. "It was an accident!"
"'Whoops!'" Meredith's still mocking me. She mimes flicking a lighter and dropping it, the most sarcastically innocent look on her face. "'Oopsy-daisy. Looks like I accidentally set the school on fire two weeks from exams. Oh, gosh. Oh, my. Oh, dear. Oh, my goodness gracious. What a tragedy! Whatever shall we do?'"
Silas falls to the floor, dropping his phone in the process. We get a nice view of his ceiling fan. "Stop, stop!" he pleads. "I'm seriously gonna pee!"
"Guys! I accidentally set the school on fire with my fucking power!"
Meredith lets out one last snort, and both of them fall silent.
"Oh, my God!" Meredith says. "I was there with you! I should have realized . . . "
Silas fumbles for his phone. "What does that mean?"
"It means that the rift opened itself back up again and we're all gonna die," Atlas, ever the optimist, explains.
"Oh," says Silas.
"But we have a plan," Atlas offers. "Sort of."
"And what is it?" Meredith asks. "Are y'all gonna die fucking?"
"As lovely as that would be, no." I shake my head. "We're gonna go into the rift to find Rachel and Avani. Who's up for a little interdimensional adventure?"