He lay there helplessly, bleeding and battered, but the instant Glenn touched him he began to purr. They had spent weeks nursing him back to health.
With a touch of a finger on her tablet, a series of tiny projectors around her room came to life, throwing a 3-D image of the night sky onto her bedroom ceiling. It was as if the ceiling had disappeared and she was looking straight up into the stars, unburdened by the light pollution that hid the real stars behind a flat curtain of gray. Glenn would be exhausted at school, but she didn’t care.
“Eight thirteen.”
There was a soft tone as the house’s computer went to work.
When it was done, a faint green dot winked at a corner of the ceiling.
“Expand.”
The green dot grew larger until the emerald body of the small planet became visible. A text field popped up next to it, but Glenn ignored it. She already knew everything there was to know about 813.
Mineral-rich and Earth-like. Much of its surface covered in heavily canopied jungles. A single research outpost situated on the northern continent.
The next manned trip to 813 would leave in four years. If she couldn’t get through high school and the Academy in that time, she’d never be picked. If she did, she’d be twenty when the ship left and, traveling beyond the speed of light, twenty-five by the time she got there. Of course, due to the quirks of physics, while five years would pass for her, twenty or thirty would pass for everyone at home. Her father would be in his seventies by the time she got there and even older if she ever made the trip back. No one ever did come back, though. What would be the point? Everyone you knew would be gone.
Glenn pulled Gerard Manley Hopkins close.
“Don’t worry, Hopkins, I’ll take you with me.”
“Rooooowr …”
“Seriously. They encourage people to bring pets now. Makes the trip easier.”
Gerard Manley Hopkins wiggled away from her. His eyes glowed in the dimness of her room, skeptical.
“What?”
Hopkins sneezed dramatically, then ran to the edge of the bed and leapt off, disappearing down the hall.
Glenn fell back into her thick pillows. “Coward.”
A sharp
ping
startled Glenn. Her tablet pulsed blue, on and off, sending cold shadows dancing around the walls. She knew who it was.
Kevin had been messaging her ever since last night. She had ignored the messages, all ten of them, but there he was again. Dread settled in the pit of her stomach. Ignoring him was a losing game. He was Kevin Kapoor; he would never give up. Glenn snatched up the tablet and opened the line.
“Kevin, look, I don’t think —”
“Cupcake Slaughterhouse.”
Glenn stared at his image on the screen. Kevin was rail thin with big brown eyes opened wide and intense. His Mohawk was magenta and stood straight up like an open fan. In his hands he held a wrinkled, ink-splattered page. Glenn could tell he’d been at this for hours.
“That’s a terrible name for a band,” she said.
“Art School Foot Fetish?”
“This is why you called me? This is what couldn’t wait?”
“Ha,” he squeaked. “Like you were doing anything. Hey. You
think Lorna Bale is a robot? I mean, robot is the only answer. Right?”
“Answer to what?”
“How she could be so hot. I mean, nothing naturally occurring could be that hot.”
“I don’t know. The sun? Listen, Kevin —”
“Lorna Bale Is a Love Robot,” Kevin said. “Now
that’s
a good name for a band.”
“Kevin.”
“Lorna Bale Is a Love Robot. Tonight only!”
“What did you want?”
“Fine. You hanging around after school tomorrow? I could, uh, really use some help with history. It doesn’t fit into my worldview, you know? Cause and Effect. Action and Reaction. What’s that all about?”
Kevin waited for her to laugh, but Glenn looked away from the screen and twisted her rumpled comforter in her fingers. She wished she could dive underneath it and disappear. So this was how he was going to play it. This was the plan.
“Please!” he mock wailed. “If I don’t learn my history, I’ll be condemned to repeat it!
Condemned
, Morgan!”
In moments like these, Glenn wished she would have simply
walked away that first time she met Kevin outside his father’s office.
Dr. Kapoor was the highest-ranking local council member and the district psychologist. Glenn had been seeing him, at her father’s insistence, every week since her mother had left ten years ago. One day she was on Dr. Kapoor’s waiting-room couch doing her homework when Kevin sat down on the floor beside her and started talking. Glenn ignored him completely but Kevin returned the next week and did the exact same thing. And the next. And the next. He kept up that one-sided conversation for six solid months until he finally turned to Glenn and said: “You know, Morgan, I will not be dissuaded. For I am stalwart.”
Glenn had laughed.
Stalwart
. She had never actually heard someone say the word out loud before.
Glenn turned to her window. It was already lightening with the dawn. What did it really matter if she met him? As soon as Dad signed the form, she’d be out of school and on her way.
“Sure, Kevin.”
“Ha! I knew it! I knew you couldn’t say no to a chance to —”
Glenn swiped her hand over the glass and cut the connection before he could finish. She was surprised to find her heart pumping and a staticky buzz sizzling through her. Glenn looked up and there was 813, a great green stillness amidst the jumble of stars. Somehow knowing it was there, like a distant promise, put Glenn at ease. None of this mattered. She would get where she was going and everything would be fine.
“But
why
did everything change after the Rift? And why did it happen in the first place?”
Kevin sat cross-legged on the snow-dotted soccer field the next day. His fingers clasped his stubbly skull on either side of his now cobalt blue hair. It was as if he was trying to hold his brain in. Glenn had spent the last hour helping him study for a history test covering major events from 2023 to 2153. Leave it to Kevin to get fixated on day one.
“We’ve been over this,” Glenn said. “We can’t get stuck.”
“I have a thirst for knowledge, Morgan. I want answers to the big questions.”
“You want to avoid studying.”
The school was almost completely emptied and the last train would be arriving soon. If she didn’t want to end up walking home, she was going to have to deal with this. Nip it in the bud. Glenn put her tablet down and faced him.
“Nothing changed after the Rift.”
“But —”
“Conspiracy theories.”
“Conspiracy?! What about trans light —”
“Trans-light-speed travel was inevitable.”
“The breakthrough was right after the Rift!”
He had been reading the Rifter websites again. Glenn would have bet hard money that if she took his tablet from him, she’d see a long list of sites like rifttruth, riftlies, therealworld. It was amazing that people were still harping on stuff like that after over a hundred years.
“‘Post hoc,’”
Glenn recited,
“‘ergo propter hoc.’”
“‘After this, therefore because of this.’ I know the fallacy, Morgan. I swear, sometimes you think I’m a moron. If it was one thing, that would be fine. But it’s everything. Trans-light travel. Cold fusion.
Bioengineering. It all happened after the Rift.”
“I’d like to refer you to the earlier fallacy.”
Kevin dropped his tablet and shifted so he was sitting squarely in front of Glenn. He leaned in and fixed her with kohl-lined eyes framed in thick wisps of blue from his fallen Mohawk. There was barely a foot of air between them. Glenn leaned away from him, drawing her knees up to her chest and hugging them close.
“So what about the mutants?” he asked. “People have seen them on the other side of the border. There’s video —”
“There’s no video —”
“— of these, like, wolf people. And bird people! Bird people, Morgan!”
Glenn tossed her tablet into her bag and stood up. “Yeah. I heard they found Atlantis over there too. And aliens! Forget it. I’m outta here.”
Kevin bounded along backward in front of Glenn as she crossed the soccer field toward the train station.
“So you believe the official story. You’re like a — what do they call it? A dupe!”
Glenn’s hand curled into a fist around the strap of her bag.
Sometimes Kevin had a way about him that seemed to demand
punching. “I believe that the simplest explanation is always the best.
The government’s explanation, which, by the way, is the same as every major scientist’s —”
“Who are all controlled by the government. Yes, go on.”
“There’s no need to be smug, Kevin.”
“I’m not being smug,
Glenn
. I just can’t believe you’re being so naïve about this. We live right next to the border. You’ve never wondered? You’ve never been curious?”
“There’s nothing to be curious about!”
Kevin jumped in her face, dancing back and forth to block her way to the train.
“You’re curious about everything, Morgan. You’re telling me you’ve never looked? Never seen anything? Never
felt
anything?”
A wind rose up through the alleyways behind the school. Rushing through the concrete plains, it sounded like whispering voices. A chill rippled across Glenn’s shoulders and down her spine. She shook it off and dropped her bag on the ground between them.
“On May 5, 2023, there was a massive explosion —”
“Glenn!”
“— somewhere between what was then Japan and the United
States. Millions of people died in the initial blast.
Millions
, Kevin. And then millions more died in an aftermath that covered roughly a third of the planet in toxic ash and radiation.”
“But what about —”
“It took years after the Rift to establish the border and get life back to something remotely normal. Everything on our side of the border became the Colloquium, which, over the course of the last
hundred and thirty years
, pursued a massive research and education effort, which
easily
accounts for a spike in scientific and technological discoveries following the Rift event. As for what’s on the other side?”
Glenn whipped out her tablet and brought up a series of satellite photos. Seen from far above, the world glittered, alive with sprawling networks of lights. There were thick knots around the major cities, and tendrils reaching one to another in a shining web that was broken only by a vast clot of darkness thousands of miles wide and long, which cut through continents and oceans. Within it, not a single light shone.
Glenn clicked through the pictures as they drew in closer.
A two-mile band of forest, with a string of towering red warning lights at its center, formed a no-man’s-land between them and what lay on the other side of the border. Beyond the border there was a vast, barren plain: uncountable miles of flattened trees, scorched earth, and piles of rubble that had once been great cities.
“People look up at the clouds and they see faces,” Glenn said.
“They look at the stars and see constellations. They look across the border and instead of seeing a graveyard they see mutants and monsters.”
Kevin was watching her intently, the light in his brown eyes dimmed. Glenn remembered the clean smell of the snow as it blew between them and felt an ache in the center of her chest.
“People see what they want to see,” she said. “Whether it’s real or not.” Glenn dropped down to tuck her tablet into her bag. “Now. Do you think you can remember all of that for your test?”
“What test?”
A scream, made all the worse by the idiotic grin rising on Kevin Kapoor’s face, roared inside Glenn. She shut her eyes so tight her lids nearly cramped, and counted to ten.
Why did I agree to this? What was I thinking?
When she opened her eyes, Kevin was still grinning, but now that wasn’t the worst of it. The sun was a dim orange circle dropping between two white towers in the distance. It was forty degrees at most, but since Glenn’s clothes were impregnated with a solution that either generated heat or drew it away from the body, depending on how she
manipulated an app on her tablet, she wasn’t cold. It was a miracle of science and especially handy now, Glenn thought, as the last train home glided into view over Kevin’s shoulder. It pulled into the station, pausing only briefly since there were no passengers waiting, and moved silently down the line.
“Last train just pulled out, didn’t it?” Kevin asked.
Glenn glared at him.
“Did I mention the dragons? Bunches of people have seen
dragons.”
“I hate you, Kevin Kapoor.”
Kevin took her by the arm and nodded gravely. “I know.”
“You should really thank me,” Kevin called out, struggling to keep up as Glenn tore across the soccer field. “Brisk walk on a beautiful night with a good friend? You can’t buy that kind of peace and contentment! It’s what memories are made of!”
The school’s perimeter fence clicked open as they approached.
Glenn stepped from the soccer field’s artificial grass to the road that led through Berringford Homes, a housing project that covered the two miles between school and home. Since people weren’t generally eager to buy land near the border, it wasn’t the greatest neighborhood, consisting of little more than a grid of black asphalt roads lined with fifteen-to twenty-floor apartment stacks. The stacks were pressed so close together, there was hardly a breath between them, making the street seem lined with one continuous home snaking along through the dark. Its sides were lit by fluorescent streetlights and the bluish glow of holographic games and films playing inside.
Kevin caught up and was loping along at Glenn’s side, his leather jacket creaking as he pumped his arms. “Look, Morgan …”
“Kevin, please.”
“I mean, there’s
going
to be a test. Eventually, at some undetermined point in the future, there will be a test. Tests are inevitable. And I’ll need to be ready for it, whenever it comes. I was being proactive!”