Silent Symmetry (The Embodied trilogy) (23 page)

“Crap, crap, crap,” I said under my breath as Aranara and Fake Elle got out of the SUV.

Cruz tried to restart the engine. It wheezed and coughed.

Then I saw the gun.

Fake Elle had it. She strode purposefully forward, holding it in one hand at head height, aiming right at us.

“Get down!” I shouted.

A millisecond later the back windscreen shattered into
a thousand pieces.

“Holy shit!” yelled Cruz and tried the ignition key again.

Fake Elle reached the car, the gun still trained on us. She jumped onto the trunk and started to slither inside through the back window. Aranara was coming around the passenger side.

Cruz opened his door, grabbed my wrist and dived out, dragging me with him.

Another gunshot rang out and the front windshield exploded.

We rolled onto the asphalt. Scrambling. Breathless. Scared.

And then we were on our knees at the edge. The frigid, killer Hudson massively gray below us, sparkling menacingly in the bridge’s Christmas lights.

We turned to see
Fake Elle, gun still in hand, getting back out of Cruz’s car. Aranara was only a few feet away from us. Fake Mom was now almost upon us too.

Cruz was still holding my hand. Squeezing it too tight.

Fake Elle raised the gun again, pointing it at his head. Without thinking about it, I moved in front of him.

“Stop!” I ordered.

The Embodied halted instantly. They were looking at something in my hand. I realized I was still holding the diamond pyramid. Noon. One of their kind. I could feel Cruz behind me, struggling to accept that this was the only way.

Distant sirens. The other cars on the bridge were reversing. This was not a scene any innocent party would want to be close to – two kids on the edge of the bridge, three women moving toward them, one with a gun.

Aranara spoke. Her voice like honey, as always.

“Kari, Kari, Kari
... You don’t need to do this. You already know what you need to do. You can save the world. You can save Cruz.”

“What about
Mom?” I asked, “Where is she?”

“She’s safe,” answered Fake M
om.

I shuddered. It was beyond creepy.
And I didn’t believe her for a second. There was no way I could step away from Cruz. They would kill him instantly. But something was tugging me forward. I realized that the Embodied were controlling me. I fought against it, reaching back with one hand and grabbing Cruz’s wrist.

“We don’t want to harm anyone,” continued Aranara. “Even you.”

A million rapid-fire thoughts. Nothing Noon had told me contradicted what she was saying. For god-knows-what reason, I had been bred to fulfill this destiny. It was bigger than me. Who was I to stop it? This was what my whole life had been leading up to. This moment. This decision.

And the truth was, this moment was somehow part of
Noon’s plan too. And I loved him. Cruz would do anything for me, I knew that now, but he was too much of this world. With Noon I... I saw a door opening. A door to the whole universe – a chance to live what no one else had ever lived. And maybe a chance to find out what happened to my father.

The sirens were much louder. I could see the red and blue lights out the corner of my eye.

Time to step through the door, Kari.

“Okay. I’ll do it.”

Almost imperceptibly, Aranara relaxed.

“Thank you.”

Fake Elle lowered the gun a few inches.

I gulped. “On one condition.”

“Don’t do this, Kari,” said Cruz.

He stepped aside and
Fake Elle raised the gun again, following his movement. I held his wrist tight and moved to block him again. He pulled back, but I steeled myself.

“This is how it’s going to be, Aranara,” I insisted. “No negotiations.”

The whoop of the siren was now coming from the far end of the bridge.

“Do the operation
,” I continued. “Insert the pyramid.”

I held out the heavy, symmetrical crystalline form. The lights on the bridge were refracted in the massive diamond like a thousand rainbows.

“But do it with this one.”

Aranara seemed to hold her breath.

“If I have to go to the Dark Universe,” I continued, “I’m going with Noon.”

The Rebel Embodieds’ eyes flickered in silent conversation. They were discussing. Communing.

“Alright,” answered Aranara. “but we need to go
now
.”

The sirens were closing in from both sides of the bridge. Aranara advanced toward me, smiling. She was so
, so perfect. Just like the pyramid, her beauty was almost hypnotic.

Then Cruz grabbed the pyramid from my hands and before anyone could move, he launched it over the railing and into the
Hudson.

I screamed, “NOOOOOO!!!” and ran to the edge just in time to see the pyramid –
Noon – disappear into the dense, forbidding river.

Fake Elle raised the gun at Cruz once more. Her finger seemed to be squeezing tighter on the trigger. But Aranara ran into her line of sight, climbed onto the railing and swan-dived after her brother into the icy water. I watched her plummet, then disappear deep into
the river a hundred feet below with barely a splash.

Cruz and I looked at each other in shock, then back at the gun. Fake
Mom and Fake Elle seemed totally stunned, almost like computers that had crashed.

Five police cruisers screeched to a halt behind the SUV. A couple more arrived behind the jackknifed t
ruck. Cops leaped out and crouched down behind the car doors, guns trained on Fake Elle.

“Put your weapon down,” came the command over the police m
egaphone.

Fake
Mom and Fake Elle communed silently once more.

“
PUT YOUR WEAPON DOWN!”

Fake Elle calmly lowered the gun and placed it on
the ground. Then she and Fake Mom walked together to the railing, right beside us.

“Don’t move!” ordered the police.

But the two remaining Rebel Embodied ignored them and started to climb the railing.

“Stop. Or we
will
shoot!” was the final threat, before they both jumped off the bridge and disappeared into the river below.

“Oh my god,” murmured Cruz.

We both leaned over and looked down at the water, but there was no sign of anyone.

“Stay where you are,” came the new command from the police.

“People die jumping off this bridge every month,” said Cruz.

I looked at him, and could tell from his eyes that he was scared. The relief had drained the last of his adrenaline and now fear was taking over.
But I didn’t feel like that. The only sensation I could feel was a simmering anger. How would I ever find Mom now? And get some answers about Dad?

A half-dozen police officers approached cautiously from both
sides, weapons drawn but pointed downward. We turned to face them. The captain radioed for an ambulance and rescue divers. A policewoman asked us our names and where we were from. It all felt like a dream. The New Jersey cops stood down. Cruz and I were escorted past the eighteen-wheeler to separate NYPD cruisers.

As we were about to get in, I heard fireworks in the distance. Cruz turned to face me. Our eyes met and I smiled weakly at him.

“Happy New Year.”

Chap
ter 10

Dream #51: The kitchen cupboard is wide open. I crawl inside and open the flap. Inside is a smaller flap, so I push that one open too. Beyond that is another even smaller flap, and I open it. The next flap is so small I can only reach through with my hand, so I do. I feel another tiny flap and push it with my fingers. Then I touch the fingertips of another hand and recoil, terrified.

The cops drove us at high speed to the 33rd Precinct. The place was a zoo, already overflowing with beer-soaked, bloodied revelers, some protesting their arrests, several carrying on the altercations that got them there in the first place.

Cruz and I were
each interviewed in different rooms by one cop and one female social worker. She calmed me down and explained that the police were only trying to help. I had no idea what to tell them. Did I want them to think I was crazy? The trouble was, I was so worried about Mom that I made a huge mistake. I told them that the Embodied had kidnapped her.

I still can’t believe I was so stupid.
This opened a whole new can of worms. They asked if I had a photo of her and I pulled one up on Facebook. Two of the police cruisers had captured the whole bridge scene on their dashboard video cameras and of course it looked like Fake Mom and the woman in my photo were exactly the same person. My explanation failed miserably to convince them otherwise: my mother had been kidnapped by the woman on the bridge who looked exactly like her, but who was really a man. They thought I was traumatized and confused. And who could blame them? No, it wasn’t an identical twin, I told them. No, it wasn’t someone wearing a mask. Yes, she looks exactly like that but it wasn’t her.

Hey, even I didn’t believe me.

I pleaded with the social worker not to call my grandparents. I could only imagine how freaked out they would be. She said that it was the police department’s responsibility to notify Mom’s next-of-kin. I decided to change my tactics and stopped trying to convince them about Fake Mom, arguing that I was also Mom’s next-of-kin and that I’d been notified when I saw her jump off the bridge, meaning that they had fulfilled their responsibility. I asked the social worker if she could at least get the cops to wait 24 hours before calling Gran and Pops, hoping against hope that something miraculous would happen in the meantime to shield them from the truth. She finally relented and agreed to give me a day’s grace. The interview was over.

Cruz’s mother showed up at the station
, a hysterical mess, just as Cruz was released from his interview room. In the space of a few seconds she veered from relief that her son was okay to anger that he’d gotten himself into such a dangerous situation in the first place. I found out later that he had simply clammed up when asked in his interview what had happened. He had been raised to distrust cops. Besides, he couldn’t make any sense of what he’d witnessed at the clinic and on the bridge that night.

The social worker agreed to let Dora
take me to her place with Cruz. As I left the police station the cops reassured me that they would do everything they could to find my mother. But I knew that meant they would be looking for her body washed up on the Hudson shore.

* * * * *

The next morning Cruz was really in the shit with his mom. She wouldn’t let him out of her sight, but I needed to go back to The Warrington. Maybe if the other Temple of Truth Embodied were there, they could help somehow.

I stopped off at my apartment first, just in case. The door was open. For a second, hope welled up in my chest. Then it dissolved as I saw a police detective come out of the kitchen.

“Hey, kid – you’re Kari Marriner?” he asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m detective McGuire. This was the last place you saw your mother?”

“Yeah
... no. We were in Florida. At my grandparents.”

“Right. And you told my colleague that she left
Fort Lauderdale on...” he checked his notepad, “on December 26th.”

I nodded. It felt so strange to be back home and it not feel like home anymore.

“Did she talk to you about anything or anyone before she left? Was she acting strange?”

“I answered the same questions last night.”

“Yeah, I know.” He flipped back a few pages. “Let me see... she was dating a man called Bob and you don’t know his family name, right?”

“Uh-huh. And he was flying her to
Paris. At least that’s what he told her.”

“Yeah, that’s the problem. There’s no record of her leaving the country. But about a dozen police officers saw her – I’m sorry, honey – saw her
... on the bridge last night.”

Tears welled up in my eyes. Tears of sadness and frustration. What were the police supposed to think, anyway?

“There’s no sign of anyone having been here for a few days,” he continued. “There’s no evidence of any crime, so you can come back here whenever you like.”

He put a consoling hand on my shoulder, but I moved away coldly.

“I know it ain’t easy, honey,” he mumbled. “The social worker will check in on you this afternoon.”

He closed his notebook, handed me my set of keys, then left in silence without closing the door.

I walked into the kitchen, a lump in my throat. The truth was closing in on me: Mom was gone. There were only three leads. The tunnel, the ToT apartment and her office. I kneeled down at the cupboard, took a deep breath and opened the door. I leaned inside and pushed the back wall. It wouldn’t budge. I pushed harder. The flap had been closed. I thought about the tunnel. It split off at one point and I had never taken the other pathway. Did it lead to another apartment where the Rebel Embodied hatched their plans? Is that where the Persian cat came from? They could take on any organic form... It was one of them, wasn’t it?