Silent Symmetry (The Embodied trilogy) (6 page)

I
marched swiftly into the street from the parking lot with my head down against the cold October wind and the brown leaves blowing around my ankles. Maybe I was over-thinking the whole thing? Maybe I should just go with it. What was the problem here anyway? Kissing a good-looking boy was what girls my age should be doing, right? But that wasn’t the issue. It was something else, and as I walked home an unpleasant sensation kept bugging me: I knew deep down inside that during those few minutes I was with Cruz in the language lab, I wasn’t myself. I literally wasn’t myself. Something, or someone, had been directing my thoughts and actions. And when I’d seen Noon in that SUV, there had a been a flash of insight. Somehow I knew that he was involved. My logical side kicked in. I decided then and there that I had to confront him and find out what was going on.

* * * * *

When I got back home, Mom was freaking out. Flash had vanished. Of course I knew where he’d gone, but for Mom it was completely inexplicable. One thing for sure – there was no way I was going to tell her about the secret tunnel.

“He must have scooted out when we left this morning,” I ventured, hoping she would buy it.

“But we would have seen him!”

“I dunno, we were in a bit of a rush,” I said.

She shook her head. “No, it’s impossible. He just wouldn’t do that.”

“It’s still a strange new place for him. Maybe he was confused?”

“Even if he raced out through a gap in the doorway while I was looking for my keys or something, he wouldn’t have run away any further. You know what he’s like – he never wants us to leave so he would have followed us, meowing.”

She had a point. “Yeah, I guess.” I was trying not to seem too bothered. This strategy backfired immediately.

“What’s the matter – why aren’t you freaking out?” she frowned at me.

“You’re right – we should look for him.”

“But I already have!”

Her voice was rising and I could understand why. If I’d actually believed Flash was lost, I’d be running around like crazy trying to find him.

“Did you try shaking the cat food bag?” I suggested as I walked into the kitchen.

Mom threw up her arms in exasperation as she followed me. “Of course I did.”

My eyes shot to the cupboard. The door was open. The cat food bag was sitting on the tiled floor in front of it. I didn’t want to shake it again because if Flash was in the tunnel and heard it, he would come running back and Mom would find out about the passageway. I needed to distract her so that I could go into the tunnel myself while she was asleep. I was cursing myself for not having thought about finding a way to stop Flash pushing open the flap at the back of the cupboard.

I grabbed the bag and
walked out of the kitchen with Mom right behind me. “What are you doing, pumpkin?” she asked. I stopped in my tracks. She was stressed and reverting to her old habits.

“Mom
...”

“What?”

“Pumpkin?”

She grinned sheepishly at me. “Oh yes – sorry!”

I opened the front door and went out into the hallway, shaking the cat food bag. “Flash!” I shouted, making squeaky noises with my lips. This went on for about half a minute until an old man in a robe opened the door across from the elevators.

“What
in God’s name is going on?” he grumbled, peering through thick eyeglasses, his thinning gray hair mussed up as though he’d been napping.

“
Aw shucks, we didn’t mean to disturb you, Sir,” apologized Mom, doing her best impression of a Midwestern farmer’s wife. The man grunted something and shuffled back inside his apartment. “See? He’s gone,” said Mom in desperation. She meant Flash, not the old man. “We’ll have to make a bunch of those sad Lost Cat posters and put them up around the neighborhood.”

“Good idea,” I answered, not really knowing what else to do. Then I thought of a way that Flash could reappear without it seeming like magic to
Mom once I’d found him in the tunnel. “Hey – what if he’s just lost in the building somewhere – we should leave the door open so he can come back in.”

“Are you crazy?!” she exclaimed in a loud whisper, glancing over at the old man’s door. “This is
New York! People have three locks on their doors. No one leaves them unlocked, let alone open.”

“But there’s a chain, so we could almost close it and it would look closed to anyone who happened to come by, and how many people are going to do that anyway between now and
the morning? Then if Flash comes back he can nudge the door open a bit and come inside.”

She had that look on her face that always appeared when she was processing. She started to nod slowly, which was usually a good sign. “You’re right – statistically the odds of a thief getting in the building and then happening to pass by our door out of the hundreds of apartments are practically zero. And if Flash does come back, the chain will allow the door to open just enough for him to enter, but stop anyone else coming in.”

“That’s my whole point!” I smiled. “And when he does come in, he’ll meow hello to us and we’ll get up and close the front door.”

“Okay, okay
... I guess it’s pretty low-risk.” She seemed to cheer up and went back inside the apartment. “I’ll get supper ready while you work on the posters in case we need them,” she said, disappearing into the kitchen.

I was super proud of myself. This was the plan: I’d set my alarm for 3 am, crawl into the tunnel, track him down, bring him back, and pretend that he’d come through the chained front door and woke me up by jumping on my bed. Then I’d just have to find a way of stopping him going back through the flap tomorrow. What could go wrong? By morning, I had the answer.

* * * * *

The tunnel was colder at night. I’d thrown on some sweatpants but had totally not expected to be shivering in there. I crawled along the passageways, following the route I’d taken before. I quietly called out Flash’s name, shining the flashlight in front of me, then above me. I came to the vertical junction that he’d jumped down from the last time. But there was no sign of him.

I began to worry that he’d found a similar flap in another apartment and gotten stuck in there. What if the tenant hated cats and threw him out in the street? The posters suddenly didn’t seem like such a waste of time. Or what if he was trapped somehow in a narrow part of the tunnel? I knew that last idea was unlikely, seeing as how Flash was able to squish himself down to about two inches high. And if he did, surely he’d be squealing in pain or meowing in fear and I’d hear him...

Sure enough, just as that thought entered my head, I heard it. Faintly, but undoubtedly, it was a soft meow. Heartened, I crawled faster. The sound seemed to be getting louder – I must be headed in the right
direction. I rounded a couple corners, no longer cold because of how fast I was crawling. Then I stopped as I realized that the tunnel sloped upward in front of me. I shone the flashlight up, but I couldn’t see how high the incline went. But now that I’d stopped it was obvious that the meowing was louder.

“Flash!” I
called, this time in more of a hoarse shout than a whisper.

“Meow!” came the response from somewhere up the sloped tunnel. I started to crawl upward.

After a minute or so the incline leveled off. I thought I saw something glinting in the distance ahead.

“Flash?” I edged forward. Something told me that it wasn’t Flash. The meowing had stopped. But there was definitely something reflecting back the beam of the flashlight. I wondered whether I should continue. But curiosity got the better of me.

That old saying came to me: curiosity killed the cat.

The number of times
Mom had said that after catching me sticking my finger in a hole as a little kid or poking my head through a railing to see what was below... But she never got super mad at me. How could she, with her scientific background and engineer’s training? She’d always encouraged me to explore, to ask questions. Although, come to think of it, she never specified whether crawling along a small dark tunnel in the middle of the night was allowed.

Now I could see what had been glinting in front of me. Not the eyes of a cat, but the brass of a metal grille. It was about two feet wide and ten inches high, with an ornate design of curly leaves and twisting stems. The kind of grille you found covering a heating duct in an old building like this.

I realized that if it opened somehow, a cat could get through the gap easily. I approached the grille and shone my flashlight through the opening. Before calling Flash’s name again I wanted to see if it was someone’s bedroom. The last thing I needed was to give some poor old lady a heart attack.

The room on the other side of the grille was in darkness. I could make out a patterned rug and the legs of various tables and chairs. Cool – it didn’t seem to be a bedroom, so I whispered “Flash?” and waved the flashlight around some more.

Then I sensed a movement and focused the beam in its direction. I narrowed my eyes, trying to make out what it was in the gloom. Just as I was about to call the cat again, I felt a wave of shuddering overtake my whole body. The movement had come from a person’s legs. Maybe twenty feet away (the room was pretty big) the flashlight’s beam was wider, but fainter. And it wasn’t just one person’s legs. There were half a dozen people seated around an oval dining room table, eyes closed. In the pitch dark.

This was beyond freaky. It made my blood run cold. There were three men and three women, old and young, all holding hands like they were participating in the world’s spookiest séance.

None of them seemed to have noticed my presence behind the grille. This was a good thing. All thoughts of Flash had vanished as surely as he had vanished from our apartment. What on earth was going on here?

I swept the room with my flashlight, peering into the dimness. Something on the wall caught my attention. What was it? A symbol
... something I’d seen before. WTF – it was the logo of the Temple of Truth! Is this what they did to get to the truth? Sit around in the dark holding hands?!

One of the men at the table suddenly turned toward me and opened his eyes. I hadn’t made a sound but he looked right at the grille. I turned the flashlight quickly away
, then switched it off. The man broke the circle of hands and got up from his chair. He padded softly but deliberately toward me. I recoiled instinctively. Even though it was as dark as a coalmine in the room I could tell that he was getting closer. I shuffled backward as quietly as I could. But I hadn’t realized that I couldn’t turn around in the tunnel. When I’d crawled into it the first time I only changed direction when Flash jumped down on me at the intersection, and it must have been wider than the regular width of the passageway. Now I was stuck going backward and trying not to make any noise.

The man was at the grille. I held my breath. He was only about six feet away but for some reason hadn’t thought of turning on the light in the room. It was almost as though he was sniffing the air in the tunnel.

And then I heard it. A single word. Spoken by one of the women in the room.

“
Noon?”

I knew it was him. I knew that the man at the grille was
Noon.

He moved away and replied
gravely to the woman: “We should have known.”

My brain was speeding at a thousand miles an hour. What did all this mean?
Noon lived in my building? And he was somehow involved in the Temple of Truth that Mom worked for?

Then the light
did go on in the room. It pierced the grille, casting a shadow of sinewy leaves and stalks on the walls of the tunnel. There was the sound of chairs being pushed back and people murmuring. They were going to find me.

I shuffled back as fast as I could, unconcerned
by the swooshing of sweatpants and the click of the flashlight on the wooden tunnel floor. I caught a glimpse of a face pressing against the grille as I started to slide back down the incline. It was a woman. It might have been the woman I’d seen outside The Warrington holding hands with the other one in the doorway, but I lost sight of her as gravity took over.

I let myself go and in a few seconds
was down at the bottom of the slope, heart pounding and sweat pouring from my forehead. I still couldn’t turn around, so I carried on edging backward as fast as I could. I don’t know why, but I felt like puking. This was too much to process. I was tired, scared and confused.

After a couple of minutes I reached an intersection and found that I was able to turn around. The search for Flash had suddenly become secondary. I sped back to the flap and into the kitchen.

I stood there panting, looking down at the cupboard, thoughts careening through my brain. None of it made any sense. I turned on the faucet and took out a glass. The water gushed into the sink. Somehow it calmed me and I stayed there watching the stream and the splashes. It was as though all my confusion was being washed down the drain.

I must have been super tired or totally out of it because the next thing I remember is waking up to the sound of purring.

My first thought was happiness. Flash had found his way home! I turned around to face the warmth and reached out for his fur. But my fingers knew it before my eyes confirmed it: this was a different cat.