Erica O'Rourke - Dissonance

“Foster!” she called into the twilight. From his office in the garage, my dad shouted back something unintelligible, and then hustled inside. Nobody messed around when my mom used that tone.

Monty patted my arm. “She’s in a temper, isn’t she? Been snappish all day.”

“Do not move from that spot,” Mom said, her glare nailing me to my seat. Addie smirked as they filed into Mom’s office and shut the door.

“You’ve been out a long time.” Monty drew two glass bottles out of the fridge. “Root beer?”

“Not thirsty,” I mumbled as he pried off their tops.

He brought both bottles over and drained half of his. I rolled mine between my hands, listening to the faint hiss and snap of the carbonation.

“I screwed up,” I said. “Big.”

He belched gently, and I wrinkled my nose. “Nothing’s done that can’t be un-, Delancey.”

It’s what he’d always said, when I was a kid and we’d gone Walking together. A song he’d invented, special for me.

Nothing’s done that can’t be un-,

Nothing’s lost that can’t be found,

Make a choice and make a world,

Find another way around.

It had cheered me whenever our Walks had gone awry, and with Monty, they usually did. But I’d figured out by now that plenty of things—and people—stayed lost forever.

People like my grandmother. She had been a medic—the Walker equivalent of a doctor—charged with keeping Cleavers like my grandfather and my father healthy during their trips through the multiverse. A few months before I was born, she’d gone out on a Walk and never returned.

My parents and Addie had been living in New York at the time; Monty and Rose were here, in this house. According to my mom, the Consort’s teams had searched for weeks, but she’d vanished completely. Their official verdict was that Rose had been caught on the wrong side of a cleaving, like we’d been today.

Monty wouldn’t accept it. They were meant to be together, he insisted—Montrose and Rosemont, two halves of a whole. He’d wandered the multiverse alone, looking for her, until the Consort had stepped in and issued a second verdict: Either my parents come back to take care of Monty, or they’d send him to a home. So, a month after I was born, we returned permanently.

It was Walker tradition to name a kid after big pivots in their parents’ hometown, and few pivots were bigger than train stops, where decisions accrued on a regular basis, day after day. Everyone else in my family was named for Chicago, but I’d been named for New York, a reminder of what could have been. My grandmother’s disappearance had given me my name and an entirely different life.

When someone vanishes, it leaves behind a scar. Some heal better than others. My grandmother had unwittingly left her mark on our whole family. My mom saw the world as a collection of messes to be contained. Addie was so desperate to please her, she’d taken that need for order and translated it as a need for perfection. My dad tried to keep everyone happy, ever the peacemaker. The only path left to me was the one marked trouble.

Even now Monty didn’t believe my grandmother was really gone. He slipped away whenever he could to continue the search. But instead of finding Rose, he’d lost his mind.

His song had failed us both, but I didn’t tell him so.

“Now,” he said, leaning back in his chair and lacing his hands over his stomach. “What’s this about?”

“I cleaved an Echo,” I said. The words felt leaden as I spoke them, and Monty’s head snapped back as if he’d taken a punch. I hurried to explain.

“Not on purpose. I touched the strings for a second and it sort of . . . happened. Everything fell apart crazy fast. I’ve never been inside a cleaving. I didn’t know . . .” My throat clogged up. “There was a guy from school—an Echo of a guy from school. Simon Lane. One minute I was talking to him and the next he was gone.” Monty’s eyebrows lifted, his watery blue gaze turning sharp. “I know they’re not real, but . . . that’s not how it felt. It felt awful.”

He nodded. “As it should.”

“We barely got out in time, Grandpa. I thought unravelings took days.”

He looked like I’d given him a prize instead of a problem. “How’d you manage to escape?”

When I explained about the balloon, he chuckled. “Clever girl.”

I didn’t feel clever. I felt sick. “I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.”

“There are no accidents,” said my mother from the doorway. My father’s hand rested on her shoulders, a unified front.

I turned to plead my case. “I only wanted to know what the threads felt like. I’d never been anywhere so out of tune. Then Addie yanked me away, and they split. That’s it.”

“That’s it?” Mom’s voice was like a lash. My father stepped between us.

“You two must be starving. We’ll talk after dinner.”

I barely touched my food. Monty smacked his lips, slathering butter and jam on a biscuit. How could he be so cheerful after what I’d told him? My parents were ominously quiet, while Addie spooned up delicate bites of lentil soup with a satisfied air. Whatever punishment they’d decided on, she was happy. It must be bad.

Finally my dad pushed his bowl away. “Your actions today were reckless. And dangerous. Do you know what could have happened to you and your sister?”

I stared at the brown ooze congealing in front of me.

“You could have been killed. And we’d never have known. This is exactly why we don’t like you going out by yourself. Did you even think about us? What it would have done to your mother, living through that again?” Dad asked.

“This isn’t about me,” said my mom. She folded her napkin precisely and set it on the table. “This is about you, and your behavior, and your constant need to flout every rule that has been laid out for your own protection and the protection of the Key World.”

“I’m sorry.” I slid lower in my chair. “I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

“You never do,” my mom said. “You rush in and trust that your gifts will be enough to get you out of any mess you create.”

I poked at my bowl. I’d screwed up, but I’d also saved us. That should count for something, shouldn’t it?

“It was a neat trick,” Monty said. “Getting out of there. You should give her some credit.”

Gratitude rushed through me. Monty understood.

“She wouldn’t have needed a trick if she’d followed the rules,” Mom replied. “Addie made it through five years of training and we never once saw this kind of behavior.”

No, of course not. I’d figured out a long time ago that I couldn’t beat Addie at her own game, so I stopped trying.

My father added, “Cleaving can’t be handled by one person. The protocol mandates three Cleavers to manage it safely.”

“Hogwash,” said Monty. “They send three Cleavers so no one knows who cut the last string. Keeps ’em from feeling too guilty.”

“Why would someone feel guilty?” asked Addie. “They’re only Echoes.”

Monty shook his head in disgust.

“A faulty cleaving causes more harm than good,” my father said. “It leaves the Key World weak.”

There was no greater crime than damaging the Key World. My voice sounded very small when I said, “We can fix it, right? We don’t have to report it?”

I thought about the stories I’d heard, Walkers stripped of their licenses, forced to live like ordinary people, never again venturing outside the Key World. Walkers who vanished altogether, sent to an oubliette.

Oubliettes were prisons, hidden behind rumor and speculation. The story was, to contain the worst of our criminals, the Consort had played with the fabric of the multiverse. They’d created worlds no bigger than a jail cell, severing them from the Key World and Echoes except for a single thread. A world with all possibilities eliminated, impossible to escape. No one had ever come back from an oubliette, so no one knew the truth.