Erica O'Rourke - Dissonance

“Eliot heard the train when he called and put it together. Moving Simon isn’t enough.”

“It will stabilize the Key World and get the Consort off his trail. That’s what matters.”

“His signal’s too strong,” Addie said. “When he was in the Key World, it drew the Echoes there. Now it’s drawing them here.”

“That’s good,” I said. “The inversions will stop.”

“ All the frequencies,” she said, and took me by the shoulders, spinning me around. “Even the Key World’s. Look.”

A cast-iron replica of a steam engine stood at the front entrance of the school. As we watched, it shifted to a statue of George Washington. “I don’t understand.”

“I do,” Simon said, coming to stand next to me. “Did you know they changed the school mascot?”

“Did you know I don’t care?”

“Twenty years ago,” he said. “We used to be the Iron Horses. After the crash, they renamed the school.”

The sky tilted, the world going dim. “I don’t know what that means.”

“This world’s mascot is a train, not a president. But the Key World is being pulled here. Toward me.”

“We can’t win.” Addie’s eyes filled with pity. “The Consort was at the school when I left. They’re already cleaving the inversions. They’ll find this world, and they’ll cleave it.”

My stomach wrenched. All those Echoes, gone. All those Simons. All those lives we’d worked so hard to save, rippling away.

“Breathe,” Simon said, rubbing slow circles on my back. “Breathe, Del. In and out. Come on.”

“No. No. There’s got to be a way around this.” I dragged Addie to the edge of the sidewalk. “If we bring him back, the Consort will kill him.”

“We don’t know that for sure. They might fix him.”

I laughed. “They don’t want to fix things. It’s inefficient, remember? Why bother tuning an Echo when you can cleave it? Why bother saving a life when you can end it?”

“They’re preserving the Key World. You know this. It’s kid stuff. It’s what they’ve always taught us.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Did it ever cross your mind that they aren’t telling us the whole truth?” As fluid as water, as faceted as diamonds, as flawed as memory. What were the other facets? What was the Free Walkers’ truth? The Echoes’?

What was mine?

“Del, listen to me. You are the best Walker I’ve ever met. You can go anywhere. You can Walk to any world, have anything you want.” She gave me a gentle shake. “But you can’t have him.”

It was the easiest choice I’d ever made.

“Then I don’t want to be a Walker.”

“Do I get a say?” Simon asked. He rejoined us, tucking me against his side.

“Only if you can talk sense into her,” Addie said.

“You want to hand me over to the Consort,” he said, with the same shrewd look he used when sizing up the opposing team.

She met his eyes squarely. “You’re a nice guy. You care about Del, which is not easy, and you make her happy. If there was another way, I’d take it. But there’s not, and I won’t let the multiverse crumble because of one person, no matter who it is. I’m sorry.”

“Monty said this world was safe,” he pointed out.

“Monty was wrong,” I replied. Monty had been wrong about a lot of things lately.

“If they don’t get the inversions under control,” he said, “if the Key World keeps degrading . . . what happens to my mom?”

I didn’t say anything. He looked at Addie, who turned her hands skyward, helplessly.

“And if I don’t go back?”

“They’ll cleave this world,” Addie said. “Once they figure out the source is here, the easiest thing to do is unravel. That would stop your signal from affecting the Key World. Or any Echoes not connected to this one.”

“So either I hand myself over to the people who took my dad, or they cleave me.” He swallowed hard. “I gotta say, for people who deal in choices, the ones you’re giving me suck.”

“Choices,” I murmured. The plan came bright and fast as a lightning strike, a charge running through my body and stopping my lungs. Simon must have felt it too, because his eyebrows arched as he looked down at me.

I went up on tiptoe to kiss him, saying against his mouth, “Trust me?”

“Always,” he said.

I pressed closer to him, drawing out the kiss, savoring the taste of him, gaining strength from his signal and his steadiness.

Addie cleared her throat. “Del. We have to go.”

I turned toward her, wiping my eyes. “Five more minutes, Addie. Please. They’ll take him the minute we cross back. You know they will. This is my only chance to say good-bye.”

She hesitated, but Simon met her eyes and nodded once. Inches away, a pivot swelled into being.

“Privately,” I added.

“Fine.” Addie checked her watch. “I’m going to wait around that corner of the school. But in five minutes and one second, if you two aren’t walking toward that pivot, I will drag you both back there by your freaking hair.”

“You won’t have to,” I assured her.

AS SOON AS Addie rounded the corner, I turned back to Simon. “Ready to go?”

“What?”

“We’ve got five minutes. Less, the longer we stand here talking.” I listened for the pivot he’d just created. “Kiss me again, in case she’s looking.”

“We can’t run.”

“If we keep moving, they might not be able to find you.”

“Running won’t help. You said so yourself. No matter where I go, the Key World will follow me. As long as I exist, everyone I love is in danger. My mom. Iggy. You.”

I leaned my forehead against his chest, feeling the tears start in earnest. “I’m not giving you up.”

“These Cleavers that everyone keeps talking about. What do they do?”

“The Echoes are connected by threads. The Cleavers cut the ones tying a specific Echo to the rest of the multiverse.”

“So they’re completely separate? No possibility of a crossover?”

“Cleaving unravels the entire fabric. Once the strings are cut, the Echo—and every Echo that came from it—disintegrates, from oldest to newest.”

“So it’s not instantaneous. You’d have time to get out.”

And then I understood.

“No,” I said, my voice cracking. “I’m not leaving you.”

He slid his hands through my hair and I closed my eyes, willing the tears back as his mouth came down on mine, more fierce and frantic than ever before. He tasted like salt and sunshine, and he smelled like the rain that was threatening to fall, and I knew I couldn’t let him go, not in a million worlds.

“Will it hurt?”

“I’m not doing it!” I tried to twine my arms around his neck, but he gripped my wrists, evading me.

“Will it hurt?”

“I don’t know! Echoes don’t feel anything, but you’re real. You’re mine .”

“You have to help me, Del. I can’t find the threads on my own.”

“Don’t do this,” I begged. “You’re the only person who has ever seen me, in my whole life. You see me, exactly as I am, and you still . . .”

“Love you,” he finished. “And this is how I save you. Save everyone.”

Except it wasn’t his job to save everyone. It was mine.

There was no getting around the truth this time. Simon was the heart of the anomaly, and my heart, and there was only one way to reconcile the two. To be both a Walker and myself.

“We stay together,” I said. “It’s a big world. It’ll take time to unravel. We keep moving, and we don’t give up.”

“You’ll be okay,” he said.

“So will you.”

“Show me the strings,” he said. “If I’m going to destroy the world, I’d like to at least know what it looks like.”