BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller

Sixteen-year-old Blaire Adams can walk through mirrors.

It’s called breaking symmetry. To her, a mirror feels like a film of honey. She can reach through it, grab things…even step inside. On the other side she lives every teenager’s fantasy: a universe all her own, zero consequences. She can kiss the hot guy, break into La Jolla mansions, steal things…even kill. When finished, she just steps back into reality and smashes the mirror—and in an instant erases every stupid thing she did. Gone. It never happened.

But breaking symmetry is also dangerous. First there’s the drug-like rush she gets when passing through the glass, like a shot of adrenaline. She suspects it’s degrading her body, making a new copy of her each time. A reflection of a reflection, each one a little hazier. Then, of course, there’s the risk of getting cut off from reality.

When she narrowly escapes a military quarantine zone with the San Diego Police Department hot on her heels only to discover her escape mirror littering the floor in shards, her worst fear is realized. Now, trapped in a broken reflection, she must flee through a mind-bending maze of mirrors, going deeper into the nightmare as she struggles to grasp a betrayal, uncover the chilling truth about her ability, and somehow find a way out of a dead-end universe that “never happened.”

Somehow, she must find a way home.

5-star praise for Broken Symmetry:

“Impressed…brilliantly written…I recommend this book highly for all teens and adults….”

“Great premise…an amazing science/supernatural/mystery/romance…”

an excerpt from

Broken Symmetry

by Dan Rix

Copyright © 2014 by Dan Rix and published here with his permission

Chapter 1

 

Lip gloss finally applied, I blew a kiss to the visor mirror and climbed out of my new Jeep Wrangler thoroughly ready to get asked to prom by Josh Hutchinson.

Even at midnight, the perimeter of lights around The Scripps Research Institute could wake the blind. Since this morning, the U.S. Army had erected more than a dozen sixty-foot towers arrayed with Metal Halide floodlights. The lights combined with the drone of diesel generators and the occasional scream of power tools destroyed all hope of a quiet evening on the Torrey Pines Golf Course.

Maybe this was not the best night for stargazing.

I tied my hair back and wiggled under a loose section of the barbed wire fence, grateful that three years of cross-country had carved my figure down to practically nothing.

At least we’d be alone. As of twelve hours ago, La Jolla’s world-class biomedical research institute, the thirty-five acre campus, and the golf course were all part of the quarantine zone.

I reached our lookout spot at the edge of the green. My hair, loose again, caught the sea breeze and whipped across my face.

“Josh?” I whispered.

Surf thumped the beach two hundred feet below me.

“Joshua?”

“There! Shooting star,” his voice said. He stepped out of the shadows, head angled skyward. “Did you see it?”

I straightened up. “I see you didn’t wuss out at the fence.”

Josh smoothed back his wavy hair and thrust his chin forward, flaunting a jawline that could have doubled as an architect’s straightedge. “There is my reputation to consider, Blaire.”

It was only sort of a joke. Captain of the basketball team and student body president and way too charming for his own good, Josh Hutchinson was the kind of guy everyone loved to hate.

Unless, of course, he was asking you to prom.

“So . . . stargazing in a hot zone,” I said, breaking the silence. “This is romantic.”

“I’m telling you I booked the place before they did,” he said, pointing a thumb behind him at the Army.

“You don’t think they had someone pulling strings for them, do you?”

“Anything’s possible.” He tossed a bent metal sign into the light. “At least I was able to nab one of these for my room.”

On the reflective yellow background, I recognized the international biohazard symbol. I had ignored similar signs spaced evenly along the perimeter fence. “That’s cute.” I tilted my head. “Maybe if there’s enough radiation it will even glow in the dark.”

The floodlights behind us left his eyes in shadow. “So you’re not even scared a little bit?”

“Were you hoping I’d be?”

He shrugged. “I know it’s just a drill, the whole quarantine thing. It’s just . . . we’re really not supposed to be in here.”

“Your idea, remember?”

“About that . . .” He stepped closer and took my hands in his. “I didn’t actually invite you here to stargaze.”

My heart sped up, and I squeezed his hands without meaning to and loosened my grip just as fast, hoping he didn’t notice. Act cool, Blaire. Act cool. “Yeah, I kind of figured,” I said.

“Can I ask you something?” he said.

I nodded.

“Blaire, will you go to pr—”

My cell phone cut him off. I cringed and yanked it out of my pocket to silence it. Probably my idiot friends calling for the scoop.

But then I saw the caller ID.

My fingers froze over the screen. I’d forgotten the number was still in my phone.

Josh crossed his arms. “Who is it?” he said, his eyes wandering to the Navy destroyer anchored offshore.

“I need to take this.” I raised the phone to my ear. My hands trembled, but not from the cold. “Hello?”

“Blaire. Detective Joe Paretti.”

Just the sound of the his voice unearthed layers of emotion I had no idea I still had, fear and hopelessness, and that one terrifying pang of hope that hurt worst of all.

“It’s midnight,” I said, my throat dry. “Why are you calling me?”

“You better come down to the station.”

“Joe, why are you calling me?”

A sigh on the other end. I could picture him rubbing his forehead. “We found him.”

We found him.

Three words I had waited to hear for eleven months. The cliffs blurred and the floodlights from The Scripps Institute kaleidoscoped around me. Nothing mattered anymore. That I was two seconds away from getting asked to prom by La Jolla High’s undisputed heartthrob Joshua Hutchinson could have been another lifetime.

I choked out the only question that mattered. “Is he alive?”

“Just come down to the station,” he said. “I’ll explain everything here.”

And he hung up.

The phone slipped from my hand. It bounced on the rock and skittered toward the cliff edge.

“I have to go,” I said, pushing away from Josh and grabbing the phone. “I have to go right now.”

“Wait, Blaire—” He lunged for my hand, but I tore out of his grip. I was already sprinting to my car.

***

My name is Blaire Adams.

At the end of my sophomore year my father disappeared without a trace. I was fifteen. I remembered the last evening—he kissed me goodnight then went up to bed himself.

In the morning, he was gone.

Detective Joe Paretti of the San Diego Police Department led the investigation, and found nothing for the next eleven months. In his words, it was as if my father had evaporated.

Tonight, they had finally found him.

The gas pedal bottomed out under my toes, but my Jeep didn’t budge. The engine just revved out of control, and its sudden, violent vibration stung my fingertips through the steering wheel.

First gear. Put it in first gear.

Except I had only just learned manual transmission, and I was dizzy, hyperventilating. It was like solving one of those ball-in-a-maze toys blindfolded.

Finally the stick slotted into place.

But not in first gear. The car shook and lurched forward. I floored it and rode the clutch for two blocks. The burnt smell hissing from my new car only sharpened my focus, reminded me to breathe. Instinct took over.

An eternity later, I squealed to a stop in front of the San Diego Police Department, Northern Division and tore up the ramp. A billion fragments of hope cluttered my mind to the point of popping. At the door, I gave up thinking.

Up ahead, at the end a dark linoleum hallway lit only by orange emergency strips, light spilled from a single office. And voices.

By now I knew the police station well enough to recognize the office as Joe Paretti’s. From inside the office, one voice cut through the others. A voice that made me think of a gurgling brook in winter, deceptively quiet before a flood.

Dad.

My heart did this funny thing, like I’d swallowed it wrong. My legs put on a burst of speed, raising the chilled police station air to a whistle in my ears and plowing me straight into the hulk of a man blocking the office doorway.

Joe Paretti whipped around. “Wait a sec, kid—”

I lunged for the gap at his side, and almost slipped past him. He grabbed my wrists and hauled me up the corridor, kicked the door shut behind him, and planted me against the wall. “Blaire, just wait a sec. I might have called you in too soon.”

“Daddy!” I twisted my neck to peer through the sidelites, but barely discerned a standing figure through the frosted glass. “Let me see him!” I screamed.

“Just give me time to sort this out,” Joe said. His radio crackled with an incoherent message.

“No, I’m seeing him now—” Using both hands, I shoved his arm off the wall, and his other arm came around behind me to stop him from falling into me. Like pushing through a turnstile. I cranked the doorknob.

Once again, Joe’s hand closed around my wrist. “Blaire, I don’t want you in there yet.”

“That’s my dad—”

“I called you in too soon,” he barked. Only the deep creases lining the detective’s forehead betrayed his fatigue. “Give me a chance to sort this out. We just picked him up a half hour ago”

“Where?”

“Over by the Institute.”

“The quarantine zone?”

“And I deserve the goddamn Medal of Honor for getting those jarheads to hand him over. ‘Community exercise’ my ass. Just scratching each other’s nuts if you ask me. Just give me ten more minutes to sort this out.”

“Sort out what?”

“Listen to me, Blaire,” he said, and for the first time that night his voice was gentle, his eyes full of sympathy. “Your dad’s got amnesia . . . he can’t remember a damn thing about you.”

***

Behind us, muffled shouts seeped from the glass sidelites.

My father.

And I understood what Joe meant. My father’s yells scared me, sickened me. Suddenly I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want to see what had become of him.

Because people don’t just vanish for eleven months and come back normal. They come back changed. Scarred in some way.

A nervous chill crept up my throat. I swallowed it back down and stood up straight. “It’s temporary,” I declared. “He just needs to see me, and he’ll remember me.”

“Oh, he remembers you just fine,” said Joe. “In fact, he was able to give us a picture perfect description of you . . . when you were four.”

“Four . . . years old?”

“Everything after that’s toast. I’ve seen it just like this a thousand times—post-traumatic retrograde amnesia, or something like it.”

“From what?” I said.

He shrugged. “A hit on the head.”

Another officer emerged from the office, his radio hissing on his belt, and in the brief moment the door hung open, I glimpsed my father. I surged forward. But the door latched shut, and I froze, eyes glued to the metal door between us, no longer sure I had the strength. Instead, my gaze fell to Joe’s gleaming black shoes.

His hand gripped my shoulder. “Blaire, you will survive,” he said. “There is one thing I can show you right now, something he had in his possession that might have sentimental value to you. Would you like to see it?”

I nodded, a tear forming in my eye.

The detective produced a paper envelope. “It’s all we found on him. Neither me nor the other officers make any damn sense of it.” He dumped the contents of the envelope onto his palm. “You recognize this?”

I studied the object in his hand, and the back of my neck prickled. He was holding the key to the mystery of my father’s disappearance and where he had been for almost a year.

***

In another office down the hall, far away from my father—now relocated to a holding cell—Paretti carefully extracted the evidence from the paper bag and laid it on the desk in front of me.

It was a leather-bound diary the size of a deck of cards. And from the frayed edges and the spots worn thin, I guessed well-used.

“Mean anything to you?” said Joe.

“It’s a diary.”

“I didn’t bring you down here to be a smart ass, kid. We figured that ourselves. Now open it up.”

“Oh, did that part stump you?” I said, my voice suddenly all attitude. “See, you slide the elastic off and then it opens just like a book. Here, you try it—”

The cop fixed me in an unblinking gaze. “Read it, Blaire.”

I flipped through the diary. Pages filled with my father’s longhand, practically illegible to anyone but himself. And me. As his only daughter, and the closest living person to him, I could read his loopy cursive.

Ever since I was little, he had kept a diary just like this. And if my intuition was correct, it would contain a detailed account of the last eleven months of his life. An account of his disappearance and what happened afterwards. At the thought, my heart picked up speed.

“It’s gibberish right?” said Joe.

“Only if you’re illiterate,” I said, returning to the first page, the first sentence.

I couldn’t read it.

Confused, I flipped to a random page halfway through.

Not English. Not even recognizable letters. I opened to another page, and another. Page after page of the same, foreign calligraphy. Was it Greek?

I peered closer. No, more foreign than Greek. Russian, maybe. Yet still western. Arabic? No, the symbols looked like our letters—oh, please, who was I trying to fool? I couldn’t tell.

I shook my head and closed the diary.

“Jesus, I’ll send for a linguist.” Paretti returned the diary to the bag and creased it shut. “Everything’s backwards with this guy.”

Backwards.

“Wait, let me see the diary again,” I said.

“It’s going into evidence.”

“I think I can read it.”

“You’re wasting your time,” he muttered, but handed me the diary anyway.

I opened to the first page, and the letters clicked into place. It was so simple, I laughed.

“Did I miss a joke in Farsi?”

“It’s not a foreign language,” I said. “It’s just backwards.”

“You better get to the point, and fast—”

“Backwards. Look, hold it up to a mirror—” my eyes darted to the office’s dark windows, where I glimpsed my reflection, long auburn hair crusted to blotchy, tear-stained cheeks, “or glass . . . hold it up to the glass.”

Joe did as I instructed, and his eyebrows scrunched together. “I’ll be damned. Must have hit his head harder than we thought. He’s all scrambled.”

“He’s not scrambled,” I said, my face hot. “For your information, Leonardo Da Vinci wrote backwards. He wrote forward with his right hand and backwards with his left hand.”

Joe just shook his head, massaging the creases out of his forehead. “Spare me, Blaire. I’ve had a long night.” He waved over one of the uniformed officers, a rookie, fresh out of the academy by the looks of his crew cut. “I want this scanned and typed up. The correct orientation.”

“Ten-four.” The rookie carried the diary out of the office.

“Am I ever going to see that again?” I said, watching him disappear up the hall with the diary.

“It’s going into evidence,” said Joe, facing me again. “Now, you wanted to see your daddy? Let’s go see him. He’s been asking for you.”

***

My father watched me enter the police interrogation room but said nothing. At the sight of him my heartache sharpened to a sting. Soft, straight brown hair framed a hardened face. His hazel eyes glowed from within, from his spirit. I barely resisted running to him.

But something was wrong.

The sleeves of a tattered T-shirt hung off bruised, cut up biceps. Always lean and toned before, he appeared outright emaciated now, like he hadn’t eaten in months. Nor had he shaved recently. His pale, sweaty skin gleamed under the fluorescent lights. He was clutching his stomach, as if on the verge of puking. But the worst was his eyes.

I couldn’t look away from his eyes. A spiderweb of black, swollen veins pulsed around them. Like leeches.

Something was very wrong.

“It’s not him,” I whispered, backing into Joe, overtaken by a deep sense of unease. “It’s not him. It’s a lookalike.”

“What’s that?” said Joe, nudging me forward.

Chills crawled up my skin. “Take me away, it’s not him,” I pleaded, now sobbing into Joe’s uniform, my voice too weak to hear. “It’s a lookalike.”

My father’s unfocused eyes travelled across my face like a blind man’s, not really seeing me . . . not a flicker. He didn’t recognize me.

The realization stilled my heart.

“Blaire-bear, is that you?” he said, and his voice did what the sight of him couldn’t. My anxiety melted away. I took in his withered body, bent over the desk, broken, and my heart lodged somewhere north of my esophagus.

“Daddy!” I ran forward to fling my arms around him.

With surprising strength, he clamped me in a bear hug, and I caught a whiff of him. Like ash. My fingers dug into his shirt, and I longed for him to brush back my hair, touch my face. Anything.

Instead, he sat me on his lap at arm’s length, as if scared to touch me, and his eyes explored my face for the first time.

“You’re gorgeous,” he whispered, a tear sliding down his cheek. “I couldn’t have imagined you more perfect.” His grip on my shoulders weakened, though, and I noticed he was trembling. “Listen to me, Blaire. Do not speak until I finish. I don’t have much time.”

“Where’d you go?” I whispered.

He held my gaze. “I do not have amnesia, though it will seem that I do,” he said. “It will seem that I am not as you remember, and I am sorry for that.” He lowered his palms from my shoulders and gripped my hands. “These police officers tell me I have been gone for eleven months,” he said. “This is not true—”

“Daddy, where’d you go?” I mumbled.

“Blaire, you have to listen to me,” he said. “I nevervanished . . . you vanished.”

“No, I’ve been right here, waiting for you.”

“I couldn’t find you, Blaire-bear. I couldn’t find you. You were four when it happened, when you disappeared.”

“You have to wake up now,” I said. “You went away, I stayed here.” Tears stung my eyes. My hands found the edge of the desk for support. Through my palms, the cold metal leached the life out of me. The wall to wall acoustic tiles, my soul. He couldn’t be crazy . . . he couldn’t.

“Blaire,” he whispered, struggling to hold his gaze steady, “you have to listen to me; you are the one thing that doesn’t belong.” He gestured around us. “None of this is real.”

No. I fixed my gaze on his. I had to wake him up. “Daddy, it is real . . . you have to remember . . . please—”

Before I could say more, though, his face paled, and he dropped me to the floor. His eyes darted to the one-way mirror, and he raised a shaky finger.

Joe stepped forward. “Mister Adams, I think we should get you to a hospital.”

My dad clutched his stomach and keeled over, his eyes wide. Then he vomited blood. His body spasmed, jerked, as his stomach worked to turn him inside out. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, could only watch in horror, my insides cold and frozen.

The officers rushed to his side.

My dad retched again, and from somewhere, warm liquid spattered my face.

“Get an ambulance!” Joe said. “We need an ambulance.”

***

In the trauma wing of Scripps Memorial Hospital, doctors shouted orders behind a curtain, their Rockports squeaking on linoleum. I shivered out in the hall, face buried between my knees. The world circled like a carousel. I focused on the sounds of activity, and counted each bleep on the heart monitor.

“Intubate the airway,” one yelled.

“It’s no good, his lungs are filling too fast. We need to turn his body.”

My father gurgled, coughed. Red splattered the curtain.

“Give me suction.” Silence, followed by the sound of a tube slurping up liquid. “Got it. Positive pressure now.”

I had already lost him once.

If only he could be okay, I prayed. If only he could be okay, we would drive home together.

We would begin patching up the last eleven months. It could still go back to the way it was.

The ECG pulses spiked, then raced double-time. My father’s heart rate.

“He’s going into V-tach,” said a nurse.

“The pulse . . . check the pulse.”

“Nothing.”

“Defib paddles. Give them to me. Two hundred fifty joules.”

I whimpered.

“Clear—”

The jolt nearly made my own heart stop. The ECG went silent, then beeped intermittently.

“V-fib.”

“Another shock.”

“Clear—”

The second jolt made my eardrums pop.

The heart monitor flatlined, and the ER doctor cursed. “Start CPR,” she said. “Nurse, check the leads and turn up the gain on the ECG. We need IV epinephrine.”

The heart monitor never beeped again.

***

For a long time, nothing pried into my haze. Eventually, a doctor stepped out from behind the curtain, scrubs soaked in blood, her face grim.

“Blaire, I’m Doctor Elaine Johnson.” She helped me to my feet.

“Is he okay?” I said.

“Unfortunately, we weren’t able to resuscitate him,” she said. “We’ll be doing an autopsy, of course, but the medical examiner doesn’t get in until next Monday, and he’s pretty backed up right now. It might be a while before we have answers. With your permission, I’d like to run a quick MRI on the body before they take it down to the morgue. I think I know what killed him.”

***

The leather-bound scrapbook opened with a crinkle on my bedroom floor. Everything I had collected up until now on my father’s disappearance—the newspaper article published in The San Diego Union-Tribune, missing person ads, police reports. My tears hit the seams and spilled off into the carpet.

Dr. Johnson had assured me she would get back to me in the morning with the cause of death. Answers, when there had never been anything but questions.

Before he vanished, he had been sick. According to him, it had to do with his work. Asbestos poisoning . . . or radiation sickness. I remembered the same symptoms he had exhibited tonight, almost a year ago: coughing up blood, vomiting.

Now we could add amnesia and delirium to that list . . . and schizophrenia. He barely recognized me. I sniffled and flipped to a large picture I had taken of him, grinning, his eyes crinkled with laugh lines.

The photo sent a painful jolt through my body and left me throbbing. I winced, slammed the binder shut, and sprawled out on the floor in a fetal position. My chest rose and fell, terrifyingly hollow.

In the first few months, I had been convinced—no matter what anyone told me—that it was rare for someone to disappear like he had, right into thin air. Not unheard of, just rare.

In retrospect, my father’s case was typical. The police didn’t solve nearly as many crimes as they let on; they simply didn’t have the funds. Most cases were unsolved.

Ever since his disappearance, I ran constantly, daily, pushed my body to the breaking point to keep the hole inside plugged with endorphins.

I got by.

I did well in school, even. I was popular, I was getting over him. Just like he would have wanted.

But nothing could have prepared me for tonight . . . for losing him all over again. Scabs that had taken a year to heal had ripped off in a second.

Bluish gray dawn seeped through the blinds into my bedroom, the color of cold. I shivered, the chill from the night finally soaking through my clothes.

I should sleep.

Tomorrow, I would learn the truth. Dr. Johnson would have the results of his MRI, which would probably point to a work related illness. As for where he had been all this time, I now knew exactly where I could find that information.

His diary.

 

Chapter 2

 

I took school off the next day for funeral preparations and went to the police station to pick up my dad’s diary.

“Still in evidence, kid. We’ll let you know when you can pick it up,” said Joe.

“I kind of need it now,” I said.

Joe hefted his feet onto his desk, kicking a stack of manila folders to the ground to make room for them, and fixed his beady eyes on me. “There something you forgot to mention last night about that diary, sweetheart?”

“My father’s dead, Joe. Those are probably the last words he ever wrote.”

“Well, you got to be patient. I got a couple techs on it now.”

“No, you don’t,” I sneered. “All you have to do is hold it up to a mirror. I showed you yesterday.”

“Blaire, your daddy didn’t write you a bedtime story, okay? It’s evidence. Besides, we’re not even sure it’s his handwriting.”

“Just out of curiosity,” I said, crossing the line for sure, “what are you sure of?”

Joe dropped his feet to the floor and leaned forward. “Now you listen good, sweetheart. We got a backlogged forensic lab, there’s no evidence of wrongdoing, we don’t have a suspect, and we just don’t have the manpower right now . . . And I have too much damn paperwork.” He swept his arm across his desk, dumping another stack of papers to the floor.

“Joe, I’m not asking for your help. I’m just asking for the diary.”

“Sweetheart, I have other cases. I don’t have time to babysit you.”

“Stop calling me sweetheart.” I said. “That’s what you call your wife.”

“No, I call that one woman.” He leaned back again, and this time slowly drank me in from head to toe.

I felt my lip curl, and I flattened my skirt so it covered as much of my thighs as possible. After he was through ogling me, I wanted to squirm out of my own skin. Or take a shower. “You pig.”

“As in chauvinist pig or cop pig?” he said, clearly fond of both nicknames.

“Just give me back my dad’s diary.”

“No can do.”

I sighed in exasperation. The harder he resisted, the more convinced I became that my dad had written down everything.

For my eyes only.

Joe continued to scrutinize me across his desk. “You know something we don’t, Blaire?”

“You’re the cop, Joe. You’re the one who’s supposed to know something.”

“I could use you on my side, right now, Blaire.”

“You make that pretty unappealing.”

“You’ll have it back in two weeks. Tops.”

“At least let me look at it. I’ll Xerox it and give it back, I promise.”

“All kinds of paperwork I’d have to fill out for that.”

“Then start filling. That’s my father’s property, and as his sole heir, it belongs to me now.”

“You’re welcome to contact your lawyer,” he said, yawning. “I’ll be happy to have this discussion with him.”

***

Joe Paretti might have said no, but as I had learned again and again throughout my sixteen years, no was actually code for try harder.

Outside Joe’s office I moseyed up the hallway away from the station’s exit. I needed to find the rookie officer I’d seen last night. If I remembered correctly, Joe had asked him to scan the contents of the diary. I could at least get the PDF emailed to me, right?

Farther down the hall, I peeked inside an open office. Empty. I opened another one and got waved out by an angry detective on the phone.

No good. There were too many offices. Then again, patrol officers didn’t have offices, did they? Only detectives got the offices.

My suspicion was confirmed a moment later when I found the rookie inside a cubicle in the bullpen, filling out paperwork.

“Got any leads?” My voice startled him. I stepped into his cubicle, which barely fit both of us, and peered over his shoulder, my hair brushing his biceps.

When he saw me, he did a double take and straightened up. “What—nah, these are just Administrative Hearing Requests,” he said, rifling through the quarter inch pile of folded, coffee stained forms.

“Sounds really impressive,” I said.

He puffed out his chest. “Just doing my job, ma’am.”

I set down my purse. “What are the hearings for?”

The rookie coughed and cleared his throat. “These would be for . . . ah, parking citations.”

Parking citations. While my dad’s kidnapper and killer walked loose. I scowled. “Do you guys have anything else on my dad?”

“Nothing new,” he said. “Last I heard, Paretti’s still looking into a former employer. Setting up a surveillance camera, I think.”

“Who?”

“A fellow by the name of Charles Donovan. Runs a high-tech interior design firm down in Morena. Labs, hospitals, that kind of thing.”

I nodded. My father’s work had been in interior design and construction. Joe had mentioned the guy before. I trailed my finger along the desk, noting the rookie’s keys lay an inch from my hand. Without really thinking, I pulled out my own keys and played with them.

“So . . . remember that diary he had last night?” I said.

“Sure do,” he said.

“Can you email me a copy?”

“Well, I didn’t actually make a digital copy,” he said. “I just used our copy machine to reverse it.”

That was stupid. But of course it wouldn’t be that easy. I laid my keys on the officer’s desk, right next to his. “Did you happen to read it?”

“Glanced at a few pages, didn’t really make any sense to me.”

“What did it say?”

“It’s just over in evidence,” he said. “I could see if they’re done with it, if you want?”

Bingo. I cranked up my doe eyes. “Would you please?”

He was halfway out of his seat when he cursed under his breath. “Forgot. We need an evidence release form. I’d need to get the sergeant to sign off on that.”

“We could go ask him together?” I offered.

“No, no . . . I’ll go ask,” he said, taking a deep breath. “I’ll go ask.” He squeezed by me and collided with a lump of a man in the hallway.

“I’ll save you the time. The answer’s no,” said Joe, thwarting my second attempt to get the diary. “I already told her she couldn’t.”

“Of course not, detective.” The rookie slipped back into his chair, red in the face. “I guess we can’t,” he muttered.

Joe’s angry gaze flicked to me. “Time for you to go, sweetheart,”

“Whatever.” I pretended to grab my own keys, but grabbed the officer’s instead. I tried to slip past Joe, but his meaty fingers closed around my arm.

“I’ll walk you out,” he said. More like forced escort, but I wasn’t complaining. I allowed myself to be led to the door, exhilarated and nervous about what I’d just done. I had stolen a policeman’s keys.

This was getting out of hand.

“Hey, Blaire!”

The other officer. I froze, guilt reddening my face. I couldn’t pull it off. Even if I claimed I accidentally grabbed them, he would know I was lying—

“You forgot your purse.”

I stared dumbly, hardly believing it. After I retrieved the purse, trembling, Joe jerked me back around and hussled me toward the exit.

“Next time you want to talk to an officer,” he growled, “call in ahead and make an appointment. With me.”

On our way out, I couldn’t help but notice the sign over one of the hallways leading away, marked Evidence.

Then Joe shoved me out the door and almost sent me sprawling. “Besides,” he said, “you’re supposed to be in school right now.”

I was about to retort something awful, but my phone vibrated in my pocket.

It was Dr. Johnson calling.

***

A few minutes later I arrived at the hospital, no diary, still prickling from my encounter with Paretti.

“Is there someone else I can talk to?” said Dr. Johnson, seeing I was alone. “Your mother, perhaps?”

“She died when I was little.”

“You poor thing. Do you have a legal guardian?”

I shook my head. “I’m an emancipated minor. I filed a petition with the state.”

“You’re a brave girl.”

“Well, I had a court appointed guardian for a while, but she was verbally abusive and had a drinking problem. By the time we sorted it out in court, I was already sixteen.”

“That’s frustrating,” she said.

“Yeah . . .” I nodded. “So you know why my dad died?”

“I do. I think you’d better come into my office.”

Her computer screen already showed the MRI scans, black and white cross sections of my dad’s ghostly body parts, each one dotted with brightly glowing spots.

“An MRI is kind of like an X-Ray,” she said, “except it shows us tissue, not bones.”

I stared at the monitor, mesmerized.

She tapped one of the slides with her pen. “These white areas indicate severe hemorrhaging in your father’s stomach tissue, and his lungs . . . we’re also seeing some intestinal perforation.” She clicked to another image. “And here we’re seeing brain contusion and intracranial hemorrhaging.”

“Hemorrhaging . . . what is that?”

“Essentially he died from internal bleeding. Whatever happened to him, I’m amazed he survived as long as he did. He was pretty chewed up inside.”

I choked on my next words, but managed to get them out. “What do you think happened to him?”

“This kind of widespread internal damage typically has one of two causes,” she said. “One is blunt trauma. A fall from two or three stories would do it . . . or a car crash.”

“You think he fell?”

“It’s possible. However, with blunt trauma there should be external signs. Bruising, broken limbs, torn skin . . . none of which he had. All the damage was inside.”

“So . . . it wasn’t a fall?”

Dr. Johnson closed the MRIs, clicked out of the program, and faced me. “Blaire, was your father on any medication?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, “but he could have been on something work related.”

“That’s okay if you don’t know. Our blood analyzer is being serviced right now, so I’ve sent his blood over to the Institute. Not sure if it’ll go through, though; they’ve really been dragging out this quarantine exercise. Either way, I think it’s possible we’ll find anticoagulants in his system.”

“Is that why he was acting strange?” I said. “Because of drugs?”

“It’s very possible. I think your father’s death was the result of a combination of factors, medication plus some kind of bodily trauma.” The doctor paused. “There’s something else I wanted to tell you, Blaire. I doubt we could have saved him, but there is a reason our efforts to restart his heart failed yesterday.”

I glanced up, curious.

The doctor continued. “His heart’s on the right side of his body, not the left.”

“Huh?”

“He has what’s called Situs Inversus. It’s a congenital condition in which the major organs are found on the opposite side as normal. For example, his heart is on the right side instead of the left. It’s quite rare, about one in ten-thousand.”

“Is that why he died?”

She shook her head. “It’s just a curiosity. Like I said, all the major organs are reversed, so the relationship between them is unaffected, hence why inverted individuals are often left-handed, as your father was. But everything still works.”

Weird. “Wait—my father wasn’t left-handed.”

“No?” she said. “Forgive me. I just noticed the muscles in his left hand were slightly more developed than his right. Perhaps he did something at work that required an able left hand.”

“Yeah, because I’m left-handed,” I said. “I remember at dinners if we sat next to each other, our arms hit. We joked about it.”

The doctor placed her hand on my back and smiled.

“That left-handed thing . . . Situs—whatever it was—do I have that too?” I said.

“Only if your mother’s a carrier too. Very unlikely.”

“Doctor Johnson,” I began slowly, “why didn’t my dad recognize me? He said he hadn’t seen me since I was four . . . that I disappeared.”

The doctor smiled sadly. “In head trauma cases, it’s fairly common for people to only remember things from many years ago. Often, they’ll fill in the missing pieces with false memories. Just be grateful he still knew you.”

I nodded, a lump forming in my throat. Head trauma explained his behavior perfectly.

Unless, of course . . .

Before it was even fully formed, the question escaped my lips. “What if he had a twin?”

The doctor studied me, her eyes peering into mine for so long I started to fidget. “Blaire,” she said finally, “are you wondering whether this man is your father?”

“I know it’s stupid—”

She held up her hand to stop me. “It’s an honest question,” she said. “If your father did have an identical twin, I’m afraid that would be pretty difficult to sort out. However, it might be reassuring to rule out the alternatives. If you want to, we can run a DNA test.”

“I want to.”

***

“Still sure you want to do this?” said Dr. Johnson, stretching on a pair of latex gloves. She sliced open an envelope and emptied the contents of a DNA testing kit onto the counter. “It’s not always a happy discovery.”

“I need to know the truth, don’t I?”

Dr. Johnson didn’t answer. She peeled back the plastic from a thin, white toothbrush-like utensil. “Open wide.”

“What for?”

“We’re going to take a quick swab from inside your cheek.”

“Don’t you need to draw blood?” I asked, lowering my jaw to permit the tip of the utensil.

“Your DNA is actually inside every cell in your body,” her voice said close to my forehead. “We use the ones inside your mouth because we know they’re yours.” She scraped the inside of my cheek vigorously. “Unless you’ve been kissing a lot,” she added with a wink.

She withdrew the swab and bottled it in a tiny plastic container, and we repeated the whole process two more times.

“All done!” She dropped the three containers into a padded envelope and sealed that as well. “In three or four days, we’ll know whether he was your dad.”

It was too easy.

My dad always told me, if the question was too easy to ask, I wouldn’t like the answer. Only hard to ask questions got good answers.

“What will this show?” I asked.

“It’s a basic genealogy test. Essentially we’re comparing pieces of your genetic code with your father’s.”

“And if they don’t match?”

“Don’t worry. They will.”

“But just supposing,” I said. “What if they don’t?”

Dr. Johnson stripped off her gloves, her back to me, and tiny muscles tightened at the juncture between her neck and her jaw.

“There’s an explanation for everything, Blaire. Remember, a mystery is only a mystery until we figure out the answer . . . and we always figure out the answer.”

***

I left the hospital and trudged through the parking lot, my gaze sinking to the pavement. My father had died of internal bleeding. Hemorrhaging, as Dr. Johnson had called it.

Could they have saved him? If the police had taken him directly to the hospital, would he be alive right now?

The heartache stung, and I gritted my teeth to fend off the ensuing wave of anguish. I fought back tears. In my heart, my father had died eleven months ago.

So why did this hurt so much?

I knew the answer, of course. It was because I needed closure. I needed the truth.

Since last night, I had become convinced he had come back with a message for me . . . a message he had written down.

I needed his diary.

From my experience with bureaucracy, though, I knew that if the diary remained in evidence, I would never see it again. When they finally got to it years from now, it would be filed away in some archive and lost forever.

I had to get it back while I still could.

On my way home I stopped by the hardware store and made copies of every key on the police officer’s key chain. Then I went back to the police station, apologized for picking up the wrong keys, and got my own keys back.

It was that easy.

At two in the morning, dressed in black jeans and a black hoodie, I parked a block from the police station and took a minute to steady my breathing.

***

The fourteen police cars parked on Eastgate Mall in front of the San Diego Police Department hunkered down like sleeping grizzlies, their engines still cooling and clinking from the second shift.

I was sneaking right into their den.

Straining to keep myself from shaking, I climbed the handicap ramp to the front door as casually as I could manage. If someone asked, at least my story wouldn’t have to account for crouching in the shadows like a burglar.

At the lock I fumbled with the keys, now shivering, and I swear the clinking could have woken anyone within a mile.

The first one fit, but didn’t turn the lock. The second didn’t fit. I tried the third, the back of my neck burning.

Footsteps sounded behind me, and I freaked. A spike of adrenaline fried my nerves—and any hope of playing myself off as an officer’s daughter. I scampered behind a trash can, curled into a ball, and held my breath.

The drum of my heartbeat obscured my senses. My limbs tensed, but the two approaching figures weren’t cops.

A drunk couple stumbled past me and continued down the sidewalk.

I didn’t let myself breathe until they were out of sight, and then only barely.

Back at the front door, lightheaded and nauseous, I tried the rest of the keys. Key number four fit but didn’t open the lock. Beyond the glass, emergency light strips lit an empty hallway. No one about. Please stay like that.

Key number five. The last key. I jabbed at the slot, my hands now shaking violently. The key didn’t fit.

It must have been one of the others. Maybe I’d turned the wrong way. I would have to try them all again. Or maybe none of them fit—maybe the rookie didn’t even have the station key. Why would he?

An earsplitting police siren drove needles through my heart. I froze, choked on my fear. Suddenly, it was daytime.

Bright light singed my neck and cast my shadow onto the floor inside the door. An inch from my eyes, loose strands of my hair caught the glare like filament.

Headlights. Right behind me.

The light moved on, though. The patrol car sped down the street, and its siren faded into the distance. For several minutes I stood at the station door, too terrified to move.

I had to try all the keys again.

But the cold and the adrenaline rush had leeched the dexterity from my fingers, and the keys kept getting tangled. Why the freak did this guy need so many keys anyway?

At last the first key slipped into the lock, but like before it didn’t turn. I leaned into it, and the metal dug into my finger. No way . . . with more pressure, the key would snap. I eased off and rotated the key the opposite direction. Still nothing.

On a whim, I tugged the handle anyways. The handle and the lock rotated as a unit and the door clacked open.

Warm, police-smelling air whisked past me. Oh God. I had just broken into a police station. The urge to flee sent me stumbling backwards. My heel banged into the trashcan. The noise startled me, and I scrambled over a hedge and tore down the street, soaked with sweat.

A block away I caught myself.

The truth. My father had written the truth in that diary, addressed directly to me.

Recovering the diary was not a choice.

I steeled my resolve and marched back toward the police station, slipped inside, and beelined for the evidence room.

Dim fluorescent strips swam overhead, catching up with me on the linoleum. The same hallway I ran down yesterday to find my father. The reminder hurt.

I pressed on and found the door marked Evidence. I tried the handle. Locked.

Back to the keys.

I repeated the same process of trial and error that had gotten me into the station. Of course none of the keys worked.

I jerked around, but saw nothing. Just the dark hallway. A petrified shiver shook my body, hiked my breathing.

Then I really did hear footsteps. Coming toward me. I ran.

Only the wrong direction. I crashed into a body at the intersection between two hallways. The man grunted, and his cup of coffee crashed on the floor. I caught sight of his face just as he did mine.

Joe Paretti.

Chapter 3

 

“No. No-no-no,” he said. “Do I have to arrest you, Blaire?”

“The door was open,” I lied, and then all my pride flew out the window and I burst into tears. He grabbed my arm and dragged me into his office.

“I’m writing you up for this right now,” he said. “Getting you sent to juvie for this. Breaking and entering . . . and a goddamn police station . . . Jesus Christ.”

“I had the keys,” I mumbled. “Your partner gave them to me. I was coming to return them.”

Joe slammed the door to his office. “Let me see those.” He wrenched the keychain out of my grip, and his eyes narrowed at the ACE Hardware logo on the duplicated keys. He flung them to the ground.

His rage terrified me.

While Joe rummaged in his filing cabinet for the proper forms to write me up, I stole a glance at his desk—at whatever it was keeping him here so late at night.

My dad’s report.

I peered closer.

Adams spotted on John Hopkins Dr. in bushes below South Employee Parking Lot. Speaking incoherently and delusional . . .  

Under possible suspects, he had written Charles Donovan . . . and my name—Joe slapped an arrest form on top of the report and nailed me with a stink eye.

“But I’m sixteen,” I said.

“Think I give a damn?”

The phone in Joe’s office rang, and he paused, halfway through writing the date. He picked up the phone.

An angry woman’s voice hissed over the speaker.

He replied, “fifteen more minutes, hun, I promise—”

“I’m just going to leave, okay?” I said, backing toward the door.

Joe waved me back, absently at first, then vigorously when I didn’t come. I obeyed, my head hung low.

I heard his wife say, “Is somebody there with you?”

“It’s nobody, hun.” Joe massaged his temple, clearly flustered. “No, you didn’t hear a girl . . . look, she snuck in. I’ll explain later. Just give me fifteen minutes!” He hung up.

Joe wrung his head in his hand and kneaded the sides of his head. “Just leave, Blaire, before you try my patience any more. I’ve had a long night.”

Without waiting for him to change his mind, I bolted. Besides, I already had another idea.

The wife.

***

I cupped the phone to my shoulder on Saturday morning and flipped through my mailbox while it rang. After two rings the woman answered.

“Is this Mrs. Paretti?” I asked.

“I thought I told you to take my name off your calling list,” she said. “You’re from Outbreak Awareness, right?”

“No, I’m calling about your husband.” I scratched absentmindedly at the seal of a letter addressed to me. “I’m Blaire. He’s working on my dad’s case.”

She paused. “How’d you get my number?”

“I looked it up on the internet.”

“Could I have the name of the site you found it on?”

“Look, I was just calling to see if you could ask your husband something.”

“Sorry, I’m not interested. Please take me off your calling list.”

“No, I’m calling about your husband,” I said. “I need you to talk to him because he’s being unfair and he’s not listening to me.” Even to me, my voice sounded whiny, like a spoiled kid’s. Great.

She didn’t respond, so I continued. “My dad died and left me a diary. It’s all I have left from him, and Joe—I mean, Detective Paretti—won’t let me have it. If you could just talk to him for me—”

“If it’s evidence he can’t really give it back to you now, can he?”

“But if you just talked—”

“It’s Blaire, right?” she said. “How old are you?”

Her question deflated my confidence, and my answer sounded pathetic. “Sixteen.” No one cared about a sixteen-year-old girl. They cared about fifteen-year-old girls and seventeen-year-old girls. Sixteen-year-olds were just punks.

“Hold on,” she said, her voice now edged with suspicion, “what do you want with Joe again?”

“Just tell him he’s being unreasonable.”

“Whoever you are, stay away from my husband,” she ordered. “And don’t call me again.”

“Mrs. Paretti, wait—”

The woman hung up.

I lowered the phone, mouth agape. Had she just hung up on me? I redialed her number, but it went to voicemail.

Fuming, I busied myself with the envelope in my hands and slid out a typewritten letter.

Dear Ms. Adams:

After careful consideration of your application, Intelligent Symmetry Design & Interiors is pleased to offer you a summer internship at our Mission Valley branch. Please arrive promptly at 9:00 AM on June 30 for orientation.

Sincerely,

Amy Donovan

Administrative Assistant

The internship I had wanted so badly just two days ago. My biology teacher had invited me to apply because I scored in the top percentile on the PSAT and somehow earned the title of National Merit Semifinalist. I barely remembered the months right after it happened. Just a haze.

But now the letter reminded me of how shallow my life had become without my dad.

I always forgot how jealous my classmates were, how they thought I had everything—grades, guys, first place in cross-country, internships, probably even a scholarship to Berkeley or Harvard.

But none of that could fill the hole in my heart. None of that could bring him back. At the thought, pressure swelled in my sinuses.

I would give it all up in a second to see my dad again. In a second.

***

In the afternoon, I clipped my cell phone to my tights, plugged in my earbuds, and cranked up my indie rock. Then I took off running into a blast of hot air, prepped and hydrated for five miles.

Within two blocks, the April heat stripped me out of my shirt, and I tied it around my waist. My pink sports bra earned a honk of approval.

I lengthened my stride, relaxed my body, and pushed myself to the edge of my natural gait. The exertion constricted my throat, and I forced myself to take longer, deeper breaths.

Then I broke through. My legs sailed ahead of me, caught me and propelled me, rendered me weightless again and again. I was practically sprinting, giddy with endorphins and hardly breathing. I could go all day.

Sweat slicked on my stomach and back, cooling the skin. My focus sharpened.

The diary.

How the hell was I going to get that thing back? With my legs pumping beneath me and the wind coursing through my hair, I mulled over the challenge, my dad’s disappearance, and his mysterious reappearance two nights ago.

And that other name I had read on Joe’s report.

Charles Donovan.

My dad’s former employer, now a suspect.

A ring tone interrupted whatever song was playing. I fumbled with the buttons midstride, and managed to accept the call without slowing.

“Hello?”

“Blaire, it’s Doctor Johnson.”

“Hi . . . what’s up?” Speaking broke my rhythm and I gasped for air.

“Are you okay?” She sounded alarmed.

“I’m running.”

“From what?”

“No. Jogging.”

“You bring your phone when you jog?”

“It doubles as a music player, whatever—” I crossed against a red light to a ruckus of squealing tires and honks.

“I’ll be quick then,” she said. “The blood test confirmed that he is indeed your father.”

A pang of something. I wasn’t sure what. Loss. The loss of my last hope. Disbelief. Uncertainty. Maybe just emptiness.

“Uh-huh,” I answered, my voice devoid of emotion.

“But we found something else too.”

“In his blood?” I ran through another red. More honks. I was really cruising now.

“Yes, an unusually high amount of Lysine, probably suggesting a hyperactive pineal gland,” she said.

“Haven’t gone to med school yet, sorry.”

“Basically we’re seeing evidence of a chromosomal disorder. Not proof, just evidence,” she said, “Which is why I’d like to do a karyotope test—and run the test on you as well. Would that be alright, Blaire?”

We had learned about chromosomes in biology. They were the structures inside cells that contained the DNA, of which humans had forty-six—twenty-three from each parent.

I remembered a few of the chromosomal disorders like Down Syndrome and Klinefelter syndrome; none of them were very good. “Was something wrong with him?”

“I’d just like to do the test Blaire.”

“Okay. I guess—” The ring tone sounded in my ears again. “Can you hold on a second,” I said, “I’m getting another call.”

This one was from Joe Paretti.

“Blaire, don’t ever call my wife again.”

“I can call her if I want. She has a public listing.” I hurdled a hedge and spun onto La Jolla Shores Drive, which would take me past the sea cliffs up to The Scripps Research Institute.

“Where are you, why are you breathing like that?”

“None of your business, Joe. And I’m on the line with someone else right now. So you’re just going to have to wait.”

I didn’t know how to switch back to the first call though, and I ended up hanging up on both of them. Oops.

***

Without really thinking, I ended my run along Torrey Pines Scenic Drive, near the spot where Josh and I had stargazed. Of course, barbed wire fence stopped me a hundred yards short. The loops of razors whistled in the wind.

The quarantine zone.

I peered through the fence at the cluster of buildings beyond the golf course. Over the past few days, The Scripps Research Institute had transformed into a military compound.

Ranks of soldiers, olive green Humvees, two helicopters, and even what looked like a mobile missile launcher gathered around towering structures of concrete and tinted glass—I recognized the Immunology & Microbial Science building and The Skaggs Institute for Molecular Biology.

A dark mass drew my eyes toward the water: the Navy destroyer. Still here.

Suddenly I made the connection. It wasn’t here on port call, it was stationed here as part of the quarantine. Earlier this week, the military had announced that this was an exercise to test how the community would respond to an outbreak of a virus.

Despite the heat and my sweat, I felt a chill down my spine.

I picked back up to a jog and followed the fence up the road to the south security checkpoint at the intersection of Genesee Avenue and John J. Hopkins Drive, where more troops and a handful of Humvees clustered around two guard towers.

According to Paretti’s report, that was where they picked up my dad.

My eyes flicked to the South Employee Parking Lot. I noted the security. The fence was no problem—I had slipped under easily—but the soldiers and the Humvees?

Surely they took breaks. I mean, it couldn’t be harder than breaking into a police station.

No way, Blaire. They had a freaking destroyer offshore—

Shouts from the south checkpoint made me flinch. The guards were shouting at me, telling me to step away from the fence.

I obeyed. By the time I made it home, I had firmly decided—hopped up on endorphins—that I really needed that diary. And I had an idea.

So far Joe had resisted my attempts. But there was no way he could resist me.

***

That night I grabbed my shortest skirt, my highest heels, and spent an hour dolling myself up with lip gloss, eye shadow, and blush. I even ironed my hair into playful curls.

If the only way Joe would hand over that diary was if he thought it came with a blowjob, then so be it. Let him think that.

One glimpse of Barbie Doll in the mirror convinced me; by evening’s end the diary would be mine.  All I had to do was surprise him like this and crank up the charm, and he’d agree to anything.

But it was Saturday, so where would I find him? I dialed his office, which rang twice before diverting me into an automated menu system. I tried his home phone, and he answered with a gruff “Joe here.” I hung up immediately.

I found Joe Paretti’s address online and drove over to his house, a simple one-story in the suburbs with an orange tree for a lawn.

On the walk from the sidewalk to his front door, I had to tug my skirt down four times. I must have grown a few inches taller since I’d last worn it. It was hardly decent. With each step, I could feel a breeze slipping between my upper thighs . . . where it wasn’t supposed to.

On the porch, I arranged my hair so it just covered one of my eyes and rang the doorbell.

His wife answered.

Uh oh.

“Is Joe home?” I said.

She assessed me in from head to toe, and her eyes narrowed to slits. My cheeks burned with shame, and I squirmed in my outfit, struggling to lower my skirt again.

“I’m Blaire,” I whispered, too embarrassed to speak. “He’s working on my dad’s case.”

“You’re that girl who called earlier?”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to bother you—”

“Oh, God.” Her hand shot up to her mouth. “He’s having an affair with you.”

“What? Joe? Ew, no—what are you talking about?” I blushed even hotter.

“You little whore!” She opened the door and chased me off the front porch. “You bitch . . . you slut!”

I ran, lost both my heels, and continued barefoot to my Jeep. Behind me, the wife lost steam quickly.

I dove into my car, hot and embarrassed, and slammed the door. On the drive home tears stung my eyes.

I had crossed a line.

Once secure in my bedroom, I ripped off my clothes, dragged on sweats, and crawled into bed mortified.

And for what? I hadn’t even gotten the diary.

***

On Sunday, smoldering with guilt and feeling utterly incompetent, I watched my father’s coffin lowered into the ground. Only a few people had attended the graveside service. Josh, some of my friends. Their parents. But they were here for me, not for him.

Their sympathy was all that kept me standing.

We were estranged from the rest of our family. Those who actually knew my father had been at the memorial service eleven months ago. In their hearts, he had passed on a long time ago. I didn’t even have numbers to call.

“May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace,” said the priest.

Then it was over.

Josh gave my shoulder a squeeze. I hadn’t even realized his arm was around me. I linked our fingers and squeezed his hand back.

Only when I left did I notice them.

Two figures in the shadow of a eucalyptus tree, watching the ceremony from a distance. I couldn’t make out their faces, though.

Just two shadows.

***

I woke up drenched in sweat.

Orange light poured through the cracks in the blinds, igniting the walls and tinting the air crimson. My bedroom shimmered.

It was light from the street.

I dashed to the blinds and lifted the corner to peek outside—and the blast of heat made my eyes water.

Fire.

A house across the road and two lots up.

Flames exploded from the windows and slithered up the walls and burst into the sky. Above the house, a rising column of red haze bled into the fog.

But it was the scene in front of the house that sent prickles through my heart.

My neighbor was on his knees, begging for mercy.

A boy stood over him.

A boy in a yellow leather jacket, not much older than I was, leveling a gun at the man’s forehead.

At his side a can of kerosene spilled the last of its contents into the grass, and behind him a yellow Ford Mustang GT with a black racing stripe growled on the lawn.

Yellow and black.

Like a hornet.

Finally the distant whine of police sirens cut through the roar, the sound of safety and protection. Of civilization. I let myself breathe again. Thank God—

A flash, the boy’s arm recoiled.

The gunshot echoed up and down the street, and my neighbor keeled over, his lips still pleading for mercy.

I gasped, clutching my mouth to stifle it.

The boy holstered his weapon and peered up at the burning building with a lazy smile.

I couldn’t help it anymore. A shriek escaped my cupped hands.

And despite the deafening roar of the flames, despite the scream of the sirens, despite the double-paned tempered glass windows my father had installed for my protection, the boy heard.

His back muscles flexed, straining against the tight leather. He swung around, and from a hundred feet