MirrorWorld

“I’m afraid,” he confesses.

“No one will see us,” I tell him. Though he is young, he understands this. He just hasn’t experienced it yet. “You will be safe. They cannot harm you.”

“But I don’t like this place.”

“And you shouldn’t. But we have been asked to understand it. To ensure it is not a threat.”

“Could it be?” he asks.

“They have sought us out in the past,” I tell him. “But they cannot see the world as we do. They are limited and lost to emotion, conflict, and primitive thoughts.”

“Like we were.” My son is intelligent for his age, which is why the matriarch requested his training begin early.

“Yes,” I say. “During the dark years, we … tormented these people. Made them afraid of us. And as you know, some of us still choose this path. But not me. And not you. Understanding is more important than control, and making them afraid of us only draws their attention. Our worlds are connected, but our paths must remain separate.”

My son begins his reply but cuts the thought short with a huff. His head snaps up, eyes wide. He’s sensed something I missed. Danger. Intense and close.

Before I can give the command to run, a distant light blazes on the horizon. It locks us in place, blossoming in all directions, full of raw and terrifying energy, the likes of which I have never seen and have no knowledge about. As the distant buildings are enveloped by the explosive light, I feel warmth on my skin.

No …

I take hold of my son and return us both to the swamp. “Run!”

But it’s too late. The energy rips into our world, boiling the swamp. Anguish fills me, not because of my blistering skin. I have been trained to withstand pain. It’s my son’s agonized wail that stabs my soul. He’s dying, painfully, curled up in the flash-dried muck beside me. Before my vision fades, I catch one last look at my son, his sleek and noble domed forehead, his brilliant green eyes, now flickering. I send him on his way with one last push of affection. Then he’s gone. No longer part of me.

Why? I think. Why is this happening? And then, connected to the matriarch, I send one last request: avenge us.

The memory ends as my life fades. But it wasn’t my life. It was a Dread bull and his son. The location was the Jornada del Muerto desert, better known as the White Sands Proving Ground. The explosion, which I recognize from recordings made of the event, is known as the Trinity explosion. It was the United States’ first test of a nuclear weapon. In 1945. That memory is seventy years old but still feels fresh to the mind of the matriarch. And now it’s fresh in mine.

A new surge of memories begins, but, unlike the last, they’re overlapping, snapping into my mind. I’m not just witnessing the events, I’m living them through the minds of the Dread, who are connected to the matriarchs. Sometimes it’s individual Dreads, sometimes entire colonies. Bombs explode. Nuclear fallout poisons both worlds. Species of Dread I haven’t yet seen, living in the oceans and on island colonies, are decimated by more than 2,011 nuclear tests and scads of accidents. I see Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and the SL-1 meltdown in Idaho. There are also a number of less famous radioactive accidents in Costa Rica, Zaragoza, Morocco, Mexico City, Thailand, and Mayapuri, India. The stories of these events are well known in my frequency, but the human race is naive to the vast and horrible effects these events have on the Dread world. I experience these events the way every Dread around the world does. I feel the network of minds connected through the matriarchs. They are separate and with free will but connected and unified, though some—mostly immature youths—still act outside the network, following in the old ways of haunting humanity.

The explosion of memories, coupled with the overwhelming emotions of hundreds of thousands of Dread cut down by human ingenuity and warfare, tears me apart.

It’s no wonder the Dread would see us as a threat. We’ve been waging war on them since 1945. While test sites might be empty in our world, in the mirror world we’re wiping out entire colonies.

Like I did.

The deaths I’ve caused, even in the past hour, weigh more heavily now. But they still killed my son and still have Maya, which means I would make the same choices. That Dread bull would have done the same for his son. But would the matriarchs do the same?

The matriarchs … I only have a vague sense of what they are, and I think the word is really just a loose translation enabling me to make sense of an alien memory. I suspect the Dread mole whose tendrils now embrace my still-senseless body is one of them.

Three new memories that belong to me begin to surface. They hit me all at once, snapping back into my mind. And they change everything.