02:19:32:16
Barclay convenes a meeting on the seventh and highest floor of the hospital in what looks like an old staff lounge. My doppelgänger is the only one not invited. When Ben comes in, he heads straight for me.
“Janelle,” he whispers, and I’m reminded of the day I died. It’s the way he says my name—I don’t know how he manages to put so much feeling into one word, but it makes me shiver.
I don’t respond. I don’t know what to say, but I glance his way. His eyes are soft, the lines on his face tell me he’s worried, but when he reaches for me, I flinch away.
“Are you okay? Are you hurt?” Ben asks.
“I’m fine,” I say, trying to look at him as little as possible.
We sit at a round table, drinking stale Pepsi Elijah stashed here before IA grabbed him. “We need to know everything,” Barclay says.
Ben looks at me like he wants to say something, but instead turns to Barclay. “Half the things I thought I had figured out an hour ago have just been turned on their head.”
Because he’s anything but subtle, Elijah says, “Who’s the girl?”
Ben kicks one of the legs of the table, and the whole thing jerks.
“It’s as good a place to start as any,” I force myself to say.
Ben pushes a hand through his hair and I see his eyes. They’re bloodshot, like he’s trying to keep from crying. “We’ve been here almost five days,” he says with an audible swallow. “I brought her here because we’d be safe. She was in really bad shape, bruised, beaten up, all that. I’ve been taking care of her.”
“So you don’t f*cking know who she is,” Elijah says, leaning back in his chair.
Ben shakes his head and looks down. “I thought she was Janelle,” he whispers.
I look at the ceiling to keep from tearing up again.
“She is Janelle,” Barclay begins. “But another version of her.”
Ben doesn’t say anything.
“That can’t be a bad thing, right?” Elijah says before looking at me. “Don’t let that go to your head. It’s not that I think you’re that great or anything, but you’re not half bad for a chick.”
“You’re not exactly a party either,” I say, because trading insults with Elijah is something I can handle. He must feel the same because he flashes me a grin.
Barclay shakes his head. “Look, it’s important for all of us to go into this with our eyes wide open. In IA, we call ourselves ‘originals,’ and the other versions of us are ‘doubles.’ There are cases of doubles so similar they were practically identical to their original—and cases where the only similarity was physical appearance. Right now we need to get up to speed, and then we need to talk to her, figure out exactly who she is, how she got into this, whether we can trust her—and if she can help us.”
“I think she’s suffered some head trauma,” Ben says. “Or I thought she had because she . . . she doesn’t remember me. But I guess she shouldn’t.”
I think of Ben’s double, the guy I saw at the yard sale with Cecily. I knew almost immediately he wasn’t mine.
It might be unfair, it might be a demand I have no right to hold against Ben. But I do.
He should have known she wasn’t me.
02:18:29:54
Seeing a break in the conversation, Elijah jumps in. “I told them about everything I could. How we got back and it wasn’t the same, how I went world hopping and you were being followed—”
“Come on, Eli,” Ben says. “Can’t you see now that I wasn’t paranoid? They’re trying to use me as a scapegoat and execute me.”
“They’re trying to execute all of us, a*shole,” Elijah says. “The question is, what are we going to do about it?”
I cut in. “We still need to know what happened to you,” I say, looking at Ben. “They picked you up, brought you into IA custody, threw you in prison, and then what?”
He just stares at me and doesn’t respond, so I add, “We need to know,” for good measure. Because we do.
Ben nods. “I’m sorry, J, I . . .” He swallows. “This guy came to see me—”
“What guy?” Barclay asks, I guess to make sure we’re after the right one.
“His name’s Constantine Meridian,” Ben says. “He’s tall, thin, light hair shaved close to his head, gnarly barbed-wire tattoo. Kind of looks like a skinhead.”
Barclay nods.
“He’s a bad guy,” Ben says, and I’m surprised at how shaken he looks. “He caught one of the guards sleeping when he was watching the security cameras. He got all of us together, woke everyone up who was asleep, called back the guys who were out on an assignment, and told us, ‘Carl’s tired. We need to make sure he gets more rest.’ Then he injected him with something. Killed him on the spot.”
I think of the way Meridian looked at me in the prison, the blood on his shirt, Derek telling me to run, and I feel cold.
Ben tells a story similar to Elijah’s. Meridian was impressed with his abilities and offered him a job. When Ben refused, they beat him up and threatened the people he cared about.
“I held on as long as I could,” he says, and for a moment, I think that’s all he’s going to say. He’s looking down, hair flopping in his face, his Adam’s apple moving as he swallows down the guilt he must feel.
Then suddenly, he pushes up from the table and walks toward a window. “When they brought her in,” he says, his voice cracking, “her face swollen and bloody, that was it. I couldn’t bear to see what else they would do to her.” He lowers his voice, but not too much. We all hear him. “I thought she was you.”
He stops then, and we all let him. I’ve been wrapped up in what I’m going through, so I haven’t exactly bothered to ask him how he’s dealing with all this. He thought he’d done something noble and brave—something for me—and it turned out that he made the wrong choice.
I can’t blame him for that. I’ve killed a man, and I’m going to carry that around with me for the rest of my life. But just because I don’t blame him doesn’t mean things will ever be the same.
Ben turns around, leans against the wall, and folds his arms across his chest. “I worked with them for about three weeks,” he says, his voice raw with regret. “I did whatever they asked, and then when they’d started to relax around me, trust me a little, they brought her to see me again as a reward. That’s when I ran.”
I suppose I should be thankful that he valued me over Derek and his parents—that I was more important to him than taking down Meridian and saving the people he grabbed. But it just makes me feel worse. It weighs on my chest and makes it hard to breathe. I wonder how many people out there are injured or dead because of me.
“What can you tell us about their operation?” Barclay asks. He hesitates a little as he says it, like he’s choosing his words carefully, and I realize, even though we’re all on the same side here, he’s still treating Elijah and Ben like outsiders, like suspects. He might not tell me everything, but at least he doesn’t lie to me or play games.
“While I was working for them, I lived in the world that’s their base of operations . . . it’s hard to describe, sort of like a movie, where everyone there is a bad guy. There’s a processing center for everyone they bring in,” Ben says.
“The slaves?” I ask, because I don’t want to get confused about who we’re talking about, and I don’t want to mince words or p-ssyfoot around something because it makes us uncomfortable. We need to call it what it is. These people who are being trafficked, they’re slaves.
Ben nods. “We called them the Unwilling.”
02:18:24:44
I can feel the hair on the back of my neck standing on end, and a shiver moves through me. “They have Cecily,” I say. I explain everything I know. How my world fell apart—the shortages of food, water, electricity, medicine, everything. I recount the first missing-persons case, the high count of people who vanished from Qualcomm, and the last abduction, when Cecily was taken too.
In the end, I add, “We need to get her back.”
Ben swears. “I . . .”
“We’ll get her back,” Elijah says. “We’ll get them all back, and we’ll take these f*ckers down.” He reaches out, grabs Ben’s shoulder, and gives it a shake. “What do we need to do?”
“We need to know everything about the operation,” Barclay says. “We need to know how it worked. How did you know who to grab and where and all that?”
Ben takes a deep breath and repositions himself on his chair. It’s like I can see him pulling a hardened shell around himself. He’s overcome—I know the feeling—but he’s with us. He isn’t about to let these guys get away with this. “It was different depending on the assignment. I guess Meridian had people who were doing scout work, I’m not sure. In the beginning, I had to work with a partner. We’d get a location and a type of person they wanted. It could be vague, like gender and age range, or sometimes it would be more specific, like hair or eye color or something.”
Like shopping. If my stomach wasn’t so empty, I’d be fighting to keep from throwing up.
“The last couple of jobs I did were different,” Ben continues. “I was on my own, and I had a specific person they wanted me to grab: name, age, height, weight, appearance, sometimes even a picture or files, like someone had been keeping tabs on them.”
“So they sometimes were targeting specific people?” Barclay asks, and I know from his tone he wasn’t expecting that.
Ben nods. “When I brought them in, they didn’t stay at the processing center. Someone else portaled them out that night. Usually one of Meridian’s main guys.”
I take a deep breath and blow it out slowly. I’m not sure why these targeted people are different, but they are and I know that’s important. It’s another piece of the puzzle. Whenever I think I’ve gotten a handle on this situation and what we’re up against, I’m surprised by the horror of it. How can this be real?
Barclay is still calm. “So you lived at the processing center in this world. Could you take us there if you needed to?”
Ben nods.
“And you’d get a job, portal out, grab whoever the job was, and portal them back to the processing center. Then what?”
Ben shifts on his feet and blows out a steady breath. I wonder if he lay awake at night, unable to sleep because of the guilt, how he justified to himself that saving me was worth so many other lives, and if he’s started to think about what he did—for me—and how it wasn’t actually for me at all.
His eyes find mine, and I know what I’m seeing in them. Because what Ben is feeling, I am too. I don’t know how things got so messed up, how we went from belonging to two different worlds—something that already seemed impossible—to wherever we are now, with my double in another room, human traffickers and IA agents looking for us, and countless people whose lives we’re both responsible for tearing apart.
“Come on, we need to focus,” Barclay says.
Ben nods. “There was a guy in charge of the processing center, and I’d report to him.”
“What’s his name?”
“Basil something. A lot of the guys there called him Razor or Raze.”
“You’re f*cking kidding me,” Barclay says with a snort. He pushes back into his chair and runs his hands through his hair. The gesture looks so much like something Ben would do.
Trying to concentrate, I lean forward. “What? What does that mean?”
“Basil ‘Razor’ Lehrman is a smuggler and a rapist. He got his nickname when he was fifteen and killed his parents by cutting them up with a razor blade. But he’s . . .” Barclay’s eyes widen and he lets out a bitter laugh. “They’ve set up their processing center right under IA’s nose on the Black Hole.”
“The Black Hole?” Please let this not be what I think it means. I am not up for space travel.
“It’s a world that was demolished thousands of years ago,” Barclay says. “Someone in IA found it when we were first making a map of the multiverse, but it’s got no sustainable plant or animal life anywhere. We even tried to set up a colony, but plants shriveled and died after a few days, and people would get sick. It’s like something happened to the atmosphere.”
“What does IA use it for?” Elijah asks.
“They built an underground prison there like fifteen years ago and stationed some IA guards there—you know, the guys who f*cked up beyond repair. It’s where they send the worst of the worst, the criminals who are so bad, they want them on a different world.”
“Guys like Basil Razorblade?” I ask.
Barclay nods. “Guys who have a lot of ties to other bad guys, guys who IA is never going to let see the light of day outside a prison again. They exile them to the Black Hole and put them underground.”
It’s unfathomable to me that the IA would execute me in three days, but someone like Basil gets to live out his life in prison.
“Why not just execute them?” Elijah apparently has the same thought.
“A lot of these guys have big secrets, and if they die, whatever it is they know is going to die with them,” Barclay says. “If those secrets are information that could be valuable to IA or the government, then why not put them in a hole in the ground for ten years and then see if they’re willing to give it up?”
“But if it’s an IA prison, that can’t be where the base of operations is,” Ben says.
But I see where Barclay is going with this. If you were organized and had the technology to set up anywhere—get in and out of any world—which Meridian obviously does, it would be the perfect place to set up operations. As long as Meridian and his guys could come and go undetected, there’s virtually no risk. It’s essentially an unmonitored world—no unwanted IA agents are going to just drop in, and if you kill or pay off the guards, everyone else who’s there would be cheap labor. After all, Meridian can smuggle in things they want, make their lives better in almost every possible way, and maybe even offer them a way out after they’ve done enough for him. Talk about incentives.
Which means the prison has probably been converted to the processing center, and the inmates are probably now in charge of the slaves.
I look at Barclay. “This is bad. How many guys are in this world?”
He sighs. “I don’t know. The universe has been stripped from the records. It doesn’t even have a name. We just call it the Black Hole because that’s what it is, and you’ve got to call it something when you’re talking about it. There could be a dozen guys or there could be five hundred. I have no idea.”
“It’s more than a dozen,” Ben says. “As a guess, I’d say there are about forty guys who are working for Raze, and then twenty more who take turns smuggling the Unwilling in and out. At least, I think. There could be a few more, but I met twenty of them. They’ve only got eight of the devices that open portals. I got the impression they used to have a few more, but they’ve stopped working or something.”
So they’re working in shifts. “How many jobs did you do a day?”
He doesn’t look at me when he answers. “Anywhere between eight and twelve.”
That number makes me go cold, all the way down to my fingertips.
If he was there three weeks, it means he grabbed somewhere between 168 and 252 people. And that’s just Ben. If there are twenty guys bringing back that many people . . .
“Holy shit,” Barclay whispers, and I know he’s just done the math in his head too.
“What?” Elijah says, looking from Barclay to me.
I press my palm against my chest. Ben did this because of me and that makes those people he grabbed my responsibility. It hurts to say it out loud, but I do anyway. “That’s like an average of fourteen hundred people a week.”
02:17:01:14
“It’s a huge operation,” Ben says. “And that’s just the processing center I was working with. They’ve either got others set up or they’re working on it.” He looks at Barclay. “This thing is only going to get bigger. Meridian’s got someone trying to replicate the formula for the hydrochloradneum that Eli and I drank. If he can give that to all his guys, they can stay under the radar better and work around the clock. He can even recruit more guys to help. They’ll be more efficient.”
The laws of supply and demand apparently don’t discriminate.
Barclay leans forward. “Okay, let’s go back to the processing center. After you brought in the slaves, then what?”
“Raze would have someone take the Unwilling and place them in the cell that designated where they were going.”
Thinking of Cecily, I ask, “How long did they stay there?”
“I’m not sure,” Ben says. “I didn’t have much to do with the transfers out. But I think it depended on a couple things, like how cooperative they were and what kind of orders there were.”
“Orders?” Like a purchase order—I can’t understand how human trafficking can be so emotionally detached.
Ben nods. “It’s organized. They’ve got a couple computers where they keep all the records. It’s coded, I think, but they’ve got files on all of the Unwilling, where they came from, where they’re going, whether it was a specific order or not. They’ve even got files on big customers who are doing bulk orders.”
“This shit is so f*cked up,” Elijah says, and I’m glad we’re on the same page.
“We need those files,” Barclay says. “That’s our proof.”
I agree with him completely. Something like that would be black and white—no one would be able to jump in and say they didn’t believe us. It’s enough to make me wonder why bad guys would keep a record of the illegal things they do when it’s so obviously the thing that could sink them.
But these guys have an organization that seems like it would rival a major corporation, and if Barclay’s right, they’ve got someone in IA in their pocket, and they’ve been operating for years now. They’re pretty sure they’re not going to get caught.
“So we break in and grab that shit,” Elijah says. “Let’s do it now.”
Barclay squeezes the bridge of his nose, and I know why. It’s not going to be that easy—and we still have a big problem. Ben has just given us a lot, but nothing that exposes who in IA is involved, and Barclay needs actual concrete proof of the operation that he can take to IA, and he needs to know who he can take it to so that it won’t get swept under the rug. He isn’t sure how high the conspiracy goes.
“Just tell me what to do. How can we fix this,” Ben says, and I can’t tell if he’s talking to me or Barclay.
I don’t know what to say or if this can be fixed, so I let Barclay do the talking.
“Going back to Janelle’s double,” Barclay says. “Did you ever actually see them hit her?”
“I didn’t have to. She was beat to shit.”
“I just think it’s important to note, you didn’t actually see anyone hurt her,” Barclay says, his voice quiet but stern.
“Her injuries aren’t fake, if that’s what you’re saying,” Ben says.
He might not know her, but he’s certainly willing to defend her. I can’t bear to hear any more of it, so I add, “That’s not what he’s trying to say.”
Elijah suddenly leans into the table. “Are you saying you think someone else could have beat her up?”
Barclay shrugs. “Maybe someone else beat the crap out of her, and someone in IA offered her some kind of deal. A ‘help us, and we’ll take care of your problem’ kind of deal.”
Elijah stands up abruptly, knocking his chair to the ground. “If she’s working for them, she could lead them right to us.”
“I know,” Barclay says. “Which is why we need to talk to her.”
02:16:49:43
On my way out, Ben moves in front of me and blocks my path to the door.
When I look at his face, I see him singing to her—her hand touching his arm. It’s enough to make my throat constrict, to make my eyes watery. I’m not ready to talk, so I try to move around him.
“Please,” he whispers. “I just need to know you’re okay.”
Barclay and Elijah disappear down the hallway.
I’m tempted to say, “We don’t have time for this,” or to make some other excuse. To ask him how any of us could possibly be okay in this situation. We’re on the run from IA, trying to take down human traffickers. I escaped from prison and killed a man. Cecily has been abducted into slavery. And I just saw the guy I love with another version of myself. None of that is in any way okay.
I’m some kind of glutton for punishment, so I look at Ben and tell the truth.
“No, I’m not okay.”
His lips press together, a grimace passing over his face, and he reaches for me. I can’t handle that, though, and when he sees me flinch he lets his hand fall to his side.
“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice a little shaky.
“Is that it?” I ask because sorry doesn’t fix this.
Ben shakes his head. “I just . . . I don’t know . . . it never occurred to me that she wouldn’t be you, and . . .”
He shifts his weight on his feet, and I feel like I should say something—something to bridge the gap between us, or at least something to help him do that.
But I can’t. I just can’t—it’s like I’m waiting for this tidal wave of emotions to crash down over me and carry me away from this conversation.
“Do you remember the time sophomore year when you had that old truck?” he says. It was my first car, a 1968 Ford F-250. “It was in October, I think, and I didn’t have work. I was headed up to Black Mountain Park, and I saw your truck, empty, with steam pouring out of your engine.”
The thing was a manual transmission and it sucked going up hills, even the ones that were lame. It was always stalling out or locking up. I was constantly leaving the truck on the side of the road. That afternoon was one of the reasons I convinced my dad to get rid of it.
“I went over to check it out and see what was wrong,” he continues. “I don’t know what happened, and you had obviously stormed off, so I checked it out. The radiator hose had a leak, so I fused it back together. I even waited a little for you to come back. I told myself I was actually going to talk to you, start a conversation, but then Elijah texted and asked what was taking me so long to get to his house, and I lost my nerve.”
I remember that day. I thought the engine was going to explode, the way the steam was pouring out from under the hood. But when I made my dad take me back that night to check it out, he ruled that it just needed more coolant.
“You fixed my truck?” I ask. It’s weird to think I was so present, for lack of a better word, in his life, when he didn’t exist in mine. “Why?”
“I wanted to help you,” Ben says. “You pulled me out of the ocean and you saved my life. I owed you, and then I realized you were smart and tough and different from everyone else, so I liked you.”
I look into his eyes. They’re dark and sad.
“The decisions I’ve made, they were always about getting home or helping you,” he whispers. Then he adds, “I thought they had you.”
He doesn’t need to add anything else. I get it. I would have flipped out and done something crazy if I thought he was in danger. I did—I followed a guy I barely knew through a portal and into another world.
But that’s the logic of it, and that doesn’t help undo the fact that I was alone and he was comforting someone else.
I think about saying just that, but I don’t get the chance. Ben straightens up and takes a deep breath. “I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I just needed you to know.” Then he steps aside so I can get through the door.
Something about how resigned he is almost breaks me. I feel it in the hollow place in my chest where my heart should be. I want to tell him that of course I’ll forgive him or that we fell in love in the middle of a situation that was worse than this.
But I don’t want to lie.
02:16:38:51
My doppelgänger is awake when I enter her room.
It was Barclay’s idea that I interrogate her, and no one can really argue with him. He’s the one with the investigative knowledge and experience to call the shots—not that I’d admit it.
Elijah is talking to Ben somewhere else in the building, and Barclay is outside the door in case I need him.
It’s my job to find out who she is and what she knows about all of this. Since I know myself better than anyone else, supposedly, I should be able to assess her best. I need to determine who exactly she is—how alike, how different.
At least, that’s the plan.
Right now, all I can do is stare at her.
Her hair is a shade lighter than mine, but the highlights are growing out and the roots are the same dark brown. Her face is the same shape, with an identical nose and mouth, and I’m looking into the same eyes, which is something I don’t think I’ll ever get used to. Her eyebrows are different—like someone paid more attention to shaping them than I ever did to mine.
The bruises on her face, around her left eye and her jawline, are faded and yellowed, definitely in their last stage of healing. I have no doubt they were nasty when she got them, and I don’t envy her. I’ve been lucky. I’ve been in a few fights but none left me with a beating like that.
Pulling a chair up to her bed, I sit down and give her the time she needs to get used to what I am. I want to let her speak first. What she says will tell me a lot.
Her mouth slightly ajar, she takes in my features. I wonder what she sees. With the burns and bruises around my neck, I’m not exactly at my best.
When she’s done examining me, she looks down at her fingers and picks at the chipped red polish on her nails.
I want to ask her so many things, and not just what she knows about Ben and the case, but about her family. Is her dad still alive, does she have an Alex and a Cecily who are safe and well, did her mother stay sane? But I remain silent and wait for her. If she’s anything like me, she’s dying to find out who I am too.
After about half a minute, her bottom lip starts to quiver, and I’m left thinking that they must have broken her back in that prison.
Turning her watery eyes to me, she says, “So I guess you’re the one he meant to save?”
I don’t respond. Not because I’m still playing the silent routine—her first words just told me a lot—but because I remember Ben sitting on her bed when I first saw him, and my throat feels too tight to speak.
She sniffs and looks up at the ceiling to keep from crying, and the familiarity of it catches my breath. I do that. It’s a gesture I’ve become entirely too familiar with over the last five months. “I knew it was too good to be true.”
“What was?” I ask, using my best quiet, nonthreatening voice, which probably isn’t all that good. I’ve never done meek well, and I’ve had a pretty rough past few days.
“Ben.” She looks to the door and the waterworks start. Her face crumples and the tears fall down her face. Her body rocks with the sobs. “He kept telling me that I was safe now, that I’d remember when I got better, that everything would be okay.”
I want to reach out and offer her some kind of comfort—and maybe if I was friendly, I’d get more information out of her. Besides, if she’s another version of me, I should identify with her, empathize or something. But I just can’t make myself do it.
Touching her would somehow make her more real.
“I wanted to remember,” she says, wiping her eyes, though it doesn’t do any good. She’s crying too hard to stop. “He saved me, and he’s so perfect. I love the sound of his voice and how gentle he is . . .”
The crying gets worse, to the point where she can’t talk. So I sit there silently next to her, my insides tight and burning, but I refuse to let go. We don’t have time for me to sit and cry and feel bad. We don’t even have time for me to figure out what’s going on between Ben and me.
We’ve got bigger issues, and a little less than three days to solve them.
“How could I have forgotten someone who loved me like that?”
Someone who loved me like that.
I know Ben did all of this for me. He didn’t come back to me because he was being followed and he didn’t want to bring danger to me—and later, he thought he was saving me. That should count for something.
But I don’t know what.
Because here she is, this girl who isn’t actually me, with a stylish haircut and a chicken pox scar on her forehead, and now she’s crying over being dealt a bad hand.
I’ve cried more than I care to admit, but I get over it and come up with a plan to right whatever new catastrophe has just blown into my life. Then I do it.
Shouldn’t he have seen differences in her—as someone who loves me, shouldn’t he have known she wasn’t me?
“We’re not okay either, are we?”
I shake my head. “No, we’re not.” I’m not really one to mince words.
She nods, like she knew it deep down, but it only makes her cry harder.
She knows I’m her double. Based on her reaction to me, it’s doubtful she ever saw her double before, but she knows that’s what I am. Which means she’s from a universe that has widespread knowledge of the multiverse.
And she’s either the best actress I’ve ever seen, or she’s in way over her head and scared shitless, which would make her a terrible plant. So I’m going to give it to her straight. “Janelle,” I say, rolling the word around my tongue and trying to ignore how awkward it feels. “I need to know how you ended up in that prison. It’s important.”
She nods, but it takes her a while to actually calm down enough to talk to me.
But when she does, she tells me everything.
I walk out of that hospital room knowing two things for sure.
She’s not an IA plant.
And once you get past how much we look alike, she’s nothing like me.