I hold on to her as she cries it out. For all that we’re different, Cecily is a lot like me. It’s why we’re friends. She’s tough—she lost both her parents a couple of years ago and got uprooted to San Diego to live with her aunt, and she didn’t go emo or become withdrawn. She joined the cheerleading squad, won the annual Physics Day challenge, and befriended everyone she met.
She’s like me, just nicer and peppier—and better at science too.
When she’s finished, we sit on the bed and I tell her everything that happened before the quakes—the day I died, Ben healing me, my dad’s case and the UIED, the portals, the multiverse, and Barclay. Then I tell her about what led us here.
When I tell her there are different universes, she snorts. “I’ve kind of figured that one out.”
“Sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”
She shrugs and wipes her eyes before changing the subject. “Eli told me all about how you broke him out. I hadn’t realized you were so badass.”
“Lame. I thought you knew me.”
Cecily smiles. It’s small and a little sad, but it’s enough. She’s not actually mad at me. I relax a little. “What about you?” I ask. “Are you doing okay?” I don’t need to add that she’s been through a lot.
“I’m not sleeping well and I don’t like to be alone,” she says with a shrug. “I’ll probably have to be in therapy the rest of my life, but I’m not dead and it could have been worse. It was only a few days. It felt longer, trust me, but this whole thing was only a few days.”
I wait to see if she’ll tell me more. I saw a few of those specials on 60 Minutes about human trafficking and how girls are drugged, beat up, and worse until they’re broken.
She senses what my silence is about. “Maybe I’ll tell you about it when we’re home.”
“I can have Barclay take you home now,” I offer.
Cecily shakes her head. “I can’t leave everyone, not until we know where they’re going too. Some of them are from our world, but some of them aren’t.”
“You don’t have to take them on as a responsibility. Your aunt—”
“Will still be there in a few days,” she says. “I was an Unwilling and so are these people. We’re in this together.”
Despite how much I think she’s wrong, that she should let us send her home, I nod. She deals with things by helping other people. I know that; I’ve seen her at Qualcomm.
“Janelle,” she says, grabbing my hand. “I’m going to be okay. We’re all going to be okay.”
I don’t have the same kind of blind faith, but I hope she’s right.
01:13:06:41
“That can’t be it,” Barclay is saying as Cecily and I enter the room where they’ve set up the computer and hooked it up to a generator. “Let me see that.”
Ben is seated in front of the computer and Barclay is looming over his shoulder. It’s the kind of thing that would be driving me crazy, but apparently Ben has more patience, or he’s pretending he does.
Elijah is slumped in the corner with his back against the wall and his eyes closed. Without opening them he says, “Fucking Christ, what’s wrong now?”
Ben taps a few keys on the keyboard and analyzes the screen. If anyone knows more about computers than they should, it’s him. But neither he nor Barclay respond, and I don’t like that. It implies that a lot has been going wrong since we got back.
“It’s taken a while to break down the encryption on the computer,” Cecily says next to me. “And by a while, I mean like all night. The three of them haven’t slept and at least twice they almost came to blows over something ridiculous like who was going to press ‘enter’ or something.”
I clench my jaw. What a time for me to succumb to a concussion and pass out. I can’t exactly picture Barclay and Ben getting along—although I couldn’t really picture me getting along with Barclay either, and we’ve actually worked pretty well together. But still, Barclay went to Ben’s house, accused him of opening the unstable portals, and pulled out a gun. If I hadn’t gotten there and complicated things, Barclay would have killed him.
I’m not surprised there’s tension, and I doubt throwing Elijah into the mix helps much. Confrontation follows him wherever he goes—he’s just like that.
“What is it?” I say, because I can’t just wonder how bad the