Nimble fingers, open mind. I caught the frequency on the second try, drawing it closer, out of the display case. With light, careful movements I enlarged the pivot enough to squeeze through.
One last check around the deserted lobby, and I stepped into the rift, holding my breath at the tight fit.
When I emerged on the other side of the pivot, the trophies were smaller and the room was dotted with people who took no notice of me. One look at the team picture explained the difference. Simon had never moved up to the varsity squad, and the team had never made it to State.
If the inversion took root in the Key World, would my Simon lose his place as captain? Would people treat him the same way? Would he forget me again? I wasn’t sure how he’d be affected, but it wouldn’t be good.
I touched the trophy, trying to find the strings that contained the inversion. Over and over, my fingers slipped. My hands ached from searching so meticulously through the threads, testing each one without altering it, and my head pounded. No wonder my dad had contracted frequency poisoning.
My shaking fingers snagged on a thread, and I froze. If even one line snapped, it could cause another cleaving. I had to empty my mind of everything—Simon, my dad’s illness, the anomaly threatening the Key World. The only thing I could think about was finding the bad strings.
Nimble fingers, open mind.
And there they were. Once I found the first, the rest were easy to locate. I coaxed them back into tune, painfully aware that the filaments beneath my fingers were connected to this Echo’s Simon. I wondered how my actions would alter him, if it would cause him to choose differently, or nullify the decisions he’d already made. It was too much power for one person to have over another, Echo or Original.
The frequency shifted, a grinding, grating, reluctant drop, and I checked my watch. Not bad for fifteen minutes’ work.
The empty lobby was both a surprise and a relief. Both the net and trophy were back in place, resonating at the Key World frequency, exactly as they should be. I slid the glass door shut and reached in my bag for the pick that would relock it.
“If you wanted to see it up close,” Simon said, stepping out from behind the vending machine, “all you had to do was ask.”
CHAPTER FORTY
THERE ARE THREE reasons Walkers are almost never caught:
They’re good.
They’re careful.
People don’t pay attention.
As long as you had two out of three, you could usually escape detection. I was good, but not careful. And Simon was definitely paying attention.
Basically, I was screwed.
“Don’t we have a date in the equipment room?” I said, scrambling for a distraction, hoping he hadn’t seen the truth.
One look at his face dashed those hopes. “Nobody who cuts class as often as you worries about library fines. Did you really think I was going to buy that story?”
I lifted a shoulder. “Saying yes doesn’t make either of us look good.”
“None of this makes you look good, Del. Start talking.”
“It’s complicated.” The idea of telling him made my stomach roil.
“So talk slow. Use small words. But start talking, because what I saw was impossible.”
“Nothing’s impossible,” I murmured, but he folded his arms and stared until I caved. “Can we do this somewhere else?”
“Equipment room,” he said grimly. “The truth this time. All of it.”
You don’t think about anyone else, Eliot had said. You don’t think about the consequences. He was right. It had been the Walking that mattered most, not the worlds I found. But now I’d found Simon. Irresistible, inexplicable, problematic Simon.
Walkers valued the Key World above all else, but secrecy ran a close second. We’d had it bred into us, generation after generation passing down the gene for Walking and the warning to keep it hidden. Could I really betray that trust for a boy? I ran through a million stories as we headed to the equipment room. Surely one of them would be more believable than telling him the truth. Safer, too. If the Consort discovered I’d told, they would come after us both.
Most lies aren’t meant to ruin; they’re meant to protect what we hold most dear, whether it’s a person or an idea or a way of life. But even the noblest lie eats away at the truth, until you’re left with the facade and what you were protecting crumbles to dust.
I could lie, and save Simon, and myself, and the Walkers’ secret.
And in doing so, I would lose him.
When we reached the equipment room, just inside the field house doors, he gestured to the dead bolt. “Did you want to take this one, or should I?”
“Be my guest.” My hands were shaking too hard to turn a door handle, let alone pick a lock.
The equipment room was actually a big closet—high ceilinged and windowless, smelling of rubber and dust. There were carts of basketballs and volleyballs, towers of plastic cones, and hockey sticks corralled in a trash can, ends sticking up like the bristles of a brush. A single fluorescent light fixture buzzed overhead, too dim to reach the corners.
He closed the door and leaned against it, the implication clear: We weren’t leaving until he got answers.
“Nice place,” I said, boosting myself onto a waist-high stack of gymnastic mats. “You bring a lot of girls here?”
Once again he looked at me with too much perception. “Wouldn’t be much of an escape if I did.”
“Makes sense.”
“More than I can say for you,” he said.
“Tell me what you saw.”
His expression hardened. “So you can make up a story to match?”
“Simon, please. I’ll tell you the truth. I’ll answer your questions. But it’ll be easier if I know what you saw.”
“I am not interested in making this easy for you.” He rubbed the back of his neck wearily. “You were lying about the library book. I thought it was because you were nervous about coming in here, so I started to follow you, to tell you we could go somewhere more public. When you turned around, I hid behind the vending machines and waited to see what you were up to. You’re pretty handy with a lock pick,” he added. “Are you some sort of teen superspy?”
“Really not,” I assured him. “What next?”
“You know how in the desert, the heat makes the air shimmer? You reached into the case, and the whole thing kind of . . . rippled, and you walked toward it. But instead of running into the wall, you disappeared, a little at a time. Like you were a mirage.”
He must have thought he was losing his mind. He was astonishingly calm for a person who had to be questioning his sanity, though. “What did you do?”
“I poked around, but everything looked normal. The only reason I didn’t think I’d dreamed it was because the trophy case was open.”
“What kinds of trophies were inside?”
“The ones I was telling you about. When we won State.”
“You’re sure? Did you actually see them? Or are you remembering?”
“I’m positive. I straightened the net on top.” The inversion hadn’t caused any permanent damage. At least one part of my day had gone right. He continued. “When the air started to move again, I hid. Thirty seconds later, you were back.”
“You didn’t tell anyone else?”
“Who would believe it?”
He had a point. The question was, would Simon believe me? I was surprised by how much I wanted him to. I should have felt only fear, but somehow it was tempered by a sense of relief that I could finally come clean.
“Everything I tell you has to stay secret,” I said. “You cannot even begin to imagine the trouble we’ll be in if they find out I told you.”