The shadows under his eyes deepened, but he rubbed a hand across his face and tried again. “What about bringing the medicine here?”
Breaking news gently is a misnomer. News doesn’t break. People do, no matter how you try to cushion the blow.
I tried anyway, more careful with my words than ever before. “Bringing objects over from Echoes is forbidden. It’s too dangerous.”
He scoffed. “It’s medicine. How dangerous could it be?”
I thought about the drawing his cemetery Echo had given me, how blithely I’d tucked it into my backpack. Even now, hidden in a dresser drawer, the faintest trace of dissonance drifted from it. But the sketch was a reminder, not a catalyst.
“It’s not the size of the object; it’s the change it creates, and there’s no greater change than someone’s existence. An alteration that big is against the rules.”
He dropped my hands, shocked and furious. “You won’t save my mom because you don’t want to get in trouble?”
My anger rose to meet his. “I can’t. If I gave her medicine from an Echo, the difference in frequencies might end up hurting her.” I thought about the anomaly, the plague of inversions, the way Simon seemed to be caught in it. “It could rip her apart. And the damage could spread. To you, to anything or anyone she comes in contact with. You could fade right out of existence, and I’m not doing that to you again.”
He went very still. “Again?”
I ran my fingers over the cool ivory keys and said nothing.
“Del?”
For a place that wasn’t real, Park World managed to ruin every part of my life. “I’m not grounded. I’m suspended from the Walkers. Addie and I went out a few weeks ago, to an Echo that was really unstable. You were there with Iggy. I messed around with the threads, and . . . they broke. I cleaved the entire branch.”
“Cleaved?
“Like pruning, only the branch . . . disintegrates.” I sank onto the bench next to him.
“I disintegrated?” His laugh sounded nervous, the kind that preceded a complete freakout.
“Your Echo did. You’re an Original. You belong to the Key World, so it didn’t affect you. But if we start bringing stuff over from other branches, and it damages the fabric of this one, especially around your mom, you could unravel too. Both of you.”
I touched my forehead to his shoulder. The muscles beneath his T-shirt were clenched and unyielding. “I’m so sorry. I wish . . .”
“Don’t,” he said. I flinched at the harshness in his voice. “What good is it, then?”
A chill crept over me. He’d thought Walking was amazing, in the equipment room. He’d thought I was amazing.
I can’t figure you out, and I want to. Now he had, and I wasn’t a puzzle, or the girl he’d kissed in the rain and in dreams. I was a means to an end.
But hadn’t I done the same? I’d used Walking to get what I wanted but couldn’t have.
“What’s the point if you can’t save people? Make the world better?”
“Walkers believe that the integrity of the Key World matters more than anything,” I said. “It’s the only world strong enough to sustain the weight of all the choices that spring from it. It’s like the trunk of a really big, really ancient tree, and all the other worlds are branches.”
“The world is a tree. Great. Very green.”
“If the branches are damaged, and it spreads, the tree gets weaker. If it happens too many times, the tree won’t survive. So we try to contain the damage, as much as we can, but sometimes that means letting bad things happen.”
“That’s crap. She’s my mom.” He took my hands again, and I wanted to weep at the desperation in his words. “You said it might hurt her. That means it might not. Anything is better than her odds right now. Please, Del.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. You break rules all the time. You broke one today, telling me about the Walkers. Why not now, when it might actually do good?”
I felt myself weakening, the wave of his sorrow battering my resolve. My gaze fell on our composition, the notes he’d borrowed from his Echo, the song we’d made together a reminder of all I’d done wrong. I shook my head, finally understanding what my parents had been trying to teach me. “I’m so sorry, Simon. Just because something’s possible doesn’t mean we should do it.”
Turns out, telling your almost-boyfriend you won’t save his mother’s life puts a damper on the relationship. He left a few minutes later, distant and wounded and avoiding my eyes.
I didn’t blame him, exactly. But I doubted him. I doubted myself, for confiding in him, for believing in us.
“Delancey!” called Monty from the kitchen, moments after Simon left, pulling the door shut with a solid thunk.
“Please don’t tell me you’re hungry again,” I said.
Monty sat at the island playing a phantom tune, his fingers gnarled but certain on an imaginary keyboard. “You told him about us.”
Too wrung out to bother with denial, I said, “He saw me Walk. I didn’t have a choice.”
His eyebrows lifted, two furry white caterpillars arching in unison. “He left in an awful hurry. You two have a falling out?”
“His mom is sick. He wanted me to bring back a cure from the Echoes.”
“From the look on your face, I’d guess you told him no.”
I picked up one of the cookies, but my stomach rebelled. “What was I supposed to tell him? We don’t know what could happen, especially with the anomaly causing so many problems. He doesn’t understand what’s at stake.”
“Does anyone? You toss around the word ‘infinity’ like you know what it means, but you’ve not the faintest idea. None of us do. Whatever you imagine, whatever you think you know, infinity stretches farther. It’s a bit like people. They’re capable of so much more than they realize.”
I broke the cookie in half, and in half again, until crumbs showered the countertop. “He’s never going to speak to me again.”
“Bah. Do you trust him?”
Underneath the hurt and the doubt, the answer was as clear as the Key World. “I do. There’s something about him . . . I don’t know what it is, but he matters.”
“I don’t doubt it. And if there was a way to save his mother without risking the Key World, would you?”
“Of course.”
“Tell him so. And then find a way to do it.” He twinkled at me. “Infinity, Del. Anything is possible.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
DESPITE MONTY’S PEP talk, I wasn’t ready to tell Simon anything. I was a collection of hurt feelings and unanswered questions. Better to go to him when I had something worthwhile to offer. Something more than myself.
Over dinner, everyone was subdued, lost in their own thoughts. “Things didn’t go well with the Consort today?” Addie finally asked.
“We’re not making the progress we’d like,” my mom said.
“I did some research today,” Addie said. “I have a theory about the anomaly.”
My mom set her fork down. “I thought we made it clear that you were to stay away from the situation.”
“You did. But Councilman Lattimer thinks I could be helpful.”
Monty made a face like a petulant child.
“Delightful,” Mom said. “Did a member of the Consort give you express permission to involve yourself with a classified situation?”
“Not exactly,” Addie said. “But I thought . . .”
My dad said, more kindly, “It’s nice that you want to help, honey. But this isn’t a school project. We need you to focus on your apprenticeship and keeping your sister out of trouble. Leave this to the adults.”