3:59

EIGHT

3:59 P.M.

JOSIE WOULD HAVE GONE STRAIGHT TO BED THE second she got home, if it weren’t for the explosion.

She was dragging her tired, worn body down the hallway when the foundation of the house rocked as if an earthquake had hit. Josie had to brace herself against the wall to remain upright. At the end of the hall, the basement door flew open, and a bright light flashed through the house, so intense it momentarily blinded her.

It took Josie a few seconds to process what had happened. The flash. The feeling that the house had jumped off of its foundation.

Josie swallowed, her throat suddenly parched, as a creepy-crawly feeling spread across her skin. This had all happened before. In her car, by the side of the train tracks just twenty-four hours ago. Could it be a coincidence? Or something even stranger?

You’re being ridiculous. Josie shook her shoulders, tossing off the inexplicable fear that had overcome her. She didn’t believe in coincidence, or déjà vu, or any of that crap. This was a pattern, and the one thing she’d had instilled in her since childhood by her two scientist parents is that patterns are not random. They always exist for a reason.

Josie set her jaw and marched down the hall.

Time to find the reason.

The basement lab was in a state of chaos. Books and equipment were scattered across the floor, dumped from a metal shelving unit that had tilted over onto the large stainless steel table in the middle of the room. The floor was strewn with broken glass, which crunched under the soles of Josie’s flip-flops, but she hardly noticed. Her eyes were fixed on a piece of equipment in the corner. Mounted on an elaborately rigged series of sawhorses and tables that curved around one corner of the basement, down the full length of the house, and back around the next corner, was a laser.

Not just any laser. Josie recognized the double undulators, compact accelerator, and experimental bending magnets right away. It was a prototype of a compact X-ray free-electron laser—an X-FEL—the multimillion-dollar piece of equipment Penelope had suggested they “borrow” from Josie’s mom for their science-fair entry. And it was sitting in Josie’s basement.

Wouldn’t someone at Fort Meade notice that an X-FEL the size of a minivan and worth more than the crown jewels had suddenly gone missing from a heavily secured government facility? How the hell had it gotten into Josie’s house?

Josie eased her way around an overturned table for a closer look at the laser. She’d never seen this version of an X-FEL before but she’d heard her parents discussing it excitedly over dinner for years. It had been one of the priority projects up at Fort Meade: millions in funding, a team of A-list scientists and engineers, top secret specs no one had ever seen.

Josie bent down and examined one of the undulators. It was one of the most high-tech, cutting-edge pieces of equipment in the world and yet . . .

Something wasn’t right. This rig wasn’t shiny and new and gleaming with custom-made components. It was old, gritty, and looked as if it had been pieced together with odd parts and discarded materials from earlier prototypes. Josie peered at the accelerator tube, her nose so close her breath made foggy little clouds against its metal surface. She could clearly see the seaming where different pieces of the cylinder had been fused together. An X-FEL of that caliber should have had a custom-designed accelerator of all one piece, and this one looked almost homemade.

Josie snapped upright. Homemade? Had her mom built a duplicate version of a top secret laser in their basement?

“What the hell is going on?”

The words might have come from Josie’s mouth, but they didn’t. She spun around, stumbling over a heavy steel box, and saw her mother standing at the top of the stairs.

“Oh my God,” her mom gasped, taking in the full extent of the damage.

“Yeah, I’m fine, thanks,” Josie said under her breath.

Her mom inched down the stairs, as if testing her weight against each step. Her eyes were wide with shock as she scanned the basement from left to right. “What happened?” she said at last, her voice shaky. “Tell me what happened.”

“There was an explosion.”

Her mom whirled on her. “Did you turn it on?” she said breathlessly. “Did you turn on the laser and cause an explosion? Where is the deuterium?”

“Wait, there was deuterium in the house?”

“Tell me!” her mom snapped.

Josie shook her head. “I was upstairs. There was an explosion. It blew the door open.”

Josie’s mom glanced up at the basement door. “Blew the door open?” she said absently.

“Yeah,” Josie continued, “and I found the lab like this.”

“Found the lab like this . . .” Her mom’s voice trailed off.

“Mom, what’s going on? Why do you have the X-FEL in the basement? And why does it look like you made it yourself?”

Her mom turned back to her and opened her mouth to say something, then clapped it shut. She stared over Josie’s head at something against the far wall of the basement. Josie turned, following her gaze to the mirror propped up in the corner.

“Get it out of here,” her mom said without looking at Josie.

“Huh?”

“The mirror. Get it out of the lab. Now.”

“Why?” Josie stared at her mom. The mirror? Really? There was a bootleg weapons-grade laser in the house and her mom was concerned about the mirror?

“I . . . ,” her mom started, her eyes faltering. “I don’t want it damaged. It was my grandmother’s.”

Josie sighed. Fine, whatever. She crunched her way to the back of the basement, lifted the mirror, then shimmied through the mess and up the stairs.

As she reached the hallway, she looked down at her mom to ask what she was supposed to do with the mirror. But the words froze on her lips. Her mom sat on a stool, head in her hands.

Josie had no idea what was going on, no hint of what her mom was involved in. Locked doors, homemade lasers, explosions, secrets.

Maybe this had all contributed to her parents’ separation? Maybe there was something going on—something major—that had shut her mom off from her family? Josie made a mental note to ask her mom about it. But not now. With her mom still sobbing in the basement, Josie quietly closed the door.

4:20 P.M.

Josie rested the mirror against the wall outside her bedroom and stared at it. So many odd things had happened since she picked up the stupid thing from her dad’s apartment. Could they all be connected or was it just a weird coincidence?

There’s no such thing as coincidence. That was practically a mantra around the Byrne household. So if it wasn’t a coincidence, there was something about the mirror that connected the disparate events of the last twenty-four hours. Something concrete and logical. There had to be.

She’d seen the mirror once before, at her mom’s lab on a “bring your kid to work” day back in elementary school. Her mom said the mirror helped inspire her when she was trying to solve a problem in the lab, though why she decided to bring it home a few months ago, Josie had no idea.

It stood about five feet high, with short legs on either side and a rounded top. Garish and ostentatious, the frame was heavily embellished with opulent wood carvings—jagged leaf flourishes that jutted out onto the surface of the mirror, connected by swirling vines that got denser and more entangled as they extended upward. At the top of the mirror, the heavy carved foliage entwined to form a kind of woodland crown, right in the middle of which was an angelic face. Josie’s arms got goose pimply as the delicate face stared at her with dark, unseeing eyes in the muted light of the hallway.

Part of her wanted to beat the mirror to a pulp: smash the glass, dismember the frame, and stomp up and down on its remnants until there was nothing left but dust and slivers. Instead, she found herself dragging the ugly thing into her room, where she shoved aside a beanbag chair and leaned it against the wall.

If the mirror was somehow connected to the flash of light and the explosion in her basement, she was going to figure it out. Maybe it would fix whatever her mom was dealing with. Then maybe, just maybe, Josie could fix her family too.