Magisterium

4

“Glenn! Glenny! Wake up!”

Glenn bolted upright, twisted in her sheets. A dark figure stood over her bed.

“Dad?”

“It works, Glenny,” he said. “It actually works.”

Glenn rubbed her eyes. “What are you talking about? What

works? What time is it?”

“Get dressed and come see.”

Her father leaned into a shaft of moonlight. Glenn jerked away without thinking and gasped. His hair was disheveled and his clothes were stained with oil and soot. There was a long gash on his arm that oozed blood. Hopkins reared back and hissed as Dad reached down and grabbed Glenn by her shoulders.

“We’re really going to do it, Glenn.”

“Do what? What happened to you?”

He knelt down beside Glenn’s bed. His skin was sweaty and pale, ghastly as melting plastic.

“We’re going to get her back,” he said. “We’re going to march right over there and bring her back.”

“Go where? Get who back?”

“Your mom,” he said, his voice trembling. “We’re going to

rescue her, Glenn.”

It was like a fist slammed into Glenn’s chest. Her breath stopped.

Suddenly it seemed like he was too close to her, kneeling there on the floor. Glenn could feel the fevered heat radiating off of him.

“Rescue her from what?”

“It’s not something I can just — you have to come see!”

Before she could respond, he had leapt up and was running out of the room. Glenn stumbled out of her bed and followed, Hopkins trailing behind.

“Everything you’ve been told is a lie,” Dad said as they

descended the stairs and went out into the yard. “The Rift wasn’t an accident. And it’s not some kind of wasteland over there. Ha! I can’t believe they’ve gotten away with this for so long!”

“What are you talking about? What does this have to do with Mom?”

Dad tore into the workshop. He drew a stool from the corner and sat down between Glenn and The Project.

“Okay,” he said, one hand tugging nervously at the other. “Now, how to … yes. There’s a set of rules — physical rules — that govern cause and effect, gravity, nuclear and chemical reactions, time, momentum. All of those rules come together and we call the result reality. Is that right?”

The workshop was more of a wreck than usual. Tools lay

everywhere. Half of The Project lay in pieces on the floor, and the other half had been radically altered. The generator was now directly hooked into it, and the whole thing glowed a livid blue as if it were alive.

“Glenn?”

“Of course. But what does that — ”

“Think of a set of playing cards. The cards are always the same

— King, Queen, Ace, Jack — but the game you play changes

depending on what set of rules you decide to invoke. Use one set of rules and you’re playing poker. Choose another and you have solitaire.

What we think of as reality is no different. It’s a card game. Change the rules and you change reality.”

“Dad, that’s not possible. You can’t — ”

“Yes you can. That’s just … that’s the thing: It is, Glenn.

Possible. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. The rules can change. They were changed. That’s what the Rift was. They’ve been so good about keeping it all under wraps. The border. The stories. The fake satellite pictures! They’ve made us so afraid of what’s on the other side that no one even thinks about going over and actually looking to see what’s there.”

“Who are you talking about?”

Dad leaned closer into Glenn. She could smell sweat and the blood from his arm.

“Authority. They’ve been lying to us for a hundred years. But that’s not important, what’s important is this” — he took a rattling breath — “on the other side of the border there are people like us, except for one thing — they live in a reality based on an entirely different set of rules.”

Something clicked into place as soon as he said it. Glenn had heard these words before. Read them before. She could see the web pages in her head as clear as day. The “divergent models” theory, if something so ridiculous could even be called a theory, was one of the most popular on Rifter websites. Glenn’s stomach turned. How could such nonsense be coming out of her own father’s mouth?

“Dad, wait — ”

“No, listen. I never told you this because … because it’s

complicated. Your mother didn’t leave us. Not like you think. She came here from the other side of the border and she had to go back.

That’s where she is now. That’s where she’s always been! I think she intended to go for just a little while, that’s why she didn’t say anything to us, but she … well, things are different there. She’s different there, and she was captured. Or trapped somehow. I know how it sounds, but”

— he turned to The Project — “none of that matters now. We can get her back. You and me, Glenny, we can rescue her. That’s what this project has always been about. She didn’t want to leave. She loved us more than anything and she wants to come home, but she can’t. She needs us to rescue her. And once we do, everything will be back the way it was. We’ll be back the way we were.”

Before Glenn could say anything, Dad was at The Project,

rummaging through clanking bits of metal.

“This is what I’ve been building. It finally works. This will allow us to go over to the other side but bring a bit of our reality — our rules — with us. Like … like a space suit.”

He grabbed Glenn’s arm and pushed a heavy band around her

wrist. Glenn lifted it up. It was a flat gray piece of metal with a glowing red jewel in the center.

“All we have to do is find her,” Dad said. “It won’t be easy. I know that. But once we bring her into our reality, she’ll be like she was when she was here and she’ll be able to leave with us. Then everything will be like it was. We’ll have her back, Glenn. Glenn? What are you doing?”

Glenn hissed as her fingernails scraped the skin underneath the bracelet. She ripped it off and threw it into the corner of the shed, where it landed with a crash. Icy air flooded the room as Glenn threw the bolt and opened the workshop door.

“No. Wait!”

Glenn whirled around. “There’s nothing there, Dad! Nothing!”

“Glenny — ”

“She’s not on the other side and she doesn’t need to be rescued!”

Glenn screamed. “She left because she didn’t want to be with us anymore. That’s all!”

Dad called after Glenn as she stormed out of the workshop, but she ignored him. She strode across the yard and back to the house, slamming doors all the way until she made it up to her room and shut herself inside.

The silence was awful. Glenn felt sick. She fell onto her bed and her body curled around the massive emptiness inside her. Glenn listened as her father stomped up the stairs and pounded on her door, but she didn’t move.

“Glenn?” he said, his voice shaking. She could tell he was crying.

“Glenny, please.”

Her father stood at her door for a time, his feet breaking the sliver of light beneath the door into three bars.

Glenn’s breath caught in her throat, but she said nothing. She didn’t move. After a while, there was a small sound, like a sigh, and her father’s footsteps shushed down the carpeted hall.

Glenn turned onto her back and stared at the blank ceiling.

Hopkins jumped up onto the bed and began to purr. Glenn snatched him up and pressed her fingertips into the soft white patch at his throat and then traced the angle of his face. She found the arrow-shaped nick in his right ear, the last vestige of the day they found him.

“What happened to him, Mommy?” Glenn had asked.

She was five years old and standing on their front porch.

Hopkins’s little body lay battered before her. “Was it a car?”

“No,” her mother said. “It was no car. Come on, Glenny.”

Mom wrapped Hopkins up in a towel and swept him into her

arms. After the local vet had done what he could, Glenn and her mother devoted weeks of near constant attention to nursing him back to health.

They kept his wounds clean and handfed him antibiotics and morsels of fish and chicken. Glenn held a medicine dropper over his mouth until his tongue emerged and he’d take water one drop at a time. She’d sneak down into the basement with her blanket and pillows and lie by his side, running her hand over his soft fur until he began to purr and they both fell asleep.

When he was strong enough to stand on his own, Glenn’s mom

bought him a blue ceramic food dish and placed it just beyond his bed of rumpled towels. Each night she would move the bowl a little farther away: across the room, out the door, down the hall. It broke Glenn’s heart to watch him struggle for it, but she knew he was getting stronger each time he moved away from his bed and bent his long neck to eat on his own. Finally the bowl ended up in Glenn’s room, and once he found it, he rarely left her side. He slept with his nose pressed against her cheek and his paws kneading her chest, his deep purr surrounding them like another blanket.

Once he had recovered, Glenn saw the name Gerard Manley

Hopkins printed on the spine of a book on her mother’s nightstand and liked the way it sounded in her head, musical and precise.

“You are Gerard Manley Hopkins,” she decreed, touching the tip of her finger to his small pink nose, as if she was knighting him.

It was the morning of her sixth birthday.

Ten years ago.

Glenn tried to resist what came next, but the memories had the quality of water — the harder she pushed away, the stronger they rushed back.

After Hopkins’s knighting, Mom had made Glenn’s favorite -

mushroom lasagna and garlic bread with a salad made of greens she had pulled from their garden that morning. Glenn sat across from her parents at the kitchen table, wearing a new bright yellow dress and blue sneakers that didn’t match but were her favorite that week.

Mom and Dad held hands under the table and kept up a steady chatter. Dad listened more than he talked, greedy for her mother’s every word.

Mom wore blue. It perfectly set off her ink-dark hair and pale skin, which were so like Glenn’s own.

“Daddy,” the younger Glenn said as they sat around the remains of her birthday dinner. “What did Gramma Kate and Grampa Joe do for you on your sixth birthday?”

“Well,” Dad said. “I worked in the coal mines all day — ”

“Dad!”

“- and then I was whipped soundly, given a bike, and sent to bed without supper.”

“Mom, why does Dad have to be so silly?” Glenn said in her very serious six-year-old way.

“I don’t think he can help it, dear. He’s what we adults call incorrigible.”

“What did you do on your sixth birthday?”

“I had a party,” Mom said brightly. “Just like yours.”

“Mom, why don’t we ever see your mom and dad like we see

Gramma Kate and Grampa Joe?”

Mom glanced across the table at Dad. “Because they live very far away,” she said.

“Will I ever go see them?”

Her mother’s hand, spread out on the white napkin by her plate, tensed slightly, then relaxed again. “Maybe,” she said, retreating from her chair to get more salad from the kitchen. “Maybe one day.”

Later that night, Mom lifted Glenn into her arms and glided up the stairs and down the hall, Hopkins following dutifully behind. Glenn dropped her head onto her mom’s shoulder and listened as she sang her familiar lullaby, a lilting song made up of nonsense words that rolled off her tongue.

She slipped Glenn into her bed and then her face hung over

Glenn’s, for one quiet moment, like a moon.

“Meera doe branagh, Glennora Morgan.”

The strange words drifted down from her mother’s lips,

whispered as light as falling snow.

“What does it mean, Mommy?”

Fingertips grazed Glenn’s cheek. “It means I love you. It means I’ll always love you.” She kissed Glenn softly on the forehead, then backed away. “No matter what.”

She stepped into the bright hallway and closed the door.

When Glenn woke the next morning, her mother was gone.

Glenn remembered the time as being like tumbling out of control down a long hill as images of the world assaulted her in disconnected jolts. The red of the Authority agents. Her father’s grief-stricken face.

The awful quiet of their house. Hopkins standing guard at the foot of her bed.

The search effort was called off after six months. And it was another six before Glenn and her father began to emerge from their grief, quiet and shaken, like newborns. It was years until Glenn realized that she had always sensed a distance in her mother, a vast expanse at her center that reached down to dark and unknowable depths. There were times when she laughed, chimelike and beautiful, followed by great stretches of gray silence. Glenn remembered all the times she found her staring blankly out into the forest with the haunted look of someone walking alone on a dark road, aching to glance behind her but terrified of what she might see.

Glenn knew that whatever had hold of her in those moments was what finally drove her away.

Was it possible, Glenn wondered, that the same madness had

returned to devour her father as well? And if that was true, was it crouched somewhere deep in Glenn’s genes too, biding its time?

After all, there were signs, weren’t there?

Ever since her mother had disappeared, Glenn had felt something stalking her, a shadow circling her in the darkness. From time to time it would draw close, testing her boundaries. Sitting in class, she’d feel a chill and hear a chorus of whispering voices. Or she’d step up onto a train platform and swear she saw some dark figure, huge and amorphous, moving just at the edge of her vision. How many times had she closed her eyes only to see the image of a woman in white turning to face her, her eyes like that of some awful bird of prey?

Glenn had never told Dr. Kapoor about any of this — he would have medicated her immediately, a black mark her DSS application never would have withstood — and for years she had been able to push those hauntings out of her mind, convincing herself that they were nothing but the bits and pieces of some old dream.

But what was harder to shake was the feeling that there was a message buried somewhere in those whispering voices and snatches of movement. And that if she were to surrender to them, if she invited them in, she would be able to unravel its meaning.

Glenn reached for her tablet, almost dropping it before she managed to turn the starlight projectors on. The night sky appeared above her, a winking lid of stars. She could isolate 813 with the computer, but sometimes, she thought, it was better to do it yourself.

She located Orion, then traced a path to the three blue-white stars that huddled together in a tight line to make up his belt. Alnitak.

Alnilam. Mintaka. From them she went up to Betelgeuse and down to Rigel. Found Taurus and Gemini. And then there it was. 813.