“What? You’re in a place called the rock-and-roll universe? That sounds made up.”
“It is made up!” he says, suddenly sounding much clearer. “I made it up. I don’t know what this place is called. But it’s rocking and rolling, and not in a good way. Listen, just let me talk before we lose each other again.”
I stay silent, afraid to mess up the connection.
He continues. “I’m in this place—this other universe—and my parents are here, too! There are universes inside other universes, Joss! And next to, and behind. There are universes everywhere! You know how we used to think we could reach them if we could hitch a ride with enough gravitons, and then you and Bren got caught trying? Well, it’s true! Sort of! It’s hard to explain. But it’s real!”
“I knew it!” I cry, jumping from one foot to the next. “I knew there had to be other universes! What are they like? Does it look like ours? Do they have The Realms there, too? Wait till I tell Bren!”
“You can’t tell anyone!” Kal says sternly. “I don’t think we’re supposed to be here. I guess since we’re immortal, we had to go somewhere when Earth disappeared, and somehow we wound up here.”
“Are all the people from Earth with you, too?”
“No, it’s only us. Listen, my parents said… and… wasn’t what…”
“Kal!” I start to turn in circles again. “You’re getting all garbled again.”
“Don’t… other… have to go. Collapsing… slow… think.”
“What? What’s collapsing? Wait! I’m going to get you back! I have a box of data dots!” I’m aware I’m not making much sense, but I can feel him slipping away so I’m not thinking clearly. “Don’t worry, Kal! I’m going to save you!” I strain my ears to listen hard, but I think he’s gone.
I keep turning in circles, like that will bring him back. Finally I hear his faint voice say, “Joss! Will keep trying… listen for… drums… wait… don’t!” And then nothing. I’m happy and scared and freaked out all at once. He’s trapped somewhere, but HE’S NOT DEAD. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this relieved. Well, maybe after the cow pie incident ended. It wasn’t very fun being the kid whose best friend was a pile of poop.
“Hey, ballerina boy!” Annika says, snapping her fingers in front of my face.
I stop twirling, dizzy now.
“Come on.” She yanks me by my sleeve toward Lincoln’s nostril. She leaves a trail of water on the floor behind her. She’s wearing one of the shapeless flowery dresses from her closet with the same black clunky boots. It works for her. I’m so relieved about Kal that I could dance. Instead I force myself to act semi-normal because one of us has to. “Where are we going?”
“You’re taking me to the Afterlives. Let’s get a move on.”
Gone is the weepy girl from the closet floor. In her place is the one who stomped angrily on an innocent red parka and told my dad to step off.
Somewhere in between those two extremes would be nice. I pull my arm away as gently as possible. “Your grandmother’s not in the Afterlives anymore. Didn’t Aunt Rae explain all that?” Maybe she’s in shock, that’s why she’s not screaming and crying. I’ve heard of this sort of thing before.
She nods impatiently. “We’re going to see my grandfather.”
“We can’t just walk into the Afterlives,” I explain. “They don’t like visitors. We have to find someone to let us in.” Kal used to sneak me in sometimes, but obviously that’s not going to work this time.
“So?” she asks, tapping her foot. “Find someone.”
I know only one other person who works there. My brother Ty. He is the head of the Wardrobe and Scenery Department. I don’t relish the idea of asking him for a favor, but once I start going through the holofilms I’m going to be asking a lot of people for a lot of favors, so I might as well start now. “Fine, let’s go.”
“Wait,” Aunt Rae says, stopping us at the door. “Here, you’ll need this.” She hands me a bucket of water.
“When Annika starts to dry off, you’ll have to dump this on her. This one will last longer. It’s supersaturated.”
“Really?” I ask, unable to keep the grin from spreading on my face. “I can just dump this on her head?”
“Don’t look so excited,” Annika says, tugging me through the nostril.
“I’ll work on another solution while you’re gone,” Aunt Rae calls after us.
“No rush,” I call back. First Kal’s not dead, then I’m granted permission to dump a bucket of water on someone’s head without getting in trouble. Things are finally looking up!
“Oomph,” Annika grunts, tripping right over the garden gnome, still parked in front of the nose. I put down the bucket and catch her before she hits the ground. We have very fast reflexes in The Realms.
She’s slippery, but I hold on and quickly help her regain her balance. “Sorry,” I say. “I should have moved that.” I’d forgotten how good the solidity of her arms feels. She shakes her arm free of my grip, plops right down on the grass next to Lincoln’s beard, and glares up at me.
I kneel beside her. “I said I was sorry. You don’t have to look at me like I just stole your new puppy.”
“It’s not the gnome. I’m mad that you didn’t tell me the truth. You let me go on thinking all this came from my imagination.” She waves her hands wildly at the dome houses, the colorful sky. “I mean seriously, clouds in every color of the rainbow? I’m supposed to make something like that up?”
“I didn’t want to keep lying,” I say, hoping she hears the sincerity in my voice. “I really didn’t. Ask Gluck.”
“Who’s Gluck?”
“The guy whose face looks like the inside of a garbage disposal?”
She wrinkles her nose. “Oh, that guy.”
I shrug. “He’s not so bad, actually. He’s the only one trying to help me make things right.”
“What do you mean, make things right?”
“I’m going to bring back Earth,” I tell her, sounding way more confident than I actually feel. “And the sun. And your whole solar system.”
“We’re going to bring it back,” she corrects me. “I’m the one who lost everything and everyone I ever cared about. I’m not leaving that job to some strange boy whose head is slightly too big for his body.”
My hands fly up to the sides of my head. “My head’s not too big for my body!”
She shrugs.
“Yours is too small!”
“That’s the best comeback you have?” she asks. “That my head is too small?”
We glare at each other. My good mood is souring. I stand up. “Let’s go. I want to get this done as quickly as you do.”
She doesn’t move. This girl is trying my patience.
“Why do you care about making anything right, anyway?” she snaps. “You could just go on your merry way and forget about my tiny little planet.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Why?”
I glance back at the house. Now that Aunt Rae’s hearing’s fixed, I have to watch what I say around her. “I’ll tell you while we walk.” I turn to pick up the box of data dots that I’d left by the door. Only it’s not there!
I run, frantic, from one side of Lincoln’s face to the other. “It’s not here!”
“What’s not here?” Annika asks, jumping to her feet. “What’s wrong?”
“The box of films. All my data dots! It was right here, next to the gnome!”
“What are data dots?”
“Holographic films of the history of your planet. They were our one chance at making this work. I had them, and now they’re gone.”
“What do they look like?”
I lift up the gnome, as though the box could be hidden there. “Like the buttons on your dress.”
“Like this?” she asks, reaching down and plucking a single data dot from the Earth-like grass that still covers Aunt Rae’s lawn.
I grab for it. “Yes!”
We both drop to our knees, but after
covering the whole lawn, we only find one more dot. I’m faced with the truth of it: They were stolen while I was inside the house.
But who would steal them? Who would steal them from me, the seventh son of the Supreme Overlord of the Universe?
Then it hits me. If what Kal said is true, maybe my father isn’t the most powerful being in existence. If our universe is one of many, then there have to be many Supreme Overlords. That means lots of sons of Supreme Overlords. Maybe I’m not so special after all. I wonder if Dad knows about this. I shake my head. I can’t focus on that now. Random theft is very rare in The Realms. Someone must have known I had these and followed me here.
But who? And why?
Annika squints at the labels on the two recovered dots. “Amino acids,” she reads from one. “Cambrian explosion.” She looks at me. “What does that mean?”
I shake my head, feeling utterly defeated. “I don’t know,” I tell her in a flat voice. “There were thousands of dots in that box. Without that information, there’s no way to rebuild everything on Earth exactly the same as it was.”
“Does it have to be exactly the same?”
I nod. “Everything has to lead up to you looking in the telescope. Only this time you can’t look, or Earth will disappear all over again.”
“Oh.” She looks down at the tiny dots in her hands, then slips them back into her pocket. “Let’s take good care of these, then.”
“Two tiny glimpses into Earth’s history won’t help us at all.”
“Well, there must be backups of the others, right?”
I shake my head. “We have data on every planet in the universe, habitable or not. That’s trillions of trillions of planets, with thousands of data dots for each. We’re already running out of storage space.”
I can tell she’s about to say something judgmental about the importance of backing things up but is holding back. Instead, she says, “We need to find really smart people, people who understand how things work. Aunt Rae told me your brothers are responsible for a lot of stuff to do with the—what did she call them? The terrestrial planets? The rocky ones?”
I nod grimly, not liking where this is heading.
“Well, can’t they help?”
“Trust me, it’s bad enough that I have to ask my brother Ty to get us into the Afterlives.”
“But if they can help, then we—”
“I’ve got an idea!” I say, cutting her off. “We’re going to the Afterlives, right?”
She nods.
“We can ask the people there, the scientists who studied all this stuff when they were alive. As long as they didn’t die too recently, they shouldn’t have disappeared yet.”
She sizes me up. “Maybe you won’t make such a bad partner after all. I’m still running the show, but—” She suddenly starts gasping. Her eyes widen in fear, and her hand instinctively reaches for her neck. I lean over and feel her hair. Almost completely dry!
I reach for the bucket and, without warning, dump it on her head.
She sputters and coughs, glaring at me as she fills her lungs with tiny molecules of oxygen.
I grin. That was just as much fun as I’d imagined.
The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
—Eden Phillpotts, writer
The Afterlives are all the way at the far end of The Realms, which means there is plenty of opportunity for Annika to ask me a lot of really annoying questions as we walk there. Why don’t you have cars? How do you breathe? Are you really immortal? Where ARE we? Why can I see outer space beneath the ground? Why are there so many statues of strange-looking people everywhere?
Clearly Aunt Rae didn’t have a chance to explain everything about The Realms. So now I get that fun task. When Annika finally stops talking to take a breath, I begin to answer. “Besides not having the materials to build them, we don’t have cars because there’s no rush to get anywhere. We don’t experience time the way you do. Things here don’t…” I search for the right word. “They don’t decay like the rest of the universe. Or I guess they do, but so much slower that it’s not really noticeable. We don’t need to breathe because our bodies are made of the same stuff as the atmosphere around us. We don’t have the same kind of lungs and blood that you do. We assume we’re immortal because no one has ever died. My best friend, Kal, and his parents might be dying now, though, which is why I want to rebuild Earth as much as you do. Kal’s parents were on the planet when it… well, you know, and now they’re trapped in some other universe and Kal is stuck there with them. But if Earth comes back, they will, too.” I sound more certain of that than I actually am. But I have to believe that or else I’ll give up before I even begin.
She stops walking. “People from here came to Earth? You have spaceships but no cars?”
I shake my head. “No spaceships, either. We create what you’d call a wormhole through space and travel through it to the planets. A wormhole is when you pair a black hole, which sucks things in, with a white hole, which spits things out.”
Eye roll. “I know what a wormhole is. Remember my dad? Big outer-space guy?”
A thought suddenly occurs to me, which is somewhat of a rare occurrence. “Hey, I bet that’s how you wound up here! You probably got sucked into the wormhole left open for Kal’s parents! You must have gone through it right before everything got pulled out of the space-time continuum. That’s why you never disappeared like everyone else!”
She looks doubtful. “I never thought I’d say this, but if I’m fortunate enough to get to listen to my dad talk for hours about the wonders of the universe again, I’ll ask him if it’s possible to create a wormhole big enough, or stable enough, to travel in. Because I’m pretty sure it’s not.”
I shrug. “We’ve had a lot longer than you to figure it out. Do you want me to keep answering your questions or not?” I turn off the street and we trudge through an open field full of tall grasses and even taller statues. The inhabitants of The Realms love making art, and Grayden’s job is to inspire them to create it. This means that a lot of the statues have a decidedly Grayden-like appearance to them.
“This is a shortcut,” I explain. Kal knows even better shortcuts, but I’ve only been to the Afterlives a few dozen times in my whole life. It’s sort of a sacred place, a very private place where visitors are discouraged. Whenever someone dies, anywhere in the universe, a piece of their essence—a part of what makes them them—gets stored here. The rest goes somewhere else. No one knows where. Or if they do, they haven’t told me.
“So let me get this straight,” Annika says. “The Realms isn’t a planet, it’s… something else?” She ducks around a particularly large statue of a scaly two-headed Ojeron (who still, by the way, looks like Grayden, even with the extra head).
I hesitate. Since time began, knowledge of The Realms has been carefully hidden from all other inhabitants of the universe. We wouldn’t be having this discussion right now if the Powers That Be didn’t believe so strongly in keeping our secrets. Should I really be the one to reveal them?
Annika stumbles a bit and puts her hand on my arm to steady herself. “Sorry,” she mumbles, reddening slightly.
One touch of her hand and I lose my train of thought. Embarrassing. Where was I? Oh right, explaining The Realms. “It’s like this.” I look down at my feet as I speak, trying to trick myself into believing that I’m talking only to myself. She simply happens to be close enough to overhear. “The Realms are inside what you call dark matter,” I explain to my feet. “We fill up most of the space in the universe. The Realms are so enormous that no one has been to all of it. Parts of it reach out into all the galaxies. Our wormholes are more like really long elevators, so really, you don’t have to leave The Realms to get anywhere else.”
I glance up to see how she’s taking all this. She’s staring at me with wide eyes. I pick up my pace a bit and drop the pretense of not talking directly to her. If we’re really in this together, she’ll need
to understand as much as possible. “As far as I know, The Realms have been here since the beginning of time, or near there, anyway. Nothing changes too much.”
“It looks pretty different from yesterday,” she points out.
I look around us. Everything has gone back to normal now, with the exception of a few scattered hot dog and ice cream stands. Those are harder to let go of. “I’m sure it was easier for you when things looked more like Earth and less like… well, like this.”
She doesn’t answer, only scrunches up her face in a way I can’t interpret. I wish she could see the beauty of The Realms, the glowing, pulsing heart of it. To her, the tall grass we’re walking through must look like weeds, instead of living tendrils of light and shadow. The buildings and homes must look very flat, transparent, and boring, with only the occasional splashes of colorful art to break up the monotony. But the structures are an extension of ourselves, nearly alive in their own right.
I feel the need to defend my home. “You should know that The Realms don’t really look like this,” I tell her. “I mean, if you could see more than just the visible spectrum of light. Humans only—”
“And by humans, you mean me?” she says, her voice colder than I’d heard it.
“Um, I was talking about all humans. Your eyes can—”
“But I’m the only human now, aren’t I?”
“I’ll just stop talking,” I mumble. Did I say too much? Too little? Girls are really hard to figure out.
“Are we almost there?”
“Almost.” We continue walking in silence.
Annika’s gasp startles me. I don’t blame her for being surprised. We’ve reached the end of the field, and the Afterlives now loom before us. And boy, do they loom. The mirrored walls go up so high they disappear from view. The walls reflect back our surroundings, rendering the Afterlives practically invisible.
Annika waves her hand. Her reflection waves back. Annika sticks out her tongue. Her reflection does the same. This could go on for a long time. “Are you sure you want to go inside?” I ask, hoping to distract her from the wall. “It might not be what you expect.”