Caught in the Parallel E-Book

Robin Brande

• Herausgeber: Ryer Publishing
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

(Book 2 of 4)


What went wrong? EVERYTHING.

High school senior and amateur physicist Audie Masters’ cutting-edge science exploration has helped her do what no other physicist has done before. She found a parallel universe—along with a parallel version of herself.


That discovery has catapulted her into the adventure of a lifetime.


Now all she has to do is survive it.

Leseprobe

CAUGHT IN THE PARALLEL

PARALLELOGRAM, BOOK 2

ROBIN BRANDE

RYER PUBLISHING

CAUGHT IN THE PARALLEL

Parallelogram, Book 2

By Robin Brande

Published by Ryer Publishing

www.ryerpublishing.com

Copyright 2011 by Robin Brande

www.robinbrande.com

All rights reserved.

Cover art by nordenworks/Deposit Photos

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Created with Vellum

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

About the Author

Also by Robin Brande

For Further Reading

1

I am sitting on a plane.

A private jet.

Someone has put a glass of fresh pomegranate juice in front of me, but I haven’t taken a sip.

I’ve been asked questions: “Are you comfortable? Do you need anything? Are you still jet-lagged? Does the dog need anything? Would you care for an asparagus soufflé?” and I either nod or shake my head. I’ve barely said ten words in the past two hours, probably for the same reason I haven’t tasted that delicious-looking pomegranate juice: my throat seems to have closed up. I’m afraid if I open my mouth I might scream. Because nothing—and I mean NOTHING—is right about this scene.

There is a dog sleeping at my feet.

Not my dog. Not my feet.

There is a guy sitting across from me, the best-looking guy I’ve ever known, the guy I’ve been in love with for thirteen years, since I was four years old.

Not the same guy. Just his face and body, skin and voice and hair.

He calls me Halli. I am not Halli. Halli might be dead. Halli might be lost. Halli has left this body—been catapulted out of it, thanks to my brilliant move, trying to save her life—and now it’s just me in here, Audie Masters, a girl with absolutely zero clue what I’m supposed to do now.

Not my body. Not my life. Not even my universe.

Oh, great masters of physics, help me.

2

Here is what I remember:

Me, sitting in a sound-proof room in Professor Whitfield’s laboratory. The professor and his lab assistant, Albert, explaining to me that time and the laws of physics are just habits of thinking—that things don’t really work the way everyone thinks they do.

Me, testing that theory by casting my thoughts three days into the future—three days and a whole other universe away—watching to see what my parallel self, Halli Markham, was doing at that moment. What she was doing was about to get herself and her dog killed by an avalanche in the Alps.

And then I remember this: me hurtling myself at Halli, across the gap between our universes, across the gap of time, me not really a body anymore, but more like a force, pushing Halli out of the way of danger, but pushing her . . . where? Into what?

Because the next thing I knew, it was me inside Halli’s body, waking up safe in her home, her dog peacefully sleeping at the foot of her bed.

How? How did we all get there? Me and Halli’s body and Red?

And where in this universe or any other is Halli? Did I really save her? Or did I just shove her out into some empty void, and it’s just me now, alone, trapped forever inside her body and her universe?

And where, for that matter, is my body? Is it just . . . gone?

“You all right?” Jake asks me.

I didn’t realize I’d been clutching my stomach. Halli’s stomach.

I nod and let my arms relax. Jake has been very nice. No complaints there.

Except for the fact that looking at him and hearing him talk freaks me out almost as much as any of the rest of this.

Because he’s Will. The parallel version of Will. His name is Jake Demetrios over here, but he looks exactly like the guy I’ve always secretly been in love with, sounds exactly like him, and even—I know this sounds weird—smells like him. Not that Dial soap smell I’m used to on Will, but something deeper, at the skin level. Which I guess isn’t a surprise since they have the exact same DNA, but you’d think a guy in a different parallel universe might slap on some cologne or use a different shampoo or do something to throw you off his scent.

But no, it’s that same smell I like to close my eyes and breathe in whenever Will isn’t watching and I can get away with it. It’s so real to me sometimes I feel like I could spread it on a cracker and eat it. Or swipe a fingerful of it out of the air and smear it behind my ears.

I’m not saying that’s normal, I’m just saying that’s how it is. And sitting across from this stranger right now isn’t really helping me keep a clear head and gather my wits.

Plus every time I look up, he’s staring straight at me, usually with this soft sort of half-smile going on that’s just too hot for words—I can guarantee that Will has never looked at me that way—and it makes it hard to remember that I have a boyfriend now, his name is Daniel, he actually lives in this universe of Halli’s, and at some point I’m going to start thinking about him a lot, I promise, it’s just that right now I have about a billion other things to worry about before I can even get to that.

Like, what is it—exactly—that went wrong? How did I make this happen? I obviously violated every known law of physics, so were there unknown laws I somehow tapped into? And can I tap my way out and undo this whole mess?

And what happens to Halli if I do? If I somehow unravel this whole sequence, does that mean she dies after all? I wouldn’t be there to save her, so she and Red get buried in that avalanche?

The plane hits a little patch of turbulence, and Jake’s foot bumps into mine. I look up and he’s smiling at me again, in that way he really needs to stop.

“You’re different than I expected,” he tells me.

Oh, really? I want to say. Maybe because the girl who regularly inhabits this body is the fearless teenage adventurer and explorer that everyone in this universe seems to have heard of. Maybe if this were her in this situation, having to pretend she’s me, she’d be all over it and view it as some sort of exciting new challenge: Expedition Audie. Pretend to be that physics nerd who spends most of her time in her bedroom reading about quantum particles and probability waves. Oo—dangerous.

“Hm,” is all I answer, then I turn to look out the window. I figure the less I say, the better. Fewer chances to mess up and have people realize they’ve got the wrong girl.

Because I need these people. I need the information they have. And so if I can just fake my way through everything for a few days, maybe I can get out of this before anyone knows what went wrong.

Jake orders himself another glass of juice. “You need anything?”

Yeah, what I need is about five hours alone, all to myself. Time to think.

It’s been nothing but go, go since I woke up in Halli’s body this morning. I barely had time to come to grips with the fact that I wasn’t me anymore, when Red started barking his head off because a car was coming up the road to Halli’s house. Then the car stopped, and the person who got out was exactly the last person I ever expected to see.

And for that full minute and a half or however long it took for him to walk from his car to the door, knock on the door, me answer it, and Jake introduce himself—for that brief little time, I was thinking, Will found me somehow. He’s here to rescue me. That’s about the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard of.

Fat chance. In the same way Will’s disgusting girlfriend Gemma has her own—and vastly superior, I must say—version over here in this universe, Will Stamos-Valadez has his own duplicate edition walking around in his same genetic outfit, claiming to be a totally different person.

I’m not sure I can ever get used to these things.

So I opened the door, and he told me right away who he was, and that he works for Halli’s father, and that he was there to pick me up and fly me back to Halli’s parents’ house for some sort of meeting they arranged with her last week.

A meeting I knew nothing about. Halli hadn’t thought to mention it to me before. And now I was going to have to bluff my way through it. It was exactly like one of those anxiety dreams where you know you have a test starting in five minutes, but it’s for a class you never attended.

Plus, just like in any good anxiety dream, I was standing there in my pajamas—Halli’s pajamas, actually. Jake seemed a little surprised by that. Apparently I was supposed to be dressed and ready to go.

But he looked at me with those dark brown eyes of Will’s, and smiled at me in that way Will never does, and it felt even more like a dream than before.

And then he snapped me out of it.

“You must still be jet-lagged,” he said. “We saw you just got home last night.”

Information. Here was my first clue about what had happened to me between the avalanche and now.

And I knew how he knew.

It was the tracking. Halli explained it to me before. There’s a kind of microchip embedded under her collarbone—she said everyone here has them—and her parents can use that to track her whereabouts, at least until she takes them off her list when she turns eighteen. Thank goodness we’re both still seventeen. Thank goodness if I’m wearing her body I can at least get some data out of it.

I made a big show of yawning. “What day is it?”

“Thursday,” Jake said.

Thursday? My brain clicked into motion. The last time I saw Halli it was Tuesday in her world. How did I lose two days from her life? Where have I been?

If I could see a printout of that—a detailed report of Halli’s whereabouts minute by minute since the avalanche—

It might not solve my physics problem, but at least it would give me somewhere to start. Because right now I had nothing—no memory, no facts, nothing.

“I’ll go get changed,” I told Jake, and rushed off to Halli’s bedroom.

The dog came with me, and lay on Halli’s bed while I got dressed and packed. I changed into a pair of Halli’s jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, then stuffed a few more of each of those into the worn-out duffel I found at the bottom of her closet. A few pairs of underwear, a few pairs of socks, I was done. Halli told me once she always traveled lightly. Might as well live up to the image.

I was about to put on a pair of her sneakers when something else caught my eye: Halli’s hiking boots.

My heart nearly leapt out of its ribcage.

Because the last time I saw those boots, Halli had been wearing them when we were together in the Alps.

Which meant she’d made it out alive! She’d made it home.

Then my brain had to squelch the whole thing. Of course those boots made it home. They’d been on Halli’s feet at the time, and I was currently wearing Halli’s feet. The boots had come home with me. That didn’t prove anything.

I felt the tip of a wave. It was poised there, just waiting to break over me, to crash me down into despair. All it needed was for me to give in, even just a little bit. To be willing to really feel what this whole thing meant.

But I couldn’t do that. It might be a great release in the moment to collapse onto Halli’s floor and have myself a big, hysterical cry, but how was that going to help Halli? It wasn’t.

What Halli needed was my logical, thinking brain. What she needed was for me to be a robot, to not feel, to just take in all the necessary facts and then arrange them in the right, intelligent sequence so I could understand how to save her. I could be emotional later. This wasn’t the time.

So I tugged the boots onto my feet. Onto Halli’s feet. And I told her dog we were going, and the two of us met Jake back up at the front. He took Halli’s duffel from me.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. Which was just the first of the many lies I knew I’d have to start telling from then on.

3

We are flying over water.

Halli told me her parents live in Seattle. That isn’t quite true. They live near Seattle, which isn’t really the same thing, because what Halli neglected to tell me was that her parents own their own private island.

Of course they do.

When Jake points it out to me from the window, I nod like it’s all completely expected. Just like I had to be totally casual about the fact that the car he picked me up in earlier was driving itself for most of the way to the airport. All completely normal.

“You’ve never been here before, have you?” Jake asks.

I’m not sure how to answer. I’m pretty sure Halli hasn’t seen her parents in person since she was a baby. Halli’s grandmother, Ginny Markham, raised her, and Halli told me once that her parents never even tried to contact Halli for sixteen years—not until Ginny died last year.

And since then, as far as Halli was concerned, they’d been contacting her too much. I witnessed a few of the “comm” calls between Halli and her mother—the ones where Halli’s mother’s head floated holographically in 3-D above Halli’s tablet—and Halli was always very abrupt and irritable. I know it had something to do with Halli feeling abandoned by her parents, but I also think she just didn’t basically like them. At least that was my impression.

It’s just one more thing I wish I could question her about, now that I’m about to meet them. And have to pretend to be her.

“I know it’s been at least ten years,” Jake says. “I’ve lived on the island that long, and I’ve never seen you. Trust me,” he adds, smiling in that way of his and looking me straight in the eye, “I would have remembered.”

“Oh,” I say. “Mm-hm.” Halli never struck me as much of a blusher, but someone different is at the controls now. I’m sure my cheeks—her cheeks—are a nice warm red. I cover one of them by resting my chin in my hand and gazing back out the window.

From the air the island looks green—almost completely covered in trees. I can see the tops of a few buildings, and a tan border along most of the edge, which I’m guessing is a beach, but otherwise the place looks completely wooded.

And not with palm trees, either, which is what I thought all islands had. It’s forest, like in the mountains around Halli’s house back in Colorado. I wonder if her parents had all those pine trees imported.

The island is too small for an airstrip, so the pilot parks the jet on the mainland, and Jake and I finish the journey in Halli’s parents’ own private ferry.

As we come closer to the shore, I get a clear view of Halli’s parents’ mansion. Although “mansion” doesn’t really do it justice. It’s more like one of those enormous estates you see in old British period dramas—the ones where people go to balls and then all fifty guests sleep over and send for their carriages in the morning.

The mansion is made of stone and wood and glass. It’s four stories high, with huge windows stretching from the bottom floor all the way up to the top, which must give a great view out across the water. And be ridiculously hard to clean.

There’s a man waiting for us on the dock. He’s dressed very formally, wearing white gloves and holding a glass of champagne.

“Welcome, Miss Markham,” he says, and offers me the glass.

“I . . . no, I can’t,” I say. “I’m . . . too young.” I glance at Jake, who looks like he might laugh, but the servant or whoever he is just gives me a quick bow, and reaches down for the picnic basket at his feet.

“Muffin?” he asks, holding it open. “Cranberry, raspberry, blueberry, ginger—”

“No, thank you,” I say, afraid I might hurt his feelings, but there’s no way I can eat anything right now. My stomach feels like it’s digesting rocks.

“Thanks, Lyman,” Jake says, helping himself to a muffin. “Are they—? Right. There they are.”

I follow his gaze.

It’s a strange thing to see your parents and know they’re not your parents. To have to hold yourself back from running to the mother you might never see again, and throwing yourself into her arms and telling her how sorry you are that you disappeared without saying goodbye. To see some other version of your father and think, “No, that’s not right. He’s not like that. Go back—you’ve got it all wrong.”

They both look older, and heavier, than my parents. And richer. They’re dressed very expensively, and Halli’s mother is wearing all kinds of jewelry. Both of them look like they get their hair done. Halli’s mom’s is all puffy and stiff, and her father’s looks like it’s dyed.

And the way they’re walking is all wrong. Both of their strides have this kind of weird aggression about them—like they’re marching somewhere to go tell somebody off. My parents aren’t like that. They’re pretty easy-going and never in that much of a hurry.

But worse than anything else about them, it’s the expression on their faces as they come toward me. They don’t look happy. They’re not excited. This might be the first time they’ve ever seen Halli in person since she was an infant, and they don’t even look like they care.

“Halli,” her mother says, opening her arms just a little. She steps forward, clutches me with these sort of bird claws on the sides of my shoulders, and leans in to press her cheek against mine. But she doesn’t really go for it, and instead just gives me this kind of air-cheek thing, all the while still keeping me in her death grip like she’s afraid I might twist and get away.

“Halli,” her father says, giving me a nod.

“Father,” I say back.

This seems to confuse him. Halli’s mother, too. Then I remember Halli always called her mother by her first name, Regina—never “Mother.”

The problem is, I have no idea what Halli’s father’s name is. I think I heard it once, but if so, it’s completely slipped my mind. The best I can do to cover it up is give him the same kind of nod he gave me—stiff and formal, like we barely know each other.

Which I guess must be true. Even if it were still Halli inside here.

Halli’s father turns to Jake now, ignoring me. “How was the noise level?”

“Negligible,” Jake tells him.

“Vibration?” he asks.

“Non-existent,” Jake says.

Halli’s dad asks him some more questions about the plane, and I’d like to hear what they’re saying, but meanwhile Halli’s mother is talking to me.

“How was your flight?” she asks. “That’s our newest plane. Your father’s only ridden in it once. We hired DeMenici to design the interior. I hope you found it comfortable.”

“Yes, I—”

“Dual-cell,” she continues, not waiting for my answer. “It’s our latest configuration. Uses only half the water of the previous model. It’s been a very difficult process—years in the making.” She gives me a tight smile. “But I don’t suppose you care about that.”

“’Course she doesn’t,” Halli’s father butts in.

I feel the need to stick up for Halli, but I’m not sure what to say. So I just give her mother a noncommittal shrug.

Halli’s father says, “I have to get back to work.”

He pivots around and heads back to the mansion without another word to his daughter.

Halli’s mother flicks her fingers toward the man with the muffins. I forgot he was still there, standing at a respectful distance. He gives Halli’s mother a slight bow, then picks up his basket and champagne and hurries to get ahead of Halli’s father. I don’t understand why until I see the muffin man get back to the mansion just in time to hold open the door for his employer.

“We’ll try not to take up too much of your time,” Halli’s mother says. “We wouldn’t have to involve you at all if your grandmother had behaved sensibly.”

I don’t know if she’s referring to Ginny Markham dying, or to something else. But in either case, I know Halli wouldn’t have liked her mother saying anything bad about her grandmother. So I just don’t respond.

“But,” her mother goes on, “things are as they are. We should be able to take care of all of it this weekend. We’ll have lawyers here, the board will be here—we can settle matters once and for all. Then you’ll never have to worry about any of this again. You can go on with your life, your father and I can go on with ours. How does that sound?”

It might sound fine, if not for the fact that she’s standing there clasping her fingers together too tightly and smiling in this very tense way. I don’t know if that’s just how she normally is, or if something weird is going on.

“So,” she says. “Any questions?”

“Um . . . no.”

“All right, then. Jake can help you get settled. I have to get back to work now, too.”

“Okay,” I say. “Bye.”

It’s all very cold and weird.

“Dinner is at eight,” she calls back over her shoulder. “Dress appropriately. You’re in civilization now.”

I stand there and stare after her. And no matter what I think about the whole thing, I know very clearly in my heart exactly what Halli would do right now.

If it were her inside this body, standing on this dock, she’d turn right around, get back on that ferry, and never see her parents again. She’d never answer another one of her mother’s comm calls from now until February when she turned eighteen, and then she’d take her parents off the tracking access list and make sure they could never find her or contact her again.

I know that was already her plan—she told me.

But Halli’s tracking is the point. I can’t leave here until I get it. So like it or not, I’m stuck.

“Well,” Jake says with a laugh, “that went well.”

I turn to him and look at him with new eyes. He can joke about these people?

“They were nervous to meet you,” he says.

“Didn’t look like it,” I mutter.

He smiles. “Want to take a walk?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I do.”

4

Red couldn’t be happier. There’s water to swim in, a strong guy with a good arm to throw him a stick—although whenever I catch sight of Halli’s arms I’m pretty sure she could hurl a shotput out there, she’s so much more muscular than I am. But I’m happy to let Jake do the dirty work, since Red keeps bringing him back the stick, shaking off all his water onto Jake’s legs, then standing there panting, ready for the next throw.

“So,” Jake says to me.

“So,” I say back.

“What do you think of them?” Jake asks.

He picks up the stick again and throws it for Red. I use that time to try to read his face. I can’t tell if he’s testing me, or just making conversation, or pumping me for information.

The real question is, can I trust him?

He seems like a nice guy, but that’s really all I can say. I don’t know him. And if he’s lived here for ten years, and works for Halli’s father, and has never met Halli before, then it’s safe to assume he feels more loyal to Halli’s parents than to her—no matter how nice he’s being to me.

I decide it’s best to be cautious.

“I’m sure they’re both very good at what they do,” I say, even though I’m not really sure what that is.

Jake gives me a look like he knows I’ve just avoided his question.

“What do you do here, exactly?” I say.

I mean Halli’s parents and the company they run, but Jake thinks I’m asking about him.

“I’m apprenticed to your father,” he says.

“Oh. Doing what?”

“As a chemist,” he says.

I wasn’t expecting that—at all. Jake is a chemist? Halli’s father is one, too? She never told me that. Of course, she also never told me her parents own their own island, so I’m guessing there are a lot of things she left out.

Jake tosses the stick again. Red plunges in after it.

“I met her once, you know,” Jake says.

“Who?”

“Your grandmother.”

“You did?” I say. “When?” I probably shouldn’t act this excited, but I always loved it whenever Halli would tell me stories about Ginny. She only told me a few, because they seemed to always make her sad by the end, so I’m ready for anybody else to tell me as many stories about her as they want.

“I was young,” Jake says. “Eight.”

I do the calculation as we walk down the rocky shore. Will—and therefore Jake—is the same age I am. So that means he met Ginny nine years ago—a year after he said he first came to live here.

“I liked her,” Jake says. “A lot. She was tough and angry with your parents—you know how she could be—”

I nod, even though I don’t know.

“—but when she saw me hanging around, she told me to bring us a couple of horses, and then she took me riding the rest of the afternoon. It was . . . memorable.”

I bet it was. From everything I’ve heard about Ginny, I know she was a fearless, adventurous woman. She brought up Halli to be the same way. I only wish Ginny could have lived long enough for me to meet her.

Although if she had, Halli wouldn’t have been on that cliff a month ago, meditating in such a way that our vibrations exactly matched up. I’d never have found a way to slip past the barriers between our two universes, and end up bodily in this one.

And maybe Halli would still be alive if I hadn’t.

Or maybe she would have died because I wasn’t there to save her.

If I did, in fact, save her. If I didn’t just push her out of this body and take it over, leaving her no place to go.

“Halli?” Jake says. “You all right?”

I’ve got my hand to my forehead, my eyes closed. I can’t keep having these thoughts. They won’t help. They just make me feel hopeless.

“I’m fine,” I say, forcing myself to act normal and keep walking. “Go on. I want to hear your story.”

“She told me about you,” Jake says. “I already knew who you were from the histories, but she told me some stories I’d never heard.”

“Like what?”

“Like the time she lost you in the jungle, and you sat down and cleared a circle around you so you’d be able to see if any snakes crossed it. She said you never cried, you never called for her, you just waited. When she found you, there was some kind of poisonous snake hanging right above you, but you never saw it. And she never told you.”

“Huh.”

I want to ask him how old Halli was when Ginny took her into the jungle, but I can’t, because I should know that. At least I know she was younger than eight, since that’s when Jake first heard the story.

Which is just so amazing to me. How does a little girl have the kinds of experiences Halli had, and not turn out completely different from the girl I am? Halli was always so great and accepting of me and my frailties compared to her, and now I’m just even more grateful for that.

I miss her. I didn’t even realize how much. Please let her be alive.

I clear my throat. “What else?” I ask Jake. “What else did Ginny say?”

“Well, she told me about the time you broke your arm—”

I look down at Halli’s arms, trying to guess which one.

“—and how you broke your ankle—”

They both feel fine to me now.

“—and that your favorite fruit was strawberry, your favorite color was red, your favorite horse was named Samson, and you hated taking a bath and would only do it once a week, and only if you could wear your dive mask and snorkel.”

Jake tips back his head and laughs. I crack a smile. Even though I’m supposed to know all this about myself already.

“By the end of the day,” Jake says, “I’m sure your grandmother knew she’d made me fall in love with you. Poor kid—heart lost to the famous girl explorer. I’m sure I wasn’t the first.”

He laughs at himself, and our eyes meet for just a moment, and I see something there, and Jake probably knows it.

Because he quickly bends down for the stick and throws it out into the ocean, then stands there staring at the dog splashing in the water instead of looking back at me.

And I have an ache here, a pain, right where there’s a fresh wound to my heart. It’s like an indentation—like a thumbprint in the middle of a cookie. Or like someone plunging his pointy-tipped flag into the earth at the top of a mountain: Jake Demetrios was here. Mark it.

“I’ve waited a long time to meet you,” he says quietly, still gazing over the water.

“I . . .” And then my voice trails off. Because if Halli were here, I’m sure she’d be just as touched as I am by what he just said. And I’m sure she’d know what to say back. But unfortunately that response isn’t programmed into the body I’m wearing, so I just have to stand here frozen and mute.

And then Jake has to make it worse. He turns his head slightly, locks eyes with me again, and gives me that half-smile.

And adds, “I’d have to say you were worth it.”

5

The voice comes from behind us. “Good afternoon, Miss Markham. I’m Al—”

I spin around and spurt out the first thing that comes to my mind. “Lydia! Your hair!” Then I slap my hand over my mouth to keep it from saying more.

Because she’s not Lydia—of course she’s not. My best friend—Will’s twin sister—is still safely back at home in my own universe, and this person in front of me is an imposter.

She’s Jake’s twin sister here—of course she is. That makes sense. I just hadn’t expected to see her. But now it’s all coming together in my mind.

If Jake has lived here since he was seven, obviously he didn’t come alone. He would have come with his family—his mother and sister. His mother must work here somewhere. Which is a happy thought, since back home Will and Lydia’s mother Elena has been like a second mom to me. I’d love to see the version of her here.

So I can adjust to seeing this duplicate of Lydia, but still—why did she have to ruin her hair? What kind of nutcase would get rid of that long, luxurious cape of black hair that goes all the way down Lydia’s back?

And it’s not like it’s even a stylish cut. It’s this crazy, severe bob that’s even shorter than Jake’s hair. It looks like a little black helmet.

“As I said,” she tries again, “I’m Alexa Demetrios. Your mother has asked me to show you to your room.”

Her whole outfit is wrong, too. Lydia likes to wear these stretchy, flowy kind of yoga clothes, but Alexa is dressed like a little corporate soldier, all crisp white shirt and straight black skirt and impractical and probably painfully tight shoes. No wonder she looks so pinched.

“Your mother was concerned about the time,” Alexa says, casting a scornful look at her brother. “She thought maybe the two of you got lost.”

Jake pretends to ignore her and throws the stick again for Red.

“So, I should probably go,” I tell Jake. Even though his words are still reverberating in my ear. I was worth the wait?

No, Halli was worth the wait.

But he hasn’t met Halli, he’s met me.

Those stories Ginny told him were about Halli. That’s the girl he’s been waiting for.

And by the way, don’t you have a boyfriend?

“See you at dinner,” Jake tells me.

“Yeah—s-see you.” I can hear myself, and it’s a familiar sound. It’s me all tongue-tied, trying to talk to Will. It’s me trying not to let him see how madly in love with him I am.

Ugh. Audie. Snap out of it.

“Come on, Red,” I say, and I can tell the dog doesn’t want to leave any more than I do. He’s completely mesmerized by Jake and the guy’s infinite capacity for throwing the stick.

“Come on,” I say impatiently, and this time Red obeys. But even as he follows Alexa and me away from the beach, he can’t help but look back longingly at Jake.

Yeah, I know. I get it.

“It’s this way,” Alexa tells me.

I’m glad for the distraction.

Now I understand how she sneaked up on us. The woods grow almost all the way onto the beach. Alexa leads Red and me through a narrow break in the trees, up a path to a paved road. Something that looks like a modified golf cart sits there waiting for us.

The cart has no steering wheel. Alexa tells it, “Main house,” and it starts up on its own, turns around at the first opportunity, and gently drives us back to the mansion.

It was like that this morning, when Jake drove us away from Halli’s house. His car had a steering wheel, and he used it all the way up her dirt road, until we hit the pavement. Then the car took over, driving us at a steady pace all the way to the airport.

There were other cars on the road, all of them going at the same pace, too. No one seemed impatient, no one tried to pass— it was almost like everyone was in their own individual cars on the same train track, and we’d all get there when we got there.

I had to act like it was all perfectly normal to me, of course, even though my eyes were darting from the car’s control panel to the street then to the other cars, trying to figure out how the whole thing worked. And all the while Jake just relaxed and leaned back against his door, and tried to make conversation with a girl who wasn’t talking.

But now I’m glad I’ve already had that experience, so I can forget about the mechanics and look around at the scenery instead.

There are more buildings here on the ground than I could see from up in the air. Which makes sense, since the trees grow everywhere—up and over and in between. Whoever designed this whole place obviously either loved nature or loved privacy.

Here and there from some of the buildings, people come out to wave to me. Some of them call, “Welcome, Miss Halli,” some say, “Welcome, Miss Markham,” and some just stand there checking me out.

I wave back, because it seems like what Halli would do, but the whole thing feels really weird. I’m not used to being any kind of celebrity. I don’t know how Halli ever got used to it.

Alexa hasn’t said anything to me this whole ride, so I glance over to see what she’s doing. She’s engrossed in the tablet on her lap, poking at it, swishing her fingers across the screen, reading it—

And suddenly I realize I am such an idiot.

Because didn’t I see Halli’s tablet on her desk at home? Not her roll-up one that she took with her to the Alps, but a different one, just sitting there waiting for me to grab it. But instead I left it behind.

Maybe I never would have needed these people at all. I’m sure I could have figured out how to access Halli’s tracking information on her own tablet, if I’d only worked at it a little while.

But instead I’m at these people’s mercy. Instead I’m going to have to trick someone—probably Jake—into showing me the information.

I’m such a dope.

The cart stops in front of the mansion and Alexa gets out. The muffin man—Lyman, I think Jake called him—is standing in front of the enormous wooden doors. He gives us a little bow, then opens the doors for us. I say thank you. Alexa doesn’t.

“This is the Grand Hallway,” she says, gesturing to the enormous space we’ve just walked into. “To the left is the dining area. Right is the kitchen and some of the living quarters of the staff. This is the Grand Staircase. Your room is on the top floor. Follow me.”

She’s already ascending the stairs, but I’m not ready to follow yet. I’m still taking in the bottom floor.

Artwork everywhere. Paintings and statues, luxurious-looking rugs, pedestals holding delicate vases filled with flowers from the garden.

I don’t recognize any of the paintings, but something about them just tells me they’re super-expensive. Everything in this room probably cost millions. I doubt Halli’s parents are like my mom and me, picking up cheap artwork at garage sales and hanging it in our living room just because we think it’s pretty.

“Miss Markham?”