Unbreakable

All one hundred and forty of them.

I try to keep myself busy, and most days I can push thoughts of him to the back of my mind, but I can’t forget him. I’ll be doing something mundane, like teasing Jared and ruffling his hair or helping Cecily at the evac shelter, and a memory of Ben or something he said will just strike me.

Like the time Cee and I were fueling the last of the gas tanks and I told her, “I’ve always loved the smell of gasoline.”

And suddenly I was overcome with a moment and I was somewhere else—Ben and I standing outside Kon-Tiki Motorcycles in Pacific Beach, a breeze coming off the ocean, my skin feeling strangely empty and open. My fingers intertwined with his, I moved into his space and laid my forehead on his chest. His whole body relaxed, as if tension was rolling off his body in waves. His free hand came up and his fingers slipped through my hair before his hand settled between my shoulder blades, and I whispered his name.

There’s always a second where I’m lost in the memory and I feel light and happy. A giddy smile will overtake my face, and it will almost feel like he was just here.

Almost.

Then the heaviness of reality sets in, and I remember that I’m alone. That Ben is gone.

And it’s like my heart breaks all over again.

Nights are worse. I lie awake and think of the way Ben’s lips tasted against mine, or the strength in his long fingers and the way they felt against my skin. Sometimes missing him is visceral—I remember what it was like to have his arms around me, and I can feel their absence.

What I miss most is the way he smiled against my cheek.

But this isn’t my Ben Michaels.

The guy must know I mistook him for someone else, because he says, “I just moved down here from San Clemente.” He gestures to another guy behind him who is a little thinner with dark hair that’s cut a little shorter but has the same curl at the ends, and he has the same deep-set eyes. He looks almost identical. “My brother and I came after the quakes took out our house. We heard there was more food down here.”

His brother—Derek.

“It’s the military presence,” I mumble. Hopefully that’s enough of an explanation. I can’t force myself to say anything else. I’m too busy looking over his shoulder. His brother looks so much like him, just an older version. I don’t ask what happened to their parents or what kind of lives they used to have. I just stare.

Finally the guy who’s not Ben says something that’s half grunt, half mumble, then bends down and starts picking up the books he dropped.

I almost help him. I ran into him, which is why he dropped the books, but for some reason, I can’t make myself help. I don’t want to get sucked into a conversation with him. I don’t want to know who he is or why he’s here or what he’s like. It doesn’t matter. His similarities and his differences will both feel the same. They’ll hurt.

I look over my shoulder. Cecily is handing two bottles of water to the guy with the broken glasses, but she’s looking at me. I have an overwhelming need to get out of here.

So I do.

I head back to the car, grabbing Cecily and pulling her with me.

“Hey, wait, is that Ben Michaels?” she says. “Oh my God, I thought—”

“It’s not him.” I don’t want to explain what little I know of the multiverse and doppelgängers. Not now.

“But—”

“Cee, I said it’s not him. Do they have anything you want?”

Cecily shakes her head.

“Can we get out of here?”

She must see it on my face, whatever it is that I’m feeling. Or maybe it’s just her good-friend instincts that let her know this is a dead topic. Either way, she nods and moves around to the driver’s side. “Out of here it is.”

I get into the car, my door slamming shut behind me.

Cecily starts the car and we pull away, leaving Ben’s lookalike behind. I curl my hands into fists to keep them from shaking, and lean my head back against the seat.

A few times, I catch her glancing at me, and I know she wants to ask what my deal is. But she doesn’t. Because that’s what makes our friendship work. We tease each other—she’s too high-spirited and I’m too bitchy—but we’re there for each other when it matters.

Which means she knows when I need to be left alone.

I think about Ben Michaels all the time.

Sometimes I wonder if I chose wrong—if I should have asked my Ben to stay. If I had that day to do over, I wonder if I would still make the same choices.

Mostly I just wonder if I’ll ever see him again.

Normally I like being here. Something about the way Cee has adopted the shelter and all its inhabitants as her personal responsibility makes things feel a little less bleak. Hanging out and being bossed around makes it seem like we’re all in this together.

But not right now. This isn’t that kind of visit.

When she sees me, she doesn’t sugarcoat it. “There’s another missing person,” she says, her white-blond hair hanging disheveled from something that might have been a ponytail. Her gray T-shirt is dirty, and her jeans are ripped in a few places. If I’d ever wondered what it looked like to carry the weight of part of the city—the homeless part—on your shoulders, now I know.

Our missing person this time is Renee Adams. She’s twenty-two years old, and according to the description, she’s five-four and thin, with wavy, shoulder-length brown hair, and brown eyes. The only possessions she has to her name are a white long-sleeved sweater, a pair of 7 jeans, flip-flops, a last-season Coach purse, and a gold ring. She worked downtown, and before the quakes, she lived with her boyfriend in Pacific Beach. He’s presumed dead now, and she arrived at Qualcomm after seeing that her apartment building had collapsed in on itself.

Assigned to a cot in Club Level section 47, one of the areas reserved for single women, Renee kept to herself, spent more time sleeping than awake, and cried a lot. She was even assigned to the suicide watch list for one of the grief counselors.

But she wasn’t in her group therapy session this afternoon. And at this moment, a little past nine thirty on Monday evening—more than three hours past city curfew—she isn’t anywhere in section 47. The all-call announcements in the stadium have gone unanswered. Her cot is empty.

Except for the ripped sheet and a tiny, yellowed fragment that unmistakably used to be part of a fingernail.

I hold a ruler between gloved fingers and take a picture of the measurement. The rip is four and three quarters inches long, half an inch at its widest point, and the nail looks like it might be from her thumb.

I imagine a girl pulled off the cot, reaching out to grab on to something—anything—and catching hold of the sheet. Only sheets aren’t very strong, so it rips easily, and she leaves a tiny piece of herself behind.

“When did she go missing?” Deirdre asks, her voice quiet but weighed down with a sense of gravity.

I don’t look at Cecily when she says she doesn’t know. She’s trying to look calm and in charge, trying to hold it together, but her eyes are red-rimmed, and her face has that splotchy look it gets when she’s cried too much.

Deirdre has been an FBI agent for a little more than ten years. She worked with my dad for eight of them. She doesn’t know Cecily like I do, but she can recognize undeserved guilt when she sees it. “Cecily, none of this is on you. The best thing you can do right now is give us information.” Rephrasing, she says, “When was she last seen?”

Cecily swallows forcibly. “She missed the group meetings yesterday, too, which was why someone wanted to check on her after she missed again today. I’ve talked to everyone, and by everyone I mean everyone I could find, but she didn’t know many people, or I guess not many people knew her. So as far as I can tell, the last time anyone saw her was the group therapy meeting on Friday at four p.m.”

Three days.

Even though I’m in jeans and a hoodie, I shiver. My dad used to say that, in an endangered circumstance, like an abduction, if you didn’t find the person within twenty-four hours of their disappearance, the chances you’d find them alive were less than 10 percent. And those chances diminished every hour.

“I’m going to talk to the counselor,” Deirdre says, and I can tell by her tone that she’s talking more for Cecily’s benefit than mine. We’ve been opening enough of these files lately; we have a routine. “Finish up and meet by the ramp. Cecily, if you remember anything—”

“Of course,” Cecily says, her eyes wide and eager to please. Her blond hair bounces with each nod of her head. “I’ll tell you right away.”

As soon as Deirdre’s out of sight, Cecily’s shoulders droop and she slumps into a seated position on the floor.

After I snap a few more pictures and write down the remaining details—Renee’s purse is still here, overturned with a broken cell phone on the floor next to what looks like a drop of blood on the concrete—I turn and look at Cee. “I didn’t know her,” she says.

“There are a lot of people here.” We both realize it’s unrealistic to expect her to know everyone. Even someone with the social-butterfly gene like Cee can’t possibly get acquainted with everyone in a stadium full of displaced people.

“But I don’t know anything about her. Not really,” she says, folding her arms across her chest. “Just her name and what people have said about her.”

I want to say something comforting—that’s what Cecily needs from me right now—but everything I think of sounds too cold. Reducing a person to a paragraph of hearsay is depressing no matter what words you use.

“Oh!” Cecily sits up straighter. “I forgot. Someone told me they thought Renee did something with computers. You know, like, for work. They weren’t sure what, but something pretty badass. She’d said something about it one night, about missing her job, and how without computers she was practically obsolete.”

“I’ll put it in the file,” I say.

Cecily laughs. The bitterness doesn’t sound right coming from her. “She thought she was obsolete then. I wonder what she’s thinking now.”

Even though I know it won’t help, I say it anyway. “This isn’t your fault.”

“How could she have disappeared like that?” she asks, picking at her fingernails. “How could any of them? Jennifer Joyce or Clinton Nelson or David Bonnell or—”

I interrupt her before she names all of them. The truth is that she’s right. We shouldn’t be losing more people now. But I don’t say that. Instead I say, “I don’t know, but these are teenagers and grown adults. You can’t be responsible for them.”

She looks up at me, and our eyes meet for the first time tonight.

Her blue eyes are glassy, and I want her to feel better, so I reach for something—anything—that might do it.

“Who knows, maybe they’re not even missing,” I say. “Maybe Renee Adams walked off.” The words stick in my throat. The lie is awkward and forced on my tongue. Someone who loses half a fingernail doesn’t walk off without the last few belongings to her name.

Cecily just shakes her head and looks away.

She knows what I do: that most of the people who are here have nowhere else to go.

“We haven’t found any of them,” she says, her voice hitching near the end of the sentence.

I press my lips and try to think of something useful to say, something to make her feel better. But she’s always been far better at that than I have.

“Where are they all going?” she asks.

I don’t answer, because for the life of me, I don’t know.

“Don’t worry, it’ll get better,” I lie as I hug her.

Then Deirdre and I are in the car and driving through the maze that is the parking lot. We suffer in silence for a few minutes, Deirdre with her lips pressed together, her frown lines etching themselves more permanently into her face. I briefly wonder if she’ll ever laugh or smile like she used to, and then she says what I’ve been thinking this whole time. “Another one.”

I don’t answer, because I don’t have to.

My dad worked in Missing Persons—it was his first job as an analyst with the Bureau—back in the nineties. His first year, there were 67,806 active missing-person cases in the US. I remember thinking then how unfathomably huge that number seemed.

But that was when he was alive.

It doesn’t seem huge anymore.

Because as of this morning, there are 113,801 missing persons—the ones not presumed dead. And that’s just in San Diego County.

Renee Adams is number 113,802.

We pass through the first military checkpoint at Aero Drive and then the one at Balboa Avenue without incident.

Each time, Deirdre stops the car and it’s the same routine. A Marine with a machine gun strapped over his shoulder shines a flashlight into the car. Deirdre holds up both our IDs, and when we’re recognized, the Marine nods and waves us through.

While we drive, I avoid looking out the window. It’s dark, so it’s not like I could really see anything. But I know what’s there. I know the Walmart on Aero Drive survived the quakes with minimal damage, only to be destroyed by the looting. It’s too easy to remember the last time I was there. The crunch of broken glass under my feet, the thick smoke, the smell of fire and burning plastic, and the body of the dead pregnant woman, killed by blunt-force trauma to the back of the head.

It’s much too easy to remember. Every time I close my eyes, I wish I could forget.

Around Balboa, there are some houses still standing and some that are at least inhabitable—but for the most part, everything is different. It doesn’t hurt any less to drive by neighborhoods that are flattened, to see debris where there used to be structures.

It hurts to think that I can hardly remember what it looked like before.

I keep my eyes closed and try to think about nothing—absolutely nothing. I will my mind to keep itself blank. But it’s black, like a black hole, like a portal, and suddenly I can see Ben, his dark eyes and his soft brown hair. I can see the look on his face when he said, “I’ll come back for you.” When he took one more step back and promised. When he stopped, said my name, told me he loved me, and then the portal swallowed him into the blackness.

Aching and a little breathless, I press the heels of my hands into my eyes hard, as if that will somehow get rid of the memory.

But instead of waving us through, he holds on to them, examining their every corner with the flashlight.

My first reaction is to be annoyed. I’m so exhausted my whole body aches with a heaviness that makes me feel sluggish and irritable. We’re supposed to be on the same team—the good guys—and here we are being detained by some overeager hero wannabe.

But when he still doesn’t give the IDs back, a trickle of fear moves through me like a chill. I shiver a little and sit up straighter.

Something’s not right.

He looks up and says, “What’s your business on the road?” His voice is deep, and I don’t recognize it. He’s either new to this checkpoint or new to the night shift.

My heart speeds up, pumping a little too fast.

Deirdre has the patience of a saint, so she doesn’t snap at this guy. Instead she quietly explains, “We’ve just come from Qualcomm. Another missing-person case, endangered, class two.”

Endangered means it looks like an abduction scenario, rather than someone who’s run away or someone who hasn’t been found and is presumed dead from one of the disasters. Class two means it’s someone between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four.

“Can you step out of the car, please?” he says, and my breath feels shallow.

Deirdre must be feeling like me because she says, “Seriously?”

He waits for us to get out. I force my breath to stay even and my hands to relax. Clenched fists don’t exactly say cooperation.

Deirdre opens her door and glances at me. I’d have to be blind to miss the pointed look she gives me. It says, Don’t cause trouble. I don’t need the reminder. Before anyone declared martial law, people sometimes fought the military—there were even a few cases of leftover entitlement after it was official, people who didn’t want to believe the world had changed, people who refused to give up their liberties.

Those people ended up dead.

I bite back the spike of fear that shoots through my chest and open my door.

Getting out of the car, I immediately raise my hands and intertwine my fingers, locking them behind my head. I exhale evenly and tell myself that I know this drill. That I will cooperate and that this is routine.

In a few minutes we’ll be back on our way.

Two Marines in full camouflage step out of the darkness. One trains his gun on me.

“No, sir,” I say.

He nods and begins patting me down.

I almost tell him my gun is in the glove compartment, but then I don’t.

For one, he didn’t ask. And I’d rather he not know it’s there in case I need it.

My whole body is tensed, poised for something—fight or flight, I’m not sure. Maybe I’m also just inherently resistant to some guy with a gun feeling me up. I see two Marines search the car, and I hear the muffled sounds of Deirdre’s voice, though I can’t make out the words.

I force myself to let go of my breath and relax a little.

The Marine feeling me up straightens. He’s young and makes me think of Alex—not because they look anything alike, but because four months ago, this guy could have been in high school.

“You can put your hands down,” he says to me, adding louder, “we’re clear.”

Not for the first time, I wonder if Alex would have enlisted if he hadn’t died out behind Park Village. The wave of guilt and sorrow at that thought roils through my body, leaving an ache in my chest and a bitter taste in my mouth. I made so many mistakes, and Alex paid for the worst of them.

I hear Deirdre open her car door. “Janelle, get in.”

I don’t hesitate. I jump in and shut my door in one movement.

My leg bounces a little while I wait for Deirdre to start the car. Her movements are slow and purposeful, so it doesn’t look like we’re running away. Even though I understand the psychology of it, I feel a panicked urge to reach over and do it for her.

I keep my face blank while the engine roars to life. As we start to drive away, slowly leaving the flares and guns behind, I realize I’ve been holding my breath.

“We’re fine,” Deirdre says, her shaking voice the only thing that tells me she’s trying to convince herself as much as me.

“I know,” I say, so she doesn’t worry, but then I lean my forehead against the cool glass of the window, feeling my pulse ring through my ears.

Either she’s unconvinced, or talking it out will help her calm down, because she continues, “They stopped a driver, alone, fifteen minutes before us. He had no explanation for being out after curfew, and when they asked him to get out of the car, he abandoned the vehicle, disarmed one of the Marines, and gave the guy a bloody nose. They lost him in the dark.”

“He got away?” I ask, because I’m surprised. The checkpoint Marines are well trained and heavily armed. Probability would suggest running from them would mean injury or death.

Deirdre nods. “The suspect was male, approximately six feet in height, and in his twenties with shaggy dark hair, blue eyes, and light facial hair. He was dressed completely in black with boots that looked military.”

She stops, and I wait for her to keep going. There’s obviously more.

But she doesn’t say anything else, so I look over. Her face is a mask as she stares out the windshield, but then she presses her lips together, slows the car to a stop, and looks over at me.

She repeats the description, though she doesn’t need to. “Sound like anyone you know?”

I look away. Of course it does.

It’s exactly how I would have described a certain agent with the Interverse Agency, the agency that polices the multiverse. An agent who infiltrated the FBI when he was trying to stop Wave Function Collapse. An agent that I don’t have a stellar relationship with.

Taylor Barclay.

Deirdre adds, “They sent out a search team, but it’s like he disappeared.”