Chapter 29: Earth
I cry out, both hands clutching involuntary at my heart. Hardly any light streams through my window. When my door opens and Jesse’s head pokes through, his hair is flying in all directions. Still early morning, then.
“What's wrong?”
My chest is unharmed, my heart beating steadily underneath perfectly smooth skin, but I can't seem to form words. Jesse looks me over, and then climbs into bed beside me, pulling my head against his chest.
“Bad one, huh?”
I shake my head against him. “I thought I died.”
Jesse stills. “What?”
I tell him about the Ascension, and my last memory, of being stabbed in the heart.
His eyebrows rise. “Is that something Terrans can survive?”
“I don’t know. I have a heart there, so our physiology seems to be the same. At least there were Healers present, standing near the outer edge of the courtyard.”
“I thought you said I was there,” Jesse says. “I'd never have let something like that happen to you on Earth. What’s wrong with Terran me? Sounds like Jesse 2.0 sucks.”
“You were fighting your own match. You couldn't have done anything anyway,” I say. “It's like a ritual or something.”
He swears. “You need to be more careful. We need to figure out how to get the Terran version of you a message.”
“Can't be done. How many times have we tried?” I swing out of bed and walk into the kitchen, Jesse on my heels.
“Yeah, but your dreams are growing more dangerous,” he says. “I don't like it.”
“And, people I know are popping up more. I fought Henry there last night.”
“Wait, lover boy Henry?” He pulls out a bag of generic Corn Pops.
“Yep. He's in the Unit.” A chill creeps up my spine. In seventeen years, I never encountered another single person on Terra who I knew on Earth, not even my own mom. But now Robert, then Jesse, and a few days later, Henry.
“You said they have some kind of freaky ritual or something when a baby is born, right?” Jesse asks. “Where like, the mom and dad just know the name.”
“The mom—always the mom. Sometimes there’s a dad. And actually, I even saw it happen not that long ago,” I say. “Betty had another baby, and I got a peek.” I shudder. “Kind of the same as here—she pushes the baby out. But then Betty and Abraham both kind of acted flabbergasted and then, bam. They looked at each other and Betty said, ‘her name is Sheena.’”
“What if?” Jesse taps his lip. “What if they’re connected to Earth somehow—and that’s why they don’t have sex to make the baby. The babies are being made here. The Naming thing is, like, I don’t know. Somehow the name of the person on Earth, where the mom and dad made the child, just gets, like, passed over.”
I frown.
“And that exordium thing is like the Naming thing. You fall in love here, you just become in love on Terra.”
“That doesn’t add up,” I say.
“Why not?” Jesse tilts his head. “It seems to, to me.”
“I met my soulmate,” I say softly. “And I’m definitely not in love here.”
Jesse swears under his breath. “Every time I think it might make sense.” He spreads his arms. “Nothing.”
“I know you want me to make friends and open up, but J.” I gulp. He’s not going to like this. “I think we need to prepare to run. It may come to that. Something isn't right on Terra, and it worries me. It seems more and more connected to Earth, and, I don’t know.” I shiver.
Jesse pours himself a big bowl of cereal and passes the bag to me. “But as you and I have just proven, it’s not the same. You’re seeing people you know, which is new, and you’re in danger there, but you got stabbed in the heart, and then you woke up here, completely fine.”
Because Healers fixed me there before I ever woke up here—I’m sure of it.
I’ve always been surrounded by Healers—and they’ve always fixed me right away.
“I can’t shake the feeling that we aren't safe.” I can’t explain it, but as things heat up on Terra, it’s like a noose is tightening around my neck. “They think I’m the Warden,” I say. “Some prophesied female Lifter who will destroy and remake the world.” I pour the rest of the nearly full bag of cereal into a salad bowl, and Jesse hands me the milk carton. I dump the rest of it in.
He shakes his head. “I know it’s scary.” He sits down at the table and sighs. “But let’s review. You saw some villain on Terra, and then he supposedly had a heart attack in your restaurant.”
“Supposedly?” I nearly drop my spoon. “You think I’m making it up?”
“Not at all, but we weren’t in the hospital. We don’t know what happened to him.”
“He died on Earth because I killed him on Terra.”
“But you killed him the night before. Why wouldn’t he just drop dead immediately?”
“It was a head wound,” I say. “He could have gone into a coma on Terra, and then died later—at the same time as he died on Earth.”
Jesse sighs. “And are you sure that was the same person? I mean, could it just have been someone who looked a lot like the Robert person from your dream? You did feel guilty for possibly injuring him, right?”
I freeze with a bite almost to my mouth, milk dripping back into my bowl below.
He doesn’t believe me.
“And I’m your brother in both places, for heaven’s sake. No threat there.” He chews and swallows. “Clearly Henry's trying to help you here on Earth. He's not nefarious.” He sets his spoon down and straightens. “Things are finally settling for us—I have a new job. You do, too. You’ve made a friend.”
“Doesn't it bother you that you and Henry popped up in Terra? And that Dad didn’t? Or Mom? You know, our real mom.” My heart lurches.
Jesse’s eyebrows draw together. “But who are you afraid of here?”
I don’t even need to think about it. “Declan Rosenbaum.”
“Right, but you haven't seen or heard from him in more than eighteen months.”
“But if I had, I’d have packed you up and put you on a bus no matter what you said.”
“I really do wonder what it means, that you're encountering people you know.”
I narrow my eyes and shift so I'm sitting directly across from him. “What do you mean, what it means?”
“You're seeing people you know, all of a sudden. I mean, every time I sleep, I dream about people and things I know, mixed with a lot of fantastical nonsense. I’m never healed while I’m sleeping of course, but it does make me wonder.”
“Wonder about what?”
“Hear me out here—you know I love you. You know that you’re everything to me, and always have been. Without you in my life, I have nothing. You know I’m here for you, no matter what.”
No matter what? That sounds ominous. My stomach twists.
“You believe you speak other languages—”
“I believe?” I clench my hands into fists. “You’ve heard me speak other languages.”
Jesse’s eyes are open, calm. “I have. But I only speak English.”
Realization dawns, dark and terrible. “You think I’m making it up.”
He shakes his head. “I think you believe you are speaking other languages.”
“I heard Paul speaking in German the other day. How do you explain that?”
“Did you?” Jesse asks. “Or did you think you knew what he was saying, so it felt like you understood him? Did anyone else hear him? Someone we know really speaks German?”
I gulp.
“Alora, no one in the world loves you as much as me. But—”
“What about the healing?” I ask. “You saw my wrist. And last year, there was my broken arm.”
“I saw a swollen wrist,” he says. “And your arm was puffy and it hurt.”
“You think they weren’t actually broken and a good night’s rest was more than enough to fix whatever was wrong.”
Jesse shrugs. “I don’t know what I think. I’ve always assumed that every single thing you told me was true and was actually happening. And that may very well be the case, but at least consider the alternative. What if your very vivid, very consistent dreams are not real? What if, now that life is finally good for us, your brain is conjuring up issues? Or hurdles, call them whatever you like. But what if you’re scared that by branching out, by making friends, and by trusting people, you’ll put us back in danger? That would be normal for someone who has gone through what we have.”
I can’t meet his eye.
“Our parents died, Alora. They left us when we were so young. And then Aunt Trina gave us to social services. Then the people who were supposed to care for you betrayed you—betrayed us both.” He takes my hand. “These dreams you have are atypical for sure, and they’re a problem. But I just want you to consider that it’s possible that the dreams are telling us something about what’s going on inside your brain, and maybe they aren’t actually something that’s happening on another world.”
“It’s not fake,” I whisper. I'm not making this all up, and then cutting myself in the middle of the night, or whatever he thinks.
“I don't think you're crazy.”
“Just delusional, and maybe paranoid.”
He exhales. “Look, all I'm saying is, maybe we've been looking at this wrong. We can't get a message to Terran Alora in any way we’ve figured out, but we can look into things here on Earth. You wanted to contact the detective from Mom and Dad's police file. I can dig around to find out about him today after work. We can look into what happened to them. Maybe some resolution there will help you feel better, here and on Terra. I'll even look up your court files and our foster files.”
“What will any of that prove?”
“That I'm on your side. Let's see what we can find out about what happened to us and our family. Maybe someone is following us, but it could be for other reasons than we think.” He leans back. “Or maybe not.”
“You don't think Declan’s after us?”
Jesse goes back to eating what is almost certainly soggy cereal by now. “I don't know. I've never even spoken to the man—heck, I only met him once, when he was leaving after a meeting with you. The social worker I talked to was a woman named Denise or something.”
My heart cracks a little at his words. “Do you think I'm making him up?”
“I believe there was someone scary, ominous, and threatening. I believe he might even have told you he was a caseworker, but caseworkers don’t cross state lines—they don’t have that kind of latitude, or those kinds of resources. Maybe he was a child predator or something and he did search for you. Or maybe you saw someone you thought was him, but really he just looked similar.”
My entire life people have told me I was crazy. Mom and Dad. Aunt Trina. Social workers—including a shrink at the group home—and Declan Rosenbaum. But one person always believed me—believed in me.
And now he thinks I’m losing my mind, too.
I choke on a sob.
“Look, Alora, I don't know anything. I'm just saying we should look into it a little more before packing our bags again.”
“Any digging we do could lead them to us. You said that yourself.”
His eyes are sad, and I realize that he doesn’t believe there’s anyone to lead anywhere. He’s hoping it’s all in my head. “If they’re still looking for us, that’s right. But I think we’re safe here, and I’m willing to gamble I can prove it.”
“What about Henry? Now that I’ve seen him on Terra, I feel like I shouldn't be working for him here. Right?”
Jesse leans toward me, his eyes intent. “I’m on Terra, too. Will you cut me out next?”
Tears well up in my eyes. “You're the only person who matters. You anchor me—you keep me safe and sane.”