riven, maggie morris [great book club books .txt] 📗

reached the end. I slid past him and gasped. Sitting on the ground was another gracher, and-gracher babies.

“You’re a father?” I asked Bramble, though he couldn’t understand me. I slowly approached the mom. She lifted her head and looked at me with wary eyes.

A loud sound suddenly broke the silence, and I instinctively dropped to the ground. My heart started racing. Then, I realized that the sound had come from Bramble. It must’ve been the way grachers communicated.

He brushed past me and nudged his wife with his muzzle. She licked him and wrapped her tail around the babies. Unlike Bramble, her tail was at least three feet long. It must’ve been a gender thing; the females have long tails, the males have short.

I studied the babies. There were three of them, and even though grachers are not very cute animals, these ones were adorable. There were two without short tails, and the smallest one had a long, flowing tail. She was the only one with her eyes closed.

I needed to name them, so I would know who was who. I pointed at the biggest.

“Jinx.” Then the other boy. “Kipp.” The mom. “Jen.” And finally, the daughter. “Carter.”

Jen looked at me with wide eyes. The wariness in them had been replaced by trust. I stretched out my hand and she nuzzled it. Then, keeping my eyes on her, I reached down to pet one of her babies. Carter.

I soon as my hand touched her, Carter’s eyes flew open. Staring back at me were the prettiest blue eyes I had ever seen. The color looked so strange. I had been used to seeing grey, grey, and more grey.

“I’ve got to get them to the Sanctuary,” I mumbled to myself. “They’ll starve out here!” I looked at Jen again.

Talking slowly, I said, “I’m are going to get you and your family to safety. I need you to stand up so I can put your babies on your back.”

I already knew that grachers were very intelligent creatures, but I was still shocked when Jen stood up right away. Reaching for Jinx first, I grunted at the weight of the newborn. Once he was settled comfortably on his mom’s back, I set Kipp up with him.

The I gently picked up Carter-she was a lot lighter than her brothers-and mounted Bramble. He licked my hand and then left exited the tunnel.

Now that I could see Jen standing, I saw that she was almost as big as Bramble. In the tunnel, she had looked small and fragile, but now she looked muscular and protective.

Bramble broke into a sprint, with Jen right beside him. Carter stood up and yipped. I held onto her so she wouldn’t fall off, but didn’t make her sit.

As we neared the Sanctuary, I heard shouts. I could see a big blob of people outside the gate. I pushed Bramble faster. Once we were closer, I could make out the faces of the workers in the Sanctuary. They were all circled around something laying on the ground.

Before Bramble had even had a chance to cringe from the shoe polish, I had jumped off. I hit the crowd at a sprint and shouldered through to get a better view.

Collapsed on the dirt was a little boy. His hair was long, probably due to the lack of scissors, and dirt caked every inch of his body. His eyes were closed.

“Who is that?” I whispered. All eyes lifted off the boy and looked at me.

“Alice? Why are you out here?” Liam’s worried eyes looked me over.

“Long story. Who is this boy?”

“A survivor,” my dad intervened. “He was laying here when we got back from the Collection.”

“Why haven’t the guards noticed him?”

“Not sure. Let’s get him inside,” Dad said grimly. Gently, more gentle than I’d ever seen him be, Dad scooped the boy up in his arms.

“Clear a path!” I commanded. “And someone get that gate open!” My voice rang with authority, and I was immediately obeyed. Dad waddled through, his walking affected by the weight of the boy.

Inside, the guards were sitting in the center of the Sanctuary playing cards. I blanched.

“What the heck are you doing!?” I yelled. They looked up startled. “You are supposed to be guarding our safe house from thieves and wild animals, not playing cards!”

“Alice, calm down,” Lol said.

“No! I will not calm down! A little boy was laying out there half-dead on the ground, and what were you doing? Playing cards!” For the second time that day, I stomped off to my room.

The world had ended, people were dying everyday, and the Sanctuary needed protection, and yet, those loons were sitting there playing cards. I was so angry, I punched my bedroom wall.

I shrieked as the dry wall fell through and my knuckles screamed in protest. I clutched my hand protectively to my chest and collapsed on my bed.

Tears rolled down my cheeks as I tried to move my hand. Bruises were forming, and my whole arm was throbbing. Suddenly, I heard footsteps in the hall. I wiped my tears off with my good hand and tried to act natural.

“Alice? What’s wrong?” It was Liam. Again, we were alone in my room, together. “Were you crying?” As as he sat beside me, his eyes flickered to my hand, which I was cradling. “What happened?” His fingers delicately reached for my hand, and I extended it.

“I may or may not have punched my wall,” I grimaced. Liam sighed, but didn’t say anything. He probed my hand in a way that kind of felt good.

“Four of your knuckles are definitely broken, but I think your thumb is fine. You’re lucky you didn’t tuck it under your fingers like most amateurs do, because then it definitely would’ve broken.”

“Yeah. But I’m not an amateur-I’ve punched before.”

“Wait, you’ve punched someone? I’ve always thought of you as more of a pacifist!”

“What? No! I used to take a boxing class. My parents wanted me to learn self-defense. Pacifist, though, would still not be my top choice of words to describe me,” I smiled.

He grinned back. “But I wanted to tell you-you need to learn to keep your cool. People like Jason and the guards might get on your nerves, but you can’t let them see that. No matter what you think, we aren’t safe here. Anyone in this Sanctuary could be a murderer, and we wouldn’t know it. Just-be careful. You don’t want to get on anyone’s bad side.”

XI

 

I reached my hand out and touched the water, watching in satisfaction as it rippled back and forth. My reflection shook, then steadied itself again. A small fish swam by brushing my hand.

I sat back on the lush green grass, and breathed in the rich summer air. Liam laid beside me, absentmindedly stroking my hair.

“If you could have anything, what would it be?” He asked me.

“You,” I whispered, and leaned in to kiss him. Suddenly, his eyes turned fiery, and he crumbled away into smoking ashes. The grass quickly caught fire from the heat of the ash, and it spread in a ring around me.

I screamed as the flames leapt at me, singing my hair and burning my hands. The grass I was sitting on stayed green, but past the ring of fire, flames flew across the ground, resulting everything to black.

Shadows flickered around me, but there was nothing to cast them. Flames surrounded me, and suddenly I was burning. I crumbled, melting into ash, when suddenly, the smoke cleared and sunlight broke through. My body reformed and I was wearing a white gown.

Tears spilled over my eyelids as I saw the ring of grass I was sitting on, and the blackness all around. All that was left faded away.

 

* * * * *

 

I cried out, sitting up in my bed. The sheets were twisted and drenched in sweat, and my arms were shaking. I struggled to untangle the sheets from my legs. Finally freeing myself, I got out of bed and jogged to the bathroom.

I undressed and got into the shower, turning it on. I sighed when I saw that the water was dirt brown. I locked my jaw so the water wouldn’t get into my mouth.

The cold water felt soothing on my steaming body, and massaged my sore hand, which was now bandaged tightly, so I stood there for a few minutes, just letting the water run down my shoulders. Knowing I needed to get back to sleep, I turned off the water and stepped out of the shower, grabbing a grey towel-like cloth to dry myself of with.

Suddenly, the door opened. I yelped and tried to cover myself with the cloth as Mom stepped in.

“Sweetie, you forgot to lock the door,” Mom said.

“Mom, you scared me half to death!” I kept the towel wrapped tight around my body

“I heard you cry out all the way from the lab. Are you okay? Did anybody else come in here? Did they-”

I sighed, cutting her off. “Mom, I’m alright. I just had a nightmare.”

“Oh.” Her body relaxed, then tensed again. “But guess what? We just discovered something-Bryce and Claire are actually alive!”

Shock, followed by disbelief flickered on my face. “Mom, that’s not funny. You know how much I cared about them. You don’t have to rub it in my face.” I thought for a second. “Seriously, why would you do something like this?” I started to brush past her, but she grabbed my shoulder.

“Alice, look at me.” I turned. “I’m serious. We found out that Bryce and Claire were put in another dimension, for reasons we aren’t quite sure of yet. This is no joke.” My eyes widen as I realized she actually was telling the truth.

“So they’re really alive?” I whispered.

“Yes.”

“Oh, Mom, this is so great!” I gushed, tears of happiness streaming from my eyes.

 

* * * * *

 

“We need to locate the dimension,” I said, clicking away on the keyboard. I plugged in a flash drive and pulled up the 3-D model of Sortryn. “To get to Sortryn, I just entered the coordinates at which I had planted it in the parallel universe, along with the name of the universe, which is Heslusal. That means that where Bryce and Claire are could either be a planet in the Heslusal solar system, or they might be in the completely separate dimension that was created to be Heslusal parallel universe.”

“I’m not following,” Ben said. I had woken him up to help me search for Bryce and Claire’s location. My mom and the other scientists had gone back to sleep.

“You don’t need to. Ugh, but this brings up another problem. If when Heslusal was created, another parallel universe was automatically created for it, that means that that parallel universe will have it’s own parallel universe, and so on. Which means that we have to go to each parallel universe and scan each entire one for Bryce or Claire’s DNA.”

“Sounds like a lot of work.” Tears sprung into my eyes.

“It could take the rest of my lifetime.” I buried my head in my hands. Ben awkwardly patted my back. I lifted my head. “Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, we need some of Bryce’s and Claire’s DNA and need to make a sample, so in each dimension, all we have