One Verse Multi, page 32
“Okay,” I said.
I tried to lend Hugo my arm. He waved me down and was steady on his feet. We crossed to the door. I knew only seconds remained. I turned back as Josephine demanded Justin find a way to stop the alarm.
“By the way,” I called, “when the alarm stops, you’ll be sucked back to your home-verse, so…good luck cracking security in less than ten seconds. Hope you can swim.”
Josephine gaped at me. I should have left it alone. I had time to regret stopping to brag, to see her displeasure when she understood I wasn’t going to let her keep any of what she felt she had earned. The alarm pulsed, the volume dropping then rising, but the peak of it was lost to the sound of her roaring, her rage clear and focused on me. The gun was out of Carl’s hands before he knew it. Hugo shoved me hard, my shoulder colliding with the jamb of the door. I lost track of the structure of the room, of the definition of reality. The corner of the jamb caught my ribs right where they had yet to heal. There was the added force of Hugo’s body falling on mine, falling with me, falling into me as he pushed me out of Josephine’s line of fire.
“Martin,” Hugo cried.
“Martin,” Luca said in my head one last time.
There was the sound of the gun, Hugo screaming, and then the cool rush of water all around.
Section 30
You’ll see me again
It took the doctors a while to patch Hugo up. He had taken the bullet in the upper arm and then been dipped in the ocean. Some beach cleaners had come across our bodies around dawn, and they called an ambulance. I was treated for a hundred things that didn’t matter. And Hugo made a full recovery after a few weeks. He invited me to his family’s ranch in the Wyoming territory. He told his family I was a work buddy who needed a change of pace, and that was all they needed to know.
One Saturday after about a week on the ranch, we were willing to put all the pieces together for the first time. We had spent the morning chopping up a few trees that had fallen during the last snowstorm and were tripping up the cattle. I had never used a chainsaw before, and we didn’t get very far because, healed or not, we were still bone-tired and weak.
As a treat, Hugo and his brother, Lyle, stacked some of those logs in a fire pit, and his mother, Tilda, made us coffee. We sat out under the stars by the fire, tucked into thick jackets and warm blankets. The family stayed around—Lyle, his wife and their three kids, Hugo’s parents and his two sisters. But as the second round of logs were tossed on the fire, the others decided to go to bed. After an hour or so alone, Hugo tipped a flask into his coffee. I declined. We sat in silence for a long time. Then something in the firepit popped, and I found my voice.
“It’s weird seeing you be a real cowboy. I thought the hat and boots were for show.”
Hugo laughed. “Well, those were my good boots, not like these shit-kickers. I think the real unbelievable thing is getting you to look the part.”
It was true. I fought him on wearing the French western shirts, but I couldn’t say no to his father gifting me a hand-me-down coat and hat. I had impressed Pa Del Mar with my French cowboy-isms so much that he also gave me his favorite horse, a black monstrosity named Bien Joué.
“I can’t believe it’s going to be March,” I said, warming my cold hands by the fire.
“Three months since…”
“Hey…H.”
He grunted, his breath billowing around him.
“Why am I here? I thought the Other Sock Phenomenon was supposed to send me home.”
He shrugged. “Je ne sais pas. There are still a million things we don’t understand about the multi-verse. Why does tuning transport our clothes but not the ground we stand on? Or those around us? Or the whole earth? My best guess is that you’re not all one verse, like your photos show. And because you were in contact with me during the event, perhaps the universe couldn’t tell where you belonged. Since my frequency made up the majority of our amalgam, here you are.”
“Huh.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For?” I asked.
He looked at me, his expression clear. “How lonely it must be without them.”
I knew by them he meant both my family and my partners.
“I’m glad I have someone around, though,” I said, hoping it conveyed my gratitude. “Not many guys’ll take a bullet for you.”
“You came back for me. It was the least I could do.”
“What happened that night? What happened to you?”
We hadn’t talked about it. I think we needed some time to heal. I know that thinking about it, working it out in my own head made my ribs ache and feel like they would never be the same. When I didn’t think about it, I could nearly feel my body recover. I think Hugo felt the same. At the fire’s edge that night, he explained how Josephine had demanded he let her into the system. He gave her the runaround by dragging her all over HQ, but she got the upper hand when Justin and Carl showed up with some more people. They had threatened to kill Del. Hugo couldn’t let anyone get hurt, so he caved and took them to the Main Control room. He didn’t say anything else after that, and he spent the rest of the night watching them try to hack into the computers.
“Do you think it worked? The plan, I mean.”
“I know it did,” he said. “This area of the country has a lot of natural rift activity, but I haven’t seen evidence of one. You’ll see. It worked.”
I believed him. I hadn’t used any of my rift-locating skills since getting to the ranch. I think I feared it working as much as I feared it not. I loved Hugo, but thinking about my mother and Apollo wondering where I was and what happened to me broke my heart. I liked to believe Tidus and Luca were keeping tabs on each other, but who knew.
After that Saturday, I passed time by doing whatever job Pa Del Mar and Lyle could come up with. I learned to ride a horse and learned how allergic I was to them, even though that didn’t matter. I accompanied Hugo’s uncles when they played the fiddle or the guitar. I learned to drive the oldest truck on earth. It was positive even if it wasn’t happy.
I also mapped the natural rifts Hugo had mentioned. I spent hours walking or driving around their property and the ranches nearby, scouting rift locations. Hugo was right. There was no sign of them. But other signs confirmed our plan had worked. As time passed, we saw news reports about missing people being found or missing items being rediscovered. Sometime in June, Hugo and I watched a news series about the disappearance of world-renowned scientist Carl Payne. The here-verse Carl had been killed and MVP Carl had been living as him. And in the aftermath of Operation Other Sock, the Payne family was begging people for answers as to where he might be.
In my weaker moments, I thought about driving or flying down to Florida. I thought about looking up here-verse Tidus, asking him if he knew me, asking if he could contact my Tidus. I didn’t, though. It wasn’t even out of consideration for Tidus. No, I would’ve selfishly disrupted a new Tidus if I thought it would allow me any contact with mine. But I knew if I did, I wouldn’t be able to let it go. So I just thought of the few moments we were able to have. I also knew it probably wouldn’t work. I had asked Hugo a few times if he could sense Del, but he said he didn’t. I thought of Luca. He usually snuck into my thoughts unexpectedly when I was working or just before I fell asleep.
I would say I was squirrelly and anxious and depressed during the first months I spent on the ranch. Hugo, on the other hand, was the picture of calm. He was as in his element helping goats give birth on the ranch as he had been detailing the structure of the multi-verse on a white board. He talked a lot about missing people even though he never explicitly said he did. He would just mention how much Wei had liked pancakes or how much Tamar would’ve hated some new movie. I missed all of them too.
He didn’t start to get weird until August. He grew distracted and quiet, and I could hear him deriving equations under his breath. When I asked him about it, he just said he was thinking. When he started to go to bed early and wake up late I really started to worry about him. It was on a trip into Denver to the stock show that I had to demand an answer.
“Dude,” I shouted.
He snapped out of his thoughts and looked at me.
“You missed our exit,” I said.
He slowed the truck and stared at the next highway sign we passed. “Oh shit. Did I?”
“No, dude, how could you? It’s a fucking straight shot to Denver. I just wanted you to realize how distracted you were.”
“I’m sorry, I was thinking. Were you talking about something?”
I rolled my eyes. “No. But I want to know where you’ve been.”
He looked at me and sighed. “We aren’t going to the stock show.”
I looked around feeling suddenly ungrounded, as if the mountains might suddenly shift. They didn’t. I looked back at him. “Where are we going?”
“I have a gift for you. We’ll be there in two hours. Can you wait? Just trust me.”
I shrugged. “Okay. I guess.”
I watched vigilantly as he drove into the Colorado territory and then pulled off the highway to a city I knew very well in my home-verse. My parents lived there.
“Why are we here?”
“Almost there,” he said. He pulled the truck into a neighborhood and parked in front of a nice house.
“In my home-verse.”
“Yup. This would be your parents’ front yard.”
“Why are we here?” I asked again.
He reached into the back seat and handed me a duffel bag. I opened it and it was full of the clothes he had bought me to live and work in on the ranch.
“Oh shit, you’re kicking me out?” I said looking at the neighborhood. It suddenly felt as remote as the deepest woods.
“No…well, not like that,” Hugo laughed. “The way I see it…we are running out of time.”
As he talked, he reached into the glove box in front of me. He handed me the phone he pulled out of the compartment.
“Is this a sequencer?”
“Oui. I found it in the attic when we were cleaning for Mom last month. It turned on. Martin, the people we were up against were elite multi-verse scientists. That means the fence you and Luca and Tidus created won’t hold forever. I wouldn’t even give it another year.”
“You don’t think so?”
“No, but if that’s all the time we have before those people have access to everything again, I want you to be able to spend it with people you love.”
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you too, but you know what I mean.”
The surprise of potentially losing my best friend, of leaving him behind in this verse was scary. I had done a lot of healing with that man. I had lived in his house. I had been adopted by his family. Who was I suddenly without him? He was a brother.
I looked over the device, then tried to hand it back to him. “Hugo, this won’t even work. The fence prevents tuning too.”
“It won’t tune you.”
I stared at him.
“I modified it. If you use one hundred percent of its power, it’ll recreate the frequency boost that drew things back to their home-verses. If you use it, it’ll send you to wherever you were meant to be. I figure since we don’t know which, I could drive here or I could drive to Florida. Either way, I have an equal chance of guessing right. This was closer.”
I thought about what he was saying. If he boosted my frequency, I would either end up in my parents’ front yard or I would end up in some stranger’s yard in the FOX-verse, but then I could go find them. Either way, it meant walking away from Hugo.
“What if it doesn’t work?” I asked. My voice caught, and I was surprised by my own fluctuating emotions.
“So what? We go back to the ranch. We’re having corn chowder for dinner.”
“God, I hope it works. I can’t take any more chowder,” I said with a wink.
He laughed. I looked at him. He had a subtle scar over his eye. He also looked older but in a healthy, vibrant way. Winter had suited him best, but the golden highlight to his skin from working in the sun wasn’t a miss either.
“What if—”
“Martin, you’ll see me again.”
I sighed and looked at the device. “Really, you think less than a year?”
He nodded. The decision to try it was instantaneous and overwhelming. If I believed I would see him again, I knew I could press call.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay.”
I reached over to the driver’s side and pulled Hugo into a hug. We were both stronger than we had been, completely healed with a summer of hard labor behind us. But it was painful. I felt my eyes well with tears, but they didn’t fall. I pulled away and held up the phone.
“Maybe you should get out of the truck. You’ll end up on your ass if you do it sitting,” he said. Hugo had teary eyes too, but he played it off.
“Oh, fair,” I said with a laugh. I stepped out of the truck.
“If you end up in FOX-verse, give Luca and Tidus my best.”
“Oh, I’ll give them something all right.”
Hugo laughed and cringed at the same time. I took a step back on the sidewalk and watched Hugo as I pressed call on the device. I saw him wave, then he was gone and the street was empty.
I turned around and looked at the house. It was dark, and there was a For Sale sign on the lawn.
* * *
I knew where I had to go next. I took a taxi to the next city and looked up their name in the directory at the cemetery. When I got to their headstone, I knew exactly where I was. It was a flat headstone covered in bright flowers and toys. Someone still cared for it.
“You know, I wonder about you,” I said to Mikyea Winslow’s headstone. “I don’t plan to live your life. I just wonder how you would’ve turned out. What name would you have picked? What job? Would you love Tidus too? Luca? I owe you, though. I wouldn’t get to be here if it weren’t for you.”
Mikyea didn’t seem to have anything to say. I straightened the toys on their headstone and walked away. The forces of the universes had sent me here, to them. I only need to find them.
Tidus was easier to track down than Luca since I already knew where he lived. All I knew about Luca’s family was that they lived in Pennsylvania. It took an hour of discussion at the bank to get access to the accounts I had in the FOX-verse, especially since Tidus had made some changes. Then it was two flights to Florida, all just to find out Tidus had moved. Thankfully, the kid who lived there now was one of the grandkids of the landlords Tidus had been holding the place for. Without any suspicion, he gave me Tidus’s new address.
Tidus was living in New York and going to school. I bought a phone, some new clothes, and another plane ticket. I wasn’t surprised he was doing more school but was surprised he had ended up in New York. According to a map app on the phone, his house was a brick standalone duplex on a wooded lane. I rented a room at the only motel in town so I could clean up before I went to see him. I had no idea what I was going to say.
The walk over was pleasant enough, thanks to the quaint nature of the town. I had gotten used to the wide plains of the ranch, so the tree-lined streets made me feel crowded. I wondered if I should have looked up his phone number. Or looked him up on social media. Or bought a gift. It had been eight months. I guess I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had moved on. If he could change states, he could change boyfriends.
My thoughts were interrupted by a blunt mass slamming into my body. I collapsed under the force and instinctually curled into a ball. I could only register the thing on top of me was solid, soft, and wet all at the same time.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry. He usually doesn’t do this,” a husky voice shouted. It all snapped into place, and I found myself laughing. Tidus got Bowser under control about the same time I got my laughing under control.
“I’m really sorry, I—” Tidus offered me a hand. Then he snatched it away, screaming. When he realized it was me, he screamed again, only joyfully, and tossed himself on me like Bowser had.
“Are you fucking kidding me? How is it you? Is it really you? I mean, I guess it can’t be anyone else, can it?”
“It’s me,” I reassured him. He pressed into me, trapping me between him and the sidewalk and rubbing his face against mine. His attentions quickly became an urgent and messy kiss. I lost track of everything in the breathless moments his mouth was on mine.
“I thought,” I said when he finally freed my mouth, “I thought you might’ve moved on.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I mean, you moved all the way to New York.”
“I can’t even. I had to do something while I waited for you to show up again.”
We got to our feet, and I got a proper look at him. His hair was styled into an undercut ponytail and was dyed grayish blue. He had on an uncropped T-shirt from his school and tight jeans. It was so casually him, and it was perfect.
“You look amazing,” we said at the same time.
He posed in a high-fashion way, and I tried to brush off the compliment.
“I’m amazed to see you,” he said.
“Same. Have you heard from Luca? I was going to find him too, I just knew where you lived, but then you were here and—I mean, I had to look for someone first.”
Tidus laughed. I sighed and tried to regroup.
“Chill, Martin. I get it. And yeah, I know where Luca is. We talk, I guess you could say. Oh, hey, you should come in and meet my roommate.”
“Roommate or roommate?”
“Ew, no. He’s old. Anyway, come on. We can talk about Luca inside,” he said.
“Tidus,” I said, grabbing his arm. “I missed you.”
He smiled and kissed me much more gently. “I missed you too.”
Bowser insisted on walking by my side as we went up the steps to the porch, and he sat on my feet as we waited for Tidus to open the door. Tidus stepped in and Bowser bounded inside. The hallway was wide, stairs going to the second level right inside the door. Then there was a long hallway to what I assumed was the common areas on the ground floor of the house.
