Nothing.
Entering would be stupid and dangerous—I had to find Director Facet already. The other Hazel wasn’t responding, though. If she lay inside injured and I walked away . . .
(A part of me whispered: If this is my chance to sneak into one of the off-limits barns, the way Caro tried years ago—the way I might have done if I had half her guts—)
I went in, climbing over an entry gate between two guard stations. I landed on the other side with a thud and swerved, as if the empty guard stations would prove not to be so empty after all. Sixteen years of following every rule they put in front of me, and then—when it really counted, when the world was blowing up around us—I was sneaking around unauthorized areas. Facet would be so disappointed if he knew.
I bit my lip, which tasted filthy from the dirt trapped in the air. Two hallways on the right, one on the left. I tried to recall the location of the X in that sketched rectangle of the barn, and turned left. This part of the building was relatively untouched. The lights above me were dead—I had to use my phone to see—but the walls were intact and the doors were shut, secured with card readers or retinal scanners.
Only one door stood ajar. When I creaked it open, my phone lit up a slim, tall shape standing a couple of yards away. Bright red dress, block heels. The other Hazel was using her phone to illuminate the walls, like me.
She flinched as my phone’s flashlight hit her eyes.
“Sorry.” I hastily flicked it off.
“You’re OK.”
“You came looking for me? Thank you.”
“I heard a noise.”
“That wasn’t me. But look.” She wiggled her phone at an observation window. Past it, in a square room, stood a small, white horse. Hip-height, lithe. Its chest moved fast. Something looked off about it even beyond its size. I squinted, tilted my head. The light shifted, and—
“Scales?” I said.
“And membrane. Between its legs and body. See?”
Even the horse’s color was strange. With the flashlight reflecting off those subtle scales, it skewed pale blue.
“That . . . isn’t from this world,” I said.
“It’s not from mine, either.”
The creature must’ve arrived through the rift. If the rift connected to more dimensions than only this other Hazel’s, perhaps the theories on other dimensions I’d read up on over the years were true. Infinite worlds containing infinite Hazels and infinite creatures. This one probably wasn’t even the strangest.
The MGA had said they didn’t know whether the rift connected to other dimensions. If they’d seen this animal, though, they had to have known.
They’d lied.
“That’s a . . .” The other Hazel seemed to struggle to find the word. “A water horse. Like from that show Caro loves.”
“A kelpie,” I said.
“The agents put me in a room like this, across the building. This must be where they keep whatever comes through that rift.”
The horse retreated into a corner, where a pool a few feet wide was set into the ground. The other Hazel lowered her phone.
“I doubt this is part of our ‘answers,’” she said. “You were right, by the way. Calling didn’t work. I can’t get a signal.”
She kept moving. After a moment’s pause, I followed. I shouldn’t have been there, maybe (for sure), but now that I was, I couldn’t leave without knowing the promised answers. If the MGA had lied to me about alternate universes, they could’ve kept even more from me.
The hall smelled sterile, like I imagined a hospital smelled, and it looked that way, too, with blank walls and scuff marks down the center of the dull gray floor. Red-Dress Hazel shone her phone into each cell we passed. Many were empty. Others had plants—repotted trees brushing the ceiling or shrubbery lining the walls. I could swear one plant had been moving and froze only when the light hit it. Malfunctioning solar lights and cameras sat in the ceilings. On each door there was a chart with unintelligible statistics and measurements. They listed dates—recent dates—but what did that mean? Dates of arrival? Dates of testing?
I leaned into a window, studying a cell that seemed empty aside from a silver puddle in its center. Red-Dress Hazel gasped. Her wide eyes fixed on the next cell.
I walked closer, not sure I even wanted to know.
Colors.
That was the first thing I saw. Colors shone brightly in the beam of the light, red and purple and green and yellow. A second later, my brain made sense of the rest. Inside sat a girl our age, half her hair buzzed to a short fuzz and the other half dangling down past her ears in a jagged cut. She’d dyed it every shade of the rainbow.
She was sitting cross-legged at the back of the cell and stared at us, her mouth open. Her front teeth were big—in a way I recognized. Her face slotted into place: the thin lips, the too-long chin, the glasses.
That mole above her eyebrow.
Her mouth moved. The glass was soundproof; we didn’t even hear a whisper.
“Another?” I said.
“Holy crap,” Red-Dress Hazel said.
I stared for longer than I should have. Coming face-to-face with—well—my face was one thing. With Red-Dress Hazel, I could’ve pretended I was looking in the mirror. The makeup, clothes, and glasses were the only things different about her. We even wore our hair the same style and length.
But this Hazel? I’d looked with envy and awe at women on TV with hair like hers, half dreamed of one day being bold and trying something different with my own. It’d never gone past dreams that even I didn’t take seriously. Hair like that would only make me a target. When that senior girl Kasey had donated her hair to charity and showed up to school with a buzz cut, suddenly rumors were flying around about her creeping on girls in the changing room.
I didn’t want anyone to think I was gay. Having hair like that—it’d make it so final. As though, right now, there was still a chance I’d someday wake up feeling comfortably straight, and I’d never again have to wonder about who I liked or what I had to do about it.
The Hazel in this cell didn’t seem to share my uncertainty. The buzzed, dyed-black hair on one side only made the rainbow shades on the other half stand out fiercer. Her glasses were different, too. Whereas mine and Red-Dress Hazel’s were black and nondescript, this Hazel’s glasses were a dark, stylish purple, with winged tips. And she wore a necklace: two Venus symbols, intertwined.
This wasn’t me given a two-minute makeover.
This was me from another world. A me as alien as that kelpie down the hall.
A me who—if Red-Dress Hazel’s note was to be believed—held answers.
Rainbow Hazel snapped out of it faster than either of us. She scrambled toward the glass and pointed at the wall where the keypad lock was. She said something else—shouted maybe—but I couldn’t tell what.
I aimed my light at the keypad and tapped numbers at random. It didn’t respond. No beeps, no lights. The screen remained empty.
“Can we break the window?” Red suggested.
“It’ll be bulletproof.” Everything else on the grounds was. I frowned. “Whoever wrote that note must’ve known we would have no way of getting her out.”
“Actually,” a voice to our right said, “it’s not her the note refers to.”