(eng) Paul Melko - Walls of the Universe 02 by The Broken Universe

Author:The Broken Universe [Universe, The Broken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21

John stood on the campus of the University of Toledo in Universe 7539, recognizing a place he had never visited and faces that did not know him. 7539 had no John Rayburn or Casey Nicholson. Nor was there a Grace or Henry. But there was a woman here, at least one, and a little girl, who weren’t born here. The question at hand was, how would he find them?

“What do you remember now?” Casey asked. “Does being here help the memories?”

They stood on the footpath near the river. This is where he had transferred them. The woman had been shot by food looters, and the girl had broken her leg when she’d fallen down the slope to the frozen river. All for two cans of noodle soup.

“I think it was here,” he said. “I’m just not sure.”

He shut his eyes. He’d transferred the mother and daughter from 7538 to get here, huddled in the snow with the two. From winter to fall. From death to happy-go-lucky campus. Covered in blood, he’d asked someone to call the police, but the person had pointed him toward the emergency box.

He opened his eyes. There was the box. He’d called, waited for the ambulance, then run off to the field house to shower and rinse the blood from his clothes.

So he’d been about ten meters to the east of where Casey and he now stood. He walked toward the spot, weaving through the throng of students.

“Here,” he said to Casey. “We were right here.”

Casey looked down as if there would be a clue after two years. “Here?”

“Yeah.” He’d left Kylie and her mother there. Kylie! That was the little girl’s name. He couldn’t recall the last name, however. Smith? No, not that common. “I remember the little girl’s name.”

“That’s good. Do we search the papers with that? You know the date, right?”

“The date was October twenty-ninth,” John said. Five days after Prime had tricked him out of his life.

“That should narrow it down,” Casey said. “If we know the name and the date, we can find more. There had to have been stories written.”

“Yeah, there had to have been,” John agreed. A wounded body, a child with a broken leg. On an otherwise bucolic college campus. Yeah, there had to be news stories written.

“Come on,” Casey said, grabbing John’s arm. The journalism college had a building on the main quad. It published the University of Toledo newspaper—The Dagger. The main room had three microfiche readers and an archive of past issues.

“It’s called The Knife in this universe,” Casey said. “Huh.”

Casey sat down at one of the readers, while John thumbed through the cabinet of fiche. He found the year and then the day when he had passed through this universe two years prior. He hadn’t been here long. Just long enough to call the police and wash his clothes out.

The fiche was heavy in his fingers and felt as if it might rip. The top story was on the student council race.

“Nothing,” he said.

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