InterWorld (InterWorld 1)

It was made of plastic and metal, and it started just below the sleeve of her T-shirt. She noticed me staring at it, and her look of surprise—she didn’t recognize me any more than Rowena had—turned suspicious.

“Who are you? What are you doing in this house?”

By this time I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or start screaming. “Mom,” I said desperately, “don’t you know me? I’m Joey!”

“Joey?” she said. “I’m not your mom, kid. I don’t know anyone named Joey.”

I couldn’t say anything to that. I just stared at her. Before I could think of what to say or do, I heard another voice behind me. A girl’s voice.

“Mom? Is anything wrong?”

I turned around. I think I was already sort of subconsciously expecting what I would see. Something in the voice told me who would be standing there at the top of the stairs.

It was the girl in the picture.

It wasn’t Jenny. This girl had red-brown hair, freckles, kind of a goofy expression, like she spent too much time inside her own head. She was as old as me, so she couldn’t be my sister. She looked like—and then I admitted to myself what I already knew—she looked like what I would look like if I were a girl.

We both stared at each other in shock. Faintly, as if from far away, I heard her mother say, “Go back upstairs, Josephine. Hurry.”

Josephine.

It was then that I understood, somehow. I don’t know how, but it hit me and I knew it was the truth.

I didn’t exist anymore. Somehow I’d been edited out of my own life. It hadn’t worked, obviously, since I was still here. But apparently I was the only one who felt I had any right to be here. Somehow reality had changed so that now Mr. and Mrs. Harker’s oldest child was a girl, not a boy. Josephine, not Joseph.

Mrs. Harker—strange to think of her that way—Mrs. Harker was scrutinizing me. She was wary, but she also seemed curious. Well, sure—she was seeing the family resemblance in my face.

“Do I—know you?” She frowned, trying to place me. In another minute she’d figure out why I looked so familiar—she’d remember that I’d called her “Mom”—and, like me, her world would fall apart.

She wasn’t my mother. No matter how much I wanted her to be, no matter how much I needed her to be, this woman wasn’t Mom any more than the woman in the blue coat that day at Macy’s.

I ran.

To this day I don’t know if I ran away because it was all too much to handle or because I wanted to spare her what I knew: that reality can splinter like a hammered mirror. That it can happen to anybody, because it had just happened to her—and to me.

I ran past her, out of the house, down the street, and I kept running. Maybe I was hoping that if I ran fast enough, far enough, I could somehow go back in time, back to before all this insanity happened. I don’t know if it might’ve worked. I never got a chance to find out.

Suddenly the air in front of me rippled. It shimmered, like heat waves gone all silvery, and then it tore open. It was like reality itself had split apart. I caught a glimpse of a weird psychedelic background inside, all floating geometric shapes and pulsing colors.

Then through it stepped this—thing.

Maybe it was a man—I didn’t know. It was wearing a trench coat and hat. I could see the face under the hat brim as it raised its head to look at me.

It had my face.

CHAPTER THREE

THE STRANGER WAS WEARING a full-face mask of some kind, and the surface of it was mirrored, like mercury. It was the strangest thing, staring into that blank, silvery face and seeing my own face staring back at me, all bent and distorted.

My face looked goofy and dumb. A liquid map of freckles, a loose mop of reddish-brown hair, big brown eyes and my mouth twisted into a cartoonish mixture of surprise and, frankly, fear.

The first thing I thought was that the stranger was a robot, one of those liquid metal robots from the movies. Then I thought it was an alien. And then I began to suspect that it was someone I knew wearing some kind of a cool high-tech mask, and it was that thought that grew into a certainty, because when he spoke, it was with a voice I knew. Muffled by the mask enough that I couldn’t place it, but I knew it, all right.

“Joey?”

I tried to say “Yeah?” but all I could manage was some kind of noise in my throat.

He took a step toward me. “Look, this is all happening a bit fast for you, I imagine, but you have to trust me.”