I had the feeling she was looking for something behind my eyes, but I had no idea what it was.
“Emily?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You remind me of somebody else.”
“Who?”
She shook her head and answered my earlier question instead. “It was real,” she said. “The penthouse, Crow.”
“What happened? When I went back up there, everything was gone. It was completely different.”
“Everything was gone because Crow moved it.”
“He moved a building?”
“Well, mainly just the top floor, and it’s more like he kind of…changed it.”
“How does that work?”
“It’s similar to the method I used to bring you here.”
“Where is…here?”
“It’s complicated,” Emily said.
“Fine, then. Let me ask you this. Are we in another dimension?”
Emily ran her hands through her hair and exhaled before ignoring my question and asking one of her own.
“How much do you know about quantum physics?”
“Not a lot,” I said. “I mean, I know particles can also be waves, and that in a two-slit experiment, observation affects the outcome, but I’ve always found the probability stuff daunting.”
“Okay, so I’m going to do my best to explain the mechanism behind what’s happening to the best of my ability. Just stop me when you don’t understand.”
I nodded. I had the feeling there was a whole lot I wasn’t going to understand.
“What do you know about the Meechum Radiants?” Emily asked.
“Only what Crow told me, and what you can find online.”
“What did Crow say?”
“He said Kellan Meechum had discovered something he’d likened to ley lines—veins in the fabric of the world—and that Meechum called them Radiants.”
“Good so far,” Emily said.
“He also told me that my parents believed in these Radiants, and that these mysterious lines of energy could be used to somehow manipulate travel between dimensions.”
“A lot of this is going to sound a bit…out there, but…there’s something going on beneath the world, something that you and I take for granted.”
“Some magical multiverse type of thing?”
“Quantum mechanics isn’t magic, K. It’s science.”
“What the hell are the Meechum Radiants?”
“We don’t know exactly, but back in 1945, while Meechum was leading an experiment connected to strange attractors and the butterfly effect, he believed he’d stumbled upon something. He discovered that certain cause-and-effect manipulations, coincidences, and chance encounters were…enhanced in very specific parts of the world—amplified somehow.”
“And this amplification was connected to his Radiants?”
“Yes. By performing certain…movements or patterns, or by following connections and tracking coincidences, Meechum claimed he was able to…manipulate the butterfly effect, that he could perform a series of seemingly unconnected moves and facilitate an effect based on a completely unrelated cause.”
“A series of moves?”
“Okay, the story goes that Meechum had spent years mapping out a number of ostensibly random coincidences and anomalies in and around the city of Seattle. He eventually discovered that, along certain pathways, these anomalies weren’t as random as they appeared. He began noticing groups of highly improbable coincidences the closer he came to successfully engaging certain pathways—what he called Radiants. Meechum believed that these Radiants might be used to facilitate changes in the world, and that the ability to move back and forth between universes was not only possible, but probable. He said that, in one case, he’d been able to successfully manipulate a bank’s interest rate by simply preventing a data analyst in an unrelated field from buying her morning coffee.”
“And you seriously believe this stuff?”
“Yes. And our parents believed it too.”
“So that’s what we’re dealing with here? Magical lines?”
“I already told you, it’s not magic, K. It’s science.”
“We are in another dimension, aren’t we?”
She stared at me for a long moment, like she’d been describing something completely obvious and couldn’t believe I wasn’t getting it.
“Have you noticed anything strange about your life? A terrible feeling comes over you and the world is suddenly…different somehow?”