Follow the Light

"Careful, it's hot," Andrea said, setting Steve's white mug down in front of him. "And one of these days I'm throwing it out."

"Over my dead body," Steve said, without looking up from the paper.

The lettering on the mug was neat and even: "Dad's property." Six years earlier, Jenny and Theo had broken open their piggy bank and bought the plainest white mug at the market. Jenny, tongue poking out in concentration, spent a whole evening lettering the words with a special marker until they looked as neat as anything in a shop. Back then Theo had taken to drinking his cocoa out of Dad's cups, and the label was a warning. Andrea baked the mug in the oven so the letters wouldn't wash off, and the kids presented it to Steve solemnly and a little nervously, as if it were a medal.

Since then the mug had fallen off the table twice, gone camping with them, survived a move, and never once cracked. Steve liked to say, only half joking, that as long as it was in one piece, the family was fine.

On the couch, Jenny was showing her brother a comic.

"Look, now he's going to climb the wall."

"Without a rope? He'll fall!"

"It's a comic. Nobody falls in comics."

Theo burst out laughing and bounced so hard that the glass of juice on the armrest tipped over the edge. Andrea caught it in midair without even turning around. She always caught things that fell: keys, plates, kids off swings.

"Theo."

"It was an accident!"

Steve smiled into his newspaper. Jenny was thirteen, and she took every ledge too high for her as a personal challenge. Last summer she had climbed the old oak behind the house to rescue Theo's kite from its branches. Steve had meant to tell her off, but she came down with a scraped knee, the kite, and such a grin that scolding her became impossible. Theo, at eleven, kept a box under his bed labeled SURVIVAL KIT: a flashlight, a compass, a coil of string, and a chocolate bar he had eaten long ago.

The ceiling light flickered.

The newscaster's voice on the TV stretched into one long note, slow and elastic like rubber. Then came a sound none of them had ever heard. As if somewhere a thousand doors had slammed at once, each one a fraction of a second behind the rest.

"Dad?" Jenny said quietly.

Theo was already running across the room to his mother. Andrea caught him up and held him tight. Steve jumped to his feet, and the paper slid to the floor.

"Jenny, grab my hand!"

She reached for him. Their fingers almost touched.

Almost.

The space between them folded like a sheet of paper, and half a meter became infinity. Jenny vanished. So did the room, the house, the street outside the window. The world was crumpling into itself: floors slid into floors, blocks nested inside blocks, and the city pressed down into thousands of narrow vertical wells, fitted one inside another like shards of a broken mirror.

Later the survivors would call it the Fold. Why it happened, nobody knows.

* * *

Steve came to first. His glasses were askew, and his ears were ringing. He straightened them and saw the mug beside him, dusty but whole. Not a single crack.

"Still in one piece," he breathed. "So we are too."

He drew a breath and shouted, "Andrea! Jenny! Theo!"

The answers came at once, muffled and from everywhere: above, below, behind the walls.

"Steve! Theo's with me! We're okay!"

"Dad! I'm here! I don't know where here is!"

"Stay where you are, I'll find you!"

"I am staying! There's nowhere else to go!"

He almost laughed. If Jenny was talking back, she was fine.

Among the debris lay a small, worn device. Stamped on its casing was a symbol: two folds facing each other, with a narrow gap between them. Beneath it, the letters E.C.H.O. Steve picked it up. The screen flickered, and through the static came a tired voice, as if it had said these words a thousand times:

"If the walls begin to fold, follow the light."

The device was old. Far older than anything in this city could be. It had been left by people who had already survived a Fold once. Which meant it could be survived.

Steve clipped the E.C.H.O. to his belt. After a moment's thought, he took the carabiner off his keys, threaded it through the mug's handle, and hung the mug beside it.

* * *

Jenny woke up in the wreckage of her bedroom, though a second ago she had been sitting in the living room. Her bed lay on its side, her posters hung in shreds, and around her rose the walls of the well, built from other people's rooms.

Under her upturned desk she found an old reel with a thin cable and a folding hook. It wasn't hers. It was a stranger's, and old, as if it had been lying here long before the Fold.

Above her head jutted a ledge, too high to reach.

"Of course," Jenny muttered.

She unfolded the hook, swung, and threw. The first throw missed. So did the second. On the third, the hook caught with a clink. Jenny braced her feet against the wall and started to climb.

Dad would be yelling right now, she thought, and smiled.

* * *

Andrea never let go of Theo. Not when the walls folded, not when they came to on the outskirts of the broken city, not afterward as they picked their way through the rubble.

In the ruins of a bus stop she found her own E.C.H.O., worn, with a strange symbol on its casing. The screen flickered, and the device spoke in a tired voice.

"Mom, what is that?" Theo asked.

"I don't know." Andrea turned it over in her hands. "But it looks like it was left for people like us."

Theo had picked an iron hook out of the debris and now held it with both hands, like a sword.

"I'll go first, okay? I've got a hook."

"We go together," Andrea said. "Side by side. Deal?"

Theo sighed, but nodded and walked beside her.

* * *

High above Steve's well, a huge vortex turned slowly: the visible face of the Fold. Every so often it shuddered and dropped another piece of the city.

Steve took a step, and something seemed to guide him. Nothing pushed or pulled, yet he could feel the way: forward, one step up, back from the wall. As if someone were quietly telling him where to put his feet.

And from above, the blocks kept falling.

At first he ducked and dodged. Then he noticed they weren't falling at random. One landed so that it made a step. Another stood like a wall between him and the drop. Some landed badly, sealing off the way like a trap, and he had to wait for the next. But it was as if someone were laying them down, layer by layer.

When a layer filled completely, edge to edge, the well shook. The debris flared and streamed upward, dissolving into the vortex as pure energy. The fold was complete. Compression. The vortex flinched for an instant, as if it had been hurt.

And then Steve saw the light.

In the wall of the well glowed a breach, blue-green and clean, unlike anything else in this world. It didn't fold and didn't flicker. A stubborn, quiet force was holding it open, the same one that had guided Steve from his very first step. The Seam. The thing that stands against the Fold.

Steve touched the mug on his belt. He would pour coffee into it again. At home, at the table, with all four of them there.

The vortex dropped the next block.

Steve looked up and said quietly, not knowing who he was talking to:

"Come on, then. Help me get to them."