Magisterium

Dr. Kapoor was the highest-ranking local council member and the district psychologist. Glenn had been seeing him, at her father’s insistence, every week since her mother had left ten years ago. One day she was on Dr. Kapoor’s waiting-room couch doing her homework when Kevin sat down on the floor beside her and started talking. Glenn ignored him completely but Kevin returned the next week and did the exact same thing. And the next. And the next. He kept up that one-sided conversation for six solid months until he finally turned to Glenn and said: “You know, Morgan, I will not be dissuaded. For I am stalwart.”

Glenn had laughed. Stalwart. She had never actually heard someone say the word out loud before.

Glenn turned to her window. It was already lightening with the dawn. What did it really matter if she met him? As soon as Dad signed the form, she’d be out of school and on her way.

“Sure, Kevin.”

“Ha! I knew it! I knew you couldn’t say no to a chance to — ”

Glenn swiped her hand over the glass and cut the connection before he could finish. She was surprised to find her heart pumping and a staticky buzz sizzling through her. Glenn looked up and there was 813, a great green stillness amidst the jumble of stars. Somehow knowing it was there, like a distant promise, put Glenn at ease. None of this mattered. She would get where she was going and everything would be fine.

3

“But why did everything change after the Rift? And why did it happen in the first place?”

Kevin sat cross-legged on the snow-dotted soccer field the next day. His fingers clasped his stubbly skull on either side of his now cobalt blue hair. It was as if he was trying to hold his brain in. Glenn had spent the last hour helping him study for a history test covering major events from 2023 to 2153. Leave it to Kevin to get fixated on day one.

“We’ve been over this,” Glenn said. “We can’t get stuck.”

“I have a thirst for knowledge, Morgan. I want answers to the big questions.”

“You want to avoid studying.”

The school was almost completely emptied and the last train would be arriving soon. If she didn’t want to end up walking home, she was going to have to deal with this. Nip it in the bud. Glenn put her tablet down and faced him.

“Nothing changed after the Rift.”

“But — ”

“Conspiracy theories.”

“Conspiracy?! What about trans light — ”

“Trans-light-speed travel was inevitable.”

“The breakthrough was right after the Rift!”

He had been reading the Rifter websites again. Glenn would have bet hard money that if she took his tablet from him, she’d see a long list of sites like rifttruth, riftlies, therealworld. It was amazing that people were still harping on stuff like that after over a hundred years.

“‘Post hoc,’” Glenn recited, “‘ergo propter hoc.’”

“‘After this, therefore because of this.’ I know the fallacy, Morgan. I swear, sometimes you think I’m a moron. If it was one thing, that would be fine. But it’s everything. Trans-light travel. Cold fusion.

Bioengineering. It all happened after the Rift.”

“I’d like to refer you to the earlier fallacy.”

Kevin dropped his tablet and shifted so he was sitting squarely in front of Glenn. He leaned in and fixed her with kohl-lined eyes framed in thick wisps of blue from his fallen Mohawk. There was barely a foot of air between them. Glenn leaned away from him, drawing her knees up to her chest and hugging them close.

“So what about the mutants?” he asked. “People have seen them on the other side of the border. There’s video — ”

“There’s no video — ”

“- of these, like, wolf people. And bird people! Bird people, Morgan!”

Glenn tossed her tablet into her bag and stood up. “Yeah. I heard they found Atlantis over there too. And aliens! Forget it. I’m outta here.”

Kevin bounded along backward in front of Glenn as she crossed the soccer field toward the train station.

“So you believe the official story. You’re like a — what do they call it? A dupe!”

Glenn’s hand curled into a fist around the strap of her bag.

Sometimes Kevin had a way about him that seemed to demand

punching. “I believe that the simplest explanation is always the best.

The government’s explanation, which, by the way, is the same as every major scientist’s — ”

“Who are all controlled by the government. Yes, go on.”

“There’s no need to be smug, Kevin.”

“I’m not being smug, Glenn. I just can’t believe you’re being so naive about this. We live right next to the border. You’ve never wondered? You’ve never been curious?”

“There’s nothing to be curious about!”

Kevin jumped in her face, dancing back and forth to block her way to the train.

“You’re curious about everything, Morgan. You’re telling me you’ve never looked? Never seen anything? Never felt anything?”

A wind rose up through the alleyways behind the school. Rushing through the concrete plains, it sounded like whispering voices. A chill rippled across Glenn’s shoulders and down her spine. She shook it off and dropped her bag on the ground between them.

“On May 5, 2023, there was a massive explosion — ”

“Glenn!”

“- somewhere between what was then Japan and the United

States. Millions of people died in the initial blast. Millions, Kevin. And then millions more died in an aftermath that covered roughly a third of the planet in toxic ash and radiation.”

“But what about — ”

“It took years after the Rift to establish the border and get life back to something remotely normal. Everything on our side of the border became the Colloquium, which, over the course of the last hundred and thirty years, pursued a massive research and education effort, which easily accounts for a spike in scientific and technological discoveries following the Rift event. As for what’s on the other side?”

Glenn whipped out her tablet and brought up a series of satellite photos. Seen from far above, the world glittered, alive with sprawling networks of lights. There were thick knots around the major cities, and tendrils reaching one to another in a shining web that was broken only by a vast clot of darkness thousands of miles wide and long, which cut through continents and oceans. Within it, not a single light shone.

Glenn clicked through the pictures as they drew in closer.

A two-mile band of forest, with a string of towering red warning lights at its center, formed a no-man’s-land between them and what lay on the other side of the border. Beyond the border there was a vast, barren plain: uncountable miles of flattened trees, scorched earth, and piles of rubble that had once been great cities.

“People look up at the clouds and they see faces,” Glenn said.

“They look at the stars and see constellations. They look across the border and instead of seeing a graveyard they see mutants and monsters.”

Kevin was watching her intently, the light in his brown eyes dimmed. Glenn remembered the clean smell of the snow as it blew between them and felt an ache in the center of her chest.

“People see what they want to see,” she said. “Whether it’s real or not.” Glenn dropped down to tuck her tablet into her bag. “Now. Do you think you can remember all of that for your test?”