“Were those outages a coincidence?” Dr. Torrance said. “It’s not often our main and backup generators fail.”
“How should I know? But it wasn’t me.”
The Powers That Be had probably engineered that recent power outage to give the trolls the opportunity to escape. No wonder the MGA had been on such high alert on my birthday, bringing in tanks and extra agents. I’d assumed it was because of the power outage, but it was because of what’d happened during. While I’d slept, Five and the trolls had broken out.
If there had been a similar outage on Five’s arrival two years ago, it could mean the Powers had wanted Five to escape immediately, or—
Wait. Two years ago. Power outage. Chaos on the grounds.
I turned to Dr. Torrance. “Was the night Five and the trolls arrived the same night that Carolyn tried to sneak into the rift barn?”
“Yeah. Facet worried she’d come close to seeing the new arrivals.”
“If she had . . .” I trailed off. We might’ve been someplace very different now.
“Who’s Carolyn?” Five asked.
“Our sister.” Rainbow blinked. “You don’t have a Carolyn?”
“All of you have . . .?” Five looked around the group. “No. No siblings.”
Something dawned on me. “Did Mom and Dad meet in your world?”
Five gestured at herself. “Obviously.”
“Not my bio dad. I mean Ethan Yeo. Dad.”
Her lips pressed together. “Never heard the name. Look, I’m happy you all have such normal lives in normal worlds that your moms have time for torrid romances, but—”
“Normal?” I echoed, looking back at the TV showing the umpteenth shaky video of the rift. Yelled commentary and panicky background screams blended into each other. “That thing spent sixteen years in my backyard. You think my life is normal?”
I regretted the words straightaway. I sounded so woe-is-me. Rift or no rift, I had a loving family and every luxury I could ask for. I’d never had to worry about crime or accidents, as there was always help nearby. I might be stuck in a tiny circle of the world, but that tiny circle was as comfortable and safe as it could be.
I knew my situation could be far worse.
I just also knew that none of it was normal.
“Normal enough.” I couldn’t tell whether Five already regretted her words, same as I did, or whether she simply didn’t care enough to defend her point.
If she thought my world was normal, what did that mean for hers? Five had no Dad, no Caro. She said she’d stayed on the move. That trolls had driven Tara’s family from their home. And Five was nothing like the rest of us.
When I put those pieces together, the result made my skin crawl.
“What’s your world like?” Four asked quietly.
“How long have you been in Damford?” she asked instead of answering.
“Since late afternoon,” I said.
“So imagine it with twice as many trolls, a third as many people, and fifteen to twenty years’ worth of destruction. Extend that to the entire continent.” She smiled thinly. “If you plan to freak out about every small difference like our parents’ love lives, we’ll be here awhile.”
There was nothing small about imagining a world where I didn’t have Carolyn, didn’t know Dad. That knee-jerk feeling was dwarfed by Five’s other words, though. “Your world—”
“—is a troll-infested hellhole, yes. Then, without explanation, I appear in another dimension alongside a handful of trolls. Over the next two years, I’m held captive and studied and I see what my world might’ve been like if not for them.” She gave the nearest troll a hard look. “Then, when the power goes out and I finally escape, some trolls slip out in the chaos. They follow me halfway across the state. I hitchhiked most of it, and they still managed to keep up. They probably thought I’d freed them on purpose. Heh. Girl escapes the threat of trolls in her wrecked world, sets them loose on another world, and becomes their unwilling alpha. Is that irony? I’m never sure.” She eyed Dr. Torrance, her face bitter or angry or wry. I couldn’t read her like I could the others. “I told you to kill the trolls while you could. You knew what they’d done to my world.”
“Their alpha?” Dr. Torrance said at the same time as Rainbow and I said, “Kill them? How?”
Dr. Torrance glanced over. “Right now, steel only hurts the trolls. When we had them in captivity, steel could kill them. And they weren’t this strong, they didn’t recover this fast, they didn’t multiply at this pace, they didn’t have any sort of alpha that we knew of . . .”
“No shit. You’re surprised trolls act differently in captivity?” Hazel Five crossed her arms. A few trolls who’d lingered by her feet crept into the living room with jittery, agitated movements. “Trolls are a hive mind. The fewer the trolls, the weaker they are. You only had about a dozen, and you had them split up, besides. Groups that small don’t typically have alphas, which makes them vulnerable. And you kept them locked inside with—at a guess—several feet of metal between them and any fresh earth. That means they can’t multiply. Once they escaped, they could regroup and had access to fresh earth, which led to this mess. How many are there by now? A hundred? Two hundred?” Her crossed arms tightened. “They choose troll alphas normally, but sometimes weakened trolls latch on to humans or other animals as alphas. They can form a mental link to anyone helping them. Follow. Act protective. It never lasts long.”
“The past two years, you knew all this?” Dr. Torrance said.
“It’s common knowledge.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell us?” She sounded hurt. “We asked so many times what information you could give us.”
“I told you they were dangerous, and I told you to kill them.” Hazel Five—Hazel Alpha?—pushed herself away from the doorframe. “If you were stubborn enough to keep experimenting after that, it wouldn’t matter what I said. No way was I going to give you more information
