One (One Universe)

the flame. Like I’m moving in slow motion, I step past the scanner, and nothing happens. It works. No alarm.
    “It should take the mainframe a few seconds to catch on. Go!” Leni whispers, her eyes wide.
    I reach back, squeeze Leni’s hand, and start down the hallway toward the main section of the Hub.
    And then, the alarms sound. Huge whoops that start down the hallway and creep toward us, running through the building section by section. A robotic voice echoes through the speakers: “Facial recognition checkpoint compromised. Please check and reset.”
    Yeah. Resetting that thing’s never going to happen.
    The sound of footsteps echoes down the hallway. When I imagined the hallways, I forgot to visualize the security checkpoint with real, live guards just around the corner.
    Leni and Daniel press up against each other and fold themselves into a small, tight closet a few feet behind me. But there’s no going back now. I squeeze my eyes shut. If there’s any time for going light to work perfectly on demand, now is it.
    Leni hisses, “Go! I know you can!” She gives me an apologetic look, then swings the door shut, pulling it the rest of the way closed with a soft snick.
    I tell my body to float, and when I fly upward, I can almost feel it sigh with relief. When did it start to feel more normal for me to be up in the air than down on the ground?
    The air must be blowing through the ventilation system at a pretty good pace — even though in this high-tech building it makes almost no noise — because I drift, little by little, around to the corner.
    At six o’clock on a Sunday, there won’t be many backups. They’ll have to run to get someone else out here quicker than the few minutes it will take them to find the location of the sirens.
    Two rows of security guards, each six deep, patrol down the hallway, checking inside every alcove and unlocked door. When they reach Leni and Daniel’s, and it won’t open, one of the guards in the back reaches for something in her pocket and pulls out a key. My heart beats a mile a minute.
    I plunge my hand into my pocket, searching for something — anything — I can throw. I find a balled-up foil wrapper from some junk food I ate God knows when and roll it in my palm for a second. I hurl it down the hallway, and it clatters to the floor, startling the guards and moving them all forward.
    I hover an inch below the ceiling, keeping my body rigid as a board, holding my breath inside me, hoping it doesn’t push me down like it always used to back when my biggest concern in life was trying my hardest not to float.

TWENTY-FOUR
    O nce the guards leave, I reluctantly sink down to floor level. As relieved as my body felt at going light, as much as it needed it after all that pain, I can’t move that fast — not nearly fast enough — when I’m light.
    Plus, the system will register my cuff, and if it doesn’t sense my weight on the floor, I’m pretty sure more alarms will go off.
    I speed down the hallways, the alarms from the entrance echoing down and sounding almost as loud as they did back there. The noise makes everything seem chaotic, a grotesque contrast to the spotless gleaming surfaces of the floors and walls.
    Next to each door hangs an identical etched placard, all bearing equally boring names like “Meeting Room” and “Conference Hall.” I stop at some that say “Lab,” but peering in the windows, see nothing but empty space and tall lab benches holding only trays of empty test tubes.
    I whip around, not knowing what to look at, where to go. How to find Elias. My eyes catch the words on one of the placards: “Medical Wing.”
    There’s an entire medical wing here? My heart sinks just as a familiar warm buzz takes over my whole body. Elias is in here. Are the boys in here, too? Or Elias’s sisters?
    I burst through the door, and the system gives off a pleasant ping instead of a screaming alarm. Nice work, Daniel.
    A short hallway leads to one other door, labeled simply, “Lab.” I peer in through the narrow wire-crossed window, just like the ones on all the doors at school, and see empty lab benches, long tables at standing height. A few microscopes, countless incubators, a mass spectrometer. No big deal, nothing out of the ordinary.
    My hand hovers over the door handle, and I’m about to turn away, look for a room with people in it maybe, when something glints off the wall. I look harder and realize — these walls are lined with glass