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twisted in her sheets. A dark figure stood over her bed.
    “Dad?”
    “It works, Glenny,” he said. “It actually works.”
    Glenn rubbed her eyes. “What are you talking about? What
    works? What time is it?”
    “Get dressed and come see.”
    Her father leaned into a shaft of moonlight. Glenn jerked away without thinking and gasped. His hair was disheveled and his clothes were stained with oil and soot. There was a long gash on his arm that oozed blood. Hopkins reared back and hissed as Dad reached down and grabbed Glenn by her shoulders.
    “We’re really going to do it, Glenn.”
    “Do what ? What happened to you?”
    He knelt down beside Glenn’s bed. His skin was sweaty and pale, ghastly as melting plastic.
    “We’re going to get her back,” he said. “We’re going to march right over there and bring her back.”
    “Go where? Get who back?”
    “Your mom,” he said, his voice trembling. “We’re going to
    rescue her, Glenn.”
    It was like a fist slammed into Glenn’s chest. Her breath stopped.
    Suddenly it seemed like he was too close to her, kneeling there on the floor. Glenn could feel the fevered heat radiating off of him.
    “Rescue her from what?”
    “It’s not something I can just — you have to come see!”
    Before she could respond, he had leapt up and was running out of the room. Glenn stumbled out of her bed and followed, Hopkins trailing behind.
    “Everything you’ve been told is a lie,” Dad said as they
    descended the stairs and went out into the yard. “The Rift wasn’t an accident . And it’s not some kind of wasteland over there. Ha! I can’t believe they’ve gotten away with this for so long!”
    “What are you talking about? What does this have to do with Mom?”
    Dad tore into the workshop. He drew a stool from the corner and sat down between Glenn and The Project.
    “Okay,” he said, one hand tugging nervously at the other. “Now, how to … yes. There’s a set of rules — physical rules — that govern cause and effect, gravity, nuclear and chemical reactions, time, momentum. All of those rules come together and we call the result reality. Is that right?”
    The workshop was more of a wreck than usual. Tools lay
    everywhere. Half of The Project lay in pieces on the floor, and the other half had been radically altered. The generator was now directly hooked into it, and the whole thing glowed a livid blue as if it were alive.
    “Glenn?”
    “Of course. But what does that —”
    “Think of a set of playing cards. The cards are always the same
    — King, Queen, Ace, Jack — but the game you play changes
    depending on what set of rules you decide to invoke. Use one set of rules and you’re playing poker. Choose another and you have solitaire.
    What we think of as reality is no different. It’s a card game. Change the rules and you change reality.”
    “Dad, that’s not possible. You can’t —”
    “Yes you can. That’s just … that’s the thing: It is, Glenn.
    Possible. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. The rules can change. They were changed. That’s what the Rift was . They’ve been so good about keeping it all under wraps. The border. The stories. The fake satellite pictures! They’ve made us so afraid of what’s on the other side that no one even thinks about going over and actually looking to see what’s there.”
    “Who are you talking about?”
    Dad leaned closer into Glenn. She could smell sweat and the blood from his arm.
    “Authority. They’ve been lying to us for a hundred years. But that’s not important, what’s important is this” — he took a rattling breath — “on the other side of the border there are people like us, except for one thing — they live in a reality based on an entirely different set of rules.”
    Something clicked into place as soon as he said it. Glenn had heard these words before. Read them before. She could see the web pages in her head as clear as day. The “divergent models” theory, if