The Art of Saving the World

for questioning instead of letting her find that X on the note? What if they could send her right home? I wouldn’t get to see her again. I had questions, I realized now, questions about her home and life, what it was like being a Hazel who wore dresses and who could go past one-and-a-half miles and not even think twice about it.
But I needed to find Facet.
“OK,” I said, and took off. She did the same.
The closer I came to the barn that housed Facet’s office, the more obvious it was I wouldn’t find him there. The barn had been hit hard. Flames licked at the windows, and one corner had collapsed under something that looked like a boat mast.
If he’d been trapped, agents would be trying to get him out. Instead, the building was abandoned.
I spun, trying not to panic. The barns towered over me. People would be congregating somewhere, right, to figure out their orders? It felt like I was missing something, like I was making some giant mistake. Or maybe I already had, and that was why this was happening—maybe all along, I’d missed big honking clues about what I was supposed to do, and I was still missing clues, I had to be, or else I’d know why there was another freaking Hazel here and—don’t panic, don’t panic—
I wasn’t good at not panicking.
That panic battered at me like it was trying to get in and only needed me to give a fraction of an inch. Every move I made. Every thought in my head. I kept arriving at the same conclusion: One way or another, I had caused this chaos. The rift was connected to me. I was the only one who could be responsible and I didn’t have a clue how to fix it.
Find Facet, I told myself. He’ll tell you what to do.
I only got to take two steps toward the nearest intact barn when a deafening groan cleaved through the smoky air. I turned, ready to run toward safety, but the sound hadn’t come from anywhere nearby. It must’ve come from Barn F, a few dozen yards down—
Barn F. The barn indicated on the sheet of paper. Where the other Hazel was headed.
I broke into a run.

CHAPTER SIX
Dust billowed from one corner of the barn. I scrambled through the rubble until I made it to the barn entrance. The doors stood wide open.
“H-Hazel?” I called out, awkward as it felt to shout my own name.
Nothing.
Entering would be stupid and dangerous—I had to find Director Facet already. The other Hazel wasn’t responding, though. If she lay inside injured and I walked away . . .
(A part of me whispered: If this is my chance to sneak into one of the off-limits barns, the way Caro tried years ago—the way I might have done if I had half her guts—)
I went in, climbing over an entry gate between two guard stations. I landed on the other side with a thud and swerved, as if the empty guard stations would prove not to be so empty after all. Sixteen years of following every rule they put in front of me, and then—when it really counted, when the world was blowing up around us—I was sneaking around unauthorized areas. Facet would be so disappointed if he knew.
I bit my lip, which tasted filthy from the dirt trapped in the air. Two hallways on the right, one on the left. I tried to recall the location of the X in that sketched rectangle of the barn, and turned left. This part of the building was relatively untouched. The lights above me were dead—I had to use my phone to see—but the walls were intact and the doors were shut, secured with card readers or retinal scanners.
Only one door stood ajar. When I creaked it open, my phone lit up a slim, tall shape standing a couple of yards away. Bright red dress, block heels. The other Hazel was using her phone to illuminate the walls, like me.
She flinched as my phone’s flashlight hit her eyes.
“Sorry.” I hastily flicked it off.
“You’re OK.”
“You came looking for me? Thank you.”
“I heard a noise.”
“That wasn’t me. But look.” She wiggled her phone at an observation window. Past it, in a square room, stood a small, white horse. Hip-height, lithe. Its chest moved fast. Something looked off about it even beyond its size. I squinted, tilted my head. The light shifted, and—
“Scales?” I said.
“And membrane. Between its legs and body. See?”
Even the horse’s color was strange. With the flashlight reflecting off those subtle scales, it skewed pale blue.
“That . . . isn’t from this world,” I said.
“It’s not from mine, either.”
The creature must’ve arrived through the rift. If the rift connected to more dimensions than only this other Hazel’s, perhaps the theories on other dimensions I’d read up on over the years were true. Infinite worlds containing infinite Hazels and infinite creatures. This one probably wasn’t even the strangest.
The MGA had said they didn’t know whether the rift connected to other dimensions. If they’d seen this animal, though, they had to have known.
They’d lied.
“That’s a . . .” The other Hazel seemed to struggle to find the word. “A water horse. Like from that show Caro loves.”
“A kelpie,” I said.
“The agents put me in a room like this, across the building. This must be where they keep whatever comes through that rift.”
The horse retreated into a corner, where a pool a few feet wide was set into the ground. The other Hazel lowered her phone.
“I doubt this is part of our ‘answers,’” she said. “You were right, by the way. Calling didn’t work. I can’t get a signal.”
She kept moving. After a moment’s pause, I followed. I shouldn’t have been there, maybe (for sure), but now that I was, I couldn’t leave without knowing the promised answers. If the MGA had lied to me about alternate universes, they could’ve kept even more from me.
The hall smelled sterile, like I imagined a hospital smelled, and it looked