Ant didn’t answer straight away. His idea was evolving even more, and excitement gripped him. “Wait here,” he gasped, and dashed from the room.
If his parents only knew that he had a girl in the house at this hour! He ran down the hallway and into the oversized lobby with its shiny tiled floor, where he tiptoed to the kitchen and then into the short hall leading to the multi-vehicle garage. He found some thin rope and lofted it in his hands, thinking it was probably thicker than he needed and not very long. Something thinner would do . . .
He grinned and headed back through the house toward a side door. The gardener’s storage shed stood behind some neatly trimmed hedges. Aware that he was now being watched by one of many security cameras, he knew the footage wouldn’t be viewed until the next day, and only then if there was some reason to suspect intruders had been nosing around.
Inside the shed, he found a box filled with rolls of twine, each three hundred feet. This was more like it! He grabbed the entire box—about twelve rolls—and hurried back to Madison.
“Are you serious?” she said, holding up the silver-colored boombox so he could thread the thin twine around the casing and through the carrying handle. “You’re going to hang on to this and let it through slowly?”
“Why not? Maybe we can let it down carefully at the other end instead of it flying out.”
Madison shook her head, looking like she thought he was crazy. “The wormhole stretches across the universe. Do you think you have enough twine?”
“Well, that’s the thing about wormholes,” Ant explained, working fast as the time counted down. Only seven minutes to go now. “They don’t really stretch across the universe, they just make a connection between two distant points. If the universe were flat and you folded it in half like a huge sheet of paper, then two distant points might suddenly be next to each other on facing sides of the sheet—and the wormhole would be like a bridge between the two points.”
“I get all that,” Madison grumbled, “but still, I can’t believe a bit of twine will reach all the way through.”
“Well, where’s the harm in trying? And”—he pulled his phone from his pocket—“here’s something else I’m going to send through. That can be your job.”
She looked confused as he held up the phone in one hand and another ball of twine in the other. “Huh? You honestly think Liam will be able to call us?”
He laughed and got to work wrapping the phone in twine. “No, I need you to pull this back again if you can. I’m just going to set the camera filming. Maybe we’ll see where Liam is without actually going there ourselves.”
He worked quickly while she chewed her lip. “You’re nuts,” she said after a while.
Chapter 9
The wormhole opened at 5.42 AM as promised in Madison’s note.
As before, an eerie whirlwind gripped the room, causing the curtains to flap about like the sails of a ship in a storm. This time, the bedsheets and anything else that might be sucked into the void had been stashed in the closet, leaving a secure, bare room.
The glimmering vortex opened in exactly the same place as last time. Evidently, whoever had opened it had used the same coordinates. Maybe it was Liam escaping! Or maybe the Ark Lord was . . . was . . .
Ant couldn’t fathom why the Ark Lord would reopen the wormhole except to send Liam back, but if that were the case, what was the request for a ‘noise’ as according to Madison’s sleep-written message?
Since they’d expected the wormhole to open in the same place, Ant had insisted on dragging the bed closer to the middle of the room to use as a deadweight. Then he and Madison anchored themselves to it.
Ant had rigged a simple system with which to unravel the twines at a steady but rapid pace—using the chrome toilet roll holder from the bathroom, which he’d unscrewed from the wall. All he had to do was switch out a roll of twine when it got low, making sure to tie them together first. He wished he could link them all up in advance, but that would entail unraveling multiple rolls then rolling them back up again, increasing the danger of knots and tangles. His switch-out every three hundred feet would have to work.
“Here we go,” he said when the tunnel had settled and begun spinning. The strange silence unnerved him. The tug of the wormhole was strong and should be accompanied by the sounds of a raging whirlwind, yet it hung silently except for a faint whistling as air was sucked through the gaps around the room’s door.
Ant, sitting on the floor with his back against the corner of the bed and his belt looped around the bedpost, pressed PLAY on the boombox. He cranked the volume all the way up and pushed the portable machine away from him with his feet. The CD took a moment to get cued up, but then the orchestra started with a few gentle cellos and violins, lulling the listeners into a false sense of security. By the time the singer opened her mouth, the wormhole’s suction was pulling at the boombox and causing it to wobble.
Abruptly it lifted and flew into the tunnel. But it hung there, tethered by Ant’s twine as Adelia’s first squeals tore from the speakers.
“Oh my,” Madison said, white-faced.
Ant let out the twine as fast as possible, a towel wrapped around his hands to avoid friction burns. The brown-colored string slid through his fingers, and the boombox receded into the swirling tunnel with the screeching, wailing soprano impossibly rising in pitch as though falling from a cliff. Ant grimaced. He hated opera at the best of times, but this particular singer provoked a special kind of loathing.
Meanwhile, Madison sat at the other corner of the bed, equally secured around the waist, though with the sash from a thick, white bath robe. She let out her own twine, Ant’s phone already recording as it flapped about on the end, its tiny camera facing into the tunnel.
Though the boombox was already far ahead, Ant quickly realized the two items would likely get their twines entangled. “Stay on your own side,” he warned Madison.
“Yeah, like I have total control,” she said through gritted teeth as she expertly rotated her hand and let the twine unravel from one side. “It’s like flying a kite.”
“It really is!” Ant said with a grin.
“And now I’m tangled,” Madison said a second later, letting go of her roll. It whipped across the floor and bounced into the wormhole. “Sorry.”
“No worries, it was probably too much to hope for anyway.”
Still, Ant felt disappointed that he wouldn’t get to see the footage.
His boombox was a tiny speck by now, and his roll was dwindling fast on the chrome bar. He clamped it between his knees and awkwardly maintained the slow, steady speed while reaching for the next roll of twine. When he came close to running out, he gripped it and quickly tied it to the next while the boombox tugged and jerked. Once done, he allowed the unraveling to resume.
“Three hundred feet down,” he said, sweat dribbling from his forehead. “I wish I could just let go of this thing and let it unravel, but then I might lose it.”
“And the boombox will fly out the other end,” Madison said. She seemed more relaxed now that she was relieved of her camera duties. Her hair whipped about, and she strove to keep it out of her face. “Looks like you need to get another roll ready.”
Ant glanced down. Yes, already halfway through—about four hundred and fifty feet so far. He gripped the chrome bar between his knees again and reached for another ball of twine. He felt confident he had plenty, still another ten rolls in the box. The tunnel surely wasn’t longer than three and a half thousand feet of twine!
The second roll unraveled, and he quickly switched to a third, aware that the distant boombox was still jerking around as though angry at the delay. It felt like walking an impatient dog and stopping to chat for a moment. He grinned at the analogy as he finished tying the knot and released his hold.
“Six hundred feet down,” he announced.
“I hope the opera’s still playing,” Madison said, sounding worried again now. “It faded away pretty fast, didn’t it?”
&
nbsp; “I guess wormholes don’t carry sound very well. The vacuum of space doesn’t carry sound. In fact, I’m surprised a wormhole has any air at all.”
“One of the mysteries of life,” she murmured. “Like my sleep writing. I’ve always felt a bit like someone is watching over me, telling me about these wormholes, these events.”
“And now giving you instructions,” Ant agreed. “Yeah, it’s like you have a guardian angel or something.”
“It’s like we have a guardian angel,” she corrected. “If it were just my guardian angel, she’d probably tell me to steer well clear of this thing. But Liam’s in there somewhere, and he needs help.”
Ant glanced at her. She sounded so convinced. For all they knew, Liam had nothing to do with this; it was just some random wormhole to some random place in the universe. But he had to admit it seemed more likely Liam was at the other end. It had, after all, opened in the exact same place as before.
“Oh,” he said, feeling the twine loosen a little. Then it went completely slack. The boombox had arrived at its destination—hopefully with a soft landing.
“Is it there?” Madison asked.
“Feels like it.” He released the rest of the twine from the toilet roll holder and peered at it. “Probably a third left. So the wormhole’s about eight hundred feet long.”
The knowledge made him feel like he’d got one over on the universe. Who else but him had thought to measure such an incredible phenomenon with a simple ball of string? Then again, what exactly did it prove? Was the physical length directly related to the distance it traveled? With wormholes, nothing was certain.
“Well, let’s hope the opera is still blaring out,” Madison said with a sigh. “Now I guess we wait.”
“Unless we go see for ourselves what’s happening—”
“Ant, no!” she exclaimed, twisting to glare at him. “Don’t you dare even think about it. My message said not to go, and we should do as it says.”
“All right, all right. It’s just . . . well, it’s hard sitting here and not knowing what’s going on. I could just fling myself through the wormhole, take a quick peek at the other end, and fling myself back again. Where’s the harm in that?”
“Ant, so help me—”
He laughed. “It’s okay, I’m not going anywhere. Liam might, but I’m more sensible than he is.”
They waited. The tunnel spun and glimmered, sending patterns of light across the walls of the room. Now that he had nothing to do, Ant found he could study the wormhole in more detail and wonder about its existence. How were they formed? How did a mere alien of admittedly superior intellect have the knowledge to open such a mind-bendingly remarkable bridge? Where had they learned such a trick? Were these things crafted in some fashion, manmade space-tunnels complete with breathable air? Or were they natural occurrences made more readily available?
“Looks like it’s going to stay open the full forty minutes,” Madison said after a while. “The last two sent by the Ark Lord collapsed right away. What’s so different this time?” She was frowning. “I have to assume that whoever opened it used the same coordinates as the previous one—”
“That’s what I thought,” Ant agreed.
“—which has to mean the Ark Lord opened it, right? But why?”
Ant shrugged. “Beats me. What time do you have?”
She dug out her phone. “6:08. We have about ten minutes left. Barton will be here for me at 6:30, right? Pretty good timing.”
“Yeah, and you’ll be home just in time to get up for school,” Ant said.
The idea of school depressed him. And if Liam didn’t come home in the next ten minutes . . .
As time marched on, the wormhole began to flicker. Ant’s heart sank. Liam wasn’t coming.
But something came through.
A small, black, flat object hurtled out and flew over his head. It bounced off the side of the bed and clattered to the floor by the wall. Abruptly, the wormhole sputtered and flashed, and suddenly the room was filled with specks of fading light as the event ended.
“What was that?” Madison exclaimed.
Ant untied himself and scrambled across the floor to the wall. To his delight, he picked up his phone—a little scuffed and dirtied, but otherwise intact. He pressed the button on the side, and the screen lit up.
“Look!” he yelled, jumping up and showing Madison. “It came back!”
“And without all the string,” she said, hurrying closer. “Does it have video?”
Trembling, Ant thumbed his way to the gallery. The video recording had ended either because someone had switched it off or, more likely, because it had simply run out of space on the SD card. He found the video, though, and he started it playing.
The first scene was of Madison’s nostrils as she started the recording. The sound of opera blasted out, and Ant lowered the phone’s volume a little. The view swung around to face the swirling wormhole, and suddenly the picture bounced and jumped as Madison released the phone and it hurtled into the vortex. After that, it bobbed and spun its way along.
“Ugh,” Ant said, averting his gaze for a second. “Wouldn’t want to see this on the big screen. Makes me want to puke.”
The boombox led the way, its tether coming into view often as the phone bounced around behind. Adelia Mingo continued the entire way. Abruptly, the phone spun faster and seemed to stick in a sideways position, facing the tunnel wall.
“That’s when it got snagged,” Madison said. “I let go of the twine then.”
The view didn’t change at all after that, and the next few minutes actually grew quite boring, not to mention irritating with the ghastly squeals of the female singer. But then the wormhole ended, and the phone, still snagged on the boombox’s tether, emerged into the night and slammed down on the ground. The video continued, but the picture was perfectly still, on its side, half the view taken up by the ground it lay on, the other blurred and dark. In the background, the opera singing continued unabated.
“Fascinating,” Ant murmured, a little disappointed. “Bear in mind this is the unedited director’s cut. The finished movie will be a little slicker.”
“I think you should replace the soundtrack,” Madison said, leaning heavily against his shoulder as they watched the screen together.
Nothing much happened, at least nothing they could make out. Something was going on, but the darkness prevented them from seeing it. Odd noises permeated the opera, some kind of chattering mingled with occasional shrieks, and Ant felt a shiver. But those alien noises gradually faded, leaving only the opera to continue its performance to what had to be a rapidly emptying outdoor theater.
“Sounds like the opera got rid of whatever was there,” Ant said.
“It would have sent me packing, too,” Madison agreed.
They both sucked in a breath as the picture changed. It flickered and jerked, then steadied—and looking back at them was Liam himself, or at least the robot version of him. He mouthed something, but the volume was too low.
“Whoa, that’s Liam!” Madison exclaimed, reaching for the phone. “Back it up, back it up.”
“I’ve got it,” Ant snapped. He touched the screen to set the video back a few seconds, then turned up the volume, wincing at the wailing soprano in the background.
“Thanks, guys,” Liam said over the noise. “Just what we needed.”
Madison clutched at Ant’s arm.
Liam leaned closer to the screen. “I could jump back right now and come home, but we have to finish this. We won’t be long. Over and out.”
The screen jerked again, and the video abruptly ended.
Chapter 10
“What’s the big idea?” Hammer demanded over the intercom as the wormhole glimmered and swirled three feet above the ground.
“Just be patient,” Liam said, mentally crossing his fingers.
The silent tunnel had attracted the attention of the army of Gorvian time grubs. Or some of them at least. Though most faced the three-story build
ing where their revered king slept, the nearest outer ranks turned to stare at Liam. None of them moved, though. The wormhole’s lightshow proved to be a mere curiosity, not enough to draw them from their duties.
But then a hideous wailing rose in volume, emanating from the wormhole. Liam saw a tiny, spinning object growing slowly as it approached, and the noise it produced blasted out at full volume. A boombox playing Adelia Mingo.
Liam grinned to himself. “Nice one, Ant.”
“Who?” Medic said in his ear. “What’s going on? What’s that noise?”
Hammer, Medic, Armory, and Optics were still atop the hill. “I need someone’s help,” Liam said. “Who besides me is good at running?”
Nobody answered.
“Hammer?” Liam suggested. “I’m not sure we need your giant fists if we’re going to sneak in and take the king’s head. We need Armory and one of his sharp weapons. Maybe even Stealth.”
“Where is Stealth?” Medic asked.
“She’s under a wagon,” Optics whispered.
Liam scanned the streets. He saw the wagon but not the creepy Stealth robot. Optics had to be seeing her heat signature or maybe registering her tech.
The screeching opera rose to a crescendo, and Liam grimaced. Down in the streets, more and more grubs turned his way, a ripple of interest that spread throughout the ranks like a wave until every pair of eyes seemed to be trained on the wailing wormhole.
“It’s working,” Liam said. “Hammer, I need you here.”
The iron-fisted robot muttered something unintelligible and started down the hill toward him. Meanwhile, the army of grubs had—finally!—found something more worthy of their attention than their king. A huge number of them began shuffling away from the building toward Liam and his wormhole.
The boombox came spinning out, tethered by a length of twine. It took a moment for Liam to get over his surprise at this, especially as another object seemed to have gotten twisted up in it. A mobile phone?
Instead of flying out of the wormhole and crashing down, the boombox simply hung in the air for a moment, turning slowly as the twine lengthened. The farther out of the tunnel it reached, the more it descended, and then it touched down with a jolt. For a heart-stopping half-second, the music halted and a terrible silence fell . . . but then it resumed with a vengeance.
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