by Lisa Mangum
I shrugged, though I had wondered about that part of the plans myself. “It’s the final step. You know—like making ceramics or forging a sword. There’s always a finishing process you have to go through.”
“The refiner’s fire,” Jason said with a nod. “That’s cool. Dan-gerous, but cool. Maybe we’ll call the fire department when we get to that part.” He wrote himself a note in the margin.
I felt bad for Jason. Dante’s instructions were complicated and sometimes confusing. I knew exactly what we were building, but even I couldn’t see how those finely drawn lines would result in a time machine.
“And what are all these symbols?” Jason grabbed a sheet from the ground and waved it at me. “At first I thought they were just decorative, but now I think they might mean something.”
I took the paper from Jason, handling it carefully with my slightly sticky fingers. “Well, this one is a spiral shell. It’s called a nautilus.” I traced the curved lines with my eyes, imagining Dante’s long fingers wrapped around a pen, his strong hand stroking the lines confidently onto the blank sheet. “It’s an example of a natural logarithmic spiral. See, you can trace along the spiral, circling the center an infinite number of times without ever actually reaching the middle.” My memory suddenly caught a fragment from the past: the feel of the night wind, the heat of Dante’s eyes on me, the weight of his words on my heart. Those long-ago words slipped into my mind: “Can you imagine it? To be forever denied the one thing you long for most of all?”
I handed the paper back to Jason with a steady voice but a trembling hand. “The logarithmic spiral also appears in sunflowers, the nerves of the cornea, hurricane patterns, and the arms of the Milky Way. It’s based on the Fibonacci sequence.”
“Since when do you know so much about math?” Jason asked, bumping my shoulder so I’d know he was teasing. “I thought you were strictly a word person.”
“I am.” I bumped him back. “I’ve been studying. Is that so hard to believe? And as a word person, I know that a nautilus is also called an argonaut. As in ‘Jason and the.’ And argonaut is another name for an adventurer or a traveler.”
“Seriously? That’s cool.” He leaned back on the steps and stretched his legs out on the grass, studying the nautilus sketch. The sun lined his body with golden light. “I still don’t get why we have to carve it on what appears to be the front door of this crazy house.”
I bit my lip. I wanted to tell him the truth—because it’s a mathematically perfect representation for traveling through time—but I knew I couldn’t.
I had shown the complete blueprints of Dante’s design only to Jason. He was my muscle on the project and needed to know as much as I could tell him, which admittedly wasn’t much. I had told my parents about the project, but in very
general terms—I couldn’t very well build something in the backyard without their permission. Hannah knew the basics too, but that was more because she was a nosy little sister and I figured it was safer to tell her something, if only to prevent her from snooping around, looking for answers on her own.
All of them believed it was a rather offbeat school project for a rather offbeat school.
“It’s just something I have to do for my scholarship application for Emery,” I said, hating that I could hear the lie in my voice. I hated even more knowing that I didn’t have a choice. It was too dangerous to tell Jason the truth. “They wanted to see how I would approach a seemingly impossible project.”
“And your approach is to rope me into doing your homework for you?” Jason grinned.
“No, my approach is to delegate the task to a qualified, talented individual and then supervise his work. That shows serious leadership ability, which is a very important and desirable quality, you know.”
“So is honesty,” Jason retorted.
I flinched inwardly. “I’m also being resourceful and creative. Besides, it’s not like anyone from Emery is going to come check up on my work. I’m just supposed to send them pictures of the finished piece along with a written report of what
I learned from the process. It’s an exercise in creative,
out-of-the-box thinking. A kind of organic experiment. You know—the journey is more important than the destination and all that.”
That was less of a lie than the rest. I knew that the journey to finish the time machine would be as important as the destination, if not more so. I tried not to think about what it would mean if I actually succeeded in following Dante’s plans. “I’m glad that Mom and Dad will let us use the backyard,” I finished.
Jason sighed. “I’m glad all I had to do for my scholarship was fill out an application. That took me a half hour; building this will take us weeks. Literally.” He tapped a page that detailed the step-by-step assembly instructions, annotated with specific dates and times. Start to finish, it would take eight weeks exactly. As if that weren’t bad enough, the plans specified that we had to start on the first day of a season, and since we had missed the first day of spring, I had to cool my heels, waiting for the first day of summer. I was trying to be productive with my time—studying, reading, researching, anything to help the time pass faster—but every day seemed to be traveling at a slow crawl.
“Yeah, well, Emery is a very exclusive college. They don’t let just anyone in.”
“They let you in.” Jason bumped me again. His grin was all teeth and teasing.
“Then that must mean I’m not just anyone.” I tossed my hair back over my shoulder and gave him my most haughty supermodel smile. “I’m Abigail Edmunds and I’m going to change the world.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Jason said softly. A wistful look crossed his face, flashing through his eyes so quickly I almost missed it.
My heart stuttered. I thought we’d been over this. We’d tried the boyfriend-girlfriend thing and it hadn’t worked. At least, it hadn’t worked for me. And besides, I knew Jason and Natalie were still together because Nat had told me he’d already planned to take her out to dinner after graduation tomorrow.
I was saved from having to say anything because Jason, ruffling through the papers, handed me another sheet.
“Look at the detail on this one. It’s incredible.”
I licked the last of my Popsicle and swallowed hard. A heart filled the entire page, drawn in solid black lines. Thinner lines crossed the surface, connecting to each other in a tight, interlocking web. The patterns seemed alive, twisting and twining around each other until it was impossible to tell where one line started and another line ended. A host of endless Möbius strips of ink. Two hinges were inked along one side of the heart.
I recognized the image immediately. How could I not, when the physical version of it hung on a chain around my neck? After that terrible night almost three weeks ago when the Dungeon had burned to the ground, I had taken to wearing high-collared shirts to hide the scars around my throat. My neck still bore the imprint of the chains that had been flash-burned onto my skin when the black door had disintegrated on the bank.
Dante had given me that locket—the key to his heart—and I couldn’t bear not to have it close to my own heart. I never took it off. Not to shower, not to sleep. Never.
“It’s beautiful,” I managed. My fingers twitched, itching to touch the solid lump of silver under my shirt. I shoved my hand under my leg.
“It looks like the locket Dante gave you before—”
“What?” I interrupted, a little sharply. I’d been so careful to erase any remnant of Dante’s name from the copy of the blueprints I’d shown Jason. The originals were locked away, safe in my desk drawer.
“Oh, sorry.” Jason winced. “Natalie said I shouldn’t bring him up.”
“No, it’s just—”
“You don’t like talking about him,” Jason finished. “I understand.”
“No, it’s just that—”
“He broke your heart and left without even saying good-bye.”
“No, he didn’t,” I protested automatically.
>
“What? He didn’t break your heart, or he didn’t skip town the first chance he got?”
I shut my mouth, trying to keep my emotions in check. “That’s not fair,” I finally said. “You weren’t there. You don’t know what happened.”
“Because you won’t tell me.”
“What’s with the third degree all of a sudden?” I asked, surprised at the bitterness in Jason’s voice.
“We’re friends, right?”
I nodded, strangely cautious.
“Well, as your friend, I’m worried about you.” He shifted a little closer to me. “Look at it from my point of view. We break up, and you start dating Dante.”
I opened my mouth, but Jason overrode my feeble attempts at an explanation.
“Which I was fine with. I could see he made you happy, which is all I ever wanted for you. And I’m happy with Natalie, so it all worked out, right?”
I closed my mouth and looked down at my hands. I didn’t deserve such a good friend.
“But then it all went wrong. The next thing I know, you almost die in a fire at the Dungeon and have to spend days and days in the hospital. Leo and Dante seem to disappear overnight. Valerie is in a mental hospital, of all places. Everything is different.”
“Not everything,” I said, willing my voice to remain light. “I’m still the same old Abby.”
Jason looked at me seriously. “No. You’re not. That’s my point. There’s something different about you, and all I can think is that when Dante left, he broke your heart, and now you’re in denial, hoping he’ll come back one day.”
I couldn’t help myself—I reached up and touched the locket at my throat. Tears burned the backs of my eyes and a sour taste coated my throat. Dante had left me, but not like Jason imagined. I had worked so hard not to think about it. Now suddenly I remembered so clearly stepping away from Dante, releasing him so he could follow after Zo before the door of time closed forever. I remembered how the flat light of the bank seemed to part around him as he turned away from me. I felt again the music ringing deep in my bones, the song of time as it spilled out of the doorway, drawing Dante like a moth to a flame. I heard the echo of destruction as the black door dissolved into white light.
“He’s gone, Abby,” Jason said quietly, sliding his arm around my shoulder and leaning his head against mine. “And he’s not coming back.”
I closed my eyes, and for one small flash of time I wondered if Jason was right. It had been weeks, and if Dante had survived the passage through the door a second time, then he, like Zo, was now a master of time. He could go anywhere and any when he wanted. And if that was the case, then why hadn’t he come back to me, if only to let me know he was okay? Deep down I knew he would come if he could, but since he hadn’t, I feared that it was because he couldn’t. I worried that something had happened to him somewhere along the river of time. What if he had never made it past the door? What if he was trapped somewhere on the bank, or lost in time? What if he’d already confronted Zo . . . and lost? What if I never found out what happened to him? What if he was gone forever?
“Hey, Abby, I’m sorry,” Jason said. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
I rubbed at my eyes, surprised to feel the tears flowing down my cheeks and soaking into Jason’s shirt. Dante’s locket felt like a rock chained around my neck.
“You’re wrong,” I insisted, my low voice muffled by Jason’s shoulder. “He didn’t break my heart, and he is coming back to me. He promised.”
Jason was quiet for a long time, rubbing his hand up and down my back until my tears dried and my breath stopped hiccuping in my chest.
“Do you feel better?” he asked me, brushing my hair away from my face.
I nodded, swiping my sleeve across my eyes. Oddly enough, I did feel better. It was like the tears had washed away three weeks’ worth of worry and fear and in their place was a clean and clear resolve. I would follow my heart; I would trust my instincts.
Dante had left me the blueprints for a reason. He had seen something in the river that made him decide to give them to me. He had trusted me to make the right choices, even difficult choices, and I didn’t want to let him down.
It was simple: If Dante couldn’t come to me, then I would go to him. And that meant finishing the time machine no matter what.
“Thanks, Jason,” I said, sitting up straight and squeezing his forearm.
“For what?”
“For being a good friend. For helping. For everything.”
“Well, in that case . . .” He grinned and wiped the last trace of a tear from my face. “I’ll only charge you half the going rate.”
“The going rate for what?”
“For doing your homework.” He laughed.
“Brat.” I scowled at him and slapped at his shoulder. “And you’re doing this for free, remember?”
He shrugged easily. “As long as you’re paying for the materials, I’m okay with that. Do you know how much”—he
consulted the paperwork—“‘a beam of black walnut wood, turned by hand, and inscribed with a needle-pointed awl’ costs?”
“I don’t even know what a needle-pointed awl is.”
“Me neither, but it sounds expensive.” He stood up, pulling me to my feet with him. “According to the plans, we’ll need to start actual construction on the first day of summer—that’s what? two weeks from today? Will you have everything ready by then?”
“Two weeks and two days, but who’s counting, right? And yes, I’ll be ready,” I said, crossing my fingers behind my back.
“Even the needle-pointed awl?”
“Especially that.”
“Okay, then.” He tapped the papers into a neat square and handed them back to me. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
I watched Jason head for home, a spring in his step, and heard the faint whistle of a random tune trailing after him.
I looked again at the small orange flags fluttering on the lawn and thought about how much time two weeks really was. And how fast it could disappear. “I hope so too,” I murmured.
***
The moon was lost behind the clouds, and I could smell the coming storm in the hot breeze blowing past my open window. I sat on my window seat and propped a pillow behind my back. Crossing my feet against the wall, I pulled a brush through my wet hair. After dinner, I’d watched some TV with Hannah, then headed upstairs for a bath before bed.
I loved late-night summer storms. There was something soothing about being inside while a storm raged outside. A feeling of being protected, safe against the raw power of nature. Lightning raced ahead on the horizon; thunder grumbled in the distance, petulant at being left behind. The humid air was heavy with rain.
My cell phone rang. I slipped it off my desk and flipped it on.
“Are you watching?” Natalie asked.
“Absolutely.”
A silver flicker sliced through the shadows. Natalie and I oohed at the same time.
“That was a nice one,” she said.
“Very.” I shifted the phone to my other ear. “Where are you?”
“Family room. What about you?”
“Window seat.”
“Excellent vantage point. You’ll have to tell me what I’m missing.”
I grinned. “How long have we been watching storms together?” I asked.
Natalie laughed. “How did this tradition even get started? Do you remember?”
“Of course I do. I was sleeping over at your place and we were staying up late watching old Hitchcock movies when a storm hit. We turned off the TV and ended up watching the weather instead.”
“That’s right. Ugh, weather watchers—does that make us nerds or what?”
“I’ll take the ‘or what’ category.”
“You would.”
“Hey, that sounds vaguely like an insult.”
“It is.” She laughed again. “Kidding!”
I shook my head and grinned. “I know, I know.” Raindrops starte
d to fall, invisible in the darkness, but loud against the leaves and the side of the house. “It’s starting to rain here—what about you?”
“Yep. Just now. I wish it wasn’t the middle of the night. I would love to go play in the rain.”
“And risk catching a cold before graduation? Are you crazy?”
She sighed and her voice turned serious. “I can’t believe it’s tomorrow.” She sounded sad. “One last time together before we all go our separate ways.”
“What are you talking about? You and Jason are going to school together.”
“I know, but you’re going somewhere else, and Valerie . . .” Natalie’s voice trailed off. I heard the thunder outside my window echoing through the phone. “I guess I just thought things would be different, that’s all.”
I leaned my head back against the wall, a fine rain touching my face with mist. “Have you been to see her?” I asked quietly.
“Not yet.” She hesitated. “Does that make me a bad friend?”
“No. I haven’t seen her yet either.”
“But you had a good reason—you were in the hospital.”
“Still.”
“Are you okay now?” Natalie asked. “I mean, things were a little crazy there, weren’t they?”
“I’m fine,” I said, pretty sure it was the truth. And if not, pretty sure it would be soon enough. The orange flags flickered in the lightning like individual flames. I shivered and rested my hand against the scars on my throat, memories filling me at the touch. Memories I wasn’t sure I wanted to face tonight.
I heard Natalie yawn.
“It’s late,” I said, grateful for the easy out. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
“What about the storm?”
“It’ll be fine without us,” I said. “Besides, there’ll always be another one.”
I hung up the phone, but I didn’t leave the window seat right away. Instead, I closed the window and watched the raindrops as they traveled down the glass, each one making tiny, individual tracks. Some drops ran in a straight line; others meandered in wandering trails before being swallowed up in the wake of another drop. The rain fell and the water continued to branch out into countless rivers, endlessly moving, endlessly flowing.