The World Between Blinks

by Ryan Graudin

  Their beloved porch was populated by strangers—women in bright cotton dresses and men in light gray suits and hats. Christopher among them. Music with a strange, scratchy quality floated out from the picture. It was coming from a record player. The laughing people all held glasses of golden, sparkling champagne, and as Jake watched, they clinked them together. “Cheers!”

  One woman turned toward them, smiling, and instantly Jake recognized her poppy-red lipstick. Another woman with curling auburn hair and merry eyes twined her arm through Hazel’s. She reminded Jake of Mom and Aunt Cara, and her lips twitched like Uncle Todd’s did when he was about to tell you a good joke.

  And then he knew who she was. “That’s Nana,” he breathed.

  “That’s my sister, Lucy.” Christopher’s eyes creased tight, as if to hold back tears. “She and Hazel were best friends, which is how we met. But this isn’t the memory I’m looking for.”

  He clicked the Illuminator, and the scene whirled away, replaced with a crystal-blue lake at the foot of a jagged mountain. A group stood on the pebbly shore, shrieking with laughter as they pulled off their coats. They were going to swim, Jake thought. Did they have their suits on underneath?

  “Avert your eyes, children!” Christopher fumbled for the switch on the Illuminator. “Wrong memory!”

  Jake heard Naomi laugh behind him and try to turn it into a cough as the scene shifted again. And again, and again.

  Hazel was in every one of Christopher’s memories, and Nana was in many of them too. Then came a memory that did not arrive in a flurry of color or laughter. Instead, the jacket was stained with brutal browns and dark greens, white-that-was-no-longer-white, and the occasional slash of red.

  “Ah,” said Percy sadly, from behind Jake. “This sight I know well. This is war.”

  “This is how I lost her.” Christopher’s voice sank like a boot in mud. There was so much of it on the screen. “Come, it’s perfectly safe. We can’t touch the memory, and the memory can’t touch us. Believe me, if there were a way to change that, I would’ve found it by now.”

  He held out his hand to Marisol, and she slipped her fingers into his larger, rougher ones. Jake set his tea down on the ground and grabbed her other hand, and to his right, he felt Percy join hands with him as well.

  Oz watched the human chain form, too busy gnawing on a sock to tag along.

  “Don’t let go,” Christopher warned. “I’m not entirely sure what would happen if we did.”

  And so saying, he walked toward the dirty jacket pegged to the washline, towing the children and explorers with him. When he reached the screen, Jake’s vision flickered, trying to properly see something that didn’t make sense. Somehow, Christopher took one more step and walked straight into the picture on the jacket.

  As soon as he did, they were all inside the scene. Jake clung to Marisol’s and Percy’s hands—DON’T LET GO. He didn’t dare. Not this time. At least his head was free to move, twisting sharply to take in their surroundings.

  “This is a field hospital,” Percy said. “We must be near a battlefield, just behind the front lines.”

  They were in what looked like a huge barn, lined with row after row after row of low beds, mostly pieces of canvas slung across thin metal frames. Jake had slept on a bed just like this when he went camping in the Outback with his mom. It hadn’t been very comfortable.

  But the young soldiers on the cots looked like they had other things to worry about. Most of the patients wore bandages as dingy as Christopher’s clothes. Some slept, some stared at the ceiling, some called out. Their cries sounded like ghosts. Women hurried up and down the aisles, all dressed in khaki—some wore dresses, others trousers, one had on a leather flight jacket with a sheepskin collar that reminded Jake of Amelia’s.

  Nobody seemed to notice the impossible sight of six men and two children—for even Herr Leichhardt had come—holding hands as they walked through the hospital. Christopher found them a place against the barn wall and nodded at a spot just in front of him. “They’ll be here in a moment,” he said.

  Jake didn’t have time to ask who—he knew the answer as soon as he saw them. Bandages spilled over Hazel’s arms while she bustled in their direction. Another, much younger version of Christopher, dressed neatly in his army uniform, trailed behind her. It was the Christopher that belonged back in this time.

  “It’s your break,” she said to him over her shoulder. “Go sit down, get something to eat. Your unit will be expecting you back soon enough.”

  “I’m exactly where I want to be,” he protested.

  “Where’s that?” Her poppy-red lips crimped into a laugh. “A hospital in the middle of France?”

  “Wherever you are,” he answered simply. “Can I help you carry those?”

  Hazel stopped in front of the line of apparently invisible observers from the World Between Blinks, turning to face Christopher.

  “Oh, love.” The laughter drained from her voice, until she sounded so, so tired. “We’re in the middle of a war. How can you sound so hopeful?”

  “Hope is all we have,” he said. “I’ll never give it up. I couldn’t. Not when you’re standing right in front of me.”

  “There’s so much pain here,” she murmured. “These men have lost their health, their hope, their dreams.”

  “Time will bring those things back in new ways,” he insisted.

  But Hazel shook her head, diamond-bright tears welling up in her eyes. “So much loss,” she said. “It clings to me like a cloud, Christopher.”

  He opened his mouth to reply, but his eyes went wide, and he seemed to lose his words.

  Jake felt his own breath flee his lungs, as though he’d been punched. Hazel was fading right in front of them, tears rolling down her cheeks as she became fainter and fainter, until she was translucent. And then she was gone.

  Christopher blinked at the spot where she had been, then dashed to the next aisle and grabbed a nurse by the shoulders, swinging her around to face him.

  “Hazel!” he cried. “She just vanished, she vanished right in front of my eyes!”

  The nurse blinked at him. “Who?”

  Jake heard the click of the Illuminator switching off, and abruptly they were back in the Amazon clearing. Oz whuffed a welcome back between bites of sock. Their tea was still hot, seeping steam into the jungle’s damp air, and after the chill of a French battlefield this warmth was a relief. So was the change in soundtrack—instead of distant artillery, a much softer chorus of birds, animals, and insects rushed back in at Jake. Hums, clicks, whirrs, and cries. Cries not too different from the ghost soldiers . . .

  “Are you all right, lad?” Percy squeezed his hand. “War is never easy to see.”

  Jake’s shaking fingers felt as flimsy as Hazel’s. He understood why she vanished . . . why it was easier to just slip away. “I’m fine.”

  He pulled his hand from Percy’s.

  He didn’t let go of Marisol, though.

  “¿Qué pasó?” his cousin asked. “What happened after that?”

  Their own Christopher, who now looked tired and worn thin, tucked the Illuminator away in his pocket.

  “Hazel was simply gone,” he said quietly. “She was so loving, so sensitive, that the loss around her became too much. Nobody nearby even seemed to notice, though I found out later that her family did. So did my sister, Lucy. Hazel went down in the records as missing in action. I devoted myself to finding her, and after the war I searched everywhere.”

  “Where do you even begin a search like that?” Raleigh tugged at the brim of his hat, anxious.

  “Lucy helped me,” Christopher said. “She was always very gifted at finding things. I used to tease her that she had magnet fingers. We followed the trail of hints and clues all over the world. If you know where to look, down the backs of libraries and on the highest shelves of very old bookstores, you can find records of the World Between Blinks. Eventually I found my way here.”

  “How?” Jake whispere
d.

  Christopher gave him a small sad smile. “I loved Hazel too much. I wouldn’t let her go, and by chasing something that was lost for so long, I became lost myself.”

  Jake saw the explorers around them nod. It was just the way they had come to the World too.

  Percy stooped to retrieve his cup of tea from where he had set it on the ground. “Listen, old chap,” he said. “You have my deepest sympathy, but you haven’t explained why you pulled these children into your search.”

  Christopher nodded. “Lucy—Jake and Marisol’s Nana—never gave up on me. Even after I ended up in the World too. She used her magnet fingers to find thin spots in the Unknown. She called them ‘doors,’ but we could only ever talk to each other through the space—I wasn’t able to travel back home.”

  It was just like the scavenger had explained: Lost things from the old world show up here, but it doesn’t work in reverse.

  “Lucy always took care to stay on her side, so she wouldn’t become trapped like me. She took care to document everything too. She told me she kept maps at home, and I know she marked the sites on them.”

  “X marks the spot,” Marisol whispered.

  Jake pictured his grandmother’s curling s, inked over all the places on the map she’d told him there was treasure to be found. He could practically feel the dry creases of the paper beneath his fingertips, smell the musty-but-comforting scent that always seemed to come from old books.

  “Not X,” he said slowly. “C.C. For Christopher Creaturo.” He released Marisol’s hand and dropped to a crouch. In the damp earth beside his mug, he traced out the swooping curves of back-to-back Cs. Put together like that, they looked just like an X.

  He glanced up at Marisol, whose hand had retreated to her pocket. Probably wrapped tight around the Great Mogul Diamond.

  “Nana always did say brothers are treasures.” Her lips twitched—like Uncle Todd’s, like Nana’s. “It makes a lot more sense if she was talking about someone other than Victor.”

  Christopher let out a soft sigh. “She talked about you two, the last few years. It was so hard to watch her growing old when I never did, but I loved to hear about the life she lived, with all of her many adventures. And I loved learning about the new generation of Berunas growing up to continue that tradition. She talked about your sense of adventure, about . . . the things about you that might help you make the trip.”

  What did that mean? Marisol’s magnet fingers? Jake’s own cloud of lostness that stuck to him, as Hazel’s had clung to her? His insides swirled like a dancer’s—around and around—and even though it wasn’t his fault they were in the World Between Blinks, it could easily be his fault that they stayed. They could be cataloged and trapped forever. All he had to do was let go of one more memory, let one of his hurts or farewells just drift away. . . .

  His hand turned into a fist.

  His stomach became a bowling ball.

  “Why didn’t you just tell us?” he burst out. “You could have asked us to help you!”

  “I was going to,” Christopher promised. “But the Curators arrived before I expected them to catch up, and I had to run or they’d have taken the ledger with Hazel’s name inside. I can’t save her without this book. It’s my very last chance. . . .”

  “Sure,” said Marisol, her eyes narrowing. “But then you kept running away from us.”

  “I didn’t know what they’d told you. I didn’t know if I could trust you to help after”—their great-uncle faltered—“after my lies.”

  Everyone studied him in silence. Oz dropped his jawful of yarn. Marisol crossed her arms. Colonel Percy Fawcett cleared his throat in the most British way possible. Even Herr Leichhardt turned from where he was carving his latest L into a tree.

  “I could have handled it better. . . .” Christopher shifted his weight from foot to foot.

  Go on, go on, the insects chirped.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Jake exhaled slowly, and he felt like he was breathing out the worry and the tension that had been settling into his bones, growing with every thump of his heart over the last few days.

  He looked across at Marisol, and she nodded. “Te perdonamos.”

  “We forgive you,” Jake repeated.

  “But we still need to get home,” she added.

  “They will be worrying about you by now,” Christopher admitted. “Even though we don’t age, time passes here just as it does back at home. I saw that when I managed to communicate with Lucy—she grew older, but I never did. If you’ve been in the World for days, then you’ve been missing at home for days.”

  Jake’s heart started thumping all over again. His mom would be completely freaking out. So would Aunt Cara and Uncle Mache, and everyone, come to that. . . .

  Percy took a sip of his tea. “You will have been gone for the better part of a century, Mr. Creaturo. Are you sure you wish to return with Hazel to the modern world?”

  “Yes.” Christopher sounded like a soldier when he answered. Dogged. Determined. “I have a plan.”

  “Well,” said Jake. “We’re going to need a bunch of plans to get everything we need to get ourselves home. And they’re all going to have to be good.”

  15

  Marisol

  THERE WAS A LOT TO DO.

  To escape the World Between Blinks with everyone and everything intact they’d need to collect a very long list of items. Ledger entries mostly. Sure, Christopher Creaturo had the volume with Hazel’s record inside, but there were three other names that needed to be crossed out as well: Jake’s, Marisol’s, and of course his own.

  “Yours should be easy enough,” he told the cousins around the campfire. “The Curators keep their most recent records in the Public Record Office of Ireland—the one that burned down in 1922. Security is much laxer there than at the Crystal Palace. Cataloged citizens of the World can enter without triggering any alarms.”

  “Is that how you managed to write Marisol and me into a ledger?” Jake asked.

  “That’s right.” Christopher still looked somewhat shamefaced about the situation. “I put on a white suit and walked right in with a pen.”

  Marisol’s stomach dropped. “But the Curators said that if we were officially cataloged, we had to stay here forever. Did you catalog us?”

  “No, no,” Christopher hastened to reassure her. “Cataloging requires much more detail, and at least forty-seven different forms being filled out. The red tape is a nightmare. This is . . . a shortcut. After I wrote you into the current ledger’s entries, I took the page with me, since it was always my intention to send you back home with Hazel. I left that paper with her for safekeeping.”

  “Will she remember to keep it safe?” Marisol didn’t mean to sound mean, but the woman they’d met in Kitezh had had the attention span of a goldfish.

  “It’s folded into her jacket pocket. She won’t even realize it’s there. . . .” Christopher glanced at his own hourglass. “Good thing I remembered. The sands have been slipping away faster and faster since Lucy died. I’m not exactly sure why, but that’s the reason I was desperate enough to write your names down. I knew I was running out of time.”

  Jake was getting fidgety on his log. “So that’s how you get us home,” he said. “By crossing out our names from the page you hid with Hazel, and crossing out her name from the ledger you already had us steal for you.”

  “Yes,” Christopher said slowly. “But there’s more to it. I don’t want to send Hazel back to the old world without her memories, so—”

  “Our friend Johann told us the fallen sands are archived in the Library of Alexandria.” Her primo leaned forward eagerly. “Do you think there’s a way to get to them?”

  “I hope so,” their great-uncle replied. “The Administrator makes sure the Curators save everything. Problem is, he doesn’t like giving stuff back.”

  “Hoarder,” muttered Raleigh.

  “It’s a rather selfish system,” his friend Jack agreed.

 
Christopher nodded. “We’ll have to be quick and clever about it, but if we can get into the Library of Alexandria’s memory archives without being detected, we should be able to fill our hourglasses back to the top.”

  “I’ll do it,” Jake said, without hesitation.

  Marisol blinked at him. For someone who had said he wished he could shed his memories, it was a surprise to hear Jake wanting to save someone else’s for them. Perhaps he’d changed his mind once he’d forgotten the bonfire for Nana.

  Maybe he didn’t want to be lost after all.

  The thought made Marisol breathe more freely, even though there was still so much to worry about. Missing memories, Hazel, the ripped-out record page . . . It was a ton of ground to cover, especially on foot. But there was one thing Christopher had hurried past.

  “What about your ledger entry?” Marisol studied her great-uncle. The longer they talked, the more glimpses of brotherly treasure she uncovered. His chin dimple matched Uncle Matt’s, and he laughed the way their grandmother used to.

  His sadness was also like Nana’s: a V appeared between their brows, their blue eyes went deep, deep, deep. “I was hoping my name would be in this book.” He nodded at Hazel’s ledger. “But the Curators’ records are chronological, and I arrived here several years after Hazel did. It took me decades to figure out where her volume was shelved. . . . I’m afraid trying to track the book down now would be a lengthy lost cause.”

  “I can find it!” Marisol wiggled her own magnet fingers and explained, “I can find anything, same as Nana!”

  It wouldn’t hurt to find the Great Mogul Diamond’s entry either. If Marisol didn’t cross it out, then she couldn’t take the jewel home, which meant adiós beach house! After seeing the porch party inside Christopher’s memories, the place seemed more important than ever.

  Jake tapped at his hourglass with a frown. “We might not have time to go back to the Crystal Palace before Christopher’s sand falls through. Plus it could be dangerous. What about the alarms?”

  “Alarms won’t be a problem for us. We still haven’t been cataloged,” she pointed out to her primo. “But you can sneak into the library. I’ll go to the Crystal Palace by myself. Not alone!” she amended after seeing the look on his face. “I’ll ask Amelia for a ride! And we can pick Hazel up from the underwater cities on the way! That’s two birds with one stone!”