Silver Shard

by Betsy Streeter

  “And then the portal was chopped in two so Monder couldn’t come back?” Helen asks.

  “That was the idea,” Kate says. “It was a plan made in haste. And as you can see, the plan may not have worked so well.”

  “So we can’t destroy the fragments, but we can’t let them be put back together either,” Helen says. “We have to protect something in order to keep it from working.”

  “Sounds ridiculous when you put it that way,” Kate says. “I just wonder…what if Anna is right, and the Silver Shard really does exist? What if we really could destroy the fragments and close the portal? I mean, Anna is prone to dramatics, and she relies on her feelings too much in my opinion. Your dad calls it ‘going all mystical.’ But what if she is onto something?”

  “What’s the Silver Shard?” Helen asks.

  A device buzzes in Kate’s pocket, and she fishes it out. A pigeon lands nearby and tilts its head around, eyeing the two of them.

  “I’ll have to decrypt this message,” Kate says. She pops open the back of the device and messes with its insides. The message plays back, still gibberish. The pitch of the voice goes up and down, speeds up and slows. A few more adjustments followed by a burst of static.

  “Hey Kate, it’s Anna. Look, I’ve found out some info on the Silver Shard. I think I know where it is. Or I can find out where it is, anyway. Now hang on. Before you delete this and say I’m crazy, remember I said I thought it was real. And that we could find it. But I need your help, Kate. This is our chance to destroy the fragment and the portal forever. I’m on the road. Don’t message me.”

  “Well, speaking of mystical,” Helen says. “Anna knew you were talking about her and the Silver Shard, I guess.”

  “Silver Shard,” Kate says. “I always thought that sounded like something out of a corny fairy tale. And not even a very good one.”

  “I still don’t know what a Silver Shard even is,” Helen says.

  “It’s an axe,” Kate says. “The handle was supposedly made from a branch of the silver tree in the Silverwood legends, with a blade forged from portal metal. The story is that the Silver Shard was used to chop this particular portal into two pieces.” She holds up the fragment around her neck and looks at it. “But the fact is, there are a million versions of the fragment story. And nobody knows how to melt down portals. And nobody’s seen a silver tree in oh, centuries. So, as you can imagine, I’m skeptical.”

  “Understandable,” Helen says. She opens up the radio and pulls it apart again, still not looking at it.

  “But there is something that I know for sure, without a shadow of a doubt,” Kate says.

  “What’s that?” Helen asks. Her hands still fly, reconfiguring the radio over and over.

  “I know that in order to get your brother back, we’re going to have to get creative. We have to have the skills to break into—and out of—places that we haven’t even found yet. And that means that we are going to need world-class hacking abilities,” Kate looks Helen in the eyes and places her hand on top of the radio, stopping Helen’s hands, “And you are, without a doubt, the best, most skillful, most creative hacker I have ever seen. This I know.”

  Helen leans over slowly and rests her head on her mother’s shoulder.

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Now let’s go get your brother.”

  Anna Helena Silverwood sits at one end of a park bench at the center of a gray city. Trees reach for one another with their branches, forming a canopy through which one can glimpse the tops of a variety of skyscrapers.

  She watches intently as people pass by, some rushing, others more leisurely. Each of these humans has a story to tell. Here’s a man late for a meeting, here’s an old lady lost in thought, two bicycles nearly collide, a dog’s leash becomes tangled in a lanky teenager’s legs.

  Anna observes every detail, in hopes that she will find one particular person in all of these crowds. Someone who, in all likelihood, does not wish to be found.

  A man comes shuffling down the path and sits at the opposite end of the bench from Anna. He’s got a worn briefcase to go with his worn shoes and tattered coat. He’s wrapped a black scarf around his neck so thickly it threatens to consume his face. It’s not that cold outside; probably this man has no home and is wearing all of his possessions on his body.

  Anna glances at the man and offers a smile. Then she goes back to observing.

  “This is my regular bench here,” the man says.

  “I hope you don’t mind me borrowing a bit of it,” Anna replies.

  “Nah,” the man says, “not at all. You’re welcome to it. Best place for people-watching, if you ask me.”

  “Yes, I’m sure it is,” Anna says.

  “You waiting for that special someone?” the man asks.

  Anna smiles. “Someone special, yes,” she answers. “But I’ve no idea if he will pass by here or not.”

  “Oh sure, he will, have faith,” the man says. He begins to unwrap his scarf. “I got a sandwich. You want some?”

  “Oh, no thanks,” Anna says as politely as possible.

  “Suit yourself,” the man says, rummaging in the briefcase.

  More and more people fill the sidewalks and paths in the park; folks are coming out for their coffee breaks or early lunches. Anna’s eyes dart around as she tries harder and harder to keep up with all of the faces.

  “My ancestors were Vikings,” the man says through a bite of sandwich.

  “Were they,” Anna says, still scanning.

  “Yeah, big ships, horns on their heads, everything.”

  He chews.

  “You got ancestors?” he asks.

  “Everyone’s got ancestors,” Anna answers. “A lot of us don’t even know who half of them are.”

  “You looking for your ancestors?” the man asks.

  Anna turns and looks at the man. “Why do you ask that?”

  The man ignores her question. “You know what the Vikings carried into battle? Axes. Big, heavy axes. Chop a man in half. Boy, it would be something to see that.”

  Anna slides the length of the bench and peers directly into the man’s face. His skin seems a tad gray, and the pupils of his eyes are a funny shape.

  “Seriously?” Anna says. “Another one?”

  “What?” the man says.

  She grabs the man’s chin and speaks directly into his right eyeball. “Hello, I can see you’ve sent another ‘tom. No doubt you’ll send more. But this fellow here, he’s picking up a whole lot of bogus information. Scrambled. You’ve got no coordinates, and no trace on me. Heck, this isn’t even my voice you’re hearing. So stop sending me refurbished, forgotten old humans. It’s not funny anymore.” She lets go of the man’s face.

  “What was that?” the man asks.

  “Tell me something,” Anna says. “Do you feel odd? Like, not yourself?”

  The man considers this. “Yes, I suppose so,” he answers.

  “There’s a reason for that,” Anna says. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go.” Anna gets up and hurries off.

  An older man with red hair like Anna’s passes in the opposite direction, but she doesn’t see him and he doesn’t see her.

  Henry sits on the floor in the middle of a featureless white room, bigger than the room where his bed and desk are. He has no memory of how he got to this place; he woke up here. There is no door and only a single dark window high in one wall.

  Ink stains the knees of Henry’s pajama pants. He holds a thick, black pen in his fist, as if he might stab someone with it. He puts the pen on the floor and begins to draw.

  He scrawls a tiny square at the exact center of the room. He adds another square and another, and then lines and circles around those, working his way outward. Symbols. Dead ends. More and more circles, going around and around one another like petals of an enormous rose or the surface of a room-sized circuit board. He draws connections between the shapes, as if they are all part of one big exploded diagram.

  Henry
can’t tell if it is day or night, or how long he has been in this room. His white-blond hair flops into his face as he draws.

  He adds another circle, this time with breaks in it every so often, and then he writes more unrecognizable symbols around the outside. There is a language here, but Henry does not understand it. Perhaps the symbols are labels, or instructions on a big map. He thinks back to what Mr. Goode said about Guild members mapping space and time rifts. He can only assume that this diagram is one of those, a much larger version of the ones he had created in his apartment.

  Henry’s hand is beginning to ache. Occasionally he shifts his grip on the pen, or switches hands altogether.

  Henry works his way out farther and farther toward the periphery of the room, drawing compulsively and making ever-larger circles and patterns. He spirals around the pieces he has already drawn again and again, as if adding rings to a tree. He smears the ink when he slides around on top of the drawings. When he rests his hands or arms on the floor the ink comes off, leaving a strange tattoo-like pattern on his skin.

  Henry is going several minutes at a time without blinking. His eyelids burn red and sting.

  Eventually, Henry makes his way all the way out to the walls. His drawing is huge; he has to crawl around like a crazed monkey to keep up with himself. His bare feet skit-skit! across the floor as he works, adding lines and notations and shapes everywhere.

  Finally Henry reaches the last corner and runs out of space to draw. He looks up at the one window. In the ceiling, four head-sized circles of light appear and begin to emit a faint hum.

  Henry stops drawing. He leans back against the wall, exhausted and alone. He tilts his head back up toward the ceiling and takes deep breaths through his mouth. For a moment, his hand drops to his side and rests. He lets go of the pen and flexes his fingers in and out.

  The floor begins to glow, growing brighter and brighter until it has turned blinding white. Henry puts his hands in front of his face, drawing up his knees.

  A great mechanical clicking noise comes from somewhere below, and a thick blue line of light moves across the floor from one side of the room to the other. When the line fades, the floor is once again a blank surface with nothing written on it. Every line and character Henry drew has disappeared.

  A deep, computer-generated voice fills the room from above, “PLEASE. BEGIN. AGAIN.”

  “No,” Henry says.

  “PLEASE. BEGIN. AGAIN.”

  Henry crawls like an old man who has fallen out of his wheelchair, brittle and bony, back to the center of the floor.

  ‘PLEASE. BEGIN. AGAIN.”

  Henry wonders why this pen never runs out of ink. He wonders why he feels compelled to keep drawing, drawing, drawing. He can’t seem to stop himself. He wonders if he will ever leave this room.

  “PLEASE. BEGIN. AGAIN.”

  “I hate you,” Henry says through his teeth.

  The voice will not cease until the pen touches the floor at the center. Henry holds the pen out, just an inch above the surface.

  “PLEASE. BEGIN. AGAIN.”

  Henry drops the pen to the floor as if it weighs as much as a boulder, and draws a single, tiny square. Then he rolls on his side and goes to sleep.

  Monder leans back in his high-backed leather chair and closes his eyes. He raises a hand, and one of the monitors on the wall in front of him lights up with a green sound wave undulating from left to right. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony begins to play. Monder listens, silent, enraptured.

  “Ah, human music is very nice, isn’t it?” Monder says to the skeleton on the chamber wall. “I do envy it. Think what culture we Tromindox might have developed by now had our time not been so consumed with fighting extinction.”

  The notes swell, fade, accelerate, and slow. Monder relishes the music, consuming it. He snaps his fingers and various screens change to display a chandelier, a castle, scenes of flowers and trees and grass. Monder has not laid eyes on anything resembling nature in centuries, although his sense of the passage of time disintegrated long ago. The images pulse in and out and change color as the music plays.

  Monder conducts the unseen orchestra with slow, languid movements. He stands, still conducting, and walks around the perimeter of the chamber. As he goes, openings appear in the walls. Each reveals a long corridor. Monder pays no attention to them, and they disappear one after another as he passes by. He learned long ago that his home was a fractal labyrinth and that the space was created by his own movements—leading nowhere.

  Two hundred years ago, Monder would have run and run through one passage after another until his feet bled and he fell to the ground in exhaustion. He would have taken on shape after shape and thrown his body against the stone walls. He would have screamed until he could no longer make a sound and then collapsed, exhausted, only to find himself back in the center chamber once again. Alone.

  Now, he knows better. He stays put, and listens to his music.

  “There is still time for the Tromindox, you know,” Monder says to his skeleton friend. “Now that we’ve come back in numbers. We’re whole. A species ready to take our place. We have a few millennia to catch up, now. Good thing. There’s work to do.”

  He leans forward and peers at a monitor at the lower left corner of the chamber wall, one that shows a white room with a young boy in it. The boy has white-blond hair, and he is sleeping. The screen refreshes with drawings of lines, patterns, and circles inside one another.

  “Very good,” Monder says. “A very good start. A little rough, but he’ll get better with time, I suppose.”

  Monder snaps a finger and the screen switches off.

  Daniel Brush sits on the sunny back porch of the Brokeneck Bookstore situated on the main street (the only street) in Brokeneck, California. He is reading Richard III from a palm-sized leather volume, which he holds open with one hand. Daniel has brought with him an enormous pitcher of lemonade, which sits on the deck a few feet away in the shade so the ice will melt slightly less quickly. Every so often he tips his chair to the side, picks up the pitcher and takes a few gulps from it.

  A heavy crash somewhere inside the store interrupts his reading. Daniel leans forward and peers in the back door, his line of sight reaching all the way through the center aisle to the front window. He sees nothing. Annoyed, he slips his feet into his sandals and rouses himself to investigate. He pictures Bertrand the cat looking smug after upsetting a stack of books.

  But Bertrand is at his customary perch behind the register, and there is no pile of books on the floor. Daniel takes a quick survey of each aisle, wondering if a customer has come in. “Uncle?” he calls. But Mr. Brush, his uncle and the owner of the bookstore, is out.

  “Alright, whoever you are,” Daniel says. “I’m not going to put up with any playing around in here. Show yourself. And don’t knock stuff over. I’ve just got this place cleaned up.” Daniel thrives on organization, which is why he is the perfect bookstore employee.

  Daniel reaches the front of the store; everything is as he left it. He opens the front door and steps out, nearly tripping over a knee-high, broad wooden box taking up much of the walkway. A donation? Daniel peers up and down the dusty street but all he can see are a few folks seeking refuge from the sun on porches and amongst the ruins of the Brokeneck Hotel across the street. No delivery vehicle, no one nearby. Just the box.

  He looks the box over carefully without touching it. It’s got hefty nails at the joints, and the wood looks old. There’s a label on top, but the words have faded. He squints at them. The box appears addressed to a “Marvin Brush, Watchmaker.” Marvin is Daniel’s uncle’s name. But this Marvin is a bookstore owner, not a watchmaker. An ancestor, maybe? Perhaps this box is an inheritance from a distant relative?

  Daniel points a finger at the box. “I’m opening you out here,” he says to it. “You are probably heavy, and I don’t trust mysterious objects. Also, I don’t want a mess.”

  Daniel retreats inside and emerges with a sizeable screwdri
ver to pry off the lid. The wood gives way easily, the nails pulling out with barely a squeak. He lifts up the top and looks inside.

  The first thing that hits him is the heavy smell, a mix of leather and smoke and moss. The box appears to contain a collection of about twenty identically bound volumes, dark red-brown in color and labeled with faded gold. Daniel rubs one of the spines with a finger, removing a healthy layer of grime and revealing a strange version of a portal symbol. The symbol is circular, with a square hole in the middle and a spiral, but on either side of this are a pair of wings.

  “I didn’t order an encyclopedia,” Daniel says to the box. He pries out one volume with his index finger. The book is small enough to hold open in one hand, and its brittle state has rendered it nearly weightless and without a spine to hold the pages together. Careful to keep the book in one piece, Daniel runs a hand over the back and then flips to the front. He opens the inside cover, or rather lifts it away since it is barely attached. On the inside of this he notices an embossed portal symbol.

  “I wonder…” Daniel mumbles to himself, picking at the embossing with a thumbnail. He remembers a notebook that Helen Silverwood had with a portal embedded in its cover. Could that be the case with this book, too? A bit of the edge comes loose. Daniel pries a little more, not wanting to mar the cover but too curious to leave it alone. Sure enough, the paper peels away and he finds a portal coin embedded inside.

  He opens several more delicate volumes, each embedded with a portal in its front cover and the strange winged-portal symbol stamped on the spine. He flips through the pages, but can’t make out much of the writing. A great deal of it takes the form of diagrams and symbols, and most of the writing is backwards. The diagrams seem to be labeled in some secret language, made up of circles and tiny squares connected at the edges by lines. The effect is not unlike a circuit board, even though these books appear to have been created long before anyone invented electronics or microprocessors.

  Inside the store, Bertrand lets out a yowl. Now Daniel does hear something crashing to the floor. Clearly the cat has decided that Daniel is paying far too much attention to this dumb box.