“Honestly, cat,” Daniel says, poking his head inside to admonish his friend. But he stops speaking when he sees lying flat and open on the floor and Bertrand sitting next to it.
“When did you learn to turn pages?” Daniel asks Bertrand. The cat blinks at him. Daniel looks down at the book. “What the…wait, I just saw that. Where did I see that?” Daniel rushes back outside and picks up one of the encyclopedia volumes. Sure enough, there’s a diagram inside made up of concentric circles and an arrangement of tiny squares like a circuit board, that matches exactly the open page in the larger book inside.
Daniel looks at the small book, then the big one. “Looks like all these are from the same collection, cat,” he says to Bertrand. “I wonder…”
He goes back to the box and reaches in for the volume at the very end, crammed up against the side and thicker than the rest. “Most sets like this have an Index,” Daniel says. “Let’s see if you have one, too.”
This last volume is the most worn, as is often the case with an Index. Taken out over and over to reference the rest of the material, its pages see far more use. The front cover is cracked and has almost no writing on it at all. Daniel holds it up to the light, trying to make out what’s left of the gold letters. He thinks he can see an “I,” a “D,” and an “X.” “Good enough for me,” Daniel says. He flips it open.
What he finds inside, though, is not words. Where the pages ought to be he finds a solid block. And in the middle of this, there’s an irregularly-shaped cutout with a blackfaceted stone the size of his palm stuck into it. Carved into the block below the stone is a single word, “WATCHWORKS.”
“Hey cat, this is one of those trick books, you know, the kind that you use to hide things in?” Daniel calls out. But Bertrand has curled up on the floor and rested his head on his paws. He blinks his yellow eyes but otherwise has no response.
Daniel uses his thumbnail to pry the rock out of the Index book. It’s black and shiny like a piece of polished coal; its surface is covered in tiny facets that glimmer and shift in the light.
He holds the stone up between two fingers as if appraising a diamond. “What are you, then?” he asks it. “Better question: Why am I talking to a box of books and a rock?”
“You can talk to me instead, if you like,” Daniel’s uncle says. Mr. Brush has returned from lunch down the street. “I’ve got extra fries, too,” he adds, holding up a paper bag and smiling. He looks down. “Now, what is this?” Mr. Brush leans forward and squints through his round glasses at the contents of the wooden box.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Daniel says. “All this just appeared on the porch, out of nowhere. And, this will sound weird, but it seems that the books in this box are somehow acquainted with .”
“Acquainted, eh? What makes you think that?” Mr. Brush asks, pulling a kerchief out of his pocket and wiping his broad forehead.
“Well,” Daniel explains, “look. From what I can tell these books are some kind of reference, like an encyclopedia, filled with crazy diagrams. Pages and pages of them. But now, look at …” He jumps up and runs inside, returning with the larger volume and flipping through the pages. “See? Same things. It’s like they are related. Or the same person wrote them. Or they refer to one another. Or—something.”
“Something, indeed,” Mr. Brush says. “My boy, this is interesting in so many ways. Let’s get this collection inside so we can take a better look.”
Bertrand the cat stretches out in the lengthening square of sun on the floor as Daniel and his uncle haul the wooden box through the door and into the bookstore.
Anna turns down a narrow alleyway where restaurant workers haul bags of trash out to gray dumpsters and stray kittens scurry along the walls. This is not the place for a storefront, unless the desire is for as little foot traffic as possible. Or if the proprietor only wants to deal with people who know how to find him.
The beat-up sign over the nondescript glass door reads, PAWN SHOP. Or really, PAWN SHO, since the “P” wore off a long time ago. But Anna knows this is the place.
She pushes open the shop door and a bell on top of it tinkles. The musty air hits her right away; so many years of memories and forgotten objects line this little room.
Like most pawn shops, the front counters are stuffed with smaller items: watches, jewelry, handguns. The shelves mounted on the walls hold stacks of electronics, dating from the days of cassette tapes and Betamax. Finally on the back wall hang the prized possessions mostly consisting of electric guitars and rifles. A buffalo head stares out with blank eyes.
A lump of a man lurks behind the counter. There is no delineation between his head and his body, and he wears a moustache that is as out of date as most of the electronics in the store. When he sees Anna he bellows, “Well, is that our little sailor girl?”
Anna is impressed; Pawn Shop Guy has already managed to call her “little” and “girl” and she hasn’t even said hello yet.
“Hello, Mr. Brett.”
“Let’s have a look at you.”
“Let’s not,” Anna says. “I’m looking for an item.”
“I have items,” Mr. Brett says.
“A particular item. An axe.”
Mr. Brett sniffs at Anna in the dismissive way that she remembers well from the days when she would come to this shop as a teenager. Back then, she would have stood still as this toad looked her over. Not any more.
“Only axe I got is the kind you play heavy metal on,” Mr. Brett says.
“I know,” Anna says. “Remember, I used to come here to do research for Briefings. I’d pull items for different time periods so I could orient people properly when they came through a portal into a new time frame.” She pushes a button on a non-operational tape player. “I knew your store better than you did.”
“Then you know I got no axe,” Mr. Brett says.
“I do know that,” Anna replies. “But I also know that you can locate my father, and that he does know where the axe is. It will take far too long to find him by just looking around the city. I require a portal to his time and space location.”
“Well now, missy…”
“Come on, now, Mr. Brett, I know that you keep in touch with Dad. I need to talk to him. The situation with the fragments is deteriorating. I should have been out to sea much longer than I was. But somehow I was found, and I had to come ashore before a gang of ‘toms made some major problems for me and for the whole clan. I have a bad feeling that this game is just going to play faster and faster until we lose the fragment somehow. We’ve got to put an end to the fragments, once and for all. And that axe is our chance. Now, where is my Dad?” She looks Mr. Brett straight in the face, something she couldn’t manage when she was younger.
Mr. Brett looks at Anna for what seems like a long time. “Your dad never was the same, you know, Anna. He went away for a reason. He’s still not ready to re-enter the world, I don’t think. Sometimes a person just breaks, is all. The world flips over, and that’s it.”
“Look,” Anna says, “I suffered the same loss that he did. I was fooled like he was. Neither of us had any way of knowing my mom was Tromindox. No one could have known. But when she was killed, she was no longer my mom. I knew that. She had already been taken away from us.”
“Your dad holds himself responsible,” Mr. Brett says. “That’s the difference. He sees it all as his fault. And from the look of it, he always will.”
“I still need to see him. This situation is bigger than him, or me, or what happened to my mom, or any of it.”
“That axe is just a fairy tale,” Mr. Brett says. “I’ve never seen it. Nobody I know has ever seen it. What makes you think you’re so special that you’ll just up and find it?”
“Because I know the right questions to ask,” Anna says. “Now, Mr. Brett, if you please, the portal.”
“Fine,” Mr. Brett says, and waddles off into a back room. Presently he returns with a coin in his hand. “Tell your dad hello. Tell him I still
owe him a beer.”
“Thanks,” Anna says, without smiling. Mr. Brett doesn’t intimidate her anymore, but that doesn’t mean she wants to spend a minute more in his presence.
Anna pops the portal into a device attached to her belt and she is gone.
A red VW van with windows all the way around and fancy white flame designs painted on its sides climbs up a narrow mountain highway through tall trees, swerving back and forth to the left, then the right, then left again over and over. The engine whines like an angry blender, getting louder as the van reaches higher altitudes. Gabriel leans forward on the steering wheel and concentrates on keeping the van on the road.
The for-sale ad for this van said it needed tires, and maybe a transmission, and maybe a windshield, but that it “runs good.” The picture included with the ad showed the van parked in front of a wall plastered with colorful graffiti.
“Sold,” Gabriel had said. It was just the sort of vehicle the Silverwoods needed.
Helen and her uncle Christopher sit on the floor in the back of the van, surrounded by wiring and components. They have gutted the interior; there are no seats inside except for the driver and passenger up front. Instead, the sides and ceiling are fitted with metal racks holding a wide variety of bolted-in equipment. Everything sways and rattles with each tight turn in the road. At the rear of the van is a collection of boxes packed with supplies, bedding, and Henry’s sketchbooks and drawings.
“Can you help me out here, niece?” Christopher says to Helen. “I could really use some higher resolution on this screen.”
“Trying,” Helen says, pulling loose a couple more wires and switching their positions. “When I’m done you’ll be able to zoom in by a factor of a thousand if you want.” She’s working on the back of a 1950s-era television housing, small and rounded with fat plastic knobs on the sides. Christopher stares at the screen on the front of the telly, punching characters into a gray keyboard salvaged from some ancient model of personal computer. Wires snake from both monitor and keyboard to a collection of panels in varying shapes and sizes, and with large and small blinking lights, mounted on the van walls.
“I think,” Gabriel says, “if we get to the Council Chamber, we can hack into their systems and track the other fragment from there. If we can find out who had that fragment last, and where they were, we can piece together how Monder managed to get access to it. Chances are that’s the same way he got hold of Henry, or got a hold of the swarm of helper squids who took Henry, anyway.”
“Right,” Christopher says, “except there’s one problem. The Council moves the chamber’s time and place around like crazy these days. That Tromindox invasion and the theft of all those portals really threw them for a loop and made them more paranoid—if that is even possible. Who knows where the chamber—or Council headquarters—might be.”
“So the Council is kind of like us,” Helen points out while twisting two wires together. “Staying in motion so as not to be tracked.”
“Yes, they are,” Kate says from the front passenger seat. She’s wiring more equipment into the dashboard, including a portal interface with a slot and a series of square buttons. She grabs a power drill and drives in a heavy bolt, securing the processor in place. “I wonder if the same thing happened to the Council, if their fragment was tracked like ours was before it was taken. I wonder…” she stares out the window, thinking.
Gabriel glances over at his wife briefly but then focuses again on the road. “What’s on your mind?”
“I just want to be sure we think this through,” Kate says. “We’ve got one fragment, and we know the Council had the other one, but we suspect Monder got a hold of the other fragment somehow before kidnapping Henry. On top of that, we think the Council is moving around to avoid being found, just like we are doing now in this van. I just want us to do a better job than the Council apparently did in avoiding detection, in case this is a trap of some kind. What if taking Henry was a trick, to get us to come after him and bring the other fragment to Monder? If we go rushing in after Henry, we could just get ourselves sucked in, too. Then Monder has both fragments, puts together the portal, and frees himself. That is the scenario we must avoid. We have to find a way to get Henry without being found out first.”
“We Silverwoods do a better job than the Council of Portals on pretty much everything,” Gabriel says. “On account of our superior smarts and skills. We were not the ones who got the portals stolen from us, were we? So if one of the two fragments was taken, I’m not surprised it was the one from the Council.”
“Right,” Kate says, “but this is Monder we are potentially dealing with. Monder, who we had to essentially lock out of time in order to contain him. This is no ordinary individual. I just want to be sure we stay a step ahead of him at all times.”
“Good point,” Gabriel says. “Hopefully we can decipher what happened to the other fragment and avoid the same fate. The first step will be learning who on the Council had possession of the fragment last, and where and when they were when Monder reached into time to get it. If that is what happened.” The van swerves around a mudslide spilling rocks and dirt into the road.
“Yeah,” Christopher says, looking up from his keyboard. “We’ve also got to think through this whole notion of how Monder might be accomplishing any of these deeds. None of this should be possible. The portal through which Monder was sent should have cut him off permanently from real time or space. So how could he manage to communicate with his Tromindox friends to coordinate the abduction of Henry? Or is this all a big trick, like Kate says, designed to bait us into freeing him?”
“My guess is, Monder has assistance,” Gabriel says. “Someone with information about how time and space rifts work, how that portal was encoded before it was chopped in half. Remember, Monder’s banishment was done in haste, and the technology was not well-understood at the time. It is entirely possible that some detail was missed. Monder has had a long time to think about this.”
“Or,” Helen says, her head popping up from the panel she’s wiring, “it’s possible that Monder got a hold of the other portal fragment, activated it somehow, and he’s reverse-engineering the whole process. You know, like taking a finished automobile and then pulling it apart to see how it works. Maybe he’s manipulating that other portal fragment and figuring out how to run its effects backward.”
“I would not put that past him,” Kate says. “I would not put anything past Monder, actually.”
“You guys need to explain more about this Monder guy,” Helen says. “How did he get so dangerous? Why is he imprisoned? And why can’t you just kill him instead of keeping him shrink-wrapped on the other side of some portal? How come…”
“Woa! Woa!” Christopher shouts, leaning back from the television screen on the floor. Sparks fly from the casing and the display jumps to life with fast-moving rows of characters. “Holy cow! I didn’t order that.”
The screen fills with enormous letters taking up the entire space:
YOU.
The word scrolls upward and repeats, again and again.
YOU. YOU. YOU. YOU.
Ten times, a hundred times. Christopher pounds the keyboard, but he can’t get it to stop.
“Time to reboot, I think,” Helen says. She yanks the cord out of the back of the monitor and the screen goes dark.
“What happened?” Gabriel asks, keeping his eyes glued to the road. The van is headed downhill now, easier work for the blender-engine but tricky from a steering perspective.
“A big word just came through,” Christopher answers. “Well, actually it was a short word, ‘you,’ but in big letters. Came up on the monitor out of nowhere. I’m not sure how that happened.”
Helen plugs the cord back into the monitor. The YOU message has disappeared, replaced by a blank screen and a cursor. Maybe the equipment in the van picked up a residual signal from someone else’s transmission, maybe they drove through a pocket of signals and noise and got an incomplete message meant for an
other party. For now, though, nothing more appears.
“Once we get Henry back,” Helen says, “maybe we can find out if that axe is real, and if it is, we can destroy the fragment. Finish the job and close the portal.”
“To do that,” Kate says, “Monder can’t know our intentions with regard to the fragment. He has to believe we are focused exclusively on rescuing Henry. Anna is out there right now with some crazy idea that she can find the axe, but she doesn’t know Henry’s been taken. She thinks we have time that we don’t have.”
“Right,” Gabriel says. “Son first, axe second. Just like Christopher said. And we’ve got to coordinate this with Anna. Get a message to her so she knows.”
The TV-monitor lights up a second time, this time with two words:
YOU ARE.
Again, the screen fills and the partial message scrolls up the screen over and over.
YOU ARE. YOU ARE. YOU ARE.
“You are what?” Christopher says. “That stupid message is back. I’m getting a sinking feeling this is intentional.” He hits keys again, but again the machine does not seem to be under his control.
“I don’t like the looks of that,” Kate says. “Whoever is sending these, Monder or his helpers, I would be willing to bet it’s the same entity that sent us the photo and messed with us at the apartment. Looks like we’re being tracked on the road, too. It’s time to change our coordinates and see if we can lose this thing, even temporarily, to buy some time. We can’t come up with a strategy to get Henry back if we’re just running. That’s how mistakes get made.”
Kate digs around in a bag at her feet and pulls out three or four portal coins. Some of their portal supply come from bounty-hunting jobs, others are Silverwood property. She grabs a hand-sized square diagnostic device and shoves each of the coins in, one at a time. The device’s screen displays information on each portal’s contents—time and place. She takes a careful look at them all before selecting one to use.
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