“I had to separate it from the rest of this stuff,” Julian says. “The Shard is far too concentrated. It is made from wood and portals from the silver tree. It’s almost like walking around with the tree itself. And with all the time and space rifts, the Shard is dangerous. It can induce a temporal collapse if it goes to the wrong location. So, I isolated it somewhere that it could not come in contact with much of anything.”
“Well, it’s the only thing that can potentially destroy a fragment, Dad, you know that,” Anna says.
“So that’s your intent? To destroy a fragment? Have you thought that through? How do you even know that will work?” Julian asks.
“Yes, Dad, we’ve thought it through. Although we’re kind of done thinking at this point, because our options are dwindling quickly. It’s time for concerted doing, at a high rate of speed. So please, if you would, can you tell me where the Shard is?”
“Fine, I will tell. But you mustn’t go get it alone. And you mustn’t take it through a portal. You’ve got to use normal time and space to get it to—wherever you are going to use it. Promise!? Do you promise me!?” Julian is practically shrieking, his eyes wide.
“I promise,” Anna says, trying to calm her father. “But only if you promise me something, too.”
“What’s that?” her father asks, looking annoyed.
Anna smiles for the first time since entering the room. “You’ve got to come out of this room. Get some sunlight. Take a walk, every day. Will you do that for me? I’m worried about you, Dad. Please take better care of yourself. I know it hasn’t been easy. But can you do that? It’s not much, right?”
Julian looks at his daughter, and finally his face softens. “Okay, Anna, I will go out for a walk every day. How’s that?”
Henry stretches out on his bed in his room. He moves his feet in little circles, bending his ankles this way and that. He is getting better at preserving his energy.
The days (Henry assumes days, he’s not really sure what is day and what is night anymore) are filled with drawing sessions, in which he fills floor after floor with intricate diagrams before the blue light sweeps across and they disappear. But he no longer draws like a wild child; he does not let the pen get out of control. Quite the opposite. He moves deliberately, looking over the drawings as he goes. He still does not know what the markings mean, but he has surmised that within them there exists a language of some sort. And he knows that this language—and what it communicates—are important to someone. He has a feeling that the drawings represent some kind of system of maps, larger examples of what that creepy Goode guy showed him back on the roof. He watches for symbols that repeat and notices how they connect to one another.
Henry’s new strategy is to slow down, take his time, and pay attention. He does not let the voice bother him when it commands: “PLEASE. BEGIN AGAIN.”
He has learned to close his ears to it and to not let himself get panicked. He takes the time to feel the pen in his fingers.
Back in his room, as he chews his sandwich, Henry hears the sliding noise again and the square of light appears on the floor. He climbs down and has a seat next to it.
“Hello there,” Henry says, his mouth full.
“How are things?” Renata says from the other side.
“Better.We’ve got to find a way out of here, though. I’m not going to sit around and draw on the floor forever. You’re not, either. We need to make a plan.”
“Can I show you a trick?”
“Sure,” Henry says. “Is this supposed to keep me from getting bored?”
“Just watch,” Renata says. But then the little door slides shut.
“Hey, where did you go?” Henry asks, peering at the wall. Did something happen? Is she okay? “Renata? You there?”
What if somebody found out Renata is talking to him? What if she’s in trouble? Henry sits frozen there on the floor, like an animal hoping not to be seen.
His door bursts open and a hooded figure storms in. Its digital face bears a resemblance to a particularly mean teacher Henry had in one of his brief stints at school. A fat nose, squinty eyes, scowling. Out-of-control gray eyebrows.
“What do you think you are doing?” the digital face bellows. The figure grabs Henry by his collar and shoves him back into his chair. “Finish your dinner and go to bed. How dare you mess about at a time like this? You’ve got work!”
Henry turns to his plate and picks up his apple. “Um, okay. Whatever.” He guesses that visiting with Renata will have to wait a while. He focuses on his food in hopes that the digital face will go away.
But as he chews a bony finger appears in his peripheral vision. Slowly Henry looks up.
The finger is inches from his face and the digital face looms over him. “Don’t mess about. You do your work. You rest. That is it. Otherwise you will find yourself…very, very alone. Understand? I will not warn you again.” The finger recedes and the figure exits, slamming the door.
“How is that any different from how alone I am now?” Henry shouts at the closed door. “Go away and stay there!”
Henry takes another bite of his sandwich, maintaining his nonchalant attitude for a few seconds to be sure that—thing—isn’t coming back. But then, little by little, his shoulders slump down and a tear runs down his cheek. He is not feeling brave at all. He is feeling alone and confused and his stomach hurts. He squints his eyes shut and pictures his dad’s face. Then his mom. And Helen. And Clarence. He imagines holding on to Clarence’s ear. He wants to get out of this place more than anything he has ever wanted. But he doesn’t know where here is, and he knows even less about how to begin to escape.
He retreats to the bed and lies down. As always, the room remains silent. This stupid, square room with nothing in it and a window that doesn’t open (not that he hasn’t tried it a thousand times) and this idiotic little desk. This must be what prison is like. Henry tries to think about that: how his dad was imprisoned, and his dad got out okay. Yes, Dad got out. And that was way worse. There has to be a way out of this gross room. Or building. Or whatever it is. He will find it. Someone will find it.
Someone will…right?
He hears the scratching again, like the little door opening. He sits up and looks, but there is nothing. No Renata. Then silence.
No, there it is again. Why can he hear but not see? Why doesn’t the wall open up? Has that connection been taken away? Have they been found out?
The sound continues. Henry looks around. Maybe the opening has moved and Renata is showing up somewhere else? That’s when he sees it.
A single, black line begins to draw itself across the wall. Henry watches as it goes. It snakes along sideways, then stops and ends itself in a pointing arrow. Then, capital letters write themselves on the wall: FOLLOW ME.
“Where?” Henry asks. “And who are you?”
No answer.
Now the line draws itself some more, starting at the words and moving straight upward. It ends in another arrow, pointing toward the ceiling.
“Follow you up? That’s impossible! Henry says. “Am I supposed to climb the wall?”
He puts his hands on his hips and stares up toward the ceiling. More letters write themselves: TRUST ME. FOLLOW THE LINE.”
“I can’t do that! I’m not a spider!” Henry cries. The digital-face people must be messing with him, trying to tire him out. He paces back and forth, his agitation growing. What is this place? He balls up his hands into fists, then runs at the wall and gives it a swift kick.
At least, he tries to kick the wall. But it falls away just as Henry’s foot should have made contact. Henry feels slightly seasick. What happened? How did the wall move?
Henry tries to kick the wall again, but again it recedes away from his foot. Again that woozy feeling.
Now Henry sticks his foot out, and places it on the wall. The entire room shifts slightly, so that the corner where wall and floor meet drops down just a bit. Henry leans on his foot a little, and the room tilts more.
The room goes with him. In a flash Henry is standing on the wall, which now feels like the floor. He looks back at the arrow, where the words have appeared: KEEP FOLLOWING.
The line turns and draws itself heading toward the door. Henry follows it along, across the wall/floor. It turns again, and goes back to the floor. This time Henry does not hesitate stepping from one surface to another. He finds himself once again in the room right-way-up, standing on the floor.
Words write themselves near his feet: THIS PLACE IS NOT WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE.
“I can see that,” Henry says to no one.
The lines and words fade from the walls and Henry is once again in his plain white room.
Henry climbs into bed, but he cannot sleep. His mind is racing. Now he feels like all at once, he knows more but he knows less. He still cannot imagine where he is, or why, or how long he is supposed to stay. But he has also realized, with Renata’s help (if that was Renata), that this place is some kind of an illusion. It might not even be a place. And he is beginning to suspect the meaning of the patterns and symbols he has been drawing on the floor.
Gabriel stands on a carpet of shattered glass and broken stone that crunches underneath his boots as he surveys the room.
“Wow,” he says.
“You’re not kidding,” Christopher says, picking up part of a light sheet that has been snapped into pieces and left on the floor. The sheet sparks but does not display any information. Gibberish and static flash across its surface.
Finding the current location of the Council Chambers in space and time was not easy. It took several out-of-date portals and some intercepted communications to establish that there was some sort of emergency in progress. Next it was necessary to track back those messages to find their source and thus the chambers themselves. It was like trying to read a freeway map while someone was going at it with an eraser and a marker pen all at once. And all the time, the monitors in the van kept lighting up with words: YOU. ARE. OUT. And then nothing.
Now, the Silverwoods know the full message. It is spray-painted in huge black letters all over the chamber walls:
YOU ARE OUT OF TIME
“I suppose that’s Monder’s idea of a play on words,” Kate says. “Out of time. Like the rift in which he is contained. He wants to tell us that he’s breaking out.”
“So,” Gabriel says, “given the apparent state of the Council here, which is not good, we have an important question to answer.”
“Yes, we do,” Kate says. “When this chamber was destroyed, was the Council destroyed along with it, and…
“Did those fools lose the other fragment?” Christopher completes the thought.
“Exactly,” Gabriel says. “Given the general carnage before us, I’d say we can only conclude that Monder does have the fragment. This was an ambush, a sudden attack. The object of the game was surprise—with bonus vandalism and destruction. I’m betting the Council was here when this happened.”
“Most likely,” Kate agrees. “So what that squid told you in the desert was probably true. Monder’s allies, Tromindox or ‘toms or whatever they were, came here to get the fragment for him.”
Helen is working her way around the periphery of the room, placing her hands on the walls. This was once an impressive underground chamber with a table at the center and torches placed at even intervals all along its length. Now the table lies cleaved in pieces and the torches have all been snapped to bits. This was not just an attack; it was total destruction. Whatever was not smashed was burned. Nothing remains whole.
Except, Helen hopes, some of the internal systems that the Council used to store information.
“Finding anything, kid?” Gabriel asks Helen.
“Not yet,” Helen says. “There are connections here, and I’m guessing there’s a control room somewhere nearby. We just have to locate it.”
Helen comes to an opening in the wall, a charred hole blown by some sort of explosive. Loose wires stick out of it, but none of them connect to anything. The ends look burnt, like used birthday candles.
Still, Helen tugs the wires part way out of the wall and sets to work untangling them. Once she makes some sense of the mass, she peers into the hole in the wall and lets her hacker-mind take over. The systems inside the walls and the components that make them up appear inside her mind, layer upon layer. She snaps a glass lens over her eye, mounted on a leather headpiece. A light goes on above the lens and now she can make out the pieces and parts in more detail. It seems that much of this equipment seems dedicated to transmitting communication signals. Some of the components may still be operational. She hopes so. If she can hack into these systems, maybe she can find messages or other clues left behind that can lead her to Henry.
Helen grabs a piece of stone from the floor and pounds on the wall until more chunks fall away, making the opening larger. Now she can see that there are bundles of wires running side to side and up toward the ceiling. She notes the colors and which ones connect to each another inside. She finds a junction box, then another, and a control panel. Peeling the cover off, she runs a finger over the circuit board and interprets the layout. For Helen this is like a private language written just for her.
“The control room is above us,” Helen says. “It’s not in this chamber. It’s in a separate space.”
“Alright then, let’s find it,” Gabriel says. “We just have to…”
A five-foot-wide chunk of stone and dirt comes loose from the ceiling and crashes to the floor only a few feet from Christopher, smashing to pieces and raising a thick cloud of dust. Christopher covers his face with one arm and waits until the air clears. Then, in a move that no one recommends, he steps under the new hole in the ceiling to look up and see what’s there.
“Here’s your control room,” Christopher calls out. “Or some part of it. Now we just have to climb up there.”
Fortunately, the chamber ceilings are not high. A boost from Christopher, and Helen scrambles into the upper room easily.
“Watch for more cracking in the floor,” Kate warns her daughter. “The whole thing might give way.”
“Good thing it’s not far down,” Helen says, and grins at her mom. It’s true: Afurther collapse probably isn’t going to be catastrophic. But a broken leg would certainly slow them down, besides being painful.
Helen looks around at this newly-discovered space. It’s small, only a few yards across, and round shaped. As of a moment ago it has a gaping hole in the middle of its floor. Helen is careful to avoid the cracks running outward from the edges of the hole, tiptoeing around the perimeter where the floor seems most solid.
The walls of the room are lined with panels, controls, and monitors from floor to ceiling. Some of the monitors are still lit up. Helen turns her attention to these, looking for any sign of life.
“There are storage modules up here,” Helen says. “Maybe a database or records.”
“We’ll take your word for it,” Gabriel calls up. “I think the rest of us should stay down; the less weight up there the better.”
“Uh, thanks,” Helen says. As if to make her dad’s point, another chunk of the floor falls into the chamber below. She had better work fast.
Helen scans the room again, more slowly this time. There are so many components competing for her attention. Wires run every which way across the ceiling. But Helen is drawn to an inconspicuous little console stuffed between two much larger machines. Though it’s got only a tiny screen and a keyboard, something tells Helen that this is the control module. It is meant to blend into its surroundings. Her hacking eye tells her that this piece of equipment is the most connected thing in the room.
She makes her way across the broken floor with care, taps the keyboard, and fires up the little machine. Nothing much happens, except that a green cursor appears floating in the black of the screen and blinks on and off. Helen tries typing in some characters to get a feel for the encryption. Sometimes home base is the termin
al with the least security because the only people who can reach it physically are the owners.
Not the case here. Helen can’t seem to get access to any files at all; the screen only displays boring “no access” messages and requests for pass codes. The cursor mocks her, blinking on and off and doing nothing else.
“What are you?” Helen asks the little machine. “Are you the Council’s master control? And where did the Council’s precious fragment go? Because, see, I’m betting that wherever that fragment went, that’s where my brother is, too. So you can keep the stupid metal thing. But you’re going to give me back Henry. Make no mistake.” Her face reflects in the mostly blank, black glass.
The cursor blinks. And then, it moves.
HELLO, LITTLE GIRL
Helen jumps. What is this? Who is this? She looks around, up at the ceiling, over her shoulder. Any machine in this room could have a camera or a microphone on it. In fact, they all probably do. But what if this message is coming from elsewhere? That would be quite a trick. From the look of it, this control room was built for the purpose of spying on other locations, not the other way around. Either way, she has been seen. A chill runs up Helen’s spine.
She types:
WHO ARE YOU
DON’T PLAY WITH THINGS YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND
Helen’s eyes narrow and she can feel herself getting angry. Better not to let on, though.
Helen types:
WHAT DOES YOU ARE OUT OF TIME MEAN
The cursor blinks some more. Then:
EXACTLY WHAT IT SAYS
After a pause:
HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE GOING EXTINCT
Helen types:
I DON’T UNDERSTAND
The cursor blinks:
OF COURSE YOU DON’T HUMAN BUT YOU WILL
And then:
YOUR BROTHER HAS BEEN A BIG HELP
Now Helen’s pulse races and her breath speeds up. Henry has helped no one. He is a prisoner. How dare this—person—imply otherwise.
Helen types:
WHO IS THIS
But Helen has a feeling creeping into her mind that she is talking to Monder.
Silver Shard Page 10