“Anything interesting?” Kate calls up to Helen.
“Um, no, not yet, just trying to break into their systems,” Helen says. “Just give me a second.”
Helen types frantically:
I’M COMING TO GET HENRY
The screen:
GOOD LUCK
Then nothing for a few moments.
The screen:
I PROPOSE A TRADE
Helen types:
WHAT SORT OF TRADE
The screen:
YOUR BROTHER FOR THE FRAGMENT
Helen:
DO YOU THINK I AM STUPID?
The screen:
WE ALREADY ESTABLISHED THAT YOU ARE A STUPID HUMAN CHILD. THAT IS BESIDE THE POINT.
Numbers appear. Coordinates. A particular location in space and time.
THIS LOCATION. THE FRAGMENT. JUST YOU. TELL NO ONE.
Helen types:
THAT’S A TRAP AND YOU KNOW IT
The screen:
FINE YOUR DECISION. TELL ANYONE LOSE YOUR BROTHER. MESS WITH ME LOSE YOUR BROTHER. HOPEFULLY THIS IS SIMPLE ENOUGH FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND.
Helen stares at the screen. Every muscle in her body is so tense she might snap in half. Her heartbeat pounds in her ears.
“Helen, time to get out of here,” Gabriel calls up. “Just pull the hard drives and hand them down and we’ll analyze them in the van. If the Tromindox have been here, or their ‘toms, we have to assume they know about this place and could come back any time. The Silverwood fragment needs to exit the premises and so do we.”
“Okay, just a sec,” Helen says. “There are a lot of drives up here.” Angrily she yanks the cords out of the little console and its screen goes blank. End of conversation. For now. She sets to work pulling loose every hard drive in the room and passing them down through the hole in the floor.
Later that night, the red VW van with the flames painted on the sides will sit parked at the side of the road beneath a dampening field to hide its location. Inside of the van, stacks of Council computer equipment will sit waiting to be broken into and deciphered. Nearby Kate and Gabriel will lie asleep in a pile of blankets. Crickets will chirp in the distance and for a time, all will be quiet.
Some distance away, on the other side of a thicket of trees, Helen will crouch alone in the moonlight. She will encode a portal with a set of coordinates and shove that portal into a device from her pocket.
Kate is dreaming. A tow truck is hauling away the red VW van, but in reverse. It beeps and beeps. She tries to call out to the truck driver, to tell him to drive forward instead, but she can’t make any sound. The tow truck pulls farther away from her, still beeping. She runs after the truck, but she can’t stop the beeping…
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
Kate rubs her eyes and realizes that a messaging device is beeping away somewhere in her pockets. She rolls over and rummages until she finds it. What time is it, anyway? The sky is barely smeared with faint light. She leans on one elbow and opens the message. It’s from Anna.
KATE I HAVE THE LOCATION OF THE SHARD. I NEED YOUR HELP.
Kate takes a breath. The Shard. Is it possible the thing is real? Their chance to destroy the fragment and close the portal, locking Monder out of time permanently? But how can they do that with Henry on the other side?
I NEED YOUR HELP TO GET IT. SHARD CAN’T GO THROUGH A PORTAL.
Kate considers this before typing back:
WE CAN’T DESTROY FRAGMENT UNTIL WE HAVE HENRY.
Nothing for a few moments. Kate reaches up and instinctively touches the fragment around her neck, as is the habit of the fragment bearer. Ever vigilant.
Except…
It seems different. Heavier. Kate pulls the chain out and looks at the pendant.
But the object on the chain, she realizes to her horror, is not the fragment. It’s just a stone.
“Oh, my god!” Kate shouts, sitting bolt upright.
Gabriel rolls over. “What?”
“The fragment! It’s gone! It’s been replaced!”
Christopher’s head pops in the van door. “What do you mean? How is that possible?”
“I don’t know,” Kate says. “Helen! Wake up! We’ve got a problem.”
“Helen?”
Gabriel pulls on Helen’s covers, but there’s no one there. Just a pillow and some blankets lumped up to look like a person sleeping.
“HELEN?”
Gabriel jumps out of the van and begins circling. “Helen? Where are you, kid? This isn’t funny.”
Nothing.
Christopher pulls a slip of paper out from under one of the windshield wipers. He unfolds it and reads it out loud:
It is my fault Henry is gone. I know where he is and I am going to get him. I have the fragment. Please do not come after me. I am sorry.
–Helen
“She’s taken the fragment,” Kate says. “She’s taken it and she’s gone to the labyrinth. How could I have let this happen?” She paces with one hand on her forehead. Now both of her children are in Monder’s grasp. Her head spins at the thought of this worst-possible scenario.
The message device lights up again.
KATE PLEASE HELP ME GET THE SHARD
Kate can barely type in letters with her shaking fingers.
HELEN IS GONE
INTO THE LABYRINTH
WE CAN’T DESTROY FRAGMENT
HELEN AND HENRY BOTH IN THERE NOW
Kate drops the device on the ground and puts her hand back on her forehead.
“Kate?” Gabriel says.
“She doesn’t THINK!” Kate screams at her husband. “Helen just acts, without the slightest idea what she is doing! She’s just like…you!” She turns away.
Those words sting because they hold more than a little truth.
“We’re going to have to put our faith in her,” Gabriel says.
“This is not a question of faith!” Kate says. “Now you’re sounding like Anna, all touchy-feely like this is some kind of belief thing. Helen knows nothing about Monder, or how the fragments work, or any of it! She’s like a lamb to the slaughter in there!”
The device lights up on the ground. Gabriel picks it up. It says:
KATE I’M COMING THERE
WHAT ARE YOUR COORDINATES
Gabriel types in numbers.
A few moments pass, then there’s a sound resembling a small sonic boom and Anna is there.
“Kate?” Anna says. The two of them embrace.
“Hello, Anna,” Gabriel says.
“Gabriel, I’m so sorry,” Anna says. “Hello Christopholous,” she calls over to Christopher. Christopher does not answer. He’s looking down at the ground. He’s got a stick in his hand.
“Is this how he deals with stress?” Anna asks.
“I don’t know,” Gabriel says. “I suppose he’s thinking.”
“Yeah, well, that’s about all we’ve got at this point isn’t it?” Kate says. “Thinking. Thoughts. Vapor in the air. And no kids. And no access to the rift. There’s an opening somewhere, and we have no idea where it is. We’ve got about as much of nothing as it’s possible to have.”
“We’ve got the Shard, if we want it,” Anna says.
“Great. The Shard,” Kate says. “So we can close off a portal with Helen and Henry on the other side. Brilliant. Oh wait, we don’t have the fragment any more, so even if we do get the Shard, it’s useless!”
Kate is seething. “What other fantastic ideas does anybody have?” she yells.
“I might have an idea,” Christopher says quietly, staring at the dirt in front of his feet.
Everyone turns to look at the fellow with the mohawk and the stick.
Christopher looks up. “See, I was digging through those archives we took from the Council Chambers; I got up early anyway since my head hurts, and I got into some of their research records. You know, experiments, attempts to manipulate portal technology, things like that. This one research area kept showing up over and over and it had to do with tim
e ruptures. Overlapping time-space created when portals are not closed properly. I think the Council may have been studying those ruptures and how the rift where Monder is banished might have been created in the first place.”
“When Monder was banished into the rift,” Kate says, “there was no time for analysis. And everyone thought it was a unique phenomenon. A singular event. Maybe the Council wasn’t so sure.”
“Exactly,” Christopher says. “Whoever was doing this research seemed to believe that the ruptures created by portal travel, and the resulting rifts in space-time, could be put to use. Just as a portal temporarily brings together two space-times, it might also be used to create rifts on purpose. Locations outside of space-time, maybe even multiple times in one location. At least that’s what it seemed the Council was getting at. It was preliminary stuff. Papers, ideas for experiments, things like that.”
“From what I can tell,” Christopher goes on, “there were plans to try and pull this off. To create rifts, go into them, and then untangle them again and come out. This would create the ability to, say, do something in the same place, but at more than one time. Theoretically, of course.”
“The implications of that are huge,” Gabriel says. “That means you might be able to do something crazy like set off an explosion in two different places or times simultaneously. That’s terrifying.”
“Yeah, or maybe you could bring separate elements together all at once, say if you had a medical emergency and needed five different experts,” Christopher says. “I mean, this is all really fuzzy. Just concepts. But it’s there, and the Council was clearly working on it.”
“Who was the chief scientist on the project? Can you tell?” Gabriel asks.
“Looks like it was the Chairman himself,” Christopher says.
“Huh,” Gabriel says. “Haven’t heard from him in a while. Not that I mind.”
“Maybe he did try going into a rift, and it didn’t work out so well,” Anna suggests. “Or maybe he’s in two places at once. That’s a scary thought.”
“I’m just saying,” Christopher says, taking the stick and drawing in the dirt at his feet, “the rift out of time, where Monder is imprisoned, might operate according to the principles outlined in the Council’s research. We think of it as a sealed-off location between space-times, inaccessible to anyone in real time or space. If we really could find and get into that rift, we might be able to get Henry—and now Helen—back, and then seal off the portal, all in one move. To do that we have to collapse the rift by inducing a convergence of space-times and then close the portal…” He draws two circles overlapping each other and points the stick at the area in common.
Kate looks down at Christopher’s simplistic drawing. She opens her mouth to object, to tell him that this is all just ideas and concepts, that no one could ever pull that off. But then her eyes meander to the space next to the drawing, where she notices a series of calculations. She looks further out still, and realizes that there must be fifty square yards of numbers and diagrams and graphs scraped on the ground. Christopher has clearly been working on this for hours.
“You’re serious about this, aren’t you?” Kate asks Christopher.
“I am serious about it,” Christopher answers. “This idea got into my head, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So I tested out some ideas. And I think it could work. But there are a lot of parts that have to come together. First we have to locate and access the rift in space-time. Next we have to get Henry and Helen out of it, even if they are separated. Then we have to close the portal. After that we’ve got to destroy the fragments, thus sealing off the rift permanently. That’s where the Shard, if you can get it, would come in really handy.” Christopher waves his hand at his calculations.
“Well,” Gabriel says, looking at Kate, “if this is for real, and it’s looking pretty real, it would appear that we’re going to need that Shard.”
Kate looks her husband in the eye for a long moment. “What do you think, husband? Do you think this is for real?”
“I think it’s what we’ve got,” Gabriel says. “And Silverwoods have always worked with what we’ve got.”
“Okay then,” she says, turning to Anna. “Let’s go get that axe.”
Helen tumbles downward through the pitch black , banging her knees and elbows and rolling over and over. She tucks her head, desperate to avoid slamming her skull. She grabs for any sort of handhold, any way to slow her fall, but the surface is too slick. No matter what she does she keeps falling, faster and faster until finally she shoots out of a hole, rolls over again, and smashes her back flat into a wall. She crumples into an awkward heap and gasps for air until her wind comes back.
“Ow,” Helen says out loud, sitting up and checking her body for damage. Nothing feels broken, but she’s collected many unpleasant scrapes and bruises. What is this place?
Helen pulls her utility knife from her pocket and flips on a light in the handle. It would appear that she fell out of a chute into a tunnel constructed of stone and dirt, only a few feet high and a little wider than it is tall.
Helen stands, slowly, and tests the footing by scraping her boots around. The floor seems level, but in the dim illumination from the knife it is difficult to judge; for all she knows she could be standing at the edge of a cliff. She would rather not fall any more so she takes her time.
All she can make out is a featureless tunnel stretching into total darkness in both directions. There doesn’t seem to be any difference so she heads off to her left, keeping the light on the ground just in front of her feet and her other hand out to protect her head.
The tunnel offers no doors, no windows, just more and more dirt and rock. The ceiling gets higher, though, and soon Helen can walk without crouching. It’s dark, and musty, and—boring. What does this place have to do with Henry, or Monder, or anything at all? Did she enter the wrong coordinates and drop herself into a hole?
Helen touches the fragment around her neck. That’s her leverage. Monder will have to deal with her, one way or another, if he wants to try and get hold of it. But so far, this place looks like a lot of nothing.
And then, it becomes more nothing when she reaches an abrupt dead end. The tunnel concludes in a blank dirt wall. Helen looks it over; no doors, indentations, nothing suggesting an entrance or exit.
“Fine,” Helen says to herself, and heads off in the opposite direction.
The tunnel curves and curves to the right, still offering no hints of entrances or exits. She continues around, hoping to find some way out; but soon all she finds is another cul-de-sac.
Feeling distinctly claustrophobic, Helen takes a deep breath and collects herself. Perhaps she has to climb back up where she came down. It might have been slick and would be a difficult climb, but that chute is beginning to look like the only option. She walks back to where she fell through in the first place.
There’s nothing there but wall.
Helen feels around the stone and dirt for a false door, a secret latch, any sign of where she came from. But it’s as if the chute never existed. She wonders if she is looking in the right place. How can she be sure? There are no landmarks. And wasn’t the ceiling lower here? Or are her eyes fooling her?
She needs a landmark. Helen marks an “X” in the wall with her knife and takes off again, boots scraping on the rough ground, counting her steps. Again she reaches the dead end. She turns and counts her steps back, keeping her eyes peeled for the X. It should be here somewhere…where did it go? She tracks back and forth but finds nothing. She tries it again, this time counting her steps. Out, and back. But her mark, again, is gone.
Helen swings a small pack off her shoulders, pulls out a device and checks the coordinates again. She’s in the right place, unless Monder lied to her and sent her to a sewer as a joke. Or maybe the fragment threw her readings off. It dawns on her that both of these scenarios are entirely possible. She tugs the pack back on, clips the device onto her belt, and presses forward.
A n
ew feeling comes over Helen; if the dim light is not fooling her, she could swear that the tunnel is getting larger. The ceiling seems higher above her head, and she can sense more space.
Is it possible that the tunnel is growing? Uneasy, Helen reaches up and touches the fragment around her neck—again.
Now she walks upright, stretching her arms out to the sides. The tunnel walls stay just beyond her finger tips, the tunnels themselves becoming more spacious as she goes.
Helen takes off running. The corridor curves one way and then the other, no dead ends in sight now. Here’s another passage off to the right. She takes that, still running. She doubles back, and sure enough the corridor has changed again. It seems the faster she goes, the faster the tunnels alter their shape and configuration. What if this place is changing according to her movements?
Helen stops again, catches her breath, and takes a mental inventory of her increasingly disorienting situation. This seems like a good time to try Super Logic Mode.
“Let’s see, what are my options?” Helen asks herself.
Option one: This is all an illusion, designed to disorient and confuse her. She came to the correct coordinates, but the place has been disguised and in order to find her way she must break through and uncover some kind of inner workings. This means finding a control, or some flaw in the system, like revealing the Wizard behind the curtain. Maybe if she can figure out how this place really works she can shut it down, or better yet, find Henry.
Option two: This place is—somehow—alive. Capable of responding to Helen, or the way she moves around, or something. This would explain why it seems to change based on her movements. Helen’s environment is, for lack of a better term, shape-shifting. How can she find Henry in a place that only mutates more and more as she tries to move through it?
Option two is scarier. It makes her think of being lost inside of a Tromindox.
Helen’s dad has always said, Do the best you can with what you’ve got. What Helen’s got are hacking skills. Vision. The ability to pull her surroundings apart in her mind. Could this possibly work in some dank, morphing, underground tube?
Time to find out.
Silver Shard Page 11