Helen slides the drawings together between her thumb and forefinger, lining up the edges as Henry had done. Sure enough, the drawings fit together exactly. The straight lines running through the circles also match, like little bridges from one drawing to the next. “These look like layers of a cake,” Helen says, “or floors of a building.”
“Layers!” Henry yells. “The maps are all full of layers, like a three-dimensional space! That’s it—they stack up.” His hair flies over his face as he jumps and he’s creating his own personal dust devil.
“We have to try it with the rest of them!” Henry yells, pulling out papers from his pockets and pants and from underneath pebbles. The sheets are small, and Henry shuffles them around like a big deck of cards. He puts one on top of another, holds it up, adds a third, and so on. He keeps shuffling the sheets around, changing their order and trying to find how they combine.
“See, then when we read it page by page…” Henry says, carefully turning through the crinkled drawings one by one. “See? You go here, and then there’s a gap, and then the line goes here, and so on all the way through. That’s cool! At least I think it’s cool…”
“So, Henry, you just know how to draw these maps for some reason? Your teacher Rose never showed you how or anything?” Helen asks.
“Yeah, I guess,” Henry answers. “It’s like I remember them from somewhere. Like, a dream. Rose never mentioned them.”
“You have odd dreams,” Helen says. “But now that you’ve figured this out, let’s take a look at the whole bunch of them together.”
The two of them sit down on the ground and pick through the maps again, more slowly this time. They find that if they flip the sheets like a flipbook, the connections from the maps reveal themselves more clearly. A horizontal line partway across one drawing continues on the next. Gaps in the circles line up. Helen and Henry order and re-order the pages until they seem to be at least close to the proper sequence.
Flipping the pages also shows them that in all the drawings, there is one thing that does not change. The same symbol appears over and over again, in the same position. A square, with a circle inside and then a strange squiggly line inside that.
“What is this thing here? That’s got to be pretty important; it shows up over and over,” Helen says, putting a finger down on the square symbol.
“Yeah, I wonder what it means,” Henry says.
Helen looks at her brother. “This is the weirdest thing,” she says. “Here you’ve got all this stuff in your head, super-complicated diagrams, circles, little symbols, and you dump it all over this paper, and then you don’t know what half of it is supposed to say.”
“Yeah,” Henry says simply. “I know. Sorry.” His shoulders drop.
“It’s not your fault,” Helen says. “I mean, the fact that you can draw any of this stuff is pretty amazing. It’s just peculiar.”
“I know,” Henry says. “I just wish I could read it better. I also wish I could go back to drawing superheroes.”
“The overlapping layer cake thing is a big breakthrough,” Helen says, trying to reassure her brother. “Now let’s figure out why this one mark never changes. Maybe that’s the one thing that holds it all together. Like a pin through the middle.”
“Pin through the middle…” Henry says. “Hang on. Hang on. I think I drew a bigger version of that…” He rummages around in his pockets and his pants until he finds one last sheet of paper and holds it up. “I left this one out because it didn’t fit, but maybe…”
This drawing does look different, like it doesn’t go with the maps at all. It’s got a big square on it, and then a circle inside, and then a squiggly image of a tree with winding roots and round leaves.
“This! This is what goes in that box—I’m almost positive,” Henry says. “I swear I’m not making this up. I drew this right after I drew the box with the squiggle. I think that’s what it looks like bigger.”
“And maybe this pin, the symbol with the tree, is where the link is,” Henry says. “Like when you saw Daniel. Maybe it’s what linked us together, how we found each other.”
“Yeah, maybe…” Helen says. “These maps are linked, and the space is linked, and…the answer is here somewhere. It’s all connected. Like a staircase that goes to all the floors of a building. Henry, we’ve got to figure this out before Monder finds us. He’s not going to be happy when he finds that you’re not drawing any more backwards maps for him in your little room.”
Anna sits on the ground with her back against red-orange rock. She and Kate have parked themselves and their bikes underneath an outcropping that provides them a shelter the size of a small carport. From this vantage point they can look out across the valley; although there’s little to look at except windblown shrubs and dust. The sky, for the moment, is mercifully empty of flying scorpion-like Tromindox or refurbished ‘toms. This is thanks to the dampening and misdirection field Anna projected across the mouth of the rock opening like an invisible spider web across a hole in the ground. For now, the ‘toms’ sensors will receive readings indicating that Anna and Kate are hundreds of miles from where they really are.
The Shard, dusty but still shining silver, leans blade-down on the back wheel of Kate’s bike. Kate sits cross-legged next to it, punching numbers into a device with a tiny keyboard in an effort to communicate with her husband and brother-in-law. She turns knobs one way and another and high-pitched whines come out, every so often resolving into the voice of a trucker or someone landing a small plane. But nothing from Gabriel or Christopher.
The women would much rather be chewing up miles on the road, but there’s little point in traveling at maximum speed without knowing where they’re going—or what they might find when they get there. For all they know, Helen and Henry have escaped from Monder and taken over the world. Or, Gabriel and Christopher have gotten captured, too. Or some other scenario has taken place that they haven’t thought of yet.
“Anything?” Anna asks.
“Nothing,” Kate answers. “This radio silence does not give me a warm fuzzy feeling.”
“Well, I guess we’ll have to head for the spot we agreed on with them before we left and hope that’s the right answer,” Anna says.
“That would appear to be the only choice we have,” Kate says. “But I don’t like it.”
“I don’t like it, either,” Anna admits. “And the stuff in Winston’s little book here just muddies the waters.” She holds up the tiny leather-bound volume Winston pressed into her hand before they left him in his trailer.
“Why? What does the book say?” Kate asks.
“Well, to be honest, I haven’t been able to make sense of a lot of this writing,” Anna says. “The title says, ‘On the Dispersal and Convergence of Time in Portal-Created Rifts,’ which sounds like somebody’s senior thesis.”
“Sounds exciting, too,” Kate says.
“But here’s what’s interesting,” Anna says. “You know those drawings you said your son had been making? The ones with the circles and notations on them?”
“Yeah, supposedly they are maps of some kind,” Kate says. “The Guild guy who wasn’t really Guild seemed overly interested in them.”
“Did they look like this?” Anna asks, holding up the book.
“Oh, wow—that’s exactly like the pictures Henry drew,” Kate says.
“Well,” Anna says, “it sounds to me like your child has the Vision, very strong. These are ancient Watchmaker maps. Notations that haven’t been used in forever. My Dad showed some of these to me when I was a little kid. And based on your description, Henry is drawing them out of his head. It’s as if someone loaned their knowledge to Henry, and passed the Vision over to him. Guild kids are known for their ability to see places and events, but only a few of them have ever been able to draw maps. And never in so much detail. Henry’s got an exceptional gift.”
“Let’s see more of them,” Kate says, sitting down next to her cousin.
The two women page thr
ough diagram after diagram made up of circles with symbols at the edges. Every so often one of the symbols appears repeated and bigger at the top of a page, with miniscule handwritten notes underneath.
On one page, they find a diagram containing an axe at its center that looks exactly like the Silver Shard.
“Well, that sure looks like our axe, but what are these other markings around it?” Kate says, squinting at the tiny drawing.
Around the Shard symbol someone drew a series of circles, as if the axe were contained in a sort of cylinder. The edges of those circles are connected together using dotted lines. Around the outside of the drawing, the notations consist mostly of mathematical formulas and scribbled lines and arrows. The page includes very little in the way of description. On the following page is lettered a single sentence:
CONFIRMATION OF SHARD-INDUCED CONVERGENCE ACHIEVED AT RIFT 27-077-A
The rest of that page is blank.
“’Shard-induced convergence’?” Kate repeats. “From the look of this, Winston was conducting experiments with space-time rifts similar to the one in which Monder is imprisoned. And it also looks like his experiments involved the special properties of the Shard. That would explain the Shard’s disappearance! Winston was keeping all this activity under wraps.”
“That would be just like Winston,” Anna says. “Always tinkering. But this was a lot of firepower to mess with all by himself. I’d be willing to bet there were accomplices.”
“There’s different handwriting in here,” Kate says. “It’s not all Winston’s.”
The writing in the book changes every so often, from looping letters to a tiny precise handwriting in blue ink. Winston had a research partner, for sure.
“This research team used the ancient notation to cover their tracks, I bet,” Anna says. “They knew only a few people would be able to read it. Hey, here’s a third handwriting. There was another partner. And this one, I recognize. My dad wrote that.”
“Uncle Julian was involved, too?” Kate says. “They kept all this work from us. I wonder why.”
“They kept it from everyone,” Anna says. “There have been many parties—Tromindox, humans, everyone—looking for the Shard for a very long time. And all along Winston and Julian and their team knew where it was. They were experimenting with it. One thing’s for sure—I don’t think they were using it to chop down trees.”
“Well, we need to use it to chop up a portal,” Kate says. “If we can just find where that portal is. We only need one of the fragments, you know, to do the job. And my daughter took off with it. I would be planning ways to strangle her if I wasn’t so worried about getting her back.”
“You can strangle her later,” Anna says. “We will go to the agreed-upon location, and we’ll get her for you so that you can get on with the strangling.”
Kate smiles. Something about the way Anna says things makes her believe.
“Here’s the good news,” Gabriel says, “we’re still at the same coordinates where we’re supposed to meet up with Anna and Kate and the Shard. The weird news, though, is that we seem to have changed our location in time and space without moving.”
“How is that possible?” Christopher asks. “Do you think we managed to get ourselves sucked up into a time-space rift, never to be heard from again?”
“I don’t believe that’s what happened,” Gabriel answers. “Look. The van’s here, the dog is here—the terrain hasn’t changed. What has changed is that we now have the ancient clan seat sitting in front of us. It’s like we brought the rift to us instead of the other way around.”
“Okay, so perhaps we just got Daniel sucked up into a rift, never to be heard from again,” Christopher says. “And this doesn’t appear to have brought us any closer to locating Helen or Henry, either.”
“Ah! But perhaps it has,” Gabriel says. “This is the building where Monder was banished into the rift. This is where he was tried and convicted. There has to be some significance to us seeing this particular place, in this particular location.” He shakes his head. “A place in a location. I don’t know what to make of that concept.”
“I thought we were trying to find a remote rift that nobody paid attention to,” Christopher says. “You know, someplace obscure, not the central place that Monder might be most aware of in the whole entire world.”
“Yes, well, you could say we chose poorly,” Gabriel says. “Or, depending on how you look at it, we hit the jackpot. Given the circumstances, I’m going with the latter.”
“Well, I guess it doesn’t matter now, does it? Is this building really here?” Christopher asks, eyeing the stone facade. “It looks solid enough.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Gabriel answers. “Let’s go inside and take a look around.”
The brothers bound up the front steps. “After you,” Christopher says.
The imposing front doors of the ancient clan seat are shiny black, fitted with silver hinges and knobs. Gabriel pushes on the right-hand door and it swings open. An ornate doorknocker with a lion face chomping on a metal ring watches them enter. Christopher makes a face at it as he goes by.
“Hello?” Gabriel calls. “Anybody home? Butler? Cat? Anyone?”
Clarence the dog follows the men through the front door and immediately takes off around the perimeter of the room, sniffing as he goes. This is a grand entryway. A carved ceiling soars high overhead, and Clarence’s claws echo as he runs on the marble checkerboard floor.
A wide marble staircase swoops upward at the rear of the entry hall, but Clarence ignores that and runs around behind it. He disappears through a smaller door and into another room, the clicking of his claws fading.
“These family pictures sure are attractive,” Gabriel says, pointing up at an array of stuffy-looking portraits on the left-hand wall. Painted and photographed faces scowl down from ornately carved frames in every shape and size. “What a fun bunch.”
“Yeah, ancestors,” Christopher says. “That one looks exactly like cousin Anna.”
He’s pointing at the portrait imposed upon the center of the arrangement, a full-length painting of a lady in a black dress with a simple background and holding a single white rose. The woman has Anna’s face and red hair. However, this relative looks considerably less pleasant. Perhaps the model was pained by having to hold still so long.
“How many of these people have you met?” Christopher asks.
“Oh, let’s see…” Gabriel says. “That one, and that guy there, and that’s uncle Phil, and those twins, even though they don’t look like twins, oh, and I think that’s an early photo of Julian. And that’s Rose, there.”
“Right,” Christopher remembers. “Those twins were mean.”
“Yeah, you never liked them,” Gabriel says.
Clarence runs back into the room and stuffs his wet nose into Gabriel’s hand.
“Alright, boy,” Gabriel says, “show us what you found.”
Clarence takes them back through the little doorway behind the big staircase.
Back there they find another vast space, larger even than the entry hall. Windows stretch all the way across the back and carved wood panels line the walls. Through the windows they can see a few scraggly trees. But the floor is the most eye-catching aspect of this room. It is covered in a circular pattern that begins at the center and goes all the way out to the periphery.
“Hey check this out; this is a labyrinth,” Christopher says. He starts walking in a wide arc, heel to toe. “You go around and around and eventually you get to the middle.”
“If I’m not mistaken, this is the room where Monder’s trial was held,” Gabriel says. “How ironic somebody chose to decorate using a labyrinth. I wonder if they knew about the rift when they laid down these lines.”
“This labyrinth is huge,” Christopher says. “It would take forever to go all the way through.” He steps out of the path and crosses to the center, where he finds a circular piece of stone a few feet wide and stamped with the image
of a tree with round leaves and meandering roots.
Christopher holds his hands out at the center of the labyrinth. “See? I got to the middle, I win…ugh!” He doubles over, clutching the sides of his head.
Gabriel runs to Christopher’s side. “Chris? What is it now? What’s happening?”
“It’s getting worse,” Christopher says. “A lot worse. And I see the yellow eyes again…” He stumbles forward and then holds still, taking deep breaths. “There. It’s not as bad.” He straightens back up. “These headaches are not fun.”
“No, they are not fun, and I doubt they are very safe, either,” Gabriel says. “We’ve got to get you some kind of permanent Tromindox removal. There has to be someone in the world who knows how to do that—completely extract all traces of Tromindox occupation.”
“Yeah, I would really like to meet that person,” Christopher says, stepping back into the circle. “Woa! Bad again. Bad…”
He steps out of the circle.
“Hey, hang on a second…”
He steps in again; the pain intensifies. Stepping out, it quiets down.
“There’s something strange about this spot right here,” Christopher says, pointing to the circle with the stamped tree. “I don’t know, an energy field or anchor or something. But I feel a major effect when I stand right there.”
“Well, let’s keep you out of there for now, then,” Gabriel says. “Protect your skull.”
“Indeed,” Christopher says. “I wonder what other mysteries this old place holds.”
The two of them turn to leave to explore the rest of this strange place.
But a loud whump!, like a sack of flour dropping on the floor, makes Gabriel and Christopher turn around. When they do, they find Daniel lying in the middle of the room, right at the labyrinth’s center.
Daniel springs to his feet. “Wait, what the—? Where—what, what just happened?” And then, “Ow. Owww—” His surprise had delayed his response, but now Daniel is feeling the full effects of a hard landing on solid stone. He clutches his shoulder.
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