Shadow Borne

by Angie West

  “Mike’s notes. Some of them are in English, the rest are written in some sort of code. But from what we were able to figure from those notes and the drawings, along with a small bit of literature he apparently printed out, we think he found a...realm. Some sort of—”

  “Alternate universe? You’ve got to be kidding me.” I started to laugh. “Oh, this is great, just great. You expect me to believe...lord. Okay, you got me. April fools.” Except it wasn’t April. Still, I was certainly feeling the fool.

  John cleared his throat and lifted his chin another notch, indignant now. “Yes, well, it’s there in the notes. I realize how this sounds; we all realize how this sounds. But, the fact is, your brother took a considerable amount of money from me and from this organization. He vanished without a trace, and now we’ve found—”

  “Yeah, by the way, where did you ‘find’ this?”

  “The documents were at his residence.”

  “Nice.” Asshole.

  “It’s all there in black and white, Claire. Science has speculated the phenomena of separate plains of existence for centuries. To actually be part of a discovery like this—well, that would be something spectacular. Surely you can see that, being the scientist that you are.”

  “Botanist,” I murmured absently as I leafed through the box again. My head snapped up then. “What are you…oh no, John, no you don’t. I’m not getting involved in this, whatever ‘this’ even is. Have you taken up drinking?”

  “How very amusing, Claire. I wouldn’t have involved you in this if I didn’t have to. Your brother mentions you specifically in his notes. We think you might be of some assistance to us—and to him.”

  “Me?” I gestured to the box. “Where is it? Show me.”

  “Look in the last notebook. The inside of the back cover.”

  I flipped the book over and read the words near the bottom. “To Baby Bear and Indian summers,” I read aloud. Shocked, I lifted my eyes to John.

  “Baby bear?”

  “What my family used to call me. Yes.”

  “And Indian summers?”

  “They only meant long summers. We, ah, had a lot of fun, together on summer break, me and Mike did. Megan was older and...well, never mind.” I didn’t tell John about the summer Mike turned ten. I was twelve. We set out for the woods near the end of the summer, in August. It was burning hot, but Mike insisted that we were on an adventure. I closed my eyes, trying to remember the details of that long ago camping trip.

  “Does it mean anything else to you?”

  I shook my head, mute.

  “What about the code he used?”

  “Code? Oh.” I noticed now—and wondered briefly how I could have missed it before—that the words that filled Mike’s notebooks were a jumbled mess. I looked a little harder, concentrating, and tried not to smile. The words and many of the actual letters were backwards. Some of the letters were even upside down, like most of his ‘A’s and ‘C’s. Throughout the book, I noticed that he had even simply scrambled many of the words. It was a pain in the butt to read, but easy enough to figure out if you took the time to do it.

  I coughed and sipped coffee that was somehow still warm. “You and your gang of reputed business men couldn’t crack the code, huh?” I couldn’t help but notice that several of the men didn’t appreciate the remark.

  “Do you recognize it?” John was impatient now.

  “Yes, I do. Mike developed a secret code recently.” No point in telling him it was something we had been doing since childhood.

  “And you are familiar with it, I am assuming.”

  “You assume correctly.” I leaned back and folded my arms across my still damp chest. “I’m not giving it to you.”

  “Of course you aren’t,” he muttered. “But lucky for you I’m not asking for the key to the code.”

  “Then what do you want from me?”

  “I want you to find your brother.”