“It would drive me crazy,” Thea said without thinking, and then flushed again, biting her lip. “Sorry. But I’m not the world’s tidiest person and I live in a house where six brothers came before me. My mother gave up a long time ago. We pick up our own messes…when we remember.”
“This is the library,” Isabella said, pushing open the door of the room with the portrait above the fireplace. Isabella pointed to the portrait. “That’s Estella, Father’s first wife, the one for whom this place was built. He has several…photographs of my mother in his study.”
“Is your mother…,” Thea began carefully, but Isabella gave a short, sharp laugh that made Thea stop dead.
“My mother,” Isabella said, “gave up too. She left this place a long time ago, when I was barely five, and left us to my father to raise.”
“I’m…sorry,” Thea said, feeling exceedingly lame.
Isabella turned and crossed the hall to the room where Thea had seen the huge old table. “That’s where dinner will be,” she said. “I’d better go and get ready. We dress for dinner in this house, just so you know.”
“What am I supposed to wear?” Thea asked, astonished.
“If you get it wrong, he’ll let you know,” Isabella said. “Well, I’ll see you at dinner, Galathea.”
“It’s Thea,” said Thea.
Isabella shook her head. “Not in this house. Father doesn’t hold with nicknames. You go by the name you are given by the Gods when you are born. You’re Galathea, get used to it. Don’t be late, by the way—Father hates it when dinner has to be held for latecomers.”
She inclined her head at Thea by way of dismissal, and turned to waft her way up the spiral staircase. Thea wasn’t sure what Isabella would be wearing for dinner, but she knew that she wouldn’t be surprised at a tiara.
She went back to her room, where she discovered that someone had closed the French doors and tidied away the laptop onto a small desk. She wondered about plugging it in to recharge the battery, but quickly realized she would have to ask for instructions. What she had taken for an electrical outlet was no more than just a blank white socket-shaped plate set into the wall. She left that problem for later and opened up her closet instead, wondering if she had packed anything elegant enough for the professor’s dinners. In the end she decided on a dark-red dress with a scooped neckline, dressed up with a belt made from old silver coins and a pair of dangly earrings. She was still standing before the mirror, wondering whether or not to add a draped silk scarf to the ensemble, when there was a knock on her door.
“Thea? You in there?”
She crossed the room in a couple of long strides and flung the door open. “Terry! I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life!”
“Well, thanks,” he said with a grin. “What brought that on?”
“This place…is weird,” she said. “I think we’d better pull a slipstream world fast, before you get into trouble. This place…is packed with magic.”
“I know,” he said. “I’d better not say any more just yet. What’s this dinner? That housekeeper woman told me to wear a tie.” He suddenly realized what she was wearing and did a double take that made Thea suddenly blush almost the same shade as her dress. “Wow,” Terry said, “you look pretty.”
“Thank you!” she said, genuinely pleased. And then remembered something else. “But I am not even in the running,” she added.
“There’s a competition?” Terry asked.
“I’ve met your Isabella,” Thea said.
It was Terry’s turn to blush. “She isn’t my Isabella,” he muttered.
“Sorry,” she said, contrite. “You’d better get ready. I am told the professor hates it when people are late. Which you are, by the way. What took you so long to get here? I thought you were supposed to be here before me.”
“I was,” Terry said, “but then they got another…another…you know what….”
Thea flung out a hand. “Stop! I need to plug in my computer before you can say anything about that…and there isn’t a plug. Not that I can figure out.”
“Yes there is. Watch.”
Terry crossed over to the desk and crouched beside the blank plate in the wall.
“Where’s your power cord?” he asked.
“In the case.”
Terry dug around and came up with a power cord, grasping the business end with his right hand and pointing the prongs at the blank metal. For a moment nothing happened, and then the blankness acquired a translucent quality, like a soap bubble, and then vanished altogether, leaving behind a serviceable power socket in the wall. Terry clicked the prongs of the power cord into it, and gestured that Thea should plug the other end into the laptop. She booted up the computer, then pulled up the word processing program and typed up a couple of short sentences.
“Okay,” she said, hitting ENTER. “We should be okay.”
“We…” Terry began, but then something buzzed in the air around them, and then there was an audible snap, as though someone had broken a guitar string. The light in the room darkened for a moment, and then brightened again. Terry touched Thea’s arm gently and pointed; the laptop’s power cord dangled loose, the socket once again a blank plate in the wall.
Thea yelped in consternation. “What was that? I’d better not screw it up, my brother will have my head on a platter if I ruin his computer!”
Terry mimed writing, and Thea gave him a notebook and a silver ballpoint pen.
I think we need to find a way to make it compatible with this house, Terry scribbled on a blank page. We’ll talk later. But there was another you-know-what, just before I left. This time offering a diploma to whoever looked. Not specified in what, exactly, but I suspect it’s in Jumping to Conclusions or perhaps Picking a Ripe Watermelon—but the problem was that the subroutine triggered something else entirely and the person who got the “diploma” was written up as graduated—and was therefore not eligible for a REAL diploma anymore. One of the kids at the Academy is going to have a hard time proving to someone that he’s only sixteen and that he hasn’t in fact graduated high school, let alone whatever that diploma says he’s done.
“Oops,” Thea said softly. “But we’d better talk later. After dinner. I think your hand is going to be very sore if we don’t get this computer thing figured out. I guess we’ll have to talk to the professor about that.”
“Well,” Terry said, “that’s what we’re here for. To talk to the professor. Can you give me five minutes to get cleaned up? We can go down together.”
“Sure,” Thea said. “What do you think…scarf, or not?”
He looked back to where she was holding her scarf across the front of her dress, and rolled his eyes at her as he went out of the room.
He returned fifteen minutes later, dressed in a clean white shirt and a dark blue tie, his hair damp and slicked back.
“I guess I’m ready,” he said dubiously.
They made their way down the spiral staircase, and then hesitated before the door of the dining room, hearing a murmur of conversation. Terry knocked softly.
“Come in,” said a deep baritone, followed by the noise of a chair scraping on the floor. Thea and Terry stepped into the room, and were greeted by a tall, olive-skinned man with white hair slicked back from his forehead and a trim moustache and pointed salt-and-pepper beard framing a full-lipped mouth. The eyes on either side of a beaked aquiline nose were those of a raptor, dark and very bright. His hands were long and thin, with polished nails and a gold signet ring on the ring finger of his right hand.
Beside him, seated at the table, Isabella de los Reyes nodded at Thea. She wore a tight long-sleeved top made of layers of white lace, and pearls in her ears; her hair was piled on top of her head and held with a huge intricate antique Spanish comb.
Beside her, his elbows on the table, sat a lanky youth with glossy, slightly greasy-looking black hair curling around his collar, and a pair of gold wire-rim glasses perched slightly askew on a nose he had obviously in
herited from his father.
“Welcome to my home,” the white-haired man said, indicating the table set with gleaming crystal and silverware. “I am Sebastian de los Reyes. And these are my children—Isabella and Beltran.”
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1.
DINNER PASSED IN A sort of formal daze. Everyone sat around the magnificently set table asking very politely for the salt or the basket of fresh-baked bread. Isabella at least said thank you when she was handed something, which was more than anyone got out of Beltran.
“Shop talk” of any sort seemed to be not considered suitable for dinner conversation. At the conclusion of the meal, Sebastian de los Reyes took his leave, reminding his new students that he would be seeing both of them in his study at nine sharp the next morning. Terry, suddenly made sharply aware of why he was in this house, looked as if he had just had a glass of cold water thrown into his face. Isabella and Beltran had smirked a little at the announcement, and it seemed obvious that it was a favorite ploy by the professor to keep his students on their toes.
Thea might have asked about it, if either of the de los Reyes siblings had showed any sign of being remotely friendly—but straight after the meal Beltran simply disappeared, and Isabella excused herself and floated up the stairs to her room, presumably to change. Terry watched spellbound and open-mouthed until Isabella, without even glancing back, had vanished around the curve of the stairs.
Thea elbowed Terry in the ribs.
“Unh?” he said, apparently having lost the power of coherent speech.
“Earth to Terry,” Thea said.
He blinked, tore his eyes off the stairs, and looked down at her. “What?”
“We still have a problem,” Thea reminded him. “That session tomorrow morning could turn out to be a very short one if we can’t solve the computer question. If I can’t slip us sideways into that other place where you are actually able to hold a coherent conversation. You want to try it again?”
“You want to risk your laptop?” Terry said. “If we get that kind of feedback energy again, it could fry its brains. Maybe we should ask someone….”
His head angled upward again, almost instinctively, to the stairs where Isabella had vanished. Thea actually giggled.
“Not Isabella,” she said.
“Well, Beltran didn’t seem too friendly either,” Terry muttered. “Perhaps we’d be better off just waiting for the professor’s input tomorrow…even if you have to do all the talking initially. If he lets me at his Nexus…”
“Yes, well, we have to talk your way into that first,” Thea said. “Principal Harris grabbed you because he needed you; the professor seems to be doing fine by himself.”
“But that’s why I’m here,” Terry said obstinately. “To see how this other Nexus—” He shut his mouth abruptly, with a snap, looking a little wild.
“That was close,” Thea said. “Don’t say anything until we get this figured out.”
“I miss Tess,” Terry said.
“I miss everybody,” Thea said morosely.
It felt a lot like school, but worse—all the weight of expectations, but without the support of being surrounded by friends. It certainly seemed as though Beltran and certainly Isabella were not the sort to go out of their way to actually befriend anyone whom their father’s mentoring activities washed up on the shores of their world.
Terry gave Thea’s shoulder a squeeze.
“We’ll deal with the computer stuff tomorrow,” he said. “I have a few ideas, but perhaps they’re better saved for the professor. I’m going to go read for a bit, and then I suppose we’d better both get a good night’s sleep. It looks like it’s going to be quite a summer, one way or another.”
They climbed the stairs together, and then waved at each other in a self-conscious way before disappearing into their own rooms. The house was apparently built out of soundproof materials, because once she shut the door to her bedroom, Thea could hear only silence—and, if she opened the doors to her little balcony, the sounds that drifted in from the outside, the passage of the occasional distant car, a cicada that seemed to have taken up residence somewhere very close by, the whisper of leaves in a light breeze. It should have been lulling, in its own way, but she could not seem to find that calm quiet place in which she could drift into sleep. She lay, instead, in the unfamiliar bed and stared with wide-open eyes up to the ceiling. Thoughts buzzed around her like angry bees, questions she could not answer, visions she could not quite understand. When she finally sighed and looked over at the clock, she realized that it was nearly half past two in the morning, that she was very wide awake and desperately thirsty.
The thought of padding around in her nightgown in the corridors of a strange house suddenly made Thea feel self-conscious. But the bathroom was just across the hall. She had not thought to bring a bathrobe, but she suddenly remembered that she had noticed one hanging in the closet when her suitcase had obeyed the unpacking spell. She switched on the bedside Tiffany lamp, with a stained-glass shade that sent a muted jewel-colored light across her bedspread, and swung her legs out of bed. The bathrobe was where she remembered seeing it, a dark burgundy that looked almost black in the colored light—it was a shade too long, but she tied the sash securely around her waist and padded to the door in her bare feet.
The corridor was empty, lit by two sconce-lights that flanked the top of the stairs; a night-light spilled a faint green glow from the half-open door to the bathroom. The house was quiet. The thick carpet on the floor absorbed the sound of her footsteps. The only other thing she could hear was the distant sound of a haunting, plaintive melody being picked on a guitar.
The music became louder as she stepped across the hall. Disconcerted, she paused—and the music faded, becoming only a wraith of itself, a wisp of a tune that reminded her suddenly of another melody she had heard once, the flutelike tune that was an echo of the song that created the world, spilling from the mesas above Cheveyo’s red desert. But this was not something old, it was something very new—a lure, not a memory. It swelled again as she took another step toward the bathroom. The faint green light that glowed beyond the half-open door suddenly took on a strange quality, a luminescence rather than a light, something dappled and living, like sunlight through thick foliage, filtered rich and green down to a forest floor; the music seemed to play that, too, a vision of old woods, the carpet beneath her feet suddenly ancient mulch deposited by centuries of fallen leaves and mixed with rich forest earth.
The door was not simply a door, it was a doorway.
To somewhere else.
Thea tensed, froze, knew that she should stop moving and run for the safety of the bedroom, close the door, and hope that the enchantment would be deterred. But her feet kept moving. The doorway called to her, reminded her of the portal she herself had once raised under the starlit skies of the First World.
This is stupid, she told herself even as she reached out to push the bathroom door wider.
As it swung open soundlessly at her touch, she glimpsed…something else, something other, certainly not the tidy,
pretty guest bathroom where she had watched her toiletries arrange themselves neatly on the vanity cabinet.
She could not be sure of exactly what she saw, because at that precise moment Terry’s door opened. Its quiet swish crashed like a discordant note against the guitar melody, which twanged into an errant chord and died very suddenly. The bathroom reasserted itself, awash in a green-glowing night-light; Thea saw her hairbrush on the vanity, and glimpsed herself in the mirror, a little wild-eyed, her fair hair loose around her face.
“Thea…? What’s going on?” Terry asked. He was barefoot, wearing a pair of bright red shorts and a faded T-shirt bearing the image of a monster with fangs dripping blood. “I thought I heard something.”
“What did you hear?” Thea asked quietly.
“Music…? I’m not sure. Maybe I dreamed it. What are you doing up? It’s two in the morning!”
“I thought I heard something…too.”
Terry stepped out into the corridor, looking left and right. “What?”
“There’s nobody here.”
But she knew she wasn’t quite telling the truth. Because she had seen someone, just a blur, in the place that had not been a bathroom only moments before, a place she would have entered in another heartbeat and gone…who knew where. There had been a shimmer, beyond—a shimmer like green glass, and the mirrors had not been those of the guest bathroom in the house of Professor Sebastian de los Reyes. The face she had glimpsed in those mirrors from otherwhere had not been her own. She had not seen it for long enough to identify it with any degree of certainty, but she could definitely swear to a set of high aristocratic cheekbones, and dark eyes.
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