The Crown of Fire

by Tony Abbott

  “He’s not my father anymore.”

  She smirked. “It hardly matters. If I ask him, he will kill you.”

  Wade raised the gun in his hand. “You evil thing.”

  “Evil!” Galina sneered. “I only want what everyone wants. If I can’t get it, no one will.”

  “Where are the relics?” Lily asked. “You have six of them. Where are they?”

  Gunfire popped from the surface, a few shots to begin, then rapidly becoming a roar. The attack on the palace had begun. Without looking at his watch, Wade knew the deadline was near. Galina leaned across the armature of the great machine, flipped something on the control board. A spinning sound, low and deep, began.

  Wade could barely make out her face in the pulsing glow of the astrolabe. Shadow, light, shadow. “You killed hundreds,” he said.

  “Hundreds?” Galina said. “Certainly more. And still more to . . . come . . .”

  She faltered on her feet and gripped the armature for support. Her face went white, was now so like Becca’s face—because she had been poisoned the same way. The poison she had given Becca was killing her, too.

  The crossbow drifted to her side, the ceiling started grinding open, and Wade faked left, then charged straight at Galina, surprising her. She lifted the crossbow and pulled the trigger, while Darrell and Lily ducked behind the machine. The shot went wild. Wade tore the crossbow from her hands, aimed his handgun at her.

  The roar of gunfire drowned all sound now, and the troops guarding the pit were suddenly moving away. The others—his father, Sara, Terence, the agents and military—must have discovered the kids’ plan, but as angry as his parents undoubtedly were, they were drawing the Order’s troops away from the labyrinth.

  Then, over it all, they heard the roar of Silva’s Hummer, weaving across the last half mile toward the center of the maze, zigzagging across the lower field of ruins.

  Galina climbed to her feet. “You will not use the machine. You cannot!”

  Moments later, Silva was on the surface above them, strafing the ground around Galina, forcing her back into one of the passages. Then he was climbing down over the edge of the maze, Becca a lifeless bundle over his shoulder. Then he was on the ground, cradling Becca’s head, offering her to Wade. He helped Lily strap Becca into the astrolabe, when suddenly Ebner peered over the rim of the ceiling. He shrieked and fired down at Silva, who answered in kind, sending Ebner back. The next moment, Galina appeared from another passage. Her face was now flame itself. She uttered a cry like iron being twisted. Wade hurled his handgun at her, and Silva body-slammed her from behind. She collapsed forward against the wall.

  “Go!” Silva shouted. “Go, now!”

  As if possessed, the three of them tore open their backpacks and connected the six relics in their locations. Vela, Triangulum, Lyra, the black crow of Corvus, the arrow Sagitta, and the massive crown, Corona Borealis. The machine trembled as if woken up, electricity sparking, sizzling from one relic to the other. The sky all at once shuddered open above them, a black darkness lit suddenly by curtains of flashing light.

  “The aurora!” Darrell gasped.

  “No—” Galina shrieked. She fumbled for her weapon, while Silva shot and drove her back, giving them time as he hustled back up the side of the pit after Ebner.

  Wade took hold of the levers and began to follow Hans’s translation of the Protocol instructions. He threw the leftmost lever forward one-quarter, while Lily threw the right one three-quarters. The machine hummed deeply, and the armature turned from gold to white to fiery red, then it sent out a sideways blast of heat and fire. The walls around them shrieked with the impact.

  “It’s working!” Lily cried.

  His stomach rising into his throat, Wade could barely set the controls to the coded destination, his fingers shook so violently, and Darrell had to finish for him. The machine seemed on the verge of disintegrating around them when, all at once, his father and stepmother appeared at the edge of the pit, shouting.

  “Wade—don’t!”

  Galina shrieked and clutched at a small black device at her waist. “No! No!” she cried.

  The relics kept shooting brilliant blasts of light from one to the other, and directly above the pit there appeared a laser-sized dot in the sky, which quickly grew into a black cylinder of space. Cascades of purple and white and red and green light blossomed out of the sky’s hole, like a vast multihued drapery shaken across the darkness of the sky.

  It was the perfect storm, an immense man-made nuclear event, a planetary shift, a waterfall of otherworld fire.

  As the battle fell into chaos all around the palace, Wade threw the great lever forward, and the astrolabe quaked. Instantly, he, Darrell, Lily, and Becca shot through the shimmering hole and into the immeasurable darkness of time.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  The moment icy jets of flame shot from each of the six relics in a sizzling circle of light around the astrolabe, Darrell felt he was being turned inside out, thrown on a barbeque, plunged into ice water, and pushed off of a tall building all at once.

  “The relics are giving us a protective shield!” Lily said. “Helmut Bern discovered that! It keeps the passengers free from radiation!”

  “It better!” He worked the levers and switches on the console while Wade shouted about a guy named Kardashev and his scale and the energy of multiple universes.

  “The idea,” Wade babbled, “is basically that every possibility exists! And we’re shooting through all the possibilities now! The relics will take us to the right one, the one that we want, and the constellation-specific relics allow not only the astrolabe’s passage through time, but also pinpoint the exact place. Guam. Last March.”

  Multiple universes?

  Darrell just hoped to survive in one of them.

  As the machine hurtled through the timehole, he was thrown back and forth and suddenly glimpsed Becca strapped in the seat behind Wade. He didn’t want to look, but he couldn’t not look. Her lips were blue. Her skin had sunken, pushing her cheekbones into terrible relief. Her eyes were open, glazed, unmoving.

  Without touching her, Darrell knew she was cold. Her head cloth had become a shroud. Becca had passed. She had died. His heart burst. His insides ran with tears.

  “Guam. March. Guam. March,” Wade kept mumbling.

  Darrell watched his stepbrother take hold of the lever that moved Vela in the armature. The blue stone glimmered in response, the hidden heaviness in its center brightened, and the frame of the astrolabe shuddered. The console’s center dial spun back to that day in March, to the hour they discovered the blue stone, to the minutes just before Becca was wounded and poisoned.

  After clunking and clanging like an alarm, the machine whooshed to near silence and seemed to sink—into what, Darrell didn’t know—when soon the whirling darkness around them brightened with flashes of blue, watery light. The smell of the sea washed over them, and the dank odor of wet stone drifted around them like a blanket.

  And everything stopped.

  Aqua-colored light swam in the air and up the stony walls surrounding the astrolabe. Above them stood a nearly perfect circle of white light from which hot raindrops fell, splashing to the stony floor below.

  They were in the cave where they’d discovered Vela.

  They were in Guam.

  They were six months ago.

  Sometime during that insane storm of crazy, Lily’s head had become a chunk of lead, bobbing heavily on her shoulders. She shook it to try to clear it, but instead a hot sharp pain pierced the center of her forehead and sliced out the back of her neck.

  She turned to Becca, held fast in her seat by heavy leather straps. Her skin was gray, deadly still. Her beautiful face had turned to expressionless stone. Her eyes had become distant and glass-like. Strings of her beautiful hair had dulled and coiled across her waxen cheeks. Lily pulled them away, tucked them under her head cloth. Her body was icy cold.

  Oh, my God. Oh, my Becca!

  Wade
released the primary lever, and the machine settled itself on the stone floor. It sat, she saw, out of the way, in a sort of niche off the main conical cave. If you didn’t know it was there, you might not see it at all.

  Had we missed it the first time we were in this cave? Is that how time travel works? It’s happening all the time, one time crisscrossing another, or an infinite number of times, but unless you’re the traveler, you don’t know?

  No, that doesn’t make sense.

  Does it?

  “Our earlier selves will be here soon,” Wade whispered. “I hope.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Darrell.

  “No. But the instruments say so. Dad worked on these, remember. He knows his stuff. We should be seeing us soon.”

  And it began, the insane talk about themselves and their former selves in the same time and place. Lily couldn’t understand it and doubted anyone could. She still couldn’t believe they were actually in the past. Time was as baffling and un-understandable as ever, scientiam temporis or no.

  She unstrapped herself and stepped out onto the cave floor very close to Darrell. His presence was grounding to her, and she didn’t move. She breathed in. Yes. She remembered that cave air—salty, stony, airy, and close at the same time. She hadn’t remembered how beautiful the light was. Now it was all around her. There was a splash from the pool on the far side of the cave. Darrell swore something softly under his breath and instinctively took her arm.

  Astonished, she watched as Wade, then Becca—alive again!—bobbed their heads out of the pool. Their faces streamed with watery light. As they hoisted themselves up to the cave floor, the earlier Wade and Becca seemed to move incredibly slowly and yet not sluggishly. It was strange, weird, to observe them. Their earlier selves were in some kind of other place and time, and yet right here at the same time and place!

  What she really wanted to do was run screaming to the younger Becca. To see her move and talk as before! To brush her wet hair from her face. But she couldn’t budge. None of them could.

  It was then that she noticed how the machine was actually still vibrating, very subtly.

  Is it still “out of time,” so that—maybe—neither the machine nor they themselves could be seen by the people in the past? Maybe that’s it. Or not. Either way, it seems impossible. It is impossible. Or not.

  Lily watched as the earlier Becca and Wade searched the walls for clues. She saw the moment when Becca located Magellan’s dagger and then Vela, hidden behind it, some feet up the side of the wall. She watched the two of them start laughing as rain sprinkled down through the opening at the top of the cave. Oh, they looked so young!

  The space suddenly—and at the same time slowly—seemed to revolve around the earlier two in a way that was almost hypnotizing. Then she saw Wade’s face while he gazed at Becca holding the shining blue stone in her palm.

  Oh . . .

  Wade loved her, and he had from the very beginning.

  She turned around to look at his older self now. His eyes were riveted on younger Becca, and they were gleaming with tears.

  The pool’s surface broke again, and she saw herself and Darrell splash up from the water, gasping for breath. Her lungs ached to remember the moment.

  Darrell still held her arm. “Remember?” he whispered.

  “Yes . . .”

  “They’re here!” her younger self said. “They’re right behind us—”

  While she and Darrell scrambled from the pool, it splashed a third time, and Galina appeared, as beautiful as she was when all this started, an eerie goddess emerging fully formed from the water. Slithering up next to her was her slimy gnome of a lieutenant, Ebner von Braun, pulling his scuba mask back. He was followed by two heavily armed, brute-faced Knights of the Teutonic Order. Lily surprised herself. Her heartbeat, booming as it was, didn’t get any faster while she saw all this. She was strangely calm.

  This is the past, not now.

  Galina held the now-infamous crossbow as if it were an extension of her arm.

  “Give me the relic,” she said.

  “Exactly as it happened the first time,” Lily whispered.

  And, just as he had before, the younger Wade raised Vela over his head and vowed to destroy the blue stone—and everything in the cave stopped to take a breath.

  Lily was startled by how fresh she herself had appeared only half a year ago. How young they all seemed. How innocent. Without stealing a look at Darrell now, she knew his face had changed far more than the normal change over six months for a thirteen-year-old, just as he had changed in a thousand other ways, too.

  She herself had become more realistic, tougher, more down-to-earth, a quicker thinker, more real. But she’d lost something, too. That very innocence. Her silliness. Her ego. Her other friends. She couldn’t imagine going to school—high school, now—let alone hanging with her old friends. Sure, the recent wound on her cheek, likely to scar, might change the way she looked. Big deal. The cut went far deeper than that. It was an outward mark of a new and different Lily. Younger Lily had faded from the picture. Peeking now around the edge of the stone at her former self trembling in the cave, she saw that the change had begun to happen even six months ago.

  Six months ago? Is that when we are? Or are we now? Multiple universes!

  A rope tumbled down in slow motion from the aperture at the top of the cave. Breaking away from the skirmish below, her younger self and Darrell grabbed the rope and climbed up. Wade and Becca followed. Ebner took the crossbow and aimed it angrily up at Becca, who had the relic in her pocket. Galina took hold of it, too.

  Wade whispered something behind her. It sounded like “I’m going.”

  Lily realized that this was the moment. Galina would tussle with Ebner, trying to deflect the shot, to avoid the risk of the relic dropping to the cave floor. In their struggle, the poisoned arrow would fire anyway and strike Becca in the arm.

  But Wade streaked past Galina. As slow as things were happening in the cave, Wade was impossibly—even invisibly—swift. She couldn’t tell if Galina or Ebner even saw him.

  Is this how past and future twine together? They happen together at once?

  Now Wade was between Galina and Ebner, trying to snatch the crossbow from their hands. But he couldn’t. Something prevented him. He cried out in frustration, then he hung on to the barrel of the crossbow as it fired exactly like the first time.

  Did he move it? A few inches? Even an inch? A fraction?

  Becca was clinging with both hands to the rising rope, her legs twisted around it. The arrow flashed toward her. Lily could see it move in the air. It was going to strike Becca exactly as it had the first time!

  Then she and Darrell flew across the floor of the cave, their minds linked by the same idea. Move the rope! Just as the arrow reached Becca, its poisoned tip ready to graze her arm, all three of them grabbed the rope, clung to it, and pulled.

  A few inches?

  Even an inch?

  A fraction?

  Yes!

  The arrow whizzed past Becca. It struck the ceiling of the cave and clattered back to the floor. Becca disappeared unhurt through the opening in the cave ceiling.

  “Omigod, Darrell, Wade, did we—” Lily started, but whatever she was going to say was lost under a wild shriek coming from the astrolabe.

  She turned.

  “Becca!”

  Still half wrapped in her burial cloth, Becca was sitting up in the machine. Color was rushing back into her cheeks. Her face was soaked with tears, and she was saying, “What . . . what . . . what? Where am I? Wade—”

  Even as the shades of Galina and Ebner vanished into the pool to escape in their motorboat at the base of the cliffs, Wade threw himself back into the astrolabe.

  He scooped Becca into his arms, crying her name over and over, not caring what anyone thought. All his stupid embarrassment vanished in that moment. He hugged her to himself and wouldn’t let go. Her arms were weak, didn’t obey her, but she wrapped them around him
as best she could. He held her and held her, just like that, joined now by Lily and Darrell, weeping and shaking for what seemed like an hour.

  Becca was alive.

  She was alive, and for the longest time there were no words. Finally, Wade spoke. “We need to go back to the present. We need the other six relics.”

  “Right,” Lily said with a nod. “To accomplish the Frombork Protocol.”

  After helping Becca restrap herself into the astrolabe, Wade got into his seat.

  “But there’s something else,” he said. “We just changed the past. That’s what Nicolaus—and Hans—were always telling us. And Dad. The butterfly effect. Changing the past changes the future. Maybe we’ve just turned back the flood of the future. Maybe Galina’s not an issue. Or maybe Dad and Mom and everyone defeated her, or stole the relics from her.”

  Lily shook her head. “We can only hope.”

  “Besides that,” Wade said, “our parents need to know we’re all right. And we need to know they’re all right. Becca, your mom and dad. Maggie. They need to know you’re alive.”

  He moved the main control lever, and the machine’s hum grew deeper.

  “But do you think we did enough here to change the future?” Darrell asked.

  “We don’t know,” Wade said. “That’s my point. Is Becca’s rebirth—if that’s what it is—a small thing, or is it huge, as huge as it is for us?”

  No one had an answer.

  Becca stripped the shroud off and tucked it under her seat. “We have to be ready to fight Galina for the relics.”

  Lily took a breath. “All right then. Battle stations.”

  Wade gripped the primary lever with both hands. He couldn’t imagine how quickly he had gained mastery over the complex controls and the mechanism of the machine, but it must have been the scientist in him.

  The astrolabe roared. The mouth of the timehole lingered in the shadows of the cave and seemed to draw them into it. They spun away into the hole. Seconds later the launch site at the center of the labyrinth materialized solidly around them.