The only hints of the continuous change we'd seen outside were the passing auroras. Little streamers of multicolored light rippled through the air around us like miniature versions of the Northern Lights. When I reached up to touch one, it swiveled away from me like a trout.
What impressed me most about the Great Hall, though, were the people. They were everywhere, sweeping around us in constant motion, armed with PDAs and tablet computers. The men and women alike wearing crisp white dress shirts, ties, and dark trousers. Every one of them exuding a sense of great purpose and importance.
Looking around, I felt a quick pang of envy for these purposeful go-getters who were part of something big and sophisticated. I also felt a twinge of paranoia when I realized that any one of them could be the killer I was hunting. He or she could have been watching me right at that moment, and I wouldn't even have known it.
"This is where it all happens." Solomon had to raise his voice over the hubbub of passing go-getters. "What do you think?"
"What are they all doing?" said Laurel. "All these people?"
"Giving birth," said Cassandra. "To a better future."
"Coming soon." Solomon winked. "Lucky you, you get a sneak preview."
Cassandra walked over to the window wall. "Let's go out and have a drink, shall we? It's almost time for the show."
"Perfect." Solomon spun and headed for the windows. "Any excuse to enjoy this fabulous summer weather." Taking Cassandra by the hand, he walked onward—and like the cart driver, gave no sign of slowing down as he approached the wall.
It turned out he didn't need to. As Laurel, Mahoney, and I watched, Solomon and Cassandra walked right through the window as if it weren't there. Then stopped on the other side and beckoned for us to follow.
Mahoney didn't budge. "That's glass there, isn't it? A great big pane of glass."
I stayed put, too. "That's what it looks like to me."
But Laurel charged forward without hesitation. Like Solomon and Cassandra, she passed right through without resistance.
Mahoney and I looked at each other and shrugged. Walked up to the window and took a good look at it. When we rapped it with our knuckles, it felt and sounded solid.
"Just walk through," Laurel said from the other side. "Come on!"
I tried, and my shoulder bumped up against the pane. Stopped dead. Mahoney bounced off the glass, too.
Finally, Solomon and Cassandra reached in and grabbed us. Pulled us through with no problem, and all of a sudden, we were standing outside.
"See?" said Solomon. "Nothing to it."
"Let's go get that drink," said Cassandra.
*****
Chapter 41
Huge terraces lined the mountainside behind the Great Hall, stacked like the tiers of a wedding cake. As we walked across the first one, the floor beneath our feet was transparent, like glass or Lucite. I could see the rock and brush below, then the next terrace down in the staggered arrangement. I saw a group of people down there, hard at work on some kind of project I couldn't identify. Whatever it was, it involved laptop computers, piles of dirt, and big, black hoses. Everyone working on it wore an orange t-shirt with the Parapets logo on the back and left breast.
Solomon and Cassandra led us to a row of tables along the rim of the upper terrace. "Please, sit," said Solomon, and we did...though Laurel and Cassandra were the only ones whose chairs Solomon pulled out.
At first, the table was too small for the group, but it grew as we took our places around it. The shape of the smooth, black surface spontaneously changed from round to oblong as I watched, stretching out to accommodate all of us.
"Great timing." Cassandra smiled and patted Laurel's hand on the tabletop. "If you'd gotten here fifteen minutes later, you would've missed the performance."
"Performance of what?" said Mahoney.
Just then, a waiter arrived. A young guy with shaggy blond hair. "What'll it be?" He whipped a pencil from behind his ear and a notepad from his back pocket.
"Wine all around. How's that?" Solomon looked at each of us, and no one disagreed. "Make it our best Riesling, Nate."
"Done and done." With a smile and a nod, Nate was off to get the wine.
"So what do you think?" As usual, Solomon was talking to Laurel. "Like what you've seen so far?"
Laurel nodded and rolled her eyes. "To say the least." She gazed at the back side of the Great Hall, which was constantly morphing like the front side had been. "This might be the most incredible place I've ever seen."
"Well, I'm glad you're here." Solomon put an arm around her and squeezed her shoulder. "My only regret is that you didn't get here much sooner."
"How exactly do you two know each other?" I thought I knew the answer from the way Laurel looked at him, but I asked anyway.
"We were very close," said Laurel. "A very long time ago."
Solomon smiled at her. "We were in love." He reached out and touched her cheek. His Southern accent was smoother than ever. "The Lady of the Alleghenies and the Lord of the Mississippi. It was a natural."
"So you're Landkind then," I said. "You're an avatar of the Mississippi River?"
"Guilty as charged." Solomon grinned and bowed his head. "As for my darling Cassandra..." He gestured at Cassandra, and she waved languidly. "...she represents a place you would know as the Badlands of South Dakota."
"Wait a minute," said Mahoney. I'd momentarily forgotten he was sitting there. "What the hell are you people talking about?"
Solomon laughed. "That's right! It's a brave new world for you, isn't it, Mr. Wells?"
Cassandra laughed, too, and patted Mahoney's arm. "You're about to find out why we had you sign that non-disclosure agreement, Mahoney."
Just then, music started playing—a lilting melody from instruments I couldn't at first identify. Flutes, maybe, dozens of them, all playing with a flickering trill. Or maybe high notes on dozens of electric guitars, shivering with distortion.
Suddenly, twin streams of earth launched from the next terrace down, shooting up and out into the sky. They slowly drew together and intersected in a cloud of colliding dirt and dust over the mountainside.
The music rose, and the cloud began to ripple and twist. It spun first one way, then the other...all the while growing as the streams of earth continued to feed it.
The cloud swirled and bucked like a cyclone, spinning ever faster. Then, as the music hit a single, keening note, it collapsed into a sphere. The sphere bobbed in midair, still fed by the streams, still growing—until, suddenly, the streams and music cut off all at once. And just like that, the sphere plunged straight down out of sight.
Mahoney jumped to his feet and peered over the fieldstone wall at the edge of the terrace after the sphere. I got up and rushed over to join him, wondering if I could still catch sight of it.
Then, I stumbled back as the huge, whirling sphere leaped up from below right in front of us. Close enough to touch, I thought, though Mahoney tried and failed to reach it.
The music burst back to life, accompanied by thunderous applause all around us. It was only then I realized there was a huge crowd on the terrace, all watching the show. Men and women in dress shirts and ties, cheering and clapping like crazy.
As the music soared, the sphere shot back into the sky and changed shape. Flattened into an enormous, spinning disk, big enough to block the sun. And suddenly, five figures flew up from the terraces to meet it. Five women, each wrapped in a different color of gauzy robe.
Hair whipping, the women darted around the disk, waving their arms. One kind of force or another sprang from their fingertips—fire or lightning or wind or rain or light—lancing the earthen disk, carving it precisely.
Soon, the disk had become an intricate flower, a giant lotus blossom turning in the sky. The crowd on the terrace roared and applauded, and the five flying women took a bow in the sky.
It was then, as they hovered in place, that I got a good enough look at them. Good enough to realize I recognized one of them.
The one who was surrounded by a sparkling, golden glow.
Phaola. The nymph who'd helped us find Aggie at Divinities. One of the Hyades and a onetime customer at Cruel World Travel. What was she doing here, I wondered, other than the obvious?
I watched as Phaola basked in the applause...and then, all of a sudden, she and the other four nymphs charged into action again. As before, they trained their individual talents on the turning disk, carving it into a new shape. This time, it became an enormous face...the face of Solomon himself. A perfect replica.
Solomon cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted at the nymphs. "Bravo! Fantastic!" Then, he turned to the roaring crowd and took a deep bow. "Thank you! Thank you all!"
"Happy birthday!" Cassandra hopped up and kissed him on the cheek. "Happy birthday, Solomon!"
I looked over at Laurel, and she was watching the kiss with no expression, no apparent emotion. But still watching with more than casual interest, I thought.
The nymphs let the portrait of Solomon hang in the sky for a few moments, then changed it again. Sculpted it into an elaborate filigree, a blossom of lace. The toughest carving yet, I thought.
And then they really went to work. The five of them flew faster and faster around the spinning disk, applying their powers with increasingly elaborate hand gestures.
The lacy blossom became a giant snowflake. The snowflake split into five smaller flakes, and the five smaller flakes exploded into a hundred even smaller ones. The audience cheered and applauded louder than ever.
The lilting music continued to play as the hundred snowflakes became five hundred molecules, whirling jumbles of linked atoms in constant motion. The five hundred molecules banked and bounded, dancing in a graceful frenzy of oscillation, trading component particles and recombining in new arrangements.
The molecules melted and merged into long, thin threads, and the threads wove into a great tapestry. They became an image of a vast crowd smiling upward, colored in shades of brown from the earth. Suddenly, the tapestry burst apart, and the individual faces separated from each other. All at once, they flashed toward the terrace. Only when one of them raced down and stopped in front of me to hover at eye level did I realize the face was my own. The faces belonged to the crowd, in fact; every face from the tapestry hung in midair in front of the person it was modeled after.
Everyone cheered and reached out, but as soon as they made contact, the faces dissolved. The same thing happened when I reached for mine. The earth shot back to the nymphs in hundreds of spiraling braids.
As soon as the braids rejoined to form the giant disk, the nymphs went to work on it again. They moved faster than ever, molding the earth into ever more convoluted designs, changing them rapidly—their perfect control never wavering in spite of the faster pace.
They sculpted the earth into clusters of interlocking shapes—hoops and loops and diamonds and cubes and cones, all of them spinning. Pyramids and octagons and dodecahedrons. Every shape under the sun, carved in every size and orientation. Collapsing together and spreading apart in geometric precision like paper dolls. Turning and rearranging with elegant symmetry like the crystals in a kaleidoscope. Flowing in textured strokes like the brush of a painter.
The music built, and the pace of the changes accelerated. The nymphs zipped around the disk like hummingbirds, arms blurred from the speed of their gesturing. Never running out of dazzling new designs.
Then, suddenly, the music hit a wailing crescendo, and the disk flew apart. The nymphs raced off, and the earth that had been their artist's canvas in midair showered down on the mountainside below.
The applause from the terrace was the biggest yet. Everyone clapped and whooped and whistled, shouted at each other about how fantastic the show had been. Solomon chanted "Encore!" and the rest of the crowd joined in.
Moments later, the nymphs rocketed back into view. The shower of dirt reversed into the sky and spun into a disk again. As the nymphs careened around it, gesturing madly, the disk flashed through a hundred different designs in hyperfast succession. So many so fast it was impossible to register every one of them.
Then, a bolt of lightning flared from the hands of a nymph. I shut my eyes against the blinding brightness...and when I opened them again, the superspeed changes had come to a sudden stop. The material of the disk had assumed a new form: giant words fanning across the sky. Sunlight beamed in a rippling halo around and between them, enhancing their grandeur.
"WE LOVE YOU LAUREL!" That was what the words said.
Everyone on the terrace looked at Laurel at once, smiling and clapping. Laurel smiled serenely back at them, waving like a celebrity at a movie premiere.
When I looked back at the words in the sky, they changed one more time. A second set of words dropped down from the first: "YOU TOO GAIA!"
Mahoney bumped his shoulder into mine, snapping my attention back to the terrace. "What does that make me? A bear scat sandwich?"
I smiled and looked back at the words in the sky. Phaola saw me looking and waved excitedly. The people on the terrace, all around me, kept clapping.
And I felt something. I'd only just arrived, and I had a secret purpose that had nothing to do with this shindig. I believed my best friend's killer lurked among these very people, and I was determined to find and punish him. But I still felt something that surprised me.
I felt a sense of belonging. Or maybe it was more like a longing for that sense.
A longing to believe I belonged there.
*****
Chapter 42
After things had settled down, the waiter finally brought glasses and a bottle of Riesling, and we sat at the table. The waiter poured, and Solomon raised his glass in a toast.
"To friendships, old and new." He tipped his glass to Laurel and then to me. "There is no greater treasure in this life. No greater wonder."
We all clinked glasses and sipped the wine. I closed my eyes, savoring the rich, fruity taste...the warmth as it rolled down my throat and into my belly.
I had another swallow, then put my glass on the table and sat back, feeling languid. Realizing as I did so that I ought to be less at ease...but not much caring. It seemed like I'd been in a constant state of alarm forever; I didn't think it would kill me to relax for five minutes.
Cassandra sat back, too, holding her glass by the stem and swishing the wine around in it. "So what did you think of the show?"
"It was marvelous." Laurel shook her head slowly. "Truly remarkable. I've never seen anything like it."
"We have one every day," said Cassandra. "Sometimes more than one."
"Like that one?" I pointed at the patch of sky where the show had taken place.
Solomon looked at Cassandra and waggled his hand. "Actually, I wouldn't say that was typical, would you?"
"Not at all." Cassandra looked around and lowered her voice conspiratorially. "That one was a bit on the weak side."
"I'd like to see the ones on the strong side." Mahoney blew out his breath. "It's a crime, you know. Keeping something like that under wraps. Keeping this place closed to tour groups."
"Parapets isn't about tourism," said Cassandra. "And the shows are about much more than entertainment."
"Such as?" said Mahoney.
"Inspiration," said Cassandra. "Motivation."
"And testing," said Solomon. "Trying out the technological advances we've developed here."
"There was technology involved in the show?" I said. "I thought the nymphs did everything themselves."
"Nymphs?" Mahoney scowled. "What nymphs?"
"The flying women," said Laurel. "They were nymphs."
"I thought they were some kind of special effects," said Mahoney.
Solomon nodded and raised his eyebrows. "Technology made that show possible. The performers could never have exerted such control otherwise. They could never have synchronized so many moves with such precision at such speeds."
"Technology, magic, and Landkind united for the common good. The trinity of
powers." Cassandra raised her glass. "The perfect demonstration of the core tenets of Parapets."
"Hear, hear." Solomon clinked his glass against Cassandra's, and the rest of us followed suit. "Three forces coming together to pave the way for a brighter tomorrow."
Mahoney whispered to me while tapping his glass against mine. "What the hell is Landkind?"
"Just go with it," I whispered. "I'll fill you in later."
Laurel sipped her wine and smiled at Solomon. Her serene smile looked much the same as it always did, but her eyes twinkled when she looked at him. "Tell us about this bright tomorrow, Solomon."
"This." Solomon spread his arms wide, encompassing Parapets. "On a global scale. A trinity of great powers united to dispel the woes of the world."
"Sounds familiar." Mahoney smirked. "Didn't somebody try that already? Like in the 1940s?"
"Not like this." Cassandra shook her head. "Not with these three powers."
"What we're doing here at Parapets is something truly new," said Solomon. "Bringing together the technological expertise of humanity...the magical prowess of gods and goddesses...and the earth-based powers of Landkind. Three forces that have often worked in opposition in the past, but now, for the first time, they are working in cooperation. They are working to solve problems common to us all."
"The world is too small now," said Cassandra. "What affects one, affects all."
"So that's what you've been doing up here," I said. "This is what all the secrecy's about."
"Not for much longer," said Cassandra.
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