The Lighthouse between the Worlds

by Melanie Crowder

  Fi gasped. She gripped the windowsill and leaned out as far as she could. There, so far out she had to squint to see it, a trail of dust curled into the sky. In the distance, a line of people scoured the ground, guards watching their every step. Hope took Fi by the throat. She grasped the sill so tightly she slipped, her knuckles scraping against the coarse brick. Blood skimmed the surface of her skin, and she backed away from the window.

  She leaned over the railing a second time. Griffin and his mom were coming, but painfully slowly. “Hurry!” Fi shouted.

  “Come on, Mom. We’ll go up together.”

  “You go first.” Katherine gasped for breath. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  “No—I’m not leaving you.” Griffin’s voice faltered.

  “All those people back there, fighting—they’re counting on us to open the way to Vinea, and to Earth. We have a job to do.”

  “But I don’t even know what you did to block the portal. I don’t know how to fix it.”

  Katherine brushed a lock of thick brown hair out of Griffin’s eyes. “You do know. Trust, Griffin. Trust in everything your father and I have taught you. Trust yourself.” She gave him a gentle push. “Go.”

  Griffin ran up the tower steps. On the second-to-last landing, he paused at the window, grabbed the zigzag-shaped block of wood off the windowsill, and moved straight for the huge brass gears.

  “What are you doing?” Fi shrieked.

  Griffin didn’t answer. He stood directly below the gears, watching them turn. There was only one way inside the lens, through a gap in the rotating metal plating. He waited until the gap appeared overhead, and then he thrust the block of wood between the pegs. With a groan, the gears stuck. A triumphant smile broke over Griffin’s face, and he pulled himself up inside the lens.

  Nobody was allowed up there, except the lighthouse keepers. Griffin had always loved it when his dad had let him crawl inside the lens with him. The outside world went fuzzy at the edges—it was magic. The kind of thing he’d always thought of as magic before, anyway. Everything, all around you, was glass. You had to squint, sometimes, it was so bright, six-hundred-something prisms winking in the sunlight.

  Griffin spun in a slow circle, examining each panel. Someone who didn’t work with glass every day might think the panels were all the same. You had to know what you were looking for. The block his mom had installed would be something to stop the light’s amplification. Think. The smallest circle in the bull’s-eye, then, where all the refracted light was concentrated into a single beam. He dropped to his hands and knees and ran his fingers along the stepped edge.

  “Griffin!” Fi shouted. She pressed her hands against the glass on the other side. Her voice sounded like she was underwater. He could barely see her—Fi’s outline was broken up and hazy, but the tension in her voice cut through the glass between them. “Will you hurry up?”

  Griffin ground his teeth together. The circular prism in front of him was smooth and unaltered. He moved to the next, and then the next. He found what he was looking for on the fifth try: a thin glass collar ground to a tapered edge that slid over the round prism. You couldn’t see it if you looked from inside the lens or out, and you couldn’t feel it unless you knew that lens as well as you knew the bumps and grooves of your own skin.

  Griffin slid the collar off and held the thin circle up to the light. The design wasn’t in his father’s notebook or in any of the drawings. Griffin lowered himself through the opening in the floor, and then he dropped the rest of the way, his feet clanging against the metal landing below. He jumped up and took the small flight of stairs up to the lantern room two at a time.

  “Before the rest get up here, come here, quick,” Fi whispered.

  “What?” Griffin peered over the edge to where Liv was shoving Dr. Hibbert ahead of her and somehow also helping his mother climb higher and higher. “Fi, there’s no time. We’ve got to get these portals open.”

  Fi closed the distance between them until she was toe-to-toe with Griffin. “I helped you. You owe me. Come on.”

  Griffin swallowed. “Okay, but quick.”

  “Oh, now you’re in a rush.” Fi handed him a folded rectangle of map paper. She grabbed his shoulders and positioned him beside the bull’s-eye leading to Arida. “Do exactly what I do.”

  She raised the paper in front of the one leading to Glacies, blocking the beam, and then she lowered it again quickly. Up and down, up and down in a rhythmic pattern, so the beam stretching over Somni flashed like an alarm signal.

  Griffin matched her movements. “Why are you doing this? Who are you signaling? Does Liv know?”

  “I already got Somni, Maris, and Vinea while you were in there.” She dragged Griffin past the eighth bull’s-eye leading to Stella. It was empty, the rectangular frame missing its glass. Fi stopped in front of the one that read CALIGO.

  “These are the last two. Come on, hurry.” Once more, they blocked the beams in steady intervals. Whatever message she was trying to send with her blinking lights, it would stretch all the way around the tower and travel straight out to the horizon. Fi dropped the papers behind her just as Katherine, Dr. Hibbert, and Liv climbed up into the lantern room. Griffin reached out and clasped his mother’s hand. His eyes were bright, still marveling that she was there with him. “Let’s go home.”

  Katherine squeezed his hand, and she moved in front of the bull’s-eye leading to Earth. Far below, the stairs pounded with footsteps. Fi leaned over the edge. Flashes of red and black speared through the holes in the grate.

  “They’re coming! Quick!”

  The soldiers were nearly to the second landing. Fi groaned—they must have come in through a different entrance to the temple. All that time, mapping the city so meticulously—what else had they missed? Liv pulled the crowbar from her sash and moved to block the top of the stairs. To everyone’s surprise, Dr. Hibbert took the hammer from Katherine’s hands and stood shoulder to shoulder with Liv.

  Just then, the bull’s-eye behind Griffin began to shift—not the one to Vinea, and not the one to Earth, either. The panel wavered and swirled, the yellow of the reflected Somnite sky mixing with the sea-green glass.

  “Are you doing that?” Fi screeched.

  “No—it’s not me!”

  Liv swung her crowbar left and right, landing dull, cracking blows. Dr. Hibbert gripped the hammer with both hands and chopped as if the oncoming soldiers were nothing more than firewood. They had the advantage, the higher ground. But there were too many soldiers, and eventually, Liv and Dr. Hibbert were pushed back into the cramped lantern room.

  The whites of the priests’ eyes flashed, and the red of their robes swished. Fi darted out of the way of a hand that reached out to grab her by the neck. She took a step toward Griffin, and in that instant the swirling glass reached out. The soldiers closed in and the priests loomed, but they were too late.

  Fi lifted her hand in front of her face, staring in disbelief. The edges of her skin wavered, glowing and insubstantial. She felt the pull of the portal like a tractor beam tugging at her organs. If Griffin hadn’t opened the portal, then who?

  The whole world went silent in a roar of light, and the noise all around her, and the glass in front of her eyes, and the floor below her—everything except Griffin’s hand in hers, was gone.

  28

  AN ENDING, AND A BEGINNING

  Fi didn’t wake so much as she became gradually aware of air passing in and out of her lungs, and of worry, like tiny bolts of lightning flashing across her mind. Did the raze crews get her signal? Was it enough? Or were they powerless to do anything even if they saw it? And what about Liv? Was she hurt? And—oh no. No—Eb.

  A sharp cold stung her skin. Shivering. She was shivering.

  Fi curled her fingers, and there, at last, was something familiar. Griffin’s hand gripping hers.

  She opened her eyes.

  Everything was mist. It pooled under her, lifting her aloft. And it tickled. The mist hovered like
a nursemaid over a gash in her arm and the torn skin on her knuckles. It washed over Griffin’s cheeks until his eyes blinked open. And it cradled Katherine like a stream welcoming a wilting flower.

  Fi sat up.

  They were in the tower, but this wasn’t Somni. She crawled to the gallery windows, raised up onto her knees, and peered outside. Clumps of structures stretched out over the mist like an archipelago: nestlike homes and open-air markets, vertical gardens and elaborate mews on the horizon. Fi watched as a raptor sped like an arrow, turning his talons up at the last minute to grasp the falconer’s arm. Smoke wafted above the ashes of a funeral pyre burning in the distance.

  The day was bright—the mist collected the light of newborn stars and dying ones all the same. It cradled the light inside itself until it gleamed. Half the sky was white, made up of layer after layer of mist, and the other half was the hungry black of space.

  Behind Fi, Griffin shot up, looking frantically around him. He reached out and brushed the hair away from his mother’s brow. Katherine lay in the mist as if she might sleep forever. Griffin shook her arm, and when she didn’t wake, he shook even harder.

  “Mom, wake up!”

  Katherine’s eyes fluttered open, and she struggled to prop herself on her elbows. Oh, she mouthed, and when she reached a hand up, both Griffin and Fi hurried to help her stand.

  “Oh.” This time the word moved past her lips and onto the sodden air. She crossed to the gallery door and opened it wide, stepping onto the narrow balcony and gripping the railing. The mist pooled around her feet, nudging her toward the edge.

  But she didn’t step up and over. She reached behind her and gathered the children close. “Look.” Katherine’s voice, still raw from disuse, trembled in awe. “We’ve been called to the mists of Caligo.”

  Fi groaned.

  “What?” Griffin cried. “We were supposed to go home! I promised Dad I’d get you to a doctor.”

  “It seems that someone had a different idea.” Katherine smiled down at her son. She traced the thin line of his jawbone with her thumb, just as she had imagined doing every day for the past three years. “Do you remember the story I told you about this world?”

  Griffin nodded. It was so surreal, hearing her speak about the memories he’d clung to like the crumbling edge of a cliff. He leaned over the railing, looking for the ground that should have been there, at the base of the tower. But there was only mist.

  “Give me your arm, Fi,” Katherine said, and she lifted the girl’s hand, turning it over to reveal the soft flesh of her forearm with its ribbons of green veins overlaid with trails of dried blood. A tendril of mist wrapped around the elbow, and Katherine shooed it away. The mist retreated in overlapping swirls, revealing a pink line of raised skin.

  “But—” Fi rubbed at the new scar. That had been a nasty gash a few minutes ago. “How?”

  “You see?” Katherine said to her son. “The mists are healing. Just being here will do me more good than any hospital on Earth. I’m feeling stronger already.”

  Griffin relaxed against her side, and he grabbed her hand where it draped over his shoulder. The sharp curve of her ribs against his cheek, the pattern of her breath on his hair—Griffin had spent so long missing those very things that a ribbon of shyness tied his tongue.

  Beside them, Fi tensed. “What’s that?”

  Griffin and Katherine looked past her pointing finger to where a shallow boat floated steadily toward them, riding the currents of air. At first it seemed like nothing more than a shadow in a seam between layers of mist. But as the boat left the aerie in the distance and wove closer, the wind nudged the bow, and light glanced along its pea-pod shape. The boat swung broadside as it drew near; now that it had reached its destination, it lay perfectly still, not tempted by the swirling mists anymore.

  Griffin tilted his face up to look at his mother. She didn’t seem tired anymore, and though she was still far too thin, the chill in the air had brought color to her cheeks. Or maybe it was the thrill of it all.

  Griffin laughed. He’d forgotten that look on her face, how even the barest hint of adventure made her whole being light up. Katherine’s face was flushed, the tops of her cheeks apple red. Griffin took his mom’s hand and laughed again. He couldn’t help it. Neither one of them was any good at hiding their emotions. And maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing, after all.

  * * *

  When you’re floating along a river, you can feel the current beneath you, tapping against the underside of the boat, nudging you away from boulders and drawing you down into churning holes below. This boat trip was marked by the absence of those things. Nothing bumped or pulled at them, nothing knocked against the sides or lapped against the stern. And there were no paddles or oars of any kind.

  The boat simply slipped its mooring and turned about, climbing steadily upward against the airstream. Griffin and his mother leaned over the edge, marveling at the winged creatures that flitted and flapped in the space above and far, far below them.

  The aerie was a single platform with a round structure like a swallow’s nest at its center. The boat drew near and slowed. A boy knelt on the platform a few paces in front of rows and rows of men, women, and children, their heads bowed in deference. Their skin rippled and shifted in concert with the mists that slid all around. Behind them, a dozen women stood together. Fi squinted, peering more closely. It wasn’t just the starlight glimmering off their skin, or the weight of her wishing that made it so: The women glowed, the strength of the green blood in their veins potent enough to light the mists around them.

  Fi trembled. Her cheeks were wet, tears streaming down them and soaking into the collar of her stola. “Greenwitches? Here? But . . .” Her words drowned in her own tears.

  “Welcome to Caligo,” the kneeling boy said with a gesture of welcome to the girl from Vinea and the mother and son from Earth. He wore a cloak of white feathers over a bald head and bony shoulders. His knees and toes were pillowed in mist. “This is my first official act, summoning you three.”

  Fi swallowed, swiping the backs of her hands across her cheeks. The shock fell away with the last of her tears.

  “You’re the Levitator?” Griffin frowned. “But you’re just a kid.”

  The boy ducked his head, hiding a grin. He gestured to the funeral pyre far below. “I was merely a child, but when the Levitator left us (may he rest in peace forever) his sight and strength fell to me.”

  “And you’re going to help us?” Griffin asked. A new feeling bubbled up in his chest—something he hadn’t felt in so long he almost couldn’t put a name to it. Something light and airy. Hope.

  “We were always meant to work together. Somni and Vinea, Earth and Caligo.” He nodded in deference to Katherine. “The winds are changing direction and picking up speed.”

  Griffin scraped his fingernail against the calluses on his palm, where all that work in the glassmaking studio had toughened the skin and strengthened the muscles beneath. On one side of him was Fi, practically glowing, she was so happy to be in the presence of greenwitches. On the other side was his mother. Not just not dead but alive. Griffin let out a breath, and for the first time in years, he let his worry go.

  There was a gap between the boat and the platform. He clasped his mother’s hand, and, matching her smile with one of his own, together they stepped out onto nothing but mist. When they reached the platform and climbed up onto solid ground, the Levitator nodded once in approval, and he offered a cryptic smile.

  “Welcome. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Seeing this book out into the world was the work of a whole host of people—friends and family who bobbled and bounced my infant twins so I could step away to write, colleagues who gifted me with limitless belief and sharp critique, and the stellar team at Atheneum who waited patiently for these fantastical worlds to spin into being.

  And so, a thousand thanks to:

  Whitney Walker

  Reka Simons
en

  Justin Chanda

  Audrey Gibbons

  Jeannie Ng

  Julia McCarthy

  Brian Luster

  Debra Sfetsios-Conover

  Kailey Whitman

  Ammi-Joan Paquette

  Kathleen Wilson

  Meg Wiviott

  Kristin Derwich

  Cammen Lowstuter

  Anna Eleanor Jordan

  Annie Walker

  Ted Walker

  Tiffany Crowder

  Stacy Stahl

  Shanna Freeman

  Justine Lacy

  Kelly DePalo

  Sandra Galván

  Miki Aylesworth

  Ben Ervin

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MELANIE CROWDER lives on the Colorado Front Range, where she is a writer and educator. She holds and MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the author of the middle grade novels Three pennies, parched, and A Nearer Moon, and the young adult novels Audacity and An Uninterrupted View of the Sky. Visit her at MelanieCrowder.net.

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  Simon & Schuster, New York

  Visit us at simonandschuster.com/kids

  Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Melanie-Crowder

  Also by Melanie Crowder

  A Nearer Moon

  Three Pennies

  Parched

  Audacity

  An Uninterrupted View of the Sky

  ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  www.simonandschuster.com

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.