It was so intense in her mind now that she could not shake the feeling she would look over and see the darkness, even though it was day and the light slanted warmly behind them.
Her shadow wavered in front of her, cast long by the sun, and she caught her breath. She looked behind her but there was nothing there. It was only her and merely her shadow.
The road bottomed out and ran along the base of the hill, and the mere sight of it made her want to run, screaming. It was wrong. All of this was wrong.
She looked up and saw the peak and that kept her going. She had to get there. Maybe it felt wrong because she was in a place that was wrong for her. She had to believe that—not that it felt wrong because she was supposed to stay there as she was broken and she’d never be able to return to her life.
Now, she remembered it with aching clarity. There were the mornings she had woken up early, only she and her mother awake, sipping coffee together or her mother making congee for the two of them before the others woke. There were the times she’d tried to follow Emilia on her bike, her older sister easily outstripping her, but Taigan pedaling so fast she thought she’d lose the pedals and the wind on her arms while she laughed.
There was so much she missed and she was so scared she would never see it again.
Taigon struggled desperately up the hill and she couldn’t stop herself from crying as she forced herself to keep moving. Jamie hated her now. He would always wonder if she had wanted to come back at all and would regret helping her. None of this would ever be mended.
She looked at him and saw him pale and resolute. He wasn’t supposed to be there. What if he was injured in this world and they couldn’t wake him in the other one? What if he died there and it killed him, and he died thinking she didn’t care?
A scream tried to push free.
“Taigan.” Jamie’s voice sounded rough. “I’ve heard of this before. This wind.”
“What?” Speaking took effort.
“It’s…the frequency. It makes you feel things.” He reached out the way he had when they were little. His fingers twisted against hers, knuckles on knuckles and everything aching. “It makes you scared.” He looked ahead to Esak and Midnight, and she could see him fighting for calm. “They have each other. We have to…you and I…”
Only one thought crystalized in her brain. It didn’t matter how frightened she was and it didn’t matter how hopeless all this was, she didn’t want Jamie to be scared. She wanted him to have hope. And for him, she could find the words she couldn’t say to herself.
“You’re okay, Jamie.” Her voice quavered. “It’s only wind—it’s not real. None of this is real. It only reminds you of times you were scared but there’s nothing to be scared of now.”
He gave her a look. “If I can’t make it to the peak—”
“You’ll make it,” she said fiercely. “And it doesn’t matter, remember? They’ll wake you up.”
“It matters for you.” He was looking at her, his face pale. “I don’t want you to have to do it alone. I know you’re…scared. I get it.”
Her heart warmed and she knew tears trailed down her cheeks. “Of course I’m scared, Jamie. I’m terrified. But that doesn’t mean I won’t do it. I’m scared of coming home but I will do it.”
He pulled her into a hug and she felt his body shaking.
“That,” he whispered into her shoulder, “was all I needed to know. I don’t care if you’re scared and I don’t care if you’re afraid. I get it. I only care if you care about the scared part more than you care about all of us.”
She held him tightly in return. “Never,” she whispered fiercely.
With a sigh and a moan, the wind dropped away. They swayed and studied their surroundings. A shout echoed from up the slope. Esak descended, rubbing his ears where he had shoved his fingers into them.
“What was that?” he asked. “I thought it was the wind but even when I put my fingers in my ears, I could still hear it in my bones.”
“Infrasound,” Jamie said suddenly. “That’s the word. It’s called infrasound. Like infrared—it’s below what we can hear with our ears so we feel it with our body. And it makes us afraid.”
The young man looked at him for a moment before he shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “Anyway, let’s get as far as we can before it comes back.”
Arm in arm, the twins followed him.
In the lab, Nick released his breath and sagged into his chair.
“See?” Amber’s voice was gentle. “See, Nick? I told you they would find a way forward.”
Nick rubbed his face. “It’s only…I didn’t want this to ruin their relationship. They’re twins.”
“And that’s what pulls them out of this,” she said encouragingly. “But for every way they’re closer than usual siblings, it’s also harder for them too. They’re so much closer than other people would be that it’s harder for them when they’re on different sides of something.” Her voice changed. “I wonder if he ever feels guilty for not having the same problem.”
Her companion sighed. He had forgotten his coffee while he watched them and now, it was cold. A single gulp told him he didn’t want it like this. He stood. “Microwave time. Are you coming?”
“Sure.” She wandered willingly after him. When they were clear of the main lab, she asked quietly, “Did Price have any advice last night? It’s weird being on the side of it where I can’t risk much communication. Even that encrypted text service is risky. I shouldn’t have sent it but I knew you couldn’t sleep.”
“I appreciate it,” he said. “I was sitting there all in knots about what I should say to them. ‘Hey, sorry, I broke your twins.’”
Amber snorted into her coffee.
He put his coffee in the microwave and set it before he slouched against the counter and considered the question. “No, she didn’t say much. She basically said she had a plan and she’d invite us all to see it.”
“To see it?” She frowned. “What in the name of…oof.” She sighed. “It’s weird, I have to tell you. We’re so careful with what we say. Like, we’re making it sound like we’re using encrypted lines, but we aren’t. He seems to be falling for it.” She laughed. “He’s turned the bathroom bug off. We checked yesterday. Whenever we want to talk, we start the fart soundtrack and write on whiteboards.”
“Ah, romance in the twenty-first century,” he said whimsically. “Have you touched hands yet? No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to have to rat you out to the village elders.”
She laughed. “And what about you, huh? Anyone here you’re falling for?”
Nick shook his head. “Nope. Alas. I wish, but honestly…New York women scare me. Everyone’s so intense.”
“You’re kind of intense, you know.”
“Yeah, but I’m dorky intense. I’m intense in a way that I can tell you all about this one engineering schematic I saw. Not intense in the way that I can tell you my work-life goals for the next twenty fiscal quarters.” He opened the microwave and shrugged as he took his cup of coffee out. “I don’t know.”
Amber slung an arm around his shoulders as they walked back. “Cheer up,” she advised him. “It’s only that we don’t need to be as hands-on with all of the projects as we used to be. With all the other things we have to keep track of and all the people we hired to complete those projects, what we should do is focus on the new management things. Trying to focus on all of it will make you crazy and you certainly won’t have time for dating.”
He sipped his coffee with a shrug.
“Don’t give me that ‘I don’t care’ act. I know you, remember.” She settled at one of the lab tables with her stack of paperwork. “I remember you a year or so out of college telling me how you wanted a house with a hammock in the back yard and a big hill nearby for sledding and a whole pack of dogs that would rush around your legs when you went downstairs in the morning.” She looked at him and smiled. “And I want you to have that, too, Nick. I don’t want you to give up on that.”
“Oh, let’s not do me.”
“No, no, you started it. You wanted—what was it? Oh, right. You wanted a workshop with a reading nook. You wanted to live near a panaderia. You wanted…oh, right. You wanted a Porsche.”
“They’re gorgeous machines. I regret nothing.”
“You shouldn’t regret anything.” He sipped his coffee and slid the knife in. “You should merely make sure you know what Jacob wants so the two of you can get a place you both like.”
“Listen, bucko. We’ve forgiven you for that little lying extravaganza you went on to help us start dating because it turned out well, but don’t push it.”
DuBois stopped next to the table. “Don’t kill Nick, please. We’re on too many projects together right now.”
“Let me know when those are over,” she said.
Nick gulped.
Chapter Nineteen
The group had a quiet dinner of dried meat and fruit as they didn’t want to light a fire and reveal their presence. After they had eaten, the twins watched Esak throw sticks for Midnight.
“He’s a good man,” Jamie said after a while. “People will miss him.”
“I know that.” Taigan lay back on the rocky ground and pillowed her head on her cloak. “It’s him you have to convince.”
“I don’t think we’ll convince him,” he said. “I think the best we can do is ask him to trust us—or trust someone else. His friend, maybe. I don’t think he’ll ever truly believe it.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Dad talked to me about it once,” he said. “I was very down about something, I can’t remember what, and I thought I was letting all of you down. He told me that almost every day, he has the thought that he should leave us and we’d all be better off without him.”
She sat quickly. “He said what?”
Her brother nodded solemnly. “He said it to show me that how we feel isn’t always right. He said he would never leave us because he had learned to be brave enough to trust Mom and us when we said we loved him and trust us to tell him if he was doing something wrong. But he said the thoughts never totally went away.”
Taigan wrapped her arms around her knees and thought about this for a while. You didn’t think of your parents as having thoughts like that. You assumed they had things all worked out—even when you were angry at them for being unfair, you thought they had things together.
She wasn’t sure whether it was reassuring to know this about her father or unsettling. Maybe it was both.
“I think maybe Esak is like that,” Jamie said and drew her attention back. “He has that voice in his head for whatever reason. You saw how he picked fighting skills up. He isn’t hopeless at it. I wonder if anything he said about the others not respecting him is true. I bet he’s better liked and more competent than he thinks he is.”
“But how can two random people persuade him of that?” she asked softly.
Their eyes met but Esak returned to the camp, panting a little, and they couldn’t continue the conversation.
Thankfully, the wind did not manifest in the night. In the morning, dawn light streamed across the valley and Taigan looked at the road with a smile. With the land so raw and cracked around them, the trees thick, and the road abandoned, it truly felt like they were the only people on earth.
That feeling didn’t last long—only another thirty seconds or so, in fact, before a shout pierced the air.
“Help!” The voice was distant but they could tell how urgent it was.
Everyone was on their feet in seconds and scanned their surroundings. Midnight barked but calmed when Esak scratched behind his ears.
“A trap?” Jamie asked.
“Probably,” Taigan said. “But—”
“If it’s not, we can’t leave him,” the other young man finished. “Okay, bedrolls packed and let’s go.”
Having something concrete to do, however small, helped. She moved quickly and swung the pack onto her back as she set out with the others.
They went carefully, all of them aware that a wrong step into a crevasse would be disastrous. The call came again, closer now, and this time, Esak responded.
“Hello!” He motioned for the twins to be quiet. “Who’s there?”
“I’ve fallen over the edge!” The voice seemed weaker. “Please—I’m not strong enough to climb up and I don’t know how long I can stay here.”
“Who are you?” Esak called again.
“My name is Kural, if that’s what you want to know.” Now, the voice sounded sharp. “But since it’s unlikely we’ve met, I’m not sure what good that does you.”
Taigan smirked. She liked this man better now.
It seemed Esak had the same idea. He frowned and edged toward the nearby crevasse, a deep one that scored all down the mountainside with tumbled gravel outside it. His eyebrows raised when he saw the person. “Hello. I’m Esak.”
“Nice to meet you,” the voice responded. The man’s patience was clearly fraying. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to…oh, help me out of here?”
“Uh, of course.” He beckoned to Taigan and Jamie.
The man in the crevasse was of middling height with dark hair and a pleasant expression. His eyes were unsettling, but she couldn’t say why. When her face and Jamie’s appeared, his eyebrows raised.
“Three of you? I hope you’re not bandits.”
“We’re not,” she said. “We don’t hurt other people for the hell of it. But we do hurt them if they hurt us, so keep that in mind.”
His lips twitched and he nodded briskly. “I assure you, I have no intention of hurting you.”
The two young men, meanwhile, examined the situation. The crevasse went deeper than she would have thought possible, and the air rushing out of the vent smelled like sulfur and was far hotter than it should be. A hissing sound issued from the bottom but she could not see what was there except for a shimmer. Boiling water? Lava?
Some kind of magic?
The man was perched on a tiny ledge several feet down from the top of the crevasse. He was too far from the opposite side to brace himself and climb and too far down to jump and pull himself over the sharp edge—although, from his bloody palms, it seemed he had tried to do so.
“How did you get down there?” Jamie asked him.
“I was doing an experiment,” the man said stiffly. “This mountain is known to have strange effects on both people and animals. I wanted to know why. I was collecting air samples when my rope ladder came undone.” He nodded to where a scrap of rope was still visible. “It’s lucky I managed to get to the ledge.”
“It is,” Taigan agreed. She wasn’t sure why but she didn’t quite believe him. Still, he didn’t seem dangerous and even though she checked their surroundings furtively, she didn’t see anyone moving into position for an ambush.
She sighed. “Do you think you could hold a rope to get pulled out?”
“I’m not sure,” he said honestly. “My hands aren’t—”
“Hmm. Well, we’ll make a loop and you can sit in it. You might get banged up but we have to get you out somehow.” She ignored the little voice in her head saying she could summon a helicopter if she wanted to. For whatever reason, she didn’t want to cheat at this.
She and Jamie, both trained by their sailor grandfather in all variations of knots, made a harness in the rope from Esak’s pack and let it down. When he told them he was ready, it took all three of them to haul him up with special attention paid to making sure the sharp edge of the crevasse didn’t shred the rope.
When he was finally out, the man pushed himself off all fours and cradled his bloody palms in his lap for a moment. Taigan looked at her cloak and wondered if she should make bandages, but he waved her away. With a smile and a deep breath, he closed his eyes and concentrat
ed.
The skin on his palms healed as cleanly as if it had never been injured and all the dirt that had been in the wound now lay on the unbroken skin. He dusted them off, stood, and smiled at the looks on the others’ faces.
“I was curious,” he said. “I saw you on the mountain and I wanted to know what brought three youths here with—unless I am mistaken—a bandit’s dog.”
Everyone looked at Midnight, who grumbled at the man and stretched at Esak’s feet.
“The dog chose to come with us,” the young man said. “And you could have asked.” He frowned. “And then you put us in danger to help you when you didn’t need help! I don’t appreciate that.”
Taigan folded her arms and stared belligerently at him.
“Noted,” Kural said cheerfully. “However, since I now know you can be trusted and you are correct that I deceived you, could I make it up to you by offering knowledge or aid of any kind? For instance, why are you climbing this particular mountain?”
The mayor’s son looked mulish. He did not appear happy to explain their purposes, which she had to admit was reasonable.
But she had an idea. “My friend is sick,” she said in a burst of inspiration. “She has a mass in her stomach and even healers from the city have never heard of that being cured. I’m climbing the mountain to try to find…” She trailed off, not wanting to spill the beans on the magical artifact.
“A way into another world,” Kural said thoughtfully. “Because you think they might have a cure. Interesting. It’s quite a gamble.” He peered at her. “You’re a brave young lady.”
“Thank you.” It felt awkward to take credit for Esak’s actions.
“That said…” The man tapped his chin. “It is rather unfortunate that you’re doing something so dangerous and so likely to end in ruin for yourself. My mentor liked to say that there was a thin line between bravery and stupidity, and I think you may have crossed it.”
“Hey!” protested Esak.
The twins looked sharply at him.
“Fine.” He shrugged. “She was lying. I’m the one who’s trying to get the key. My friend is the one who’s sick.”
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