Lake in the Clouds

by Edward Willett

  He wanted to know, first and foremost, what Major knew about him.

  A simple search for his name turned up a whole file, buried in nested folders about ten layers deep. He opened it, and blinked at just how much information it contained. All his school records. The IQ test he’d taken once and had never seen the results of. He opened that first. “Near-genius,” he muttered. “What do you mean, near?” He closed the file, opened another.

  There were photos of him going to and from school, photos of his house, photos of him with Ariane, video of him at a swimming lesson in the YMCA, shot from the glassed-in parents’ waiting area at one end of the pool. He watched his skinny body flail its way from one end of the pool to the other with way too much splashing, and sighed. A natural athlete, he wasn’t.

  It was all very creepy and invasive and pretty much exactly what he’d expected. But there was nothing there that even hinted at the deep, dark secret Major was harbouring about whatever mysterious power Wally was supposed to have.

  Maybe I should tell him what Ariane told me happened when I held both shards and placed them together – how they sang in perfect harmony instead of disharmony in her mind…

  No, he decided. Not yet. I’m not ready to share all my secrets with him.

  He looked at the still-playing video of his swimming lesson, and snorted. Not that I haven’t already shared way too much without knowing it. Am I really that scrawny?

  He closed all the files, closed the folder, and opened one labelled A. Forsythe. It was much the same as his, only even creepier: one video clip had been shot with a telephoto lens through her bedroom window, and showed her sitting in her pajamas, brushing her hair. He looked at the other video files of her and decided not to open them in case they showed something even more private, and felt a flash of anger at Rex Major. However much his arguments against the Lady and in favour of his gaining possession of Excalibur held water, the man was manipulative and ruthless, and Wally had better not forget it.

  There was another file folder labelled “P. Forsythe,” presumably full of similar surveillance material on Phyllis.

  And then he blinked.

  There was a third file folder labelled Forsythe, but the first initial was E.

  E. Forsythe.

  Emily Forsythe.

  Ariane’s mother!

  Wally moved the cursor over to the file…

  …and the phone rang.

  He jerked, startled. The cursor flew across the screen. He reached out and picked up the handset. “Hell…hello?”

  “Wally,” said Rex Major. “I’ve decided you’re right.”

  “I…am?”

  “I’ve decided you deserve to get out of the condo. I’m texting the man out front while we speak. He’ll come in and bring you downtown. There’s something I’d like your help with…”

  “Um…great,” Wally said, even as he frantically closed everything he had opened, turned off the monitor – no, wait, it had been on, but asleep – turned it back on, pushed back the chair, shoved it in just the way it had been as best as he could remember, and darted for the door, handset still in hand.

  Rex Major kept talking, oblivious – at least, Wally hoped he was oblivious – to Wally’s desperate rush for safety. “It’s a big secret – don’t tell anyone! – but we’ve established a game division and we’ve got a couple of projects we’re just about to release for beta testing. I’d love to have you be the first beta tester, in-house, give the team some pointers from the point of view of the target audience.”

  “What…what kind of game?” Wally gasped, hoping he didn’t sound as breathless as he felt as he closed the office door behind him and dashed for the long white couch facing the expansive window.

  He’d just flopped himself onto it when the front door of the condo opened and the burly black bodyguard stepped in.

  Major laughed. “It’s a sword-and-sorcery, first-person adventure game set in the court of King Arthur, of course.”

  Wally laughed a little weakly. “Ha-ha. Of course.”

  The bodyguard was looking at him through narrowed eyes. “I’m to take you down to Mr. Major’s office,” he growled. “You ready?”

  “Just need my shoes,” Wally said brightly, and then to Major, “We’re on our way.”

  “See you shortly,” Major said.

  He hung up. The bodyguard stood inside the front door, arms folded.

  “You can wait outside,” Wally said to him. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  The bodyguard didn’t move. “I’ll wait here.”

  “Suit yourself!” Wally said with a grin, and carefully put the handset down on the glass-and-chrome coffee table.

  The handset he had brought out of Major’s locked office.

  Feeling as if he’d left a time bomb sitting out in full view, he went in search of his shoes.

  Chapter Three

  Behind Enemy Lines

  Ariane didn’t go straight to the Knight house in Regina. She thought it might be safer to wait until night. Instead she transported herself to Saskatoon, climbing out of the South Saskatchewan River at a spot where the brush along its southern shore provided some cover. A short hike and a steep climb later she was on Broadway Avenue. She had no money, but as she stood outside Starbucks, looking in longingly, a woman in a smart red business suit and black fur-lined jacket came out, took in her hungry expression and tattered and dirty clothes, and pressed five dollars into her hands. “Good luck,” she said, and then hurried away while Ariane gaped after her, too shocked to say anything.

  She thinks I’m a…homeless person, she thought, feeling outraged.

  And then the cold truth hit her: in a very real sense, she was.

  She took her five dollars and went into Starbucks for coffee and something sweet to eat.

  She kicked around downtown Saskatoon for the rest of the day. Late in the afternoon, as twilight gathered and the downtown workers headed for home, she made her way down to the river again, stomach again growling with hunger, and almost eagerly flung herself into the cold water.

  She surfaced in the Knight swimming pool in the house on Harrington Mews, and for a frightening instant thought she wasn’t alone. The only lights in the windowless room came from the pale blue glimmering lamps just beneath the surface, and it was in that dim glow she saw what she thought was a person standing at the pool’s edge. She almost let herself dissolve back into the water before she realized all she was seeing was the little diving platform at the deep end, covered with a tarp.

  Gulping, she swam to the edge, clambered out, and ordered herself dry. Then she stood a moment to let her eyes adjust before creeping over to the door leading from the pool enclosure into the main part of the house. She pressed her ear against it and listened.

  Nothing.

  She opened it.

  The hallway beyond stretched a short distance to the living room, past the downstairs half-bath on the left and the door to the basement stairs on the right, underneath the stairs up to the main floor. The journey from Saskatoon had taken long enough that full night had fallen outside and all was in shadow, the only light the slight illumination that seeped in through curtained windows from street lamps outside. Ariane crept down the hall and, a moment later, was peering into the painfully neat main room of the Knight house. It had a palpably unlived-in feel, but that didn’t mean there was no one asleep upstairs. She thought Flish was still in the hospital, and wasn’t living here anyway, and she didn’t think Mrs. Carson would be staying there with neither of the children to look after, but she wasn’t a hundred percent sure. So, just to be safe, she cautiously crept up the stairs and listened at each of the four doors in turn before opening them and peering in.

  The first room was Wally’s. She’d never been in it, but she doubted anyone else in his family would make their main decorating motif superhero movie posters seasoned with a dash of Star Wars and a soupçon of The Hobbit.

  The next room she knew was…or had been…Felicia’s. She�
�d spent an enjoyable few minutes one day trashing it. She eased open the door. The room looked just the way she remembered it, except it had been stripped of everything personal. It was no one’s room now.

  At the end of the hall she found the master bedroom. It had its own bathroom, complete with Jacuzzi, but it felt as painfully empty as Flish’s. Wally’s parents had separated, and even when his Dad had flown in right after their adventures in Yellowknife, he hadn’t stayed in the house. And he’d flown out again the next day after dropping the separation news on Wally. Wally’s Mom had been out of town for weeks, working on a series of movies. Apparently she was beginning to make a name for herself as an assistant producer. Ariane had never heard of any of the movies she’d worked on.

  Ariane hadn’t met either of Wally’s parents. She didn’t think she wanted to.

  The fourth room, on the same side of the hall as the bathroom where Ariane had first discovered her ability to command water off her body, after she and Wally had had their first damp encounter with the Lady of the Lake, had to be the guest room…and Mrs. Carson’s when she was there.

  She listened. She heard nothing.

  She eased the door open a crack, listened harder.

  Still nothing.

  She pushed it open all the way.

  The room was as empty as all the rest: emptier, because the bed had been stripped, the mattress left bare and slightly askew, and the drawers of the chest of drawers were half open. Looks like Mrs. Carson left in a snit, Ariane thought. Won’t hurt Wally’s feelings.

  And then she remembered anew what Wally had done, and felt a flash of anger, aimed at herself, for even thinking of Wally’s feelings.

  Certain at last that she was alone in the house, she went back to Felicia’s room. She knew Flish had moved out, but she thought there was at least a chance the older girl had left behind some of her clothes, especially stuff she’d outgrown…stuff that might fit Ariane.

  She was in luck. The jeans were tighter than she usually wore and the only top she could find was shorter than she would have liked, flashing her midriff at every move, but it was better than her own filthy and worse-for-wear garb, which, once she’d changed, she promptly took downstairs and threw into the Knights’ washing machine.

  Then she explored the kitchen. The light from the refrigerator seemed dangerously bright when she swung the door open, and she hastily swung it mostly closed again. She found bread and cheese and sandwich meat. There was also half a cold pizza but she had no idea how old it was. A few cans of Coke rested on the bottom shelf. She cracked one open and drank it while she made herself a sandwich, which she ate sitting on the stools by the granite-topped island.

  With food in her belly, she suddenly felt terribly tired. She moved her clothes from the washer to the dryer, then trudged back up the stairs.

  She’d thought she’d sleep in Felicia’s room, but as she passed Wally’s a new surge of anger at his betrayal drove away her fatigue, and with a feeling of perverse pleasure she went into his room instead.

  His bed boasted a Spiderman bedspread that had probably been there since he was eight. There was a Spongebob Squarepants nightlight. There were the posters she’d seen before, and there were books – lots and lots of books, from Percy Jackson to The Hunger Games to The Maze Runner to others she’d never heard of. His closet had very few clothes in it – just a few pairs of jeans. His chest of drawers contained underwear – some of the older pairs of which also featured superheroes, Superman and Batman and the Flash – and socks, along with a remarkably varied array of T-shirts with geeky slogans or pictures on them. Drawers under his bed contained toys from when he was a little boy. A desk facing the window held a computer monitor, keyboard, and mouse. The computer itself peeked out from underneath.

  Ariane stared around the room and felt tears start in her eyes. But the self-pity was soon washed away by another flood of rage. Wally had been her friend. He’d been her companion in the quest the Lady had given them. She’d trusted him, more than she’d ever trusted anyone else in her whole life. And he’d betrayed her. He’d betrayed her to the man who had threatened her, who had threatened him. He’d lied to her. He’d stolen the second shard of Excalibur, the sword forged by the Lady of the Lake, her ancestor.

  The sword is mine, she thought. Mine. And he stole part of it!

  And with that thought, the anger blazed in her so hot she felt on fire. She stepped onto Wally’s bed. She ripped down the Star Wars poster over his bed, the Iron Man poster next to it, the Avengers poster, the Hobbit poster, all the posters. She ripped them down and ripped them up and cast the torn pieces around the room. Then she pulled out the drawers and upended them, dragged the clothes from the closet and tossed them to the floor, pulled the toys from under his bed and threw them as hard as she could against the walls, smashing some of them into broken bits of plastic that bounced all over the room.

  And when all that was done, she threw herself on his bed, fists clenched, eyes scrunched shut.

  The pillow smelled like Wally.

  She burst into tears.

  She cried for a long time, then dozed for a while. Finally, feeling drained but with the weight of her earlier fatigue gone, she sat up again.

  I really made a mess of his room, she thought, looking around, but despite all the annoying waterworks she’d just had to work her way through, she couldn’t feel very sorry about it. Excalibur’s point, strapped to her side, seemed to surge with cold fire. No, not sorry at all.

  But even though she could feel the sword there, even though she could feel the power within it, she knew she couldn’t call on it. And that frustrated her. She’d still heard nothing from the third shard of Excalibur. It could be literally anywhere on the planet – well, anywhere the Lady had been able to reach by way of clouds and fresh water, which didn’t exactly narrow down the possible locations enough to be useful.

  But then she blinked as a thought hit her. She might not be able to find the shard – but she might be able to figure out where Rex Major was, so that if he had found the shard, she might be able to race him to it as she had in France.

  She swung her feet over the edge of the bed and, walking across one torn half of Wally’s The Desolation of Smaug poster, went to his desk. She shoved underwear and socks off his swivel chair and sat down. He had a widescreen monitor: she found the button and turned it on, then turned on the computer tower under the desk. Even if he had a password set she could probably log in as a guest user…

  But he didn’t have a password set. The computer booted up normally. Careless, Wally, she thought. She opened the browser, then hesitated. Merlin could be monitoring Wally’s computer, she knew. But why would he? she reasoned. He knows where Wally is.

  Deciding it was worth the risk, she typed “Rex Major” into Google, set the search terms for the past week, and clicked the magnifying glass button to begin the search.

  •••

  Throughout the drive to Excalibur Computer Systems, Wally thought about the handset on the coffee table. The guard hadn’t seemed to notice it, but the second Rex Major saw it he’d know that Wally had been in his office. And then…

  What?

  Wally didn’t know. Major seemed to need him. And he still thought Major had the right idea about what needed to be done with Excalibur. But that didn’t mean he thought Major wasn’t capable of doing really nasty things, possibly even to him.

  Definitely to Ariane.

  And that brought him back to the file folder he had spotted just before he’d had to call a sudden halt to his Spy Kids exploits. E. Forsythe. Emily Forsythe. Could Major have had something to do with Ariane’s mother’s disappearance?

  Or even more intriguing…was it possible he knew where she was?

  Not for the first time, Wally felt the urgent need to talk to Ariane. But he couldn’t. He had burned that line of communication pretty thoroughly by stealing the second shard of Excalibur from her, even if he had left her the first to help her get home. He w
as trying to protect her, trying to keep her safe, but he didn’t suppose she’d quite worked her way around to believing that yet. And with her power, and the influence Excalibur was exerting on her mind and emotions – well, Major was probably right that Wally was better off well out of her reach.

  Even if that did mean the penthouse swimming pool had had to be drained.

  Still, even if she wanted to kill him, she might still listen to him, if only he could get a message to her. The trouble was, he didn’t know where she was. And he didn’t have the faintest idea how to find out.

  He didn’t even know if she was all right.

  He pushed that thought aside. Of course she was all right. She’d flown across the Atlantic to France on her own, jumping in incorporeal form from cloud to cloud. She could certainly have returned the same way. He’d made sure she still had one shard of Excalibur for that very reason.

  No, she was fine. She had to be. She was just hiding from Major.

  Which meant she was hiding from him, too. Which meant the only chance Wally was likely to have to give her any message at all was if Major found her.

  He massaged his temples with his right hand. Being the loyal sidekick in a fantasy adventure had been a piece of cake compared to being the misunderstood character whose conscience had forced him to commit apparent treason in order to protect the heroine while at the same time helping the tragic villain who really wasn’t a villain at all, just misunderstood.

  Or something like that.

  Wally Knight, he admonished himself, you read too much.

  The car pulled up in front of a towering building of black glass and dark red stone, and turned right down a ramp into a massive underground parking garage. His taciturn driver pulled straight into an extra-wide spot right by the elevators: REX MAJOR, read the metal sign on the concrete wall, in gold letters on a burnished black background. The driver got out. He came around to open Wally’s door for him, but Wally was already out by the time he got there. “Thanks, big guy,” Wally said. “What’s your name, anyway?”