Kingmaker

by Rob Preece

  She shifted into low gear, accelerated the heavy truck through the showroom's oversized door and then floored it.

  Cops spun out of her way like bowling pins as she blared her horn and kept rolling.

  She smacked her truck directly into the space between the two squad cars and prayed.

  Her body jerked forward at the sudden deceleration, but her truck was bigger, heavier than the two cars. She kept rolling.

  A faint sound of popping let her know that the cops were shooting at her. Which made twice, in two days, that someone had tried to kill her.

  So far, turning eighteen had sucked.

  Still, if she wanted to make it to nineteen, she needed to keep moving.

  The cops only took a few seconds before they were in their cars and following, but she knew this neighborhood. She'd ridden her bike down every street and every dirt path. A couple of quick turns and she found the narrow dead-end alley she was looking for. They'd think she'd trapped herself.

  She slanted the truck so it blocked the entire alley, scooted out, and ducked through the back door of the Chinese restaurant where her mother had worked before the Dojo started taking all of her time.

  None of the cooks even looked up as she walked through, even when she grabbed a blue jacket from the hook, leaving a hundred dollar bill in its place.

  She strolled out the restaurant's front door, crossed the street, walked through a video game store, and watched the police cars stream by.

  They'd block off the entire area soon, but they hadn't done it yet.

  She spent another hundred dollars at a Salvation Army thrift store and got herself a secondhand bike.

  From there, a couple of dirt paths, a short bicycle trail, and a few frightening moments on Hawthorne Boulevard brought her to the Del Amo Mall.

  Since her blonde hair dye hadn't fooled anybody, it was time for a more radical change. If Ellie had been more girlie, she'd have known how to do makeup and age herself. Since she wasn't, she decided to become a boy.

  Some of the guys in her high school had called her a dyke because she didn't wear makeup and didn't simper the way lots of girls did. Even though she knew her father would lecture her for it, she'd kicked their butts. They might still think nasty thoughts about her but after that, they'd kept their mouths shut.

  As she hacked away her hair, she was glad they couldn't see her now. They would be certain they'd been right. Tough. As far as she could tell, being a guy basically meant being a slob with no makeup and short hair. She could handle that.

  Baggy jeans, a sloppy t-shirt, and a pair of Converse All-Stars, together with a buzz cut she administered in the woman's rest room did the job. Her martial arts training kept her slim. She didn't have a lot of chest to tie down so an Ace bandage around her breasts did that trick.

  Nobody was likely to mistake her for an eighteen-year old girl now, but she had another problem. Nobody was going to rent a room to the thirteen year-old boy she looked like. And she could only hope they wouldn't look too closely at the walking stick she carried. Not likely since it was way out of context for a kid, even though she worked on a limp.

  At least she was in the perfect spot to blend in. Del Amo is huge, and filled with weird people. She ate lunch at the food court, then settled down with her parents’ book at a Starbucks.

  She was more than fifty pages into the story when she stopped abruptly. The characters, a warrior and a female mage, had just been given a baby princess and ordered to flee from the magical kingdom. What followed was a complex set of instructions in setting up some magical jewels that would allow a transition between dimensions.

  It was ridiculous, of course, but the baby princess was named something that translated, phonetically, to Ellie.

  She felt the bag of jewels in her pack. Could the story be real? She could buy international spies and terrorist organizations. But fantasy was, after all, fantasy. It wasn't something that happened to real people. Reality was twenty-first century America. She'd studied enough science to know that parallel universes were possible and that the current theory of everything relied on something like nine physical dimensions rather than the three she could see. But that didn't mean that magic would work in any dimension, or that there was any way of moving between them short of a black hole.

  But how else did she have this book—and these jewels?

  Every girl she knew fantasized that they didn't really belong to their parents. Somehow, though, Ellie didn't think many parents fantasized that their daughters were adopted. But either her mother had spent countless hours creating a story that no one could even read because it was in a language that no one else on Earth spoke, or reality was even stranger than spies, terrorists, and international jewel thieves.

  If the book was real, she now knew where her parents’ killers had come from. They'd crossed the same dimensional barrier that she and her parents had crossed when she'd been an infant. After the murders, they'd probably returned to their home. Even if they hadn't, yet, the other dimension was the place to look for whoever had sent them, whoever's plan lay behind the killings.

  Of course, it could be that she'd been such a bad daughter her mother had made up a story wishing she had come from somewhere else.

  Ellie opened the jewel bag and some of her doubts faded. The stones glowed.

  People talk about luminescent gems, but what they really mean is that the jewels reflect and refract light. These didn't. They were more like multicolored light emitting diodes, generating their own cool sparkle.

  This was too weird.

  She moved a couple around the pouch and felt the stones resist, as if they were magnetic or contained tiny gyroscopes.

  It could be a gag, but her parents had never been the joking sorts. Impossible though interdimensional travel might seem, she could believe that more easily than she could believe her parents had set this entire thing up as a hoax.

  Ellie hissed in a deep breath and made her decision. She would stay free until tonight, and then, when no one was around to stop her, she would lay out the jewels in the pattern her parents had used to come here. Maybe they would send her back to the other dimension—where she could track down her parents’ killers. If they didn't work, she'd come up with another plan.

  She packed up her mother's book, put away the gems, and set off on a disciplined shopping trip.

  She shopped the Barnes and Noble for practical books on outdoor survival and, because her mother's description of the world she came from sounded medieval, a book on technology. At the last minute, Ellie added a book on medieval warfare, weapons, and tactics.

  But she spent most of her time, and money, at a camping store.

  Eight hundred dollars later, she had a tent, a sleeping bag, hiking boots and thermal clothes, a fiberglass reflex bow and a dozen hunting arrows (they had taken one look at her and turned her away when she'd tried to buy a gun), a knife and one of those scout cooking kits, as well as enough freeze-dried food to keep her fed for a month.

  She'd thought finding a place to hide out once they shut the mall would be the problem but she solved that by buying the smock and badge from a kid in shipping who was leaving work for the day.

  Invisibly uniformed, her purchases in one of the little carts the department store used for moving clothes around, she ducked into a department store service elevator and pushed the button for the lowest floor.

  She'd never been beneath a mall before. All shiny and modern above, belowground, it was a warren of concrete passageways with boxes, racks of clothes, and computers scattered everywhere. The kids from her school who lived for role-playing games would have had a blast down here.

  Her borrowed smock let her blend in—she didn't look at anyone and they, intent on their jobs unpacking boxes, loading new clothes on racks, and scanning barcodes into computers, ignored her as well. She pushed her cart through the basement like she knew where she was going, and looked for a hideout.

  It only took her a few minutes to find a circular
rack of winter coats that had been pulled from a display when spring wardrobes had been brought out.

  She glanced around to make sure no one was looking, parked her supplies in a recess where she hoped no one would look, and then burrowed into the rack. Then she waited.

  * * * *

  At nine o'clock that evening, the basement below the mall took on a fevered urgency as workers finished whatever they couldn't do while customers had been in the store and finally headed out.

  A few minutes before ten, someone switched off the lights, leaving Ellie alone in a darkness broken only by a few glowing Exit signs.

  She waited another half-hour. Sure enough, a security guard tromped through, checking the lockers and helping himself from the bowl of jellybeans someone had left on their desk.

  He finally vanished, and Ellie was in the clear.

  She pushed her way out of the coat rack and headed for a large table.

  The stones shed enough light for her to read when she spilled them on the table, and she propped open her mother's book to the page where she'd described, and sketched, the jewel pattern that, according to the book, had brought them to Earth.

  A large blue stone formed the centerpiece. About six inches below it, an equally large green jewel formed a sort of punctuation, like the dot under an exclamation mark.

  Smaller white, red, and yellow stones surrounded the blue stone in an intricate pattern that seemed to consist of five-pointed stars intertwined with Celtic knots.

  She mimicked the scale of the drawing, figuring the gems were about twice as big as those in the picture so she put twelve inches rather than six between the blue and green centerpieces. Putting down the first few stones was easy. After that, it got harder.

  Each gem resisted its placement more tenaciously than the one before, pushing back against her hand as she forced it into position, until she'd pushed it past some point of resistance. Once she got it close, it sort of snapped into place, letting her know that she was on the right track. On a track, at any rate.

  By the time she was down to her last three stones, her face was drenched with sweat and her fingers and palm were bleeding.

  She had to wrestle with stone number three. With stone number two, she needed both hands.

  With the last stone, an insignificant green thing about as big as a ball bearing, she had to stand up, using all of her body weight to press it down.

  The last gem flickered when she finally broke through its resistance, then the entire pattern lit up with a purple glow that would have looked entirely in place in a ‘dark side of the force’ moment in the movies.

  Something twisted inside of Ellie, as if she'd been turned inside out, shoved through an old-fashioned clothes wringer, and then shook back to normal.

  The purple glow gathered itself over the blue stone, striking at her like a fist.

  She sat down on her butt, hard.

  The glow dissipated and Ellie looked around.

  She wasn't sure what she expected, but it wasn't what she saw.

  What she saw was the glowing exit signs of the Robinson's May Department Store. Other than Ellie's severe case of motion sickness, nothing had changed. Except, she glanced at the clock on the wall and then at her watch. They had been in synch. Now her watch was fifteen minutes behind.

  So, maybe, she'd crossed through the dimensions—only to end up back where she'd started. Still, something had happened. That power hadn't been her imagination: it had been frighteningly real. Whether it was magic or some super-sophisticated science, her parents’ stones made things happen. Unfortunately for her plan, whatever had happened wasn't useful.

  She flipped through the rest of her mother's journal but the remainder seemed to consist of completely mundane, and boring, incidents from here on Earth. The time Ellie had broken her arm. Ellie's first report card from school. The day she'd earned her first black belt. It was all there in excruciating detail—just like a mother keeping an ordinary scrapbook on an ordinary daughter. The only excitement came when they'd spotted someone in a knight's uniform and fled Chicago.

  One thing there weren't was any instructions on magic. Either her mother had never intended for her to use the stones to return, or she was missing something.

  So, what was the problem?

  Ellie helped herself to a handful of the jellybeans the security guard had missed and thought about it. She was sure she'd duplicated the pattern exactly. Besides the jewels seemed wedded to certain distinct positions. That pattern had brought her here, along with her parents. So, how come it hadn't taken her back?

  She'd figuratively been banging her head on that problem for half an hour before the blindingly obvious answer hit her. Her mother's pattern had brought them to Earth. She'd duplicated the pattern and ended up on—Earth. Duh. What she needed to do was create a pattern that would take her away from Earth and back to wherever these stones had come from in the first place.

  When the purple shock of dimensional travel had hit her, the stones had lost alignment, gathering themselves together in a heap in the center of the table. Now she picked them up, and stared at them, trying to garner their secrets.

  She'd messed this up once already and had been lucky she'd ended up where she'd started instead of torn to pieces or sent into the vacuum of space where Earth had been seventeen years before when she'd been brought here. If she messed up again, she probably wouldn't be so lucky—she'd probably be dead. Which meant she had to get things right this time.

  She looked at the stones, then at the pattern.

  Although each stone was unique, almost all of them were faceted, each with a single rune cut into the largest face.

  Only two stones were different. The blue and the green jewels that formed the center and punctuation mark of the pattern were smooth, with no marking or lettering to give them meaning.

  Ellie took a deep breath and nodded. She'd assume that the cut stones were the pattern, focus, and power. If that was right, then the smooth stones defined the source and destination of the spell. Reversing the source and destination should take her back to wherever she came from originally. Maybe.

  If that weren't right, then she'd probably never know.

  She laid out the pattern again, but this time, the large green stone formed the centerpiece and the blue stone the punctuation mark.

  * * * *

  The first pattern had been difficult. This one was nearly impossible.

  She had to stop by the jellybean jar for energy recharges so many times that it ran out before she'd finished, and she went through two vanilla cokes from the soda machine in the employees lounge.

  The last stone simply refused to move. It held itself in the air about four inches above its slot and hung there. She pushed with all of her might, but it pushed back, digging into her skin as if it stood on an invisible steel pole.

  She hitched her backpack and pressed harder.

  Her hand slipped against the unmoving stone, slicing a deep groove through her skin. Blood dripped over the pattern but the rock remained in place. Close to the pattern, but not close enough. Heat was building inside of her like a blast furnace, threatening to explode into spontaneous human combustion.

  "Hey. Is anyone there?"

  She'd forgotten about the security guard. The jewels’ glow might as well have been an alarm. There was no way he could miss them.

  She pulled her hand back and the last glowing jewel stayed there—hanging four inches above the pattern. The heat flared up until she was in pain and literally surprised that her skin didn't blister. She couldn't move stone into place, but she couldn't pull it away and hide either. She supposed she could run, leaving the gems behind her, but she wasn't sure that she could get away from the heat that way and besides, she needed to finish.

  In desperation, Ellie yanked her father's sword out and used the hard steel blade to press down on the jewel, pushing all of her weight against the metal.

  Her arms’ strength lifted her feet off the ground—one hundred an
d ten pounds of woman, thirty pounds of supplies on her back, and a couple of pounds of polished steel, all supported by the tiny stone. What they didn't do was move the stone, at all.

  "What the—hold it right there."

  A rustle told her the rent-a-cop had gone for his gun. He probably saw himself as the great hero. Once they figured out who she was, he probably would be.

  Ellie hooked her feet around the table legs and added that extra bit of shove to the equation.

  Amazingly it was enough. The stone slid downward, incredibly slowly, as the guard drew his weapon.

  She groaned as she pushed it closer—and then it snapped into place, dumping Ellie on the floor.

  The purple shockwave swirled her away into an oblivion of gut-wrenching stillness.

  Chapter 3

  "Drop your weapon and put your hands up."

  Ellie felt completely disoriented, again. At least that burning heat had vanished, being replaced by an empty coldness. She was certain she'd had it right this time, but there was no mistaking the security guard's voice.

  She dropped the katana and forced her eyes open. Open to sunlight and a dense green forest.

  "Turn it off."

  Sure enough, the rent-a-cop glared at her, his automatic drawn, his flashlight held like a club rather than something that could offer illumination.

  "Turn what off?"

  "Don't play idiot games with me. I didn't recognize it when you were playing with it, but I've read about holographic projectors and for sure there isn't a forest in the basement of Robinson's May. Turn it off by the count of five."

  Since she couldn't turn anything off and didn't want to get shot, Ellie caught a deep breath and thought fast.

  "Uh, try using your nose, will you. No projector could make it smell like forest."

  He wrinkled his forehead. “Power of suggestion? Maybe a cheap pine deodorizer."

  "Sorry, Toto. We're not in Torrance any more."

  For a good ten seconds, the guard pointed his gun directly at her head. Finally he lowered it.