The Gossamer Crown: Book One of The Gossamer Sphere

by Conway, Melissa

  He peeled the gloves off his clammy hands and tossed them on the counter. No point worrying about protection now. Kneeling, he swept the dark sand onto a dustpan with his hand. Immediately, his palm began to tingle. He looked down and saw that it was covered in a silvery metallic sheen. Without conscious thought, he placed his hand over the mound of sand on the dustpan. A rush of something like and yet unlike pleasure crawled up his arm and settled somewhere in his head. He stared at his hand with unfocused eyes as the sensation increased.

  “To me,” he murmured, instinctively concentrating on drawing the metal out of the sand. And it came.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  The North Sea

  After Zach had gone out of his way to give her that sweet peck on the cheek, Lizbeth thought she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. The rocking motion of the ship and her bone-deep exhaustion combined to work its magic however, and she woke feeling refreshed, if not exactly fresh in her borrowed clothes.

  She had no idea what time it was when she cracked her door and peered out into the corridor. They were supposed to all meet with Bill sometime this morning to figure out the next move.

  The door to the cabin across the way opened and Zach leaned out. He held a finger to his lips and swept his other hand for her to join him inside.

  “What?” she whispered.

  “Come in and tell me if you notice anything different about Kevin,” he said softly.

  As soon as she crossed the threshold she sensed it. Kevin was a lump under his utilitarian grey blanket; the only part of him visible was his distinctive mop of brown hair. Lizbeth felt him, though, just like she felt Caitlin and Griffey. It was as if overnight he’d obtained the same sort of tingly aura the shapeshifters had.

  “Kevin!” she said loudly.

  He flipped around under the covers and fought with them briefly before rolling out onto the floor. On all fours, he looked up through the hair hanging in his face. Lizbeth laughed. He looked like a shaggy dog.

  He got to his feet and raked the hair out of his eyes with his fingers. “Thanks a lot.”

  “What happened last night?” Zach asked.

  Kevin averted his eyes, shoved his hands in his pockets and mumbled, “Nothing.” He forced one foot after the other into his sneakers without bothering to untie them.

  “You must think we’re stupid,” Zach said. “Did you find the crown?”

  “Huh? No. I wouldn’t keep that from you.”

  Lizbeth put her hand on his shoulder to prevent him from turning away. “What are you keeping from us?”

  He stood there with his head down for a moment and then pulled something from his pocket. Pinched between forefinger and thumb, he held up what looked to Lizbeth like a melted quarter or a spent bullet. “This is the iridium from the core sample.”

  “What?” Lizbeth exclaimed at the same time Zach thrust out his hand and demanded, “Let me see it.”

  Kevin curled his fingers around the metal lump. “Why don’t we wait to make sure I don’t get sick before anyone else touches it?”

  “How did you get it?” Lizbeth asked.

  He told them about his accident in the lab, and how he put his hand in the sample and the microscopic iridium dust separated itself and congealed into a solid mass seemingly of its own volition. He hadn’t been able to stop until he’d gone to the freezer and gathered all the iridium in the lab.

  “On a good note, the lab’s probably not dangerous to normal people anymore,” he said.

  Lizbeth stared at him in consternation. “Why did you do it?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t mean to, but it felt like I was supposed to, if that makes sense.”

  Zach puffed mockingly. “It makes as much sense as anything else.”

  They found Bill in the lab. Caitlin was with him. Lizbeth was so happy to see her that she ignored the possibility that Caitlin would repulse her and ran forward for a hug. To her surprise, Caitlin hugged back. When Lizbeth stepped away, Caitlin said, “Kevin.”

  It was obvious to Lizbeth that Kevin was reluctant to meet Caitlin’s eyes. When he did, they maintained a steady gaze for several seconds. Lizbeth imagined she heard whispers of conversation in her head. Kevin looked for a moment like he was going to cry.

  “They’re all safe,” Bill said. “Like I told you.”

  Caitlin turned to him. “Thank you.”

  “I’m not sure I had much to do with it. They’re pretty resourceful.”

  “Did he tell you about Brian Griffey?” Zach asked.

  “He did. We’ll discuss it later. Right now we need to get to a safe location.”

  “You can’t leave yet,” Bill said. Lizbeth hadn’t noticed before, but he wore latex gloves on his hands. He opened the freezer compartment of a refrigerator, lifted out its only contents, and set it on the counter next to Caitlin.

  “Yum, ice cream for breakfast,” Zach said in an aside to Lizbeth. Even though she knew the container had sand in it, she had to admit it sounded good. They hadn’t eaten since the restaurant at the marina.

  Bill removed the lid, but Caitlin began shaking her head. “No, Bill.”

  “You can’t say that,” he said, sounding agitated now. “Don’t you know what I went through to get this for you? Six people – six of my friends died!”

  “I never asked for this. I told you it wouldn’t work. Any biometal in that sample is microscopic. The iridium sank too deep for the drill to reach.”

  Lizbeth started to tell Caitlin that the iridium wasn’t even in the sample anymore, when Kevin placed a hand on her arm. She heard it for certain this time, his voice in her mind. “Don’t say anything.”

  “We can get more. And you’ve got help now,” Bill swept his hand towards Lizbeth and the boys. “They can help make you a new crown.”

  Caitlin’s voice went cold. “They can’t and they won’t. Take your bucket of sand and drop it back into the ocean.”

  Bill removed the latex gloves and grasped Caitlin by the shoulders. He searched her face, which looked to Lizbeth to be made of marble.

  “I love you,” he said in a tormented whisper, before shoving her backwards and plunging his hands into the core sample. He lifted fists full of the sandy silt and shook them in the air.

  Lizbeth felt the sting of tears, but Caitlin seemed unmoved.

  Bill’s arms fell to his sides and he looked at Caitlin with something like happiness. “Now I’m either going to join you or die.”

  Chapter Thirty

  The English Channel

  Zach didn’t know which was harder to believe, that Bill had risked his life for love, or that Caitlin left him standing in the lab with only two handfuls of sand to show for it.

  She wanted them to leave right away, but Lizbeth begged her to stop by the onboard laundry room so they could get their own clothes. Caitlin waited outside while they hurriedly changed; Zach and Kevin in the laundry room proper, and Lizbeth behind an open closet door.

  Zach raised his eyebrows at Kevin. “Do you believe what he did?”

  “What he thinks he did.”

  “He must really love her.”

  “Can you imagine loving someone enough to die for them?” Kevin asked.

  Zach thought of Lizbeth and almost said yes, but balked. He didn’t love her; he hadn’t known her long enough. No, he was just fascinated with her because she was different, like him. He said, “Nope.”

  Lizbeth appeared from behind the door, expression haughty. “Oh, really?”

  Zach hadn’t yet put on his shirt, but he didn’t think she was in the mood to appreciate his sculpted chest and abs, so he quickly pulled it over his head. He offered her a grin and replied, “It’s hard to imagine something you’ve never experienced.”

  “You’ve never been in love?”

  Pleased that he’d so effortlessly distracted her, he let his gaze linger on her face for a moment before saying, “Not yet.”

  Her shoulders relaxed a bit. “Neither have I.”

  �
�Hurry up,” Kevin said in a gruff voice. He joined Caitlin in the corridor, followed by Lizbeth.

  On the way out, Zach noticed the wad of paper he’d pulled out of his pocket the night before. He’d set the sopping wet pages of The Gossamer’s crew manifest on top of the dryer before tossing his pants in the washer. Even though he supposed the ink had melted away and the pages would be stuck together like a lump of paper mâché, he reached for it on the way out. In the heat of the laundry room, it had dried into a solid clump.

  Bill was nowhere in sight when they descended the ladder to board a motorized yacht not unlike the one Zach had tried to convince Lizbeth to steal from the marina. After detaching the mooring lines, they went down into the cabin. It was paneled from floor to ceiling in a rich, dark wood and had been designed to fit all the amenities of home into a very small space.

  Caitlin took the helm and started the powerful motor. Zach noticed she had a key.

  “There’s food in the cooler,” she said.

  Lizbeth beat them to the mini-refrigerator and handed out a six-pack of soda and several prepackaged deli sandwiches. Conversation was light as Zach and Lizbeth devoured the meal. Kevin didn’t eat much.

  Replete, Zach leaned against the cushions backing the bench seat and looked out one of the narrow rectangular portals. The yacht was moving at a rapid clip, hugging the coastline.

  “Where are we going?” Lizbeth asked.

  “To see a friend,” Caitlin replied. She twisted around and said to Kevin, “Let me see it.”

  Zach wasn’t surprised Caitlin knew about the iridium. In the lab, he’d been certain Caitlin and Kevin were communicating telepathically. What would have been amazing and unbelievable to him a week ago, he now took in stride.

  When Kevin stood in the swaying cabin to show Caitlin the lump of metal in his pocket, instead of holding it out to her, he slapped his hand over his mouth and made a sound like, “Urgle.”

  Caitlin pointed. “The head’s there.”

  Kevin nodded vigorously and rushed into the tiny bathroom. The noise of the motor and the drumming of the waves against the hull almost blocked out the sounds he produced. Zach looked at Lizbeth and they both started laughing. It provided a much-needed release from some of the strain they’d been under, but he felt bad for doing it. Which kind of surprised him.

  Lizbeth stopped snickering first. “Poor Kevin.”

  With mild censure, Caitlin said, “His people were miners. He’s someone you’ll want to have with you if you’re ever in a cave.”

  Rather than putting a damper on their merriment, the statement set Zach and Lizbeth off again. By the time Kevin came out, though, looking sheepish and rather green, they were inspecting what was left of The Gossamer’s crew manifest. Lizbeth’s nimble fingers had separated the pages, revealing two dozen or so still-legible names. Zach hoped he’d have access to a computer wherever they were going so he could research the names, even though the chance any of them meant anything was slim.

  Caitlin slowed the engine and turned the steering wheel toward the rocky coast. “I need to understand something. Why didn’t you stay with Simon, as I asked?”

  Zach said slowly, “Be-cause he told us to leave. Told us you’d been ‘taken’ and that we had to hide.”

  She looked over her shoulder with the faintest trace of bewilderment. “Exactly what did he tell you?”

  “That’s pretty much it, but Len told us-”

  “Len?”

  “Yeah,” Zach said, not sure by her reaction if she knew him or not. “Horizontally challenged? Raven for a pet?”

  “Where did you meet him?” She fired the question at him.

  “Simon told us to go to his pub. Len took us to London in his toy car.”

  Caitlin abruptly shifted into neutral, letting the engine idle as she left the helm. She stood before them without speaking for a moment, eyes shifting around as if chasing her thoughts.

  Finally she sighed and said quietly, “Simon reveals his true affiliations. I’m surprised they didn’t kill you.”

  Zach suppressed a flash of dread. “Who is he? Len.”

  She took a deep breath. “He’s Guild. During the centuries when the church held Inquisitions, if the folk weren’t careful enough, they were caught and accused of heresy. Torture was often sanctioned. When one of us was clapped in irons, confessions were obtained. The existence of the crown became known. Members of the Guild continue to this day to hunt us down. They profess to want to keep the crown out of the wrong hands. I had a run-in with Len soon after Bill and I began our salvage efforts on Titanic. Suffice it to say, if Simon sent you to Len, he’s no friend of mine.”

  “So this Guild wants the same thing as you. To protect the crown,” Lizbeth said.

  “No. I was its guardian, to make sure it didn’t fall into the hands of someone like, say, Hitler. The Guild wanted to remove the crown from anyone’s influence. They would destroy it, if they knew how.”

  “Uh, I don’t know,” Lizbeth said. “The gossamer sphere crashed into the earth, right? Sounds like it’s not that easy to destroy.”

  “There is one element that the biometal is vulnerable to. It’s why I presumed the sphere was meant to strike a different planet in our solar system. This planet is rife with it.”

  Zach thought about high school chemistry. He’d done poorly memorizing the periodic table of elements. He’d been too busy doodling pictures in the margins during class. If his teacher had tested him on mythology and fairy tales, he would have gotten an “A.” There was only one element fabled to injure mythical creatures; the main element presumed to be at the core of the earth, and the one Caitlin told them iridium was attracted to.

  “It’s why they talked under torture instead of shapeshifting and escaping,” he said. “Chains are forged out of iron.”

  Caitlin nodded. “Yes. It prevents the biometal from joining the grid, effectively containing it, and it disrupts the abilities the biometal gifted us with. Chained, we cannot shift, we cannot read minds. The Guild knows it hurts us. Whether there is some way to use iron against the crown itself, I do not know, and I pray it has not already been accomplished.”

  Caitlin sat back in the drivers’ seat and reached for the controls, but Kevin asked, “So today, when we—talked—how did that work?”

  “Just like the sphere controls the earth’s magnetic gossamers,” Caitlin replied, “we simply harness the magnetic fields produced by electrical activity in the brain. I’ve tested it using an MEG, a magnetoencephalography machine, on my own head. Most people have very weak fields that can be measured with MEG. Mine were more like the gossamers, stretching as far as ten meters, reaching out towards my assistant’s head. When I read his mind, the MEG showed my magnetic fields merging with his.”

  She shifted out of neutral and eased the throttle forward. Zach noticed Kevin swallow convulsively a few times at the renewed movement. He’d been exposed to the biometal. Zach thought about the story they read, about Tadg the Small, and how six of the ten miners died.

  “Caitlin?” he asked.

  “Yes, Zach?”

  “I get it that descendants of shapeshifters are more likely to survive the biometal, but how did their ancestors become shapeshifters in the first place if they were just normal people? Why didn’t it kill everyone?”

  In reply, Caitlin said severely, “I will say only this: there are some things it is better you do not know.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The Isle of Wight

  If Kevin hadn’t experienced the same level of nausea on the drill ship this summer, he’d think he was dying. After kneeling miserably in front of the john on his third trip to the tiny bathroom, he struggled to stand on shaky legs and blearily inspected his eyes in the mirror mounted over the sink. The whites looked inflamed from the strain of repeated vomiting, but they weren’t blood-red like Astrid’s. He didn’t know how soon after exposure she’d developed symptoms.

  In the main cabin, Zach seemed to avoid him
while Lizbeth kept casting sympathetic looks his way. He sat at the bench and tried to limit the movement of his body, as if that would somehow offset the relentless bumping and bouncing of the speeding yacht. Zach must think he was a flaming wimp.

  When Caitlin announced that they’d almost arrived at their destination, he cautiously lifted his head from where he’d anchored it to the table and looked out the front windshield. A green island rose from the sea.

  Caitlin got on the radio to contact the “lock control tower,” but Kevin was too miserable to pay much attention to the procedures for gaining entrance to the harbor.

  “Where are we now?” Lizbeth asked.

  “The Isle of Wight,” Caitlin replied.

  A car waited for them in the marina parking lot, and after a short drive, Caitlin pulled into a circular gravel driveway lined with hedges that had been trimmed into fanciful dragon shapes. The stone house looked very old to Kevin, something like a castle on a much smaller scale.

  Before they got to the age-darkened and scarred front door, a huge, mangy-looking dog galloped around the side of the house and jumped on Caitlin. Its paws hit her in the shoulders and nearly knocked her to the ground.

  The door opened, and a lavender-haired old woman in a velour jogging suit appeared on the stoop.

  “Wolfdogge! Leave it.”

  The dog immediately dropped to a sitting position, its head rotating so adoring brown button eyes could take in both Caitlin and its mistress.

  “Still getting out of the kennel?” Caitlin asked.

  The two women hugged, and Kevin sensed a strong affection emanating from Caitlin.

  “I’m so tickled you called,” the old woman exclaimed.

  “How are you, Grandmother?”

  The old woman laughed, a merry cackle that brought an answering smile to Caitlin’s face. “Dinna call me that, now, or you’re sure to confuse the young ones. They’ll think me your real granny and get their minds all in a boggle.”

  The old woman shaded her eyes from the afternoon sun and looked them over. Her lips turned down when she saw Kevin.