by Ted Sanders
“I always thought the compass was pointing at you,” he said.
“So it usually appears.” Mr. Meister held up the jack. “This little Tan’kindi is called a backjack, and I carry it with me wherever I go—in one of my ordinary pockets, of course. I leave the compass in my office, so that Mrs. Hapsteade can find me, should I wander off.”
“As he often does,” Mrs. Hapsteade remarked.
“But how does this help us?” asked Chloe.
Mr. Meister shrugged as if it were obvious. “We send it traveling, of course.”
Traveling. Through the box. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Horace said, feeling uncharacteristically slow. Maybe because it was so late, and so much had happened. “You mean you think I can send it through the portal? With the box?”
“Do you think you cannot? The merged doorway is open. If you can see, you can send, yes? The backjack will travel forward through time—a mere ten seconds, as determined by the breach—and sideways through space, to wherever the others have gone.”
“But that seems crazy,” said Horace.
Mr. Meister held out the backjack. Horace took it, watching the needle swing, and placed it inside the open Fel’Daera. He raised the box, careful not to let the backjack fall out, and once again found the portal. The shimmering water, a bush rustling by the water’s edge.
“I guess if it doesn’t work, we’ll know in ten seconds,” Horace said. If it didn’t work, he assumed, the backjack would simply reappear here in the chamber ten seconds after being sent, falling to the floor.
Cautiously, Horace closed the lid. Time and space, space and time. The lid halves snicked closed, and the familiar tingle skittered through his hands. The backjack was gone.
“Goodness!” said Mr. Meister.
On his compass, the needle had disappeared. Or no, not disappeared—the formerly white face had turned entirely red.
“Did we break it?” asked Horace, alarmed.
“I do not think so. The backjack simply does not exist at the moment, and so it cannot be found. Keep watching.”
In the back of Horace’s mind, of course, he was counting. Six seconds, seven, eight.
At ten seconds precisely, an arc of whiteness began to bloom on the compass. The red portion narrowed swiftly, and began to shorten. The backjack had reappeared . . . somewhere. Within moments, the red had resolved itself into a squat arrow pointing nearly the opposite direction it had been before. The needle was short and fat now, the length of a fingernail, whereas before it had been as long and slender as a toothpick.
“But why is the needle short?” April asked. “What does that mean?”
Mr. Meister rotated the compass, experimenting. The needle stayed firmly pointed where it was. It reminded Horace of how Loki’s eyes would stay locked on a bird in the backyard, even if you jostled his body around. “The needle lengthens as it gets closer to the backjack, shortens as it gets farther,” Mr. Meister explained. “Our backjack is now . . . ten miles away? Fifteen?”
“And so we go get it,” said Chloe. “We get them.”
“Just so.”
“But what if they’re not there anymore?” April pointed out. “What if Isabel made Joshua open another portal?”
“Then we repeat the process,” Mr. Meister said. “But the possibility of multiple portals raises another danger we have not yet discussed. Has it occurred to you, Horace?”
“What?”
“You are of course aware of Dr. Jericho’s sensitivity toward the Fel’Daera.”
“Yes.”
All Mordin could sense when nearby Tan’ji were being used without protection. That was why they were called Hunters. But for reasons that had never been explained, Dr. Jericho had a particular awareness of the Box of Promises. He was so sensitive to it, in fact, that he could sense it from the other side of the glass. Whenever Horace saw a future that included Dr. Jericho, Dr. Jericho—in that future—could sense that Horace had the box open in the past, watching him. It was a dizzying challenge.
Suddenly Horace gasped. The Fel’Daera and the Laithe were linked. Made by the same hand, and similar in function. “You think Dr. Jericho can sense the Laithe of Teneves too,” he said. “Just like he senses the Fel’Daera.”
“It stands to reason,” Mr. Meister said, sounding not the least bit worried.
“But then Brian is in more danger than we thought! If Dr. Jericho can sense when a portal is being opened, even from the other side, the Riven will track them down in no time.”
“It is a possibility we must consider.”
“Let’s go, then,” said Chloe. She swiveled around to Horace’s mother. “And you’ll have to come with us, Jessica. I mean, I’m trying not to get too amped up about this whole mom-versus-mom thing, but if there are more portals out there, we’ll need you.”
Mr. Meister said nothing, his big gray eyes locked on Horace’s mother.
His mother, chewing her lip, nodded thoughtfully. “Horace, do you remember when you lost your mind because I wouldn’t chaperone your school’s field trip to the aquarium? You know—that normal mom thing you wanted me to do, but I didn’t?”
“Yes,” Horace said, blushing. He’d been like nine years old. He had a vague memory of begging on his knees for his mother to come, blubbering at her.
She folded up her harp, still nodding, letting the glistening strings collapse into nothing. She got to her feet. “After tonight, we’ll be even.”
PART TWO
The Meadow by Night
CHAPTER TEN
The Call of the Laithe
BRIAN LAY RIGID IN THE GRASS, SEETHING IN PAIN. JOSHUA TRIED calling to him, but he didn’t answer. Isabel couldn’t see him, wouldn’t see him. She sat there gazing at Tunraden while Miradel glittered on the ground before her.
“Stop!” Joshua shouted. When she didn’t answer, he marched over to her, burning with anger. He took her by the shoulders and shook her. “Stop it! You’re severing him!”
Isabel looked at him, dazed and alarmed. “What?” she said, and then she seemed to notice Brian. She cursed and grabbed Miradel. The wicker harp quickly faded and shrank.
Brian took a deep, sharp breath, like he’d been drowning but had crawled ashore. He rolled onto his stomach and lay there. “God,” he said into the weeds. “Oh, god. Not severing. Cleaving.”
“I’m sorry!” Isabel cried. “It was an accident.”
Joshua stepped away from Isabel, pressing the Laithe to his chest, horrified. Cleaving. Ripping the bond apart by force. Severing was temporary, and only really dangerous if it lasted a long time. But cleaving was permanent. Deadly.
Brian lifted himself and laid his face atop Tunraden. “You’re here,” he mumbled into the stone surface. “Still here. I feel you.”
“Brian, are you okay?” asked Joshua.
“No. Not okay. But better. Anything is better. Oh, god, my . . . existence hurts.” One of Tunraden’s circles briefly flashed golden as Brian slipped a single hand inside her. He looked over at Isabel. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“It was an accident!” Isabel said. “You were hurting me. And all those colors, all around and inside Miradel and me, they. . . .”
Brian took another long breath. “The colors,” he said to Isabel. “They scared you. So you started to cleave me?”
Joshua hadn’t seen any colors. Only gold.
“I got . . . angry,” Isabel said. “Something. It was too much.”
Brian scowled at Miradel in Isabel’s hands. “When you said you couldn’t control her, I didn’t know how bad it was.”
“I’ve never started to cleave anyone by accident before. Never.”
“I think maybe my heart stopped for a second,” Brian said. “I think my brain forgot I had a heart.” Baron came in and laid his slobbery muzzle on Brian’s shoulder. Brian leaned away, then patted the dog awkwardly on the head.
“Try again,” said Isabel. “Please. I can control her.”
“You’ve g
ot to be kidding,” Brian said.
“It won’t happen again. I didn’t understand what you were doing. I couldn’t even follow your flows, and they were hurting me, and I just . . .”
“Wanted to hurt me back,” Brian finished.
“No,” said Isabel. “Or yes, I guess. I just lost it.”
“Why would you think you could follow my flows? You’re not a Maker. You can’t alter the foramen.”
Joshua had never heard that word before, but Isabel obviously knew it. “Just try to explain what you were doing,” she said. “See if I can understand, so I can be prepared.”
“I told you it would hurt. I warned you.”
“Explain it,” Isabel pleaded. “Please. When it comes to the Medium, I . . . I’m not used to not knowing. I’ve never seen anything like what you just did.”
Brian sighed. “Give me a minute. Let me think.”
They sat in silence. Baron left Brian and ambled over to Joshua. The dog lay down, but after a few moments lifted his head sharply and looked out into the darkness to the northwest, perking his ears. Joshua watched and listened, and thought he heard music. A sweet whistling call. But no, not music, not here. Baron laid his head back down. Probably just an owl, or some other strange night bird.
Brian sat up, pulling his hand free from Tunraden. “Okay. No promises, but let me explain.”
Isabel nodded obediently.
“There are two kinds of Tanu, right?” said Brian. “There’s your basic Tan’kindi, which don’t take the bond, and which will work for anyone . . . leestones, passkeys, dumindars, et cetera. And then Tan’ji, of course, which do take the bond and will only work for their Keepers. But harps aren’t really one or the other. They don’t take the bond, but they don’t work for just anyone, either.”
Isabel said, “So it should be easy to make Miradel Tan’ji. She’s halfway there.”
“Kind of. I’ve often wondered if I could turn a regular Tan’kindi into a Tan’ji, and I’m pretty sure I could. The foramen—” He glanced at Joshua. “That’s like the operating system of the Tan’ji,” he explained. “An anchor and a passageway for the Medium. What I was trying to do, Isabel, is tailor the foramen of your harp into more of a Tan’ji shape. It’s sort of like turning a mitten into a tight glove. But the foramen—of any harp, but especially yours—is different. It’s . . . bloody.”
Isabel squirmed. She suddenly looked very uncomfortable.
“Maybe that’s not the right word,” said Brian. “There is no word. Look, there are other Tanu besides harps that don’t fit neatly into a category. Jithandras, for example—not really Tan’ji, not really Tan’kindi. But jithandras are tailored to the talents of a particular Keeper. Your harp, meanwhile, isn’t tailored at all. It’s . . . spiky and raw and open. Like a vampire’s mouth. It’s hungry.” He sighed again. “Hungry for the wound you received when you went through the kaitan.”
Isabel scowled. She wrapped both hands around Miradel and pressed her lips against the twisted surface. A kind of painful growl rumbled in her throat.
Joshua, listening intently so far, couldn’t help himself. “What wound? What’s a kaitan?”
Nobody answered him. Instead Brian said to Isabel, “If I try again, it’s going to hurt. And the hurt will get worse, if it’s going to work.”
“I can handle it,” said Isabel. “I understand.”
But Joshua did not understand. They were out here in this dark meadow, with only a broken leestone to protect them. And who would protect them from Isabel? This was no place for them to be. No place to be talking about wounds, or blood, or vampires. No place for Brian, especially.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” Joshua said quietly. “Brian should go back to the Warren. I can take him.”
Brian smiled and seemed to think about it for a few seconds, as Isabel watched silently. “No,” he said at last. “I’m going to try again.” He took his glasses off and wiped them clean on his BEWARE OF DANGER shirt. He laughed down at the words. “I guess I’m not heeding my own advice, huh?”
“I wasn’t prepared the first time,” Isabel said. “Now I am. And now at least you know—I really do need your help.”
“You could always just give up the harp instead,” Brian said. “Although I guess if you haven’t given it up by now, even with what happened to . . .” He shrugged.
Isabel held her chin high. She hesitated and then announced, “If you can’t fix me, I’ll give Miradel up.”
Joshua could hardly believe the words. And he wasn’t at all sure he should. But he could tell by the look on Isabel’s face that she, at least, thought she was telling the truth. And it occurred to Joshua then, in a way he couldn’t completely grasp, that maybe that was the entire story of Isabel.
Brian looked as skeptical as Joshua felt. “I hear you,” the older boy said. “But you need to hear me, too. Maybe you convinced yourself that I came out here tonight because I felt sorry for you, or because I wanted the challenge of fixing you, or . . . oh, I don’t know . . . because I needed to be some kind of rebel. And okay, fair enough—none of those things are totally wrong.” He leaned in, and his voice got soft and calm, almost kind. “But the real reason I’m here—the only reason I’m still here—is because you hurt people. You hurt Chloe. You hurt me. You put my friends in danger. And if I don’t fix you, I think you’ll keep on hurting people. Because that’s who you are, whether you like it or not. Whether you even know it or not. I’m going to try again to fix you because I don’t want the person that you are to be in the world anymore. Do you understand?”
Isabel looked up at the stars, blinking. Her throat worked up and down. Her lips were tight. She nodded and said, “I hear you.”
Brian knelt in front of Tunraden again. “Ready?” he said.
Isabel laid Miradel in the grass and bowed her head, folding her hands in her lap.
Brian tipped his head at Joshua, indicating that he should move back again. Joshua backed away, Baron at his side. Brian plunged his hands into Tunraden.
The fountain of golden light exploded back to life. Again, Brian pulled out thick, hanging ropes of the Medium. Joshua watched Isabel carefully. She stared like a statue, the Medium’s light dancing across her eyes.
“Chloe saw the colors too, you know,” Brian told her, gathering and twisting the Medium in his hands. “I guess she really is your daughter.”
Isabel furrowed her brow for some reason. She sat back and clenched her fists, her eyes squinting with pain.
Brian began to mold the Medium, his hands fast and sure. The golden strings responded to his touch even faster than his hands moved, seeming to gather and organize on their own. Isabel arched her back, her shoulders rigid, her face aglow. Her mouth hung open. Miradel stayed dark.
Brian held an impossible honeycomb of light with one hand. With the other, he reached down to Miradel and pulled a golden spiderweb from its surface, flowing like a thousand rivers. Isabel lurched like she was going to vomit. Brian spread his fingers and parted the web, then carefully placed his honeycomb inside. His fingers flickered over and through the new structure. The threads rearranged themselves, found one another, melting into each other like wax. The web became a funnel, or a tornado, twisting and sinking into itself.
Joshua could hear Isabel breathing. She sounded scared.
“Halfway there,” Brian said. As Joshua’s eyes adjusted back to the darkness, he could see the boy’s glasses gleaming under the stars.
Suddenly Baron leapt up, barking furiously into the darkness. A moment later, a rumble to the north, like an approaching train. No sooner had Joshua heard it than he felt it, beneath him. The ground was shaking.
Tunraden went dark as Brian pulled his hands free. Isabel grunted. “What is it?” Joshua cried over the clamor, blinded by the sudden darkness. A split second later, Miradel flared open wide, spilling green across the grass all around. Isabel started to stand, turning toward the approaching thunder, stretching out a hand for the harp. But be
fore she could reach it, something monstrous—as big as a bus—roared out of the night and hit her, swallowed her. Something thundering and huge, a great black swarm of stones. Miradel winked out. Just a few feet away, Brian’s shadow rose and then fell, yelling something Joshua couldn’t quite hear. Isabel was swept away, eaten by the river of rock, carried off like a branch in a flood.
“Golem!” Brian yelled again, scrambling away on all fours. “Run, Joshua!”
Frozen with confusion and terror, all Joshua could think was that this thing was nothing like the golems in stories he’d heard. The golem roared past them, forty feet long. It crashed into a corner of the barn, not slowing down at all. A little section of the roof sagged, splintering into dust. Then the golem turned and stood, rising high into the air like the neck of a shadowy dragon. Far above the ground, Isabel hung in its grasp, her arms and legs pinned inside. “No!” she screamed, thrashing around. “Let me go!”
Joshua realized he had grabbed the Laithe out of the air and was clasping it to his belly. Baron was dancing angrily in the grass, barking and whimpering at the same time. Brian waved and shouted at Joshua, telling him to run, but Joshua didn’t know what to do. Brian wasn’t running. Why wasn’t he running? The golem just stood there like the trunk of a giant branchless trees, swaying a little, a million smooth stones crackling and shifting. Joshua dropped to his knees.
And then, over the thin sound of Isabel’s shrieks and the low grind of the golem, Joshua heard footsteps to the east. Slow and heavy. Coming close. Baron whined and ran away into the darkness, tail between his legs. Joshua turned and saw a tall thin shadow coming closer, taking huge slow strides. Ten feet tall. Legs like lampposts. Hands as big as rakes.
A Mordin. One of the Riven, a hunter.
And Joshua knew this Mordin. He was taller than the others. He and Isabel had run into him before, and after the battle on the riverbank two nights ago, Joshua had learned his name.
Dr. Jericho.
The Mordin paused beside Joshua, grinning down at him. His beady eyes seemed to widen when he saw the Laithe. “Salutations,” he said, his tongue licking over tiny, sharp teeth and cruel thin lips. His voice sounded like an evil song.