The Portal and the Veil

by Ted Sanders

  “Okay, so . . . let’s imagine that I look through a portal with the box, and Dr. Jericho is already there in whatever place and time I’m seeing. He already senses the portal, but will he sense the box, too? Will he know I’m watching him, through the portal and through time?”

  “Yikes,” said Chloe.

  “The mind reels, does it not?” Mr. Meister said. “I have underestimated Dr. Jericho’s sensitivity to the Fel’Daera in the past. I am not inclined to do so now. We must assume that he would feel the box’s presence.” He studied Horace’s face for a moment. “Why do you ask?”

  Horace shrugged. “I was thinking about the breach. It’s set to ten seconds. Let’s say there’s an open portal, right here and right now. If I look through that portal with the box, and Dr. Jericho is on the other side, he’ll feel it, ten seconds from now. In other words, that only gives us ten seconds to do something before he knows he’s been seen. And obviously ten seconds isn’t long enough for us to get to wherever he is. It’s not long enough for us to do anything about the future I just witnessed.”

  “That is true,” Mr. Meister said, nodding.

  “But if I look too far into the future, Dr. Jericho might already be gone, and I won’t see anything useful at all.”

  “So, what do you suggest?” Mr. Meister asked.

  “Maybe before I look through another portal, I set the breach wide. Then I look, and I slowly close the breach toward the present, moving backward in time. Once I see Dr. Jericho, I’ll close the box.”

  “I’m sorry, but how does that help?” Chloe said.

  “Well, I won’t get to see everything that happens, but at least we’ll know if he’s there. And because Dr. Jericho will only sense the box later, he won’t know we’re coming earlier.”

  Mr. Meister turned to look at him, beaming. “Brilliant,” he said.

  “Wait, this is making my head hurt,” said April.

  Horace tried to explain better. He could barely hold on to the idea himself. “I need to use the box to figure out where Joshua went, but if Dr. Jericho is there—in the future—we don’t want him to sense the box. Not too soon, anyway. So I’m going to check the future several hours out, and then rewind the box into the end of whatever’s happening wherever Joshua is.”

  April just blinked at him.

  “The point is,” Horace continued, “Dr. Jericho won’t know I’ve seen him until later in his own timeline, which gives us more time to get there and surprise him.”

  “Wow,” April breathed. “You know, I used to think I was smart—”

  “You’re smart,” said Chloe. “We’re all smart here. Horace is just . . . so smart it’s stupid.”

  “He’s a Paragon,” Horace’s mom murmured. The pride and wonder in her voice were unmistakable. She was staring at him intensely, bright-eyed. Horace blushed even harder, though he had no idea what a Paragon was. His mother turned her gaze to Mr. Meister. “You didn’t tell me my son was a Paragon.”

  Mr. Meister shrugged. “It’s not a word I use lightly.”

  “What’s a Paragon?” asked Chloe.

  “Words do not matter,” the old man said. “We all do our best. Let me just say how grateful I am that when it comes to our little group, our best is extraordinary.” He nodded at Horace. “Well done, Keeper. Well done.”

  Horace was as mortified as he was mystified. Proud to have figured this out, yes, but embarrassed by the compliments, especially from his mom. Fortunately, Chloe stepped into the awkward silence as only Chloe could.

  “Does Horace get a badge or something?” she said. “A Paragon badge? I want a Paragon badge.”

  “I like badges,” said April agreeably.

  “Badges all around!” Chloe cried, raising a fist.

  “No badges,” said Mr. Meister. “Our work is our badge. And there is much work left to do this night.”

  Chloe shook her head sadly, feigning disappointment. “Work, work, work. Sorry, Horace.” In the darkness between the seats, she pressed her foot against his. She was proud of him too.

  Horace pulled the Fel’Daera from its pouch. The breach was still set to ten seconds, not nearly wide enough. “I might as well try and get it ready now,” he said. He glanced at his mom. “Don’t freak if I sort of . . . black out for a minute.”

  “I don’t generally freak, do I?” she said. “But why might you black out?”

  “It’s the breach,” said Chloe. “He can close it fine, but when he tries to open it—go further forward in time—he kind of zombies out.”

  “It’s the silver sun,” Horace admitted. “The Medium gets away from me, and the breach slams all the way open, all the way to twenty-four hours. When it happens, I kind of lose track of time for a few minutes.”

  “It’s creepy,” Chloe added.

  His mother’s eyes fell to the Fel’Daera. She studied it silently for a moment. “No wonder,” she said. “It’s rusty.”

  Horace blinked. “I’m sorry—what?”

  “No offense. Just a professional opinion. The box hasn’t been tuned in twenty years. And in that twenty years it sat unclaimed, with the breach wide open to twenty-four hours. The box got used to it. Like a book that’s been cracked open to the same page for too long.”

  There was almost no one on earth who could have criticized the Fel’Daera without making Horace mad. But this was his mother. She’d only have said these words if she really believed—knew—they were true.

  He held out the box to her. “So fix it,” he said.

  His mom recoiled like he was trying to hand her a live bat. “Whoa, I didn’t say that. I only work on instruments that have no Keeper. Besides, I told you, the Fel’Daera was beyond me even twenty years ago, when I was in my prime. And now—”

  “It was not beyond you,” Mr. Meister said from the front seat.

  “Excuse me?”

  He turned to look at her. “You believed it was beyond you because such tasks came more easily to Isabel. Isabel always succeeded; therefore your own failures were of no consequence. You allowed yourself to fail.”

  Horace’s mother let out a disbelieving, indignant huff. “Wow,” she said. “Twenty years, but I guess we’re picking up right where we left off. I’d forgotten how inspirational you could be.”

  Mr. Meister shrugged. “The truth is always inspirational once we fully accept it.”

  Horace’s mom rolled her eyes so hard he thought she’d pull a muscle. But after a moment she said, “Okay, give me the damn box.”

  Horace let her have it, hardly wincing at all as she took hold of it. She laid the box in her lap and unfolded her harp, chattering in a pleasantly surly way. “I stand by my story, though. The box was a wreck. Full of knots and strains, and burst channels from when the last Keeper—” She stopped, glancing at Horace. Her fingers began to play across the strings of her harp. “But okay. That’s all still clean. It’s just the breach now. I understand the breach. It’s a valve. A stubborn little valve.” Her fingers danced. The threads of her harp sparkled like spiderwebs in morning dew.

  “Oh!” she said suddenly. She curled her hand and took hold of three strings. “You’ll feel this, I think,” she said, and then she plucked the strings, very hard.

  Horace swayed, dizzy, as if he’d stood up too quickly. The car seemed to lurch sideways. He shook his head, clearing it, only to find that his mother was already thrusting the box back at him.

  “Try it now,” she said.

  “That’s it?” asked Horace, taking the box. “What did you do?”

  “Some flows were too tight, others too loose. I gave it a whack.” She threw a sulky glance at Mr. Meister. “It was . . . easy, actually.”

  Mr. Meister chuckled softly.

  Horace held the box. The twenty-four-spoked sun gleamed blackly. With his mind, he reached out for the breach. He found the fingerhold easily, the tiniest imaginable gate, the Medium thundering through it. He pushed his thoughts into the opening, willing it to dilate, wanting it to open to jus
t a single hour. The breach began to widen with no resistance, and he panicked a bit—afraid it would slip away from him like it always did—but to his surprise it slid open steadily. The topmost ray of the box’s blackened sun swiftly turned silver. A single perfect ray. The breach came to a halt, and he pinned it in place easily.

  “Holy crap,” Horace said.

  His mother smiled. “Good?”

  Horace pushed again, willing the breach to open just one hour wider. No sooner had he thought it than it began to spread. Silver slid neatly across the sun’s second ray, another perfect sixty minutes. The breach stopped cold at precisely two hours.

  Horace actually laughed out loud. “You fixed it.”

  “I tuned it,” his mother replied.

  Hungrily, Horace began to experiment with the breach, running it up and down. It opened and closed with ease, waves of black and silver sweeping back and forth across the face of the sun. Within seconds, he found that he could hold a specific time in his head—nineteen hours and six minutes, for example—and easily compel the breach to open to that exact position. It was so easy, so flawless. The box seemed to revel in this new simplicity, working with him as if they were one thing, one being. Horace could hardly get enough.

  “This is amazing, you guys,” he said. “Wait, wait. Let me try something.”

  He opened the lid, holding the box up in front of him. The breach was at five hours exactly, and it was now twelve past three in the morning, so he found himself looking not at the front seat of Beck’s cab and an empty highway beyond, but into a bright morning full of traffic. The cab was traveling much faster than tomorrow’s cars, so Horace was treated to the bizarre spectacle of catching up to a car, moving right through the rear window, and out the windshield. But Horace could change that.

  While he watched, he slid the breach slowly open and closed. His view began to change marvelously. As he widened the breach, the events of tomorrow sped up massively, like a video being fast-forwarded. And as he closed it, those same events ran swiftly backward. He continued to swing the breach, first opening it—an endless swarm of cars and trucks, hurtling over the horizon at blazing speeds—and then closing it—that same swarm now surging backward, a busy and flashing blur.

  And of course, the speed of this fast-forwarding and rewinding depended on the speed with which he opened or closed the breach. Carefully now, with his newfound control, he eased the breach open, slower and slower. Inside the box, tomorrow’s zooming traffic—which appeared to be moving crazy fast because he was fast-forwarding through the morning—began to slow down. And it was slowing down because he wasn’t fast-forwarding as fast.

  On the heels of this tangled thought, Horace had an idea. A brain-busting idea so fragile and complicated that the more he thought about it, the more it fell apart. He could only get a glimpse of it, a snippet at a time. If he could manage to close the breach at exactly the right speed—

  “Having fun?” asked April.

  Horace snapped the box closed, tearing himself away. April flashed him a dazzling, crooked smile.

  “Blowing my own mind,” he said.

  “Increased mastery is one of the great pleasures of being Tan’ji,” said Mr. Meister. “But let us not get carried away. Save your energies, Keeper.”

  “Work, work, work,” Chloe said again. She leaned into Horace’s mother, twirling the Alvalaithen almost in her face. “Not that I’m worried,” she said, “but there’s no rust here, right?”

  “Not a spot.”

  Mr. Meister murmured something to Beck. The cab took the next exit at a gallop, throwing them all to the left. Horace tried not to crush Chloe even as April lurched into him on the other side. Two minutes later, they turned again and found themselves on a road bracketed by forest. A mile down, they entered the park along the river, just as they had two nights earlier. They drove past the darkened swimming pool and into the parking lot. Beck swung the cab expertly into a space at the end, and they all tumbled out, glad to be free.

  The night was still clear, and warm. Arthur rose into the sky at once, wings sweeping the air, squawking in what sounded like a happy way. He alighted heavily in a tree on the edge of the woods. His harsh calls echoed across the empty lot.

  “I don’t see anyone,” April said, her eyes gray and distant. Then she bit her lip. “We don’t see anyone.”

  Horace stepped up beside Mr. Meister. The red needle of the compass was longer and thinner again, pointing at the trees, toward the unseen spit of land where the river bent from north to south.

  “Into the woods once more,” Mr. Meister said.

  They set out into the shadows of the forest. Gabriel and Chloe took their jithandras out, her red and his silver light casting an eerie metallic glow through the trees. Arthur kept pace, flying ahead and waiting for them to catch up. After a couple hundred yards or so, April said, “I feel the river. No one’s there.”

  Gabriel rubbed his thumb across the dragonlike handle of his staff. “I was not aware you could feel rivers,” he said.

  “I can’t, sorry,” said April. “I’m still getting used to the vine being fixed.” She reached up and touched the little black flower that dangled from the Ravenvine in front of her left ear. It was this piece that had been missing from the vine when she Found it, and that Brian had reattached only yesterday. “Everything in nature feels so . . . intertwined now. What I should have said is that I can feel river animals—fish, crawdads, turtles. Plus animals between here and there. Toads are awake. Squirrels are asleep. No one is disturbed. There are no humans up ahead, and there haven’t been for a while.” She lifted her chin prettily, frowning with concentration. “But there were. There’s a raccoon, and I—we—can smell that there were humans here. I don’t know how long ago.”

  “You don’t have to say ‘we,’” Chloe said. “We know it’s not really you who can smell humans from hundreds of feet away.”

  April shrugged. “It just seems impolite not to give credit where credit’s due,” she said.

  Soon Horace could hear the river, a murmuring drone just ahead. Mr. Meister, compass in hand, walked past a large silver thing lying against the foot of a tree. Horace realized with a start that it was the canoe, still lying where it had landed after Dr. Jericho had thrown it like a javelin at Isabel.

  “What happened here?” Horace’s mother asked, stepping around the fractured canoe.

  “Horace was doing ninja stuff with the box,” said Chloe. “Mordin. Auditors. Isabel came in and started mowing them down. General chaos.” She elbowed Horace softly. “But it turned out fine.”

  Horace looked around the little clearing. Here was the tree Chloe had stepped through while battling the Auditor. Here was the branch where Dr. Jericho had nearly ripped Neptune down to the ground. And here was the spot Isabel stood when she cleaved—nearly cleaved—Dr. Jericho. “Yeah,” said Horace. “Totally fine.”

  His mom rubbed her forehead but said nothing.

  Mr. Meister stopped and held out a hand. “The portal from the Warren was just here.” He bent down, picking something off the ground. “And here is our backjack.”

  “But where is Brian?” Horace asked.

  Mr. Meister spun around slowly, peering into the woods. “If Joshua made another portal, he did not make it here. They left on foot.” He tapped his chin thoughtfully.

  “Great,” Chloe said. “Now what?”

  “If my dog were here, we could track them,” said April.

  Gabriel cleared his throat. He held out the Staff of Obro. “I hesitate to compete with a dog,” he said, “but . . .”

  Horace didn’t understand what he was suggesting, but Mr. Meister obviously did. “Do it,” he said with a nod.

  Gabriel planted the tip of the staff, four curving silver talons that gathered into a point, into the mulch. A faint gray fog began to drift out from the dark hollows between them. But it wasn’t a fog. “Since this is your first time, Mrs. Andrews,” said Gabriel, “you may want to close your eyes.”


  “Oh, man, here we go,” said Chloe.

  Horace’s mom looked puzzled, but closed her eyes.

  “Steady yourselves,” Gabriel said, and then the world vanished with a roar.

  Horace kept his eyes open as the humour of Obro filled the forest around them in an instant, obliterating it. Nothing but a dimensionless gray, everywhere. Even though he was used to the humour by now, Horace’s eyes still strained to see what could not be seen. No sky, no ground, no Horace. Not even the tip of his own nose—a constant, lifelong sight that Horace had taken for granted until the first time the all-swallowing cloud of the humour stole it from him.

  The humour had swallowed the soft sigh of the river, too, and the drone of insects Horace hadn’t even been aware of. But now Gabriel spoke, his voice thundering from everywhere in the directionless gray. “They were here,” he said. “All three of them.”

  “But how do you . . . ?” Horace began, his voice trickling into the senseless void. And then he remembered again the first time Gabriel had demonstrated his powers, back in the Great Burrow. At first, he’d thought that the humour allowed Gabriel’s blind eyes to see, but that wasn’t quite right. Instead, the humour allowed Gabriel to feel, to examine his surroundings with a sensitivity far beyond any eye or fingertip. Down to the finest detail. That first time, Gabriel had actually read the dates on coins inside Horace’s pocket. And now—

  “Footprints,” Gabriel said. “All around here.” There was a pause, utter silence, and then: “They left to the east. There’s a bridge across the river. I can’t see the far side, but they crossed it.”

  Now Chloe’s voice rang out. Gabriel could control sound within the humour, deciding which sounds reached which ears. He was letting everyone hear each other now, of course, which apparently took a great deal of effort. “The bridge,” Chloe said. “Duh. I know where they went.”

  Another staticky roar, like a house-sized ball of tissue paper being crumpled, and the humour winked out of existence. Horace blinked and blinked, his eyes hungry to focus on something—anything. His saw his mother first, her own eyes wide and watery, her hands pressed against her lips.