“We’ll splint it,” Keal said, squinting down at David’s arm. “And wrap it with three or four bandages. That’s the best I can do here, but it’s going to hurt until you get it set.”
“I can take it,” David said, not sure he could.
“It can also get infected.”
“I can take—”
Keal raised his palm to stop him. “You can’t, David, not gangrene. You’ll lose your arm. Maybe get sepsis. That’s when the cells that are dying in your arm infect your whole body. Blood poisoning. You could die.”
“Are you trying to scare me?”
“Yes!” Keal took a deep breath. “Look, you probably have some time. We’ll wait till your dad gets back, but you know what he’s going to say.”
David nodded. “Hospital . . . now.”
Keal reached into a bag in the sink and pulled out a new Ace bandage. He said, “I’ll try to take some of the pressure off with this and the sling, and try to keep the bone from moving anymore.”
Xander returned and slid two rulers onto the counter, one wood, one plastic.
“Have to do for now, I guess,” Keal said.
Xander sat on the edge of the tub and dropped the sling into David’s lap. He rubbed David’s back. “It’ll be all right, Dae,” he whispered.
David forced a smile. He turned back to Keal. “Will I be able to take a bath?” He really wanted to take a bath.
Keal grinned. “Just try not to get it wet. I’ll put plastic wrap around it, in case. Then take it off when you’re done.”
“I’ll get it,” Xander said. “But first . . .” He plugged the tub’s drain, started the water, and squirted in Mr. Bubbles. He checked the water temperature, adjusted it, and headed for the door.
“Xander,” David said. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” Xander said, a sly smile on his lips. “You can give me a foot massage later.”
After he left, Keal said, “You guys are close.”
“Not always,” David said. “We used to play together a lot, but when he became a teenager, he . . . I don’t know, became a jerk.”
“Spending more time with his friends? Didn’t want you around?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s normal,” Keal said. “His interests changed. Started getting into things you weren’t ready to get into. Wanting to get serious about his filmmaking, cars . . .”
“Girls.”
Keal smiled. “Them too.” He looped the bandage around David’s arm, tugging it gently to get it tight. “So, see,” he said, “something good can come out of all this horrible trouble. You and Xander are realizing how much you need each other. I bet that won’t change, ever. Not even after your mom’s back and you’re all very far away from this house.”
David thought about that. He believed it. He couldn’t imagine Xander and himself not always covering each other’s back, not after everything they’d been through together. The King Brothers, that’s what people would call them. He said, “That’d be cool.”
CHAPTER
twenty - four
FRIDAY, 3:57 P.M.
David stepped out of the bathroom, drying himself with a towel. Every ache and pain screamed as he ran the towel over his body. Out of sight by the false walls, Keal pounded and drilled like a one-man construction crew.
David went to his bedroom for clothes. Fresh, clean clothes. He never thought he’d care so much about clothes.
Xander was sitting on the floor, going through a box. Mom had been taken on their third day in the house, so they’d never had time to unpack.
“What’s that?” David said.
“Junk, mostly,” Xander said. “Feel better?”
“A little.” He selected boxers, jeans, and a T-shirt from his dresser and pulled them on, then sat on the other side of the box from Xander. He recognized most of the items inside: soccer trophies, Matchbox cars, a pencil holder that looked like a hand with curved fingers and thumb. Xander had made it in school a few years ago. They were all things that had covered the top of their dresser, nightstands, and shelves in their room back in Pasadena.
Seeing them gave him mixed feelings. He ached for the time these things symbolized, when Mom was home and his biggest worry was whether he would do well at the next soccer game. Then again, they reminded him that the world was different from what the last week had been, different from this house. It was a nice feeling, a hopeful feeling that their lives could once again be like that.
Maybe that’s why Xander was going through them.
David noticed that Xander had tied back the thin white sheers that covered their windows, and the sun was streaming in. Even the heavy woods outside couldn’t stop it today. He’d never seen the room like this before. It had always seemed gloomy, like the whole house did. He tried to remember if he’d thought differently about it before Mom was taken, but he couldn’t.
“You still smell like shampoo,” Xander said.
“I think it’s permanent. Better than whatever that stuff was that got on my tunic in Atlantis, when I was dragged through it.”
Xander crinkled his nose. “That was the worst thing I ever smelled.”
“I almost puked.”
“The smell of puke would have been an improvement.”
They laughed, and David said, “If you’d told me then, ‘Someday we’ll laugh about this,’ I would have punched you.”
“Someday?” Xander said. “That was today.”
They smiled at each other, and Xander shook his head. He said, “Weirder and weirder.”
“So,” David said, “what got you looking in the box?”
“I don’t know.” Xander tipped the box upside down, spilling its contents between them. He picked up a rubber snake. “Remember when I scared you with this?”
“You put it between my sheets, down by my feet!” David said. “And woke me up by tickling my legs!”
“I was hiding under the bed,” Xander said. “I almost broke my arm trying to reach up and get you. But it was worth it.”
“I know, I know,” David said. Xander had told him enough times. “I screamed like a little girl.”
“That wasn’t the best of it. You kept screaming . . . shrieking! In the shrieking department, you got Toria beat by a mile.”
“Hey,” David said, grinning, “you wake up with a snake slithering around your feet and see if you don’t shriek.”
Xander gave him a serious look. “I don’t think you’d do that now.”
“That was only a few months ago.”
“I mean since everything that’s happened,” Xander said. “How could a measly little snake scare you now?”
David nodded. “After Berserkers, torturers . . . Taksidian? I’d pick up a real rattlesnake, toss it on the floor, and go back to sleep.” He picked up a trophy. “Regional champs,” he said. “Yeah, baby.”
Xander pushed aside a few items and picked up a silver bracelet with thick links. “I thought I lost this.” He turned it to show David an inscription on a flat arch of metal: DanielleXander.
“Do you miss her?” David asked.
Xander nodded, rubbing his thumb over the inscription. “Seems like a different life.”
“Yeah,” David said. “You should wear it. You know, to remind you it wasn’t always like this. Something to look forward to when all this ends.”
“No,” Xander said. He dropped it into the pile and selected something else. “This is what I want to wear.” It was a strip of dark, frayed leather with fringes at either end.
“Another bracelet?” David said.
“Help me with this.” He held his wrist up and David tied it on. Xander turned it around. Burned into the leather was his name. Along its edges, a lighter shade of leather had been stitched in. “Mom made it for me.”
David’s heart skipped a beat. “She always makes stuff like that,” he said. “Kind of hippie-ish.”
Xander twisted his wrist, admiring the bracelet. “I don’t know why I never wore it.”
“It’s like jewelry,” David suggested.
“Sort of.” Xander shrugged. “I guess.”
“Oh . . .” David said, remembering something. He scanned the stuff on the floor, ran his fingers through it. He hopped up and ran to a stack of boxes. He looked inside the top one, moved it off, and searched the next one down. He spotted what he wanted and pulled it out. Sitting again, he slipped the necklace over his head. Tied to the center of a twisted leather cord was a thick metal cross. Along the crossbeam, engraved letters spelled out David’s name.
“I remember that,” Xander said. “Mom made it for you, and you refused to wear it.”
“It made me feel like a priest,” David said.
“Pretty cool priest.”
David stared down at it. “I should have worn it,” he said, a tinge of sadness slipping in. “I think I hurt her feelings.”
Xander slapped David’s knee. “She understood. She had fun making this stuff for us. I don’t think she cared if we wore them.”
“Well,” David said. “I’m going to wear it now.” He smiled up at Xander. “I’ll have it on when we find her.”
Xander raised his hand and David slapped it. Xander stared down at the bracelet, twisting his wrist back and forth. He looked at David, just gazed at him for the longest time.
“What?” David said.
“We have to find her.”
David knew he meant now. He touched the cross pendant. Despite his exhaustion, despite his broken arm and other assorted aches, despite a morning of world hopping, he said, “Let’s do it.”
CHAPTER
twenty - five
FRIDAY, 4:15 P.M.
David and Xander walked around the corner into the short second-floor hallway. Keal was on a stepladder, drilling a screw into the top of the wall at an angle. He glanced at them and said, “You boys here to help?”
Xander said, “Uh . . . no.”
The way he said it made Keal stop and swivel around. “Want to go take a nap?”
That was exactly what David wanted to do, but he said, “We want to look through the portals.” He rubbed the cross hanging over his chest. He noticed Xander turning the bracelet around his wrist.
“Uh-uh,” Keal said, stepping off the ladder. “No way.” He pulled his shoulders back as if preparing for a fight. “You’ve done enough for one day. You’re tired and injured. Your dad’s gone. Get that idea out of your heads and go to bed. I’ll wake you when your dad and sister come home, if you want.” He turned his back to them and climbed the ladder again, as though his words settled the issue.
“We just want to look,” David said.
“No,” Keal said without turning. He positioned a screw and lifted the electric driver.
“Keal,” Xander said. “If we don’t actually see her through a portal, we won’t go over. Promise.”
Keal lowered the tool. He turned and sighed. “What’s this about?”
“We have to do something,” Xander said. “It seems like we’ve been doing everything but looking . . . just looking. Taksidian said the portals pull at the people who don’t belong in the worlds they’re in. That means she may be by a portal. If we look through them, maybe we’ll see her.”
“We . . . we miss her,” David said. His voice was weak, drowned in emotion. “Please.”
Keal came off the ladder again. He set the drill down on its top rung, then crossed his arms over his chest. “And if you don’t see her?”
“We won’t do anything,” Xander said. “If we don’t see her in two hours, we’ll go take naps.”
“We just have to do something,” David said, repeating Xander’s words.
“If you see Jesse’s world?” Keal said.
“Jesse said we need to go back there,” David said.
Xander grabbed his shoulder. “But we won’t go over if we see it,” Xander said. “This time.”
Keal looked at each of them hard. He looked at his watch. “One hour,” he said. “Come on.” He stepped toward the wall’s opening.
“You too?” David said, rushing up behind him.
“I’m not going to let you do this alone,” Keal said. He led them through the space between the walls and through the next opening, and started up the stairs to the third floor. “If you see or hear anything unusual, yell, and we all run for the stairs, got it?”
Xander laughed. “Unusual? In this house?”
“You know what I mean.”
In the third-floor hallway, Keal opened the first door. He gestured toward the antechamber with his head. “Let’s go.”
“What?” Xander said. “All of us?”
“Of course, Xander. Safety in numbers.”
“Come on,” Xander complained. “You’re only giving us an hour. Every time, we have to pick up three items to open the portal door. Then we have to look for her. I mean really look. That takes time. If we do each one together, we’ll get through six or seven at the most. If we split up, we’ll hit three times as many.”
Keal frowned. He said, “Let’s do this one together, and I’ll think about splitting up.”
Xander started to protest, but David stopped him. “It’s better than nothing, Xander. You’re wasting time.”
“Go,” Xander said, pushing David into the antechamber.
David scanned the items on the hooks and bench, none of which he’d seen before: a woven red shirt, a necklace of wood beads, a wooden mallet, sandals, a coin, and a roughly hewn walking stick. “Any idea what world these things belong to?”
“Could be anywhere,” Xander said.
Keal leaned past them and picked up the coin. “Ancient Rome,” he said, holding it up. It wasn’t perfectly round. In the center was an engraving of a soldier riding in a chariot pulled by a team of horses. Under it, in a banner, was the word Roma.
“Not the Colosseum,” Xander said. “That antechamber had a sword and shield.”
“A helmet and chain mail,” David added. He’d never forget Xander going over for the first time.
“Somewhere else, then,” Keal said. “Rome had a vast empire that lasted centuries.”
“So who’s going to open the door?” David said. He wanted to do this, to look for Mom, but Keal’s attitude had spooked him. I’m just tired, he thought. Not scared.
Xander took the coin from Keal. He grabbed the necklace and mallet and stepped to the portal door.
“That didn’t take so long,” Keal said.
“It’s not always that easy,” Xander said. He opened the door. Hot wind blew in.
“Ugh,” David said. “Smells like rotten eggs.”
“Burning rotten eggs,” Xander corrected.
As if to prove him right, black smoke billowed in. The portal itself appeared to be swirling smoke. It cleared, giving them a hazy, out-of-focus view of stone stairs leading down from the portal. The stairs ended at a narrow street paved with stones. It extended straight ahead of them. Single-story buildings lined the street. People, most of them dressed in tunics, ran toward them. Some darted through doorways, others reached the end of the street at the base of the stairs, turned, and disappeared out of sight.
In the far distance a mountain loomed over the town. Its top was on fire, spewing flames into the sky. A thick plume of smoke rose from it like an exploding atom bomb. A cloud of smoke rolled down the mountain toward the town, seeming to tumble.
“I think it’s Pompeii,” Keal said.
“That’s Mount Vesuvius?” David said. “When it erupted and wiped out everything?”
“I think so,” Keal said. “That smell is sulfur.” He extended an arm past Xander and held his palm up to the portal. “Warm, but not hot,” he said. “And I don’t feel a pull, anything that would force you to go over.”
“See?” Xander said. “We can do this alone.”
“No Mom, right?” Keal said.
“I hope not,” David said. How could they possibly jump into Pompeii right before it was consumed by a volcano’s ashes? But then, if th
ey saw Mom, how could they not? He hadn’t considered that they could be faced with a choice like that. It didn’t seem fair.
He imagined never coming back, and Dad, Xander, and Toria, knowing what had happened, visiting modern-day Pompeii. They would go to the museum that displayed plaster casts of Vesuvius’s victims, who had been preserved in the hardened ash. They would stop at a mother embracing her son, and recognize the two of them. And they would cry.
David suddenly felt depressed. In this house such a scenario was not simply a nightmare or “the product of an overactive imagination”—as a teacher had once said about a story he’d written. It could really happen, probably would happen. He said, “Shut the door.”
CHAPTER
twenty - six
FRIDAY, 4:22 P.M.
“I want to show you something first,” Keal said, gripping Xander’s shoulder to keep him in place in front of the Pompeii portal. “Listen up, guys. We’re only looking, right? So when you open a portal door, here’s what you do.” He grabbed Xander’s left hand and placed it on the edge of the open door, forcing his fingers to bend around it. “This is your safety grip,” he said. “Even if the door swings shut, you keep holding on. Got it?”
Xander nodded.
Keal moved around to Xander’s right side. Through the portal, a group of people ran toward the stairs. A churning black cloud of ashes rolled down the street and consumed them. Keal took Xander’s other hand and pressed the palm firmly against the wall beside the portal. “Lock your elbow,” Keal said.
Xander nodded.
Keal knelt. He took Xander’s foot in his hands and brought it to the wall beside the portal, directly under Xander’s hand. He angled it so the heel was on the floor and the toes bent upward on the wall.
“Okay,” Keal said. “That’s the stance.” He rose and touched Xander’s hand holding the edge of the door. He said, “One.” He touched the other hand on the wall. “Two.” Xander’s foot. “Three. Say it.”
“One . . . two . . . three,” Xander said, wiggling each anchor point. His voice was crisp as a soldier’s. He obviously liked Keal’s militaristic approach.
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