by Edward Aubry
Harrison immediately regretted his sarcasm. Claudia and Jake had become each other's support system lately, and he appreciated that. "Yeah," he said. "I'm sorry. I don't know what we're going to accomplish here, anyway. Why don't you go cheer him up."
She smiled. "Thanks." She turned to Apryl. "Good luck."
Apryl nodded. "Thanks."
Claudia went inside.
"Can we go for a walk?" Apryl said. "I'm getting edgy sitting here."
"Sure." They got up and started walking, and Glimmer glided along with them. Harrison carried the two objects. "So," he said, "the tools thing looks like a bust. Do you have any ideas at all?"
"Nothing. The tools thing was a good idea, though. Maybe we're just looking at it the wrong way."
"I don't see how," he said. "Damn, this is frustrating! I know there's something here, but I can't get my brain around it."
"Maybe we should call it a day," said Glimmer. "Faerie riddles are notoriously tricky. Trust me on that one. I don't even get what she told us, and I've been working on it, too. Why don't you both start back up first thing in the morning?"
Harrison sighed. "You're probably right," he said. "That's going to bug me, but I guess it'll have to bug me." He stopped walking. "Where's the boat?" he asked Glimmer.
"Oh!" she said. "The boat! Um … good question. She said the Chesapeake Bay, but that's all I got."
"Do you think you can find it for us?" he asked. "Plot us a course, like you did to Faerie?"
"Probably," she said. "Depends how big it is, but I should be able to spot it from the air. Where's the Chesapeake Bay?"
Harrison rolled his eyes. Random knowledge base, he reminded himself. "The river we were just on will take you straight there, I think. It runs south into Maryland, so, yeah, that has to be it. Just follow it downstream until it gets so wide that it isn't a river anymore, and that's the Chesapeake Bay. Can you find our boat?"
Glimmer saluted. "Aye, aye, Cap'n." And she was gone.
Harrison and Apryl kept walking. He had planned to turn back toward the transport, but she kept heading away from it, and he followed.
"You're the Key," she said suddenly. "What do you think she meant by that?"
"I open locks," he said. "Isn't that a no-brainer?"
She shook her head. "Maybe not. She said it in the same breath as Power and Tools. What if it's more than that? What if you open more than just locks?"
"I don't follow you."
"What if these things, these tools aren't just shut off?" she said. "What if they're locked?"
He pondered this. "That's a thought," he said. "But I've fiddled with them a bit. If it's just a question of me unlocking them, they should be unlocked by now."
They both thought about this. "What if it's not them?" said Apryl. "What if it's me?"
Harrison stopped walking. "What if it's you?"
Apryl looked unsure of herself, but she plowed ahead. "I'm still thinking about what Titania said. Something about the unlikely answers being the right ones. What if it's my power that's locked. Somehow. What if you're not just the key to locks? What if you're the Key to the Power?"
"I …" And he stopped. "I don't know." This was new ground. It was not consistent with his understanding of his own ability. But then, he had fused a lock in Scott's castle, and that had not been part of his mental model either. "That's so bizarre," he finally said, "it might actually be the answer."
They stared at each other for a full minute.
"So," said Apryl.
"So," said Harrison.
"How do we do this?" she asked.
"I'm not sure," he said. "I've never unlocked anyone before." He immediately regretted how stupid that sounded. He remembered his earlier, ultimately purposeless revelation to the group. Now he felt doubly foolish. If Apryl thought him a fool, she gave no sign of it.
"What do you do when it's a lock?" she asked.
"Locks open as soon as I touch them."
"All right," she said, and she held her hands out, palms facing him.
He looked at his hands. He was still holding the objects. He set them gently on the ground. He hesitated self-consciously, then he reached out. They clasped each other's hands, meshing fingers. Her hands were soft and warm, and for a moment he forgot why it was he was holding them. For so long, he had been weighed down by so many troubles that were impossibly bizarre that the simple pleasure of holding hands was like a brand-new experience. She was wearing a ring on her right hand. He had not noticed it until he felt the cold hard pressure between his fingers. It reminded him of the ring on his own hand, and he hoped she wouldn't ask him about it. He studied her face, looking for any sign of change.
"Do you feel anything?" he asked.
"Just your hands."
He had been thinking the same thing. "I don't think it's working. Maybe it's not quite that simple." He thought for a moment. "Let me try something," he said. Closing his eyes, he thought back to the time in Scott's castle he had caused a door to lock. At the time, he had tossed off a joke about only being able to do that when he was scared, but he had done it deliberately, and he thought about what that had felt like. He had been picturing the bolt in his mind, although he had no real idea what it looked like, but the idea of a bolt was so clear that he was able to form an image, and it had worked. He did the same thing now. He closed his eyes and pulled up the image of a sliding bolt lock, like the one on the inside of the bathroom door in his house when he was a child. He pictured himself pushing the small knob on the bolt up, rotating it out of its slot. Then he pictured pulling the bolt back, sliding it free of the socket on the door frame, and rotating it to secure the knob in the other slot. He opened his eyes.
He could see Apryl. Her eyes were closed, but not tightly, and she was breathing slowly and deeply.
He couldn't see anything else at all.
The pleasant spring day in the forest was nowhere to be seen. Beyond the two of them, there was nothing but open, black space, stretching to infinity. Wide, erratic streaks of color washed past them, like watercolors applied to the fabric of the universe with an impossibly large brush. A dull, quiet roar began sounding in his ears. It increased in volume, but not to an unpleasant level. He could still breathe, and as he gasped, instinctively, desperately for air, he could taste a tangy, sweet essence, like a pineapple, cored, stuffed with garlic and roasted. It made him salivate. He swallowed.
Her dark, wavy hair was rippling, although he could not feel a breeze. It seemed to have grown longer and fuller, and some strands were rising. The tips of those stray hairs glowed faintly, creating a pointillistic aura that made her look otherworldly and glorious. Her breaths were coming deeper. In that moment, overwhelmed, Harrison leaned in, closed his eyes, and stole a kiss.
Her lips were hot satin. He could feel the warmth running through his mouth, down his throat, into his heart, then out his shoulders and down to his hands, where they connected with hers, completing the circuit. The flow of energy was the most nourishing thing he had ever felt. She was the piping hot cup of chocolate after he came in from the biting cold. She was the slow, purging shower after a long summer day working in the fields. Then the roar in his ears faded, the flavor in the air subsided, and his entire sensual universe was the experience of this living contact. It was exquisite. Gradually, he could feel the rush diminish. As it fell below the threshold separating the sublime from the mundane, he regained enough self-awareness to understand that it was falling away, and he mourned it.
He opened his eyes. Hers were already open. Quite wide.
He pulled back, letting go of her hands, and saw behind her the June blossoms on the trees, heard insect noises. She was looking at him with something between a frown and a smirk, a look that managed to convey the most menacing aspects of both. He recognized the expression from one of his most vivid, primal childhood memories. It was the look his grade school teachers gave him when they caught him doing something stupid.
"Something happened," he said.<
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"You think?" she responded. Her expression did not change.
He gulped. "Am I in trouble?"
She shrugged, and her face relaxed. "Maybe. Do you want to talk about it?"
He looked away. "Maybe." He was feeling powerfully awkward. What he had just done was entirely unlike him, and although she was being kind about it, she didn't seem to have welcomed it. He managed to remember what it was they had been trying to do. He ran with it. "I think it worked," he said. "I visualized opening a lock, and then I had a kind of sensory overload."
"I got that, too."
"I could tell." By now, he was certain he was blushing. "You were glowing. Everything around you was like fire. I watched you exuding all this energy, and suddenly you just looked like an angel." He struggled to say it without sounding utterly pathetic. "I guess …" He faltered, and then finally said, "The moment just seemed to lend itself." He looked down.
She took his hands back. Her fingers felt normal again, but her touch was still comforting. He looked into her eyes, and found acceptance there. "We're okay," she said.
He managed a contrite smile. "Good," he said. He picked up the wand and gadget, which had been lying on the ground. "Want to see if I'm right?"
She stared at them. "Here goes nothing," she said. She took the wand in her right hand.
Nothing happened.
"Shit," said Harrison.
"Wait," whispered Apryl. Her eyes had taken a distant look. "Give me the other one."
Harrison passed the little device into her left hand. Again, for a second, nothing happened.
Then they both lit up.
The lights on the electronic device came to life in pale blue, red, and green, but that wasn't as striking as the other light it put off. Three dimensional, full color projections leapt from the device and hovered in front of it. The images came quickly. Harrison did not recognize many of them.
The green marble on the tip of the wand was radiating an uneven, rotating glow. It quietly hummed, sounding like several violins playing in harmony. Harrison recognized it, from guitar lessons a lifetime ago, as a major seventh chord.
Apryl put both objects down, very gently. Their respective glows faded. Harrison looked at her with something like awe.
"Yes," she said quietly. "You're right."
Chapter Thirty-Five:
HMS Ptolemy
Harrison held the wand at arm's length. He could feel a painful strain in the muscle in the base of his thumb as he maintained his grip. The rod was vibrating slightly, which added to his discomfort. The green marble mounted on its end was glowing so vigorously he had to look away. A few feet away, a full can of Dr. Pepper was rotating and wobbling slowly about an axis roughly ten degrees offset from vertical. It was also hovering about four feet off the ground.
They had been traveling since early in the morning to their waiting sea vessel. Around noon, Harrison called for a rest stop. While everyone else was walking around to stretch their legs, he went off to be alone for a few minutes. He had been experimenting with his newly activated tools, and wanted to have some privacy to help his concentration.
"How's it going?" Glimmer asked.
"Gah!" Harrison exclaimed. The can instantly plummeted to the ground, detonating on impact. Tan foam jetted straight at Harrison, catching him on the pant leg. He scowled at it, then looked at the wand. It had gone dim and cold in his hand. He looked at the pixie. "Not bad," he said without smiling. "Yourself?"
"Pretty good." Today she was wearing a blue chambray shirtdress with a white Peter Pan collar. Over this she had on a black vest, on which were printed apples, pencils, and the ABC's. She was also wearing a pair of spectacle frames with no lenses. Still no shoes.
"You startled me," he said.
"Oops. You figure out what it does yet?"
"No." He frowned. "You're sure you can't analyze this thing yourself?"
She shook her head. "No can do. I'm amazed you got it working at all. I'm not picking up anything from it, except that it's magic. And probably pretty potent."
"Great," he said. "Well, so far I've been able to lift small objects with it. I must admit it's quite a rush. I don't see it as much of a labor saver, though." He massaged his thumb.
"Has Apryl tried it yet?"
Harrison frowned. "No. She hasn't taken any interest in either of these things." He pursed his lips.
"Something troubling you?" the pixie asked.
"What?" He shook his head to break his train of thought. "No. No problem. I just … I thought she'd want them. They're hers, after all."
"What about the gizmo?"
Harrison slipped the wand into a small, homemade, denim sheath strapped to his belt. "I've had a bit more luck with that. Let me show you." He pulled the device out of his pants pocket and pressed the largest of the several buttons on its face. The lights came to life, as did several three-dimensional projections, which hovered in the air a few inches above the device. He toggled one of the other controls, and all but one of the images shrank down to dots. The remaining image was a crude polyhedron representation of a car.
"This is the transport," he explained. "I haven't identified the other ones, but they seem to represent things we brought with us. There's one for that camera thing in my backpack, and one for Claudia's Game Boy, among others. It seems able to identify technology near it. And assign labels to it. Once I figured out what some of the labels were, I experimented a bit." He held the device up. "Using this thing, I was able to activate every system on the transport. Navigation. Surveillance. I could probably even drive it around with this thing. Not only that, but everything works a little more efficiently than it did before, and quite a bit more powerfully. Claudia's going to be thrilled when I show her how many lives it will give her in Super Mario Land. I think this gadget is some kind of all purpose remote control booster thingy."
He looked up to get her reaction, but her expression was glassy. When she realized he was looking at her, she shook her head vigorously, then passed her hand over her head with a whooshing sound. "All remote-purpose thingy?" she said.
"Remote control," he repeated. "I can use it to make things work without touching them."
"Oooooh," she said. "Remote control. Like you control something, even though it's remote." She smiled proudly. "That's cute."
"Yeah, well," he said, "it's more than that, too. Like I said, it's also some kind of tech booster. I was able to use the transport's surveillance equipment to scan the entire hemisphere." He waited for the significance of that scale to sink in. Then he realized that, with the pixie, he would be waiting a long time. "So, that's much farther than its range was before. I'm sure there's all kinds of super-important information we could get out of it now. If I had any idea what to look for. So far, I've just been scanning for people. On this side of the planet, it was able to identify over four hundred thousand living humans, so I figure there should be about eight hundred thousand people left, worldwide."
"Is that a lot?" asked Glimmer.
"Out of six billion? No."
She landed on the device, still in his hand, and bent down to look at the little hovering car. From her perspective, it was upside down. "Can you look up how many pixies there are?"
"Um," he said, "yeah." From his tone, and his pause, it was clear he had already done so. She looked up at him.
"One?" she asked.
"One," he said.
She shrugged. "I figured that. Nothing ventured, right?"
Harrison's face went blank for a couple of seconds. Then he said, "Right. Right. Nothing gained." He hoped he sounded like he was responding to her. He hoped it was not too obvious that he was thinking about something else. A recent and rather foolhardy venture of his own, poorly executed, with nothing gained, indeed.
* * *
It took four days, including two detours to collect the last two ingredients for their counterbomb, to travel down the east bank of the Susquehanna River. Along the way, they had to navigate around enormous
hills and cross countless tributaries. The transport was designed to handle this kind of terrain, and in most cases they were able to drive right into the streams and out the other side. Only especially wide or deep creeks required them to travel significantly out of their way.
Harrison looked out a window, watching the river drift in and out of view across miles of terrain. As they traveled, he had kept mostly to himself. There really were no important decisions to be made until they found their boat, and he was still hoping that Alec would come to himself before that point. He also hoped that if he stayed more or less quiet until that happened, the transition would be smoother. And there was another reason he kept to himself, one that haunted him. He could not stop thinking about it.
Apryl.
Ever since he had yielded to his insane impulse to kiss her, he had been unable to put it aside. The bald fact was that he was attracted to her, had been since they met. It had taken a momentary but complete loss of self-control to make him see it, but there it was. Looking back, he could see that he had been impatient with Jake (and cruel to him, too) out of simple jealousy when he thought Jake and Apryl were involved. Even after learning that she was unattached, he had failed to address his own feelings, and so he could not act on them. In the best of circumstances, Harrison had no talent for courtship. In their current situation, he could not exactly ask her out on a date. But it was all moot, anyway. He was quite sure that the attraction ran in one direction. She was far more than he could hope for. It galled him, though, that he had come to grips with his feelings for her only after having made such a fool of himself. Before, they had at least seemed to have a good friendship building up. He knew now that he wanted much more than that, but he hoped at least that he might be able to salvage what they had. He could already sense her becoming uncomfortable around him. It hurt.
He sighed. Again. He reasoned that his best bet was to leave her alone for a while. His hope was that she would see the distance between them as a good faith gesture that he was not planning to push his luck. So far, the results had not been promising.