The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

by S. A. Hunt

  Sawyer bit his bottom lip, sucked on it for a second, and said, “Yep.”

  “I don’t know if—” said Noreen, and stopped herself, a look of mild confusion flashing over her features. Or perhaps it was concern. She faced the door again, clasping her hands in front of her waist as if she were praying for the door to open. “I...think I’m going to call the mechanic and see how long it’s going to take to get my car back.”

  Sawyer’s face fell. Noreen’s voice was a husky murmur. “You guys are kinda starting to scare me.”

  Ding.

  “I understand,” said Sawyer, and leaned against the back of the elevator cab. “I don’t really know what to say. Other than, well, we’re not crazy. And we’re not on drugs.”

  “And if we could ever find that video tape, we could prove it,” I added.

  Noreen spoke over her shoulder, not turning around, “It’s a little convenient, ain’t it? That it suddenly came up missing?”

  I heard a tap noise from somewhere, but ignored it. My eye caught the digital floor readout over the door, a black box with a red number inside. It was slowly flashing the number 1.

  As I stood there watching it, I heard the cab chime again. Ding.

  I glanced over at Sawyer, but he was still pining for Noreen, staring at her with worry in his eyes. I could tell that he was feeling trapped by the situation. He flinched, and reached up to wipe at his cheek, looked down at his hand. A heat-prickle of fear wormed up my spine, made my hair tingle.

  We both looked up at the ceiling. Water was leaking through the light fixture, dripping on us.

  “Uhh. Guys?” said Noreen.

  She backed away from the door. A thin rivulet of water was running out of the top of it, streaming onto the floor, now pouring, welling around our feet. My heart pounded at this surreal turn of events, and my eyes rolled in their sockets as I began to see more water, dribbling through cracks and crevices into the elevator cab, gurgling down the gleaming surfaces.

  I gasped, lurched backwards. My pants were soaking it up, chilling my feet, infiltrating my shoes. We migrated to the back of the tiny brushed-steel room and pressed ourselves against the walls of the box.

  Ding.

  The lights sparked with a gunshot-like CRACK and a shower of stars, which sizzled, leaving us in darkness.

  The door opened with a casual hiss-clunk, letting in a faint blue light....

  And a hell of a lot of water.

  A Thousand Miles from Nowhere

  THE WATER WAS ALREADY UP to my waist by the time I realized what was happening. All I could see was a dim blue-black rectangle, glassed over by a deluge of freezing-cold water, which, as it splashed a mist of droplets into my face, I tasted and recognized as salt-water. All three of us began to panic in terror and confusion, screaming and trying to scramble backwards up the wall to get away from it.

  It came in at a roaring rush, sweeping our legs out from under us with its force.

  Somehow, I sensed that the room was tilting backward, so I began to crab-walk up the wall. The water surged up around us, filling the cab with a crackling liquid darkness. I could see tiny fish darting around in it, shiny silver knives shooting back and forth in a frenzy.

  At the final moment before we were totally under, the three of us shared our horror, glancing into each others’ eyes. We all took a deep breath of stale, hot air, and then we were swallowed up. An instant later, there was a gargantuan metallic thud as the elevator cab came to rest on some soft surface.

  Sawyer was the first toward the door, leading a contrail of bubbles, kicking me in the elbow as he went.

  I followed close behind, pulling Noreen by the jacket. Her purse scooped water at her side, constricting her movement, a little leather satellite that spat out the bits and pieces of her life. I ripped the strap from her arm and let it fade into the black.

  Sawyer turned, reached in, grabbed Noreen’s arm, braced his feet on the doorframe, and dragged her out of the elevator as if it were a grave.

  I pursued them, pulling furiously at the water, my lungs beginning to cramp.

  The room continued tilting as we burst out of the door, and I could hear the faint boom below me as it slammed dully onto its back. I chanced a look between my feet and saw it in the gloomy deep blue, a hulking dark cube with steel cables noodling out of both ends like a fist full of licorice.

  We were in some enormous body of water.

  A chain snaked downward into a never-ending void and a rippling silver curtain undulated overhead. A great white crescent hovered beyond the silver, and some part of my consciousness registered it as the moon.

  My muscles shrieked in agony, alarm bells going off in my head as my mind howled for oxygen. I fought against the water, trying to reach the surface before I could give in. A strange, melodic sort of apathy crept in around the edges, suffusing me with calm.

  My chest, my ribs began to quiver in anticipation of air, flexing, trying to draw breath.

  I fought the urge to suck water as the ceiling of mercury came at me, shredded by trillions of tiny bubbles. Beside me, my friends clawed for salvation with reaching hands, time and again, their hair clouding around their heads in billowing tendrils.

  My lungs threatened to cave in, I couldn’t do it anymore. I finally let a little of the heavy sea-water into my mouth.

  It wouldn’t be so bad to die, I thought, the sea bellowing in my ears.

  My chest raged like a trapped animal within me, begged to be filled with water.

  The brine—so much like blood on my tongue—gushed into my throat as I put my hand out one last time and touched the sky. I broke the surface and shotgunned the ocean from my mouth in a blast of vapor.

  The others did the same. We floated, gasping, transfixed.

  Soaring above us was a night sky unlike any we had ever seen, even more lustrous than what I remembered from the city beyond the mirror. A black deeper and richer than any obsidian filled the heavens from horizon to horizon, salted with uncountable stars, pinpricks of light that rippled like music.

  It was a serenade gilded with ten thousand shades of ten thousand colors, more brilliant than any diamond on Earth, unfouled by the lights of any city.

  Even as starved as I was for air, I couldn’t help but forget to breathe.

  Tears laced my eyes as I drifted, in awe at the omnipotent majesty of the sight of it. The same pale moon loomed ominously in the center of the abyss, masked by the same orange orb as before, both of them scarred from rim to rim, every mile.

  “Ohhhh...” moaned Noreen, her jaw shuddering as the cool wind stripped her face of heat. “Ohhhh...my...God.”

  Sawyer threw both fists into the air and gave a loud whoop. “I told you! I told you! Ha-haaaaaa! Yeah!”

  I tore my eyes away from the spectacle and gave them a wide grin. I felt a hot tear trace the curve of my cheek. We bobbed for a little while, marveling over the incredulous view. A voice brought me back from my reverie.

  “Hey, over here,” said Noreen, and we swam over to where she was clinging to a strange sort of buoy made of wood. It looked like some sort of simplistic Viking funeral pyre, a tall tripod of slender driftwood logs nailed to a small platform about four meters across to a side.

  We clambered onto it and huddled, shivering, inside the tripod.

  “So cold,” I said. I was shivering so hard I probably looked like I was being electrocuted. “Where the hell are we? I mean, I’m guessing we’re back in the other-world.”

  “Destin,” said Sawyer. “We’re in Destin. It’s actually real. I can’t believe it.”

  Noreen took off her shirt and jacket and squeezed the water out of her top. Her white bra glowed against her skin in the light of the moon. “I believe we’re somewhere in the Aemev. This looks like a waypoint buoy.”

  “That means we’re near a ship lane,” said Sawyer.

  I wrung out my own shirt, as did Sawyer. Noreen put hers back on and curled into a ball on the platform.

  “I assume
that’s a good thing,” I said, putting my shirt and jacket back on. The leather kept me protected from the wind, but it did nothing for my soaked cargo pants. My legs were chilled to the bone. I jogged in place, trying to get some circulation going.

  “It’s a very good thing,” Noreen said, and added, “Providing there’s a boat coming sometime in the next several months.”

  “Well, if we haven’t t-t-t-time-traveled—is that even a thing?—if we haven-n-n’t traveled back in time, then we sh-sh-should be in a point after the final book in the sssseries has taken place,” Sawyer said. He hugged his knees and draped his black overcoat over his shoulders like a safety blanket.

  “So we shouldn’t have to wait too awfully long. By the end of the latest book, Ain and the settlers on K-Set had established a trade route with regular runners. They were talking about building a railroad, but it was too expensive to build more than one track that far.”

  “That sucks,” I said. “If there was a track bridge, we could start walking.”

  “Yeah.”

  Noreen sneezed. “I wish I’d brought my suitcase on the elevator.”

  “I don’t think you would’ve been able to get it out and get topside with it,” said Sawyer. “It looked like you were having a little trouble with that pocketbook.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, reaching over and slapping him on the arm. “Thanks for taking my purse away from me, you asshole. Now I have to cancel my debit card and get a new driver’s license.”

  “Hey, that was Ross, not me. Besides, I don’t think you’re going to need any of that here,” Sawyer said, and we all laughed. “Whatsoever.”

  The night tapered into near-silence, broken only by the sound of the waves slapping against the sides of the buoy-platform. I began to dry out, which only marginally lessened the chill of the wind.

  “I hope my boss doesn’t fire me for not showing up for work in the m-m-m-morning,” said Noreen.

  I heard Sawyer move, trying to cover more of his body with his coat. “I just hope we can get back hom-m-m-me at some point. I’d hate to kn-n-n-n-now we were stuck here forever this t-t-t-time.”

  “I think the Silen sent us back the first tim-m-m-me. He was the last thing we saw before we woke up on Earth,” I said. “Whatever he is, I believe he might have the ability to go b-b-b-back and forth...between the two worlds. I think we’re going to have to track him-m-m down if we want to get back.”

  Sawyer coughed, his breath misting in the air. “I don’t even know where to b-b-begin looking.”

  “First things first: we have to get off this rrrrrraft. What are these things here for, anyway?”

  Noreen stirred. “They’re here ffffffor people that go ooooverboard or ships that capsize. So they have somewhere to g-g-go, to get out of the water and wait for rescue.”

  “Wait a minute. D-d-don’t these rafts have signal braziers?” said Sawyer, unfolding himself and rolling stiffly to his feet.

  He jumped, took hold of the driftwood tripod, and climbed it like an upside-down squirrel until he could see into the point where the ends of the logs were tied together together in the middle. Where the logs were crossed, someone had tied down a primitive sort of hurricane lantern.

  He fished through his pockets and produced a Zippo, using it to light the wick. To all our delight, the lighter was dry enough to spark, the wick caught, and a tiny tongue of flame began to burn the oil inside the reservoir.

  He hopped back down and curled up next to one of the brazier’s tripod legs again, bundling up in his jacket.

  I could finally make out their faces by the weak flicker of the lantern. “Now...” I said, shivering, “...we wait.”

  As I lay down and drifted into unconsciousness, I remember thinking about how sluggishly cold my face felt, and the next thing I knew, I was struggling up out of the frigid bonds of sleep, awakened by the cold and the sound of Noreen shuffling across the platform to huddle next to Sawyer.

  I swore in my head, and tried to fight my way back under, and finally managed to doze off again.

  The rumors of sun finally irritated me back out of my cocoon, lighting up the world in my dreams until I couldn’t keep my grainy eyelids shut any longer. I rolled over onto my back and stretched, painfully peeling my limbs out of the stiff dead-bug position I’d slept in all night.

  I squinted up at the potential of a sunrise lighting up the horizon with a sickly, motionless maelstrom of green and red. The moon was a dome of white disappearing over the opposite edge of the world.

  My feet were like the unfeeling claws of a dead bird, cadaver-cold and stricken with rigor. I rubbed my numb face and found a runny nose. There was nothing to be done. For the next several hours, until the golden glow of the rising sun shot an arrow of light into my eyes, I simply lay on my side and pretended to sleep.

  The week coursed over my mind like troubled water over a bed of river-stones, worn smooth by worry and confusion.

  I was too cold, too tired to form conclusions, to puzzle over clues...I simply replayed scenes and conversations, over and over, ad nauseam, until they lost all meaning and simply became trite scripts that the people in my head acted out like puppets on a stage again and again.

  Semantic satiation, I thought in a mild delirium, waking up again. I thought about putting on a pot of coffee.

  That’s what it’s called.

  I opened my eyes. Sawyer was sitting up, gazing eastward as the white-hot orb grew into sight, burning away the shrouds of the night, warming the world and willing the life into it for another day.

  I rolled over and unfolded myself again, trying to ignore the cramps.

  An hour passed, and then two, as the sun rose ever higher, and seared away the chill. Soon, I was sweating in my leather jacket. I took it off and hung it on one of the knots protruding from the driftwood tripod, then climbed up to the oil lamp and cut it off. When I landed back on the platform with a clunk, I winced at the shock to my knees.

  Noreen rubbed her eyes and said, “I feel like crap.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  The sea around us was an infinity of dark blue, broken into hillocks of wind-shoveled water that threatened to overtake the buoy. The breeze grew stronger with the sun until the raft was bobbing in great slow swaying arcs, straining against the chain that anchored it to the sea-bed.

  As the waves came underneath it, the platform would cant heavily to one side to climb the surf, and then after teetering for a split second, slide into the trough like a half-pipe skater.

  I scrambled to the edge of the raft and spewed bitter bile into the spray.

  _______

  “I am seriously regretting my enthusiasm right now,” I said, lying on my back with my arm over my eyes, nursing a headache. Noreen was the only one of us with a watch, but it had stopped a long time ago, now displaying the time it had been when we’d stepped into the elevator at the hotel: 11:21 AM. Sawyer’s cellphone was dead, and mine was somewhere on the ocean floor below us.

  The white sun was at the apex of the sky, burning down on us with the intense directional heat of a bonfire.

  Sawyer had taken his shirt, shoes, and sweater off, and was standing on the edge of the raft wordlessly staring into the horizon. The blinding white wood of the raft felt as if it were scorching the inside of my skull.

  I could kill for a cup of coffee, I thought, and licked my chapped lips. I could kill a wolf. With my bare hands.

  “I’m still trying to figure out what to make of this,” said Noreen. She was leaning against one of the poles, hugging herself, with her jacket pulled over her shoulders like a shawl. Her voice sounded impaired, wet, as if she was having trouble breathing through her nose. “I think I’ve gotten past the I-might-be-crazy part, but I’m still having a little trouble warming up to the idea that I just walked into a fantasy novel.”

  “How are you still cold? It’s like, a thousand degrees out here.”

  “I don’t feel good. I think I might have gotten sick last night.”
>
  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “Really?” I asked. “You really don’t think I dragged you into this?”

  “No, Ross,” she said, with a weak, yet comforting smile. “You didn’t. I’m actually half-tempted to think it was fate.”

  “You think so?”

  “Maybe. Do you believe in fate?”

  “Nah. Well, I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder. Whenever I think luck’s going my way, it steps up and kicks me right in the balls. I’ve found that if you leave fate alone and do your thing, and let it do its thing, it doesn’t kick you so hard anymore. Damn. It’s too hot to be asking me philosophical questions when I’m starving. It’s like a Looney Tunes cartoon, you look like a hot dog with a face.”

  I peeled my arm from my sweaty face and sat up. The world blinded me with brilliant shades of washed-out green that became the deep, fervent blues of ocean and sky, and the bone-white of the raft.

  Diamond knots punctuated the wood at organic intervals, and it was lashed together with—surprisingly enough—some sort of plastic-coated cord, like the power cord of an appliance. I blinked. “Hey, I thought you guys said my dad’s books were a fantasy series. What’s this power cord doing here?”

  Sawyer looked down at the raft.

  “The Antargata k-Setra was home to an advanced society, remember? Well, there’s very little working power grid in most of K-Set, and a lot of the ruins were scavenged for materials and resources. Most cords like this were taken and used as waterproof rope.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “There’s actually electricity on mainland Ain, though. They were at least smart enough to reverse-engineer electric lights to use windmill power.”

  My listlessness grew by the hour until I had whipped myself into a lather and exhausted all available mental topics. I stood up and started pacing slowly back and forth, counting the logs as I walked across them, feeling my stomach knot up tighter and tighter with hunger.