by Gary Urey
Pinchole and Kari, the Doctor’s secretary, were waiting when the elevator doors opened on his office suite.
“Sir, it’s all over the news,” Kari said. “Are you okay? What can I do for you?”
“Besides a distal radius fracture, I’m okay,” the Doctor said with a wince. He turned to Pinchole. “We need to talk.” The two of them stepped inside the office and closed the thick oak door.
“I can’t believe this happened,” Pinchole said. “How do you feel? Do you need some time away? I mean, I can handle things.”
“Stop blabbering,” the Doctor said. “We need to talk about what to do with the boy and how to find Daisha. She’s the one who caused this accident in the first place.”
“How did she do that?”
“Forget it. How many men are scouring the Hoover Park area for her?”
“Ten. All of them are instructed to take her alive.”
“Good.” The Doctor sat down at his desk and let out a deep sigh. “They’ll find her in short order.”
“I was just speaking to the boy before you called,” Pinchole said.
“What did he have to say?”
“Not much. He’s holding back details. Unfortunately, as I explained earlier, the GeoPorts only work in tandem.”
“We may need to play good cop, bad cop a little more with him.”
Pinchole raised his eyebrows. “Sir?”
“You must not have watched many detective shows as a kid. Good cop, bad cop is a psychological technique used for interrogation. The bad cop is aggressive, threatening, and nasty to the prisoner; the good cop shows sympathy and support to win the prisoner’s trust. It’s what I was doing when we first brought him in here. Instead of throwing him into a dark room, I offered him food and hospitality. Get it?”
“Then I’ll be the good cop. I’m not very good at being bad.”
The Doctor laughed. “That’s why I’m a multibillionaire and you’re just my right-hand man. I want Nice guys finish last etched on my tomb.”
“If this were a bad original Hulu series, my canned response would be, ‘My dear sir, I’m a man of science and could care less about money,’” Pinchole joked while twisting the cap off a bottle of Coke. “But I love money just as much as the next PhD. However, without the other GeoPort, our research and your business plan grind to a halt.”
A jolt of pain shot through the Doctor’s wrist. He popped three pain pills into his mouth and washed them down with a glass of water. His face flushed with heat. The port-wine stain on the side of his face pulsed. Dermatologists had managed to lighten the birthmark considerably over the years, but it was still a prominent feature.
“I want you to convince Axel that you want to destroy me,” the Doctor said, fanning his face with a manila folder.
“Why would I do that?” Pinchole asked.
“Good cop, bad cop. Tell him that we have Daisha, I’m an evil jerk, and you need their help to stop me. If for some reason we can’t capture Daisha—which is highly unlikely—we will lure her into our trap with Axel, the only person she has left in this world.”
“But he’ll want proof we have her. The old surveillance tape of Professor Jack in the lab has stopped pacifying him. He’s asked several times to see his father in person.”
The Doctor reached into his pocket with his good arm and pulled out his iPhone. He pressed the camera button to access the video roll and handed the phone to Pinchole. “This should do the trick,” he said. “Press Play and see for yourself.”
Pinchole watched the video three times, an astonished expression plastered across his face. “This…is…perfect,” he stuttered. “It looks like an older version of Daisha. Are you sure it’s her?”
“Of course, I’m sure. She looks exactly like her mother.”
“Where did you take the footage?”
“While we were chasing her, I filmed twenty seconds of her standing next to a delivery truck. That should be all the proof the boy needs. Now, wring him out until he tells you where to find this Magnes Solace. We still don’t know what this mystery person knows. I won’t allow anyone else access to this technology.”
Using the Doctor’s phone, Pinchole texted the video link to his own phone and rushed out the door to show Axel. Good cop, bad cop was about to begin.
Chapter Twenty-One
AXEL
Pinchole burst into the room, ripping Axel from his Stonehenge memory. “I’ve got good news,” he said.
“What?” Axel grunted.
“Daisha. She’s back in Palo Alto.”
The hair on the back of Axel’s neck stood on end, and his skin prickled with goose bumps. “Are you serious?” he blurted out.
“Yes. One of our men just escorted her through the Warp.”
Axel’s initial excitement over hearing about Daisha quickly turned to distrust. Pinchole had lied about his father, and this was probably another tall tale. The man would do and say anything to trick Axel into giving up secrets of the Warp.
“If Daisha’s back in town, then I want to see her,” Axel demanded.
Pinchole smiled and pulled a cell phone from his pocket. “Your wish is my command,” he said and handed the phone over to Axel.
“What’s this for?”
“Proof. Push the play button on the video roll and see for yourself.”
Axel pushed Play, and there she was. Daisha’s long dreadlocks and lean, muscular frame were unmistakable. She was standing behind a white van with an orange Palo Alto Flowers logo. The footage ended after twenty seconds, and Axel pressed Play again. Seeing her made his heart swell with relief, and he fought the urge to cry. Unlike with the old video footage of his father, Pinchole wasn’t lying this time. His best friend was alive and right here in Palo Alto.
“From the emotion written all over your face,” Pinchole said. “I can tell a very large weight has been lifted off your shoulders.”
“When can I see her?” Axel asked.
Pinchole sat down on the couch next to Axel. “No one knows I took this footage,” he whispered. “The Doctor would surely kill me if he knew I showed you this.”
“Why?”
“Because he wants to keep you two apart, squeeze out all he can, and then swat you like annoying flies. The man has no conscience, but I do. I won’t let him kill you or Daisha.”
The sincerity behind Pinchole’s words took Axel by surprise. He didn’t know whether to believe him or not. After all, the man had lied to him about his father. Perhaps this was just another bullcrap story. But one fact was indisputable. The video footage he had produced of Daisha was real and recent. Except for the red dress she was wearing, Daisha looked exactly as she had the previous day when they were separated in the Vietnamese café.
“When can I see her?” Axel asked.
“I’d let you see her right now,” Pinchole responded. “But the Doctor has other plans.”
“What other plans? Now that he has Daisha, both GeoPorts are his. You can travel through the Warp just like we did. You don’t need us anymore.”
“Daisha’s GeoPort was defective when she was captu…rescued by our men. That’s one of the reasons you can’t see your father right now. He’s busy trying to fix them.” Pinchole wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead and took a gulp of water. “After the GeoPorts are repaired and working, the Doctor is going to kill you, Daisha, and your parents. But not if I can help it.”
Spider-Man: Friend or Foe popped into Axel’s brain. It was an Xbox game based on the comic book series. He had played it obsessively as a sixth grader. In fact, the game had gobbled up so much time that his father made him stop playing. The main plot of the game—besides finding the deadly shards of Venom Symbiote brought to Earth by a meteor—was figuring out whom to trust. Spider-Man’s sworn enemies tried to be his friends, and former friends turned into his enemies.
That’s exactly what is happening here, Axel’s thoughts screamed out. Pinchole’s still lying about my father being alive. He’s trying to be my
friend, but he’s still my enemy!
Axel’s insides gurgled with fury. He quickly swallowed his rage, knowing the game he and Pinchole were playing had to continue. At least until Axel figured out where they were keeping Daisha. Then he and she could escape and figure out a way to keep the GeoPorts out of the Doctor’s hands.
“I don’t want him to kill us,” Axel said. “How can we stop that from happening?”
“Tell me everything you know about Warp travel,” Pinchole said.
Axel knew it was his move. If Pinchole was telling the truth, and the Pursuers did not have the same experience as Axel and Daisha during Warp travel, the time had come to give up a secret to keep Pinchole happy. But what detail could Axel dish out? Warp travel had become as easy as riding a bike. But it hadn’t always been that way. On the first few trips, Axel had felt like someone had shoved him into a garbage can and rolled him off the top of a mountain. The ride left both him and Daisha sick, scared, and feeling like their skulls were about to explode. Soon they grew accustomed to the journey, and little by little, they got to know the Warp’s amazing abilities.
“You’ve told me how Warp travel can make you feel nauseous and woozy,” Pinchole pressed. “Tell me more. Our men who were trying to rescue you reported that it was nothing but a pitch-black void.”
“The Warp’s everything but a big, black void,” Axel said.
Pinchole’s eyes grew wide with excitement. “Keep going.”
“It’s like jumping into a supersonic rainbow or dancing directly beneath a strobe light on steroids.”
“Do you see any images?”
“Lots of them.”
“What are they?”
“I’ll tell you,” Axel said, “if I can see the video of Daisha again.”
Pinchole sighed but handed Axel the cell phone. Axel watched the video three times and then handed the phone back.
“I kept my end of the bargain,” Pinchole said. “Now it’s time to keep yours. I want to know more.”
Axel told him about the Warp’s ability to show the past. Some images were fascinating, like the time Daisha and he were in Montignac, France, and the Warp showed them prehistoric men painting inside dark caves lit only by firelight. Others were not so pleasant. After Warping away from Salem, Massachusetts, they’d seen Puritans accused of witchcraft dangling from the end of ropes by their necks.
“Fascinating,” Pinchole said, a hint of awe in his voice. “Now, tell me about a person who goes by the name of Magnes Solace.”
The blood drained from Axel’s face. His lungs deflated like Pinchole had just sucker-punched him in the solar plexus. Magnes Solace was their secret contact, the only person who, according to their parents, could destroy the GeoPorts.
“Latitude 23.1483…” Axel mumbled absently, remembering the partial coordinates Daisha’s mother had spit out right before the Doctor’s men murdered her.
“Latitude what?” Pinchole asked. “Did you just garble latitude coordinates?”
Axel shook his head. “Nothing. I’ve never heard of anyone named Magnes Solace.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
DAISHA
Daisha was a stranger to herself.
Without her hair, she felt exposed like an exotic, long-haired Persian cat shaved to resemble a hairless sphynx. The smells of the crash still lingered inside her nostrils. She splashed cold water on her face, trying desperately to cleanse herself of the sense memories.
A soft rap came on the bathroom door, startling Daisha so much she nearly leaped out of her shoes.
“Are you okay?” The librarian’s voice echoed through the door. “You’ve been in there for fifteen minutes, and other patrons need to use the facilities.”
“Um…I’m…okay…Just one minute,” Daisha stuttered, and then scooped the mound of dreadlocks off the floor and shoved them into the garbage can. She looked at herself one last time in the mirror and then charged from the bathroom, heading straight for the library’s exit.
“I have to get back to the dog run and look for Axel,” Daisha said to herself once she was outside.
The Doctor had seen her, and she knew his men were crawling all over Hoover Park and Palo Alto looking for her. Maybe they wouldn’t recognize her. She looked like a completely different person without dreadlocks, someone much older. She could maybe even pass as a Stanford University freshman.
Or Magnes Solace.
Who are you? Daisha wondered. Why did Axel’s father tell us to take the GeoPorts to you? And what’s an electron diffusion region?
Electron. Diffusion. Region.
The three words just popped into her head, and it took her a moment to remember where she had heard them before. Her mother had said them moments before the Doctor’s men killed her and Axel’s father. Her frantic, hushed voice echoed in Daisha’s ear as clearly as the horrible moment she had spoken them—Only the electron diffusion region can destroy them.
Daisha leaned against a tree, carefully analyzing the words. “Only the electron diffusion region can destroy them,” she muttered. “Take them to Magnes Solace.”
The tight sleeves of her Jamaican-style bandanna dress dug into her armpits. Daisha reached up and yanked at the fabric, trying to stretch the openings. She remembered her mother’s words when she’d given her the dress.
Her mother had said something like, “My dear solis, go put on the decorus vestio your avia sent…”
“Decorus means lovely or beautiful in Latin,” Daisha whispered to herself. “Vestio has to mean dress, and avia is obviously the word for grandmother. I’m not quite sure about solis, but it sounds a lot like Solace.”
The connection hit her. “Could what we thought was Solace really be solis in Latin?” she exclaimed. “Magnes might be a Latin word too!” She gave a quick tug on the hem of her constricting dress and then rushed back into the library.
The librarian glared at Daisha as she signed up for one of the computer stations.
“Are you the same girl who was just here?” the librarian asked, staring at Daisha with bewilderment. “Your hair…It’s…gone.”
Daisha mumbled something incoherent, grabbed a pass, and sat down at the same computer she had used before. Mr. Perry gawked at her cross-eyed like he had just seen a ghost. Daisha didn’t care. She pulled up Google Translate, configured the search to convert Latin to English, and typed in the word Magnes.
“Magnet,” she said under her breath. “Magnes means magnet in Latin. What about solis?” She typed in the word, and nanoseconds later the translation appeared on the screen. “Sun. Solis means sun. Magnet sun…sun magnet…magnet of the sun.”
Mr. Perry sat up from his computer station and approached the librarian. Daisha watched as they spoke with each other. From their hushed tones and intense stares in her direction, they were obviously discussing her.
Daisha quickly typed the words magnet of the sun into the search field. The first hit was a Wikipedia entry for something called the Konanavlah Sun Temple in Madhya Pradesh, India. Ancient rulers had built the temple in the tenth century in honor of the Sun God, Surya. After skimming the rest of the entry, Daisha clicked on the next link—a website dedicated to ancient man-made temples.
The website discussed the mysterious and mystical qualities of ancient temples around the world. Daisha clicked open the page dedicated to the Konanavlah Sun Temple. The engineers who designed the temple had used the principals of magnetism. Before falling into ruins, the peak of the temple was a massive fifty-ton magnet. This was so that a statue of an ancient sun deity, also constructed of magnetic material, could float in midair. The site of the Konanavlah Sun Temple was supposedly one of the most magnetic places in the world.
“Interesting,” Daisha mused. “But does it have anything to do with my mother, Axel’s father, and GeoPorts?”
She then typed electron diffusion regions into Google. The first of more than fourteen million search results piqued her interest. The entry was an article from the UK Space Agency—Britain
’s version of NASA—titled “Gateways Hiding in the Earth’s Magnetic Field.” She clicked open the website and read.
Electron diffusion regions, also referred to as X-Points, are places in Earth’s magnetic field that connect to the sun’s magnetic field. This creates a clear warp portal from our atmosphere to the sun.
Scientists tell us that these magnetic warps open and close several times each day where Earth’s geomagnetic field meets the solar wind. “The only problem is that we can’t predict where one will be,” says Oxford University physicist Graham Alderson. “Warp portals are sneaky buggers because they open and close without rhyme or reason. Rumors are flying around the scientific world saying that two American physicists from Stanford University have discovered a permanent X-Point, but nothing has been proven as of yet.”
Latitude 23.1483, the partial coordinates her mother had managed to spit out, flashed in Daisha’s mind. She quickly typed Konanavlah Sun Temple latitude longitude into the search field and hit Enter. The first hit nearly made her pass out on the library’s carpet.
23.1483° N, 79.9015° E
Konanavlah Sun Temple Coordinates
“Magnes Solace isn’t a person!” Daisha cried. “It’s a place and the electron diffusion region my mother was talking about!”
The librarian, who was still watching her intently, quickly picked up the phone at the front desk. “Nine-one-one,” she said, “this is Kelly Marston at the Palo Alto Main Library on Newell Road. There’s something very strange going on with one of our patrons.”
Daisha didn’t wait around to hear what the librarian said next. She dashed out of the library, tears of joy and relief gushing down her cheeks.
Chapter Twenty-Three
DOCTOR STAIN
A steady dose of prescription painkillers numbed the Doctor’s wrist pain. The wounded, helpless feeling that accompanied it made him feel like a child again. He sat back in his comfortable office chair, remembering the merciless teasing he had endured during his school years. A big oaf bully named Chucky Simmons had called him Stain for the first time during a fifth-grade gym class. The awful nickname stuck all the way through Mount Whitney High School in Visalia and beyond.