The Awakening of Ren Crown

by Anne Zoelle

  Chapter Eight: Into the Rabbit Hole

  I packed as quickly as possible, with my parents’ help. They kept hugging me and touching my hair as we stuffed clothes into trash bags. I was sure I was going to forget all sorts of important things, like underwear, but I would worry about that later.

  Marsgrove arrived back before the three hours were up, looking aggravated, winded, and determined. “Where is the sketch?”

  I pointed to the table.

  His eyes narrowed as he took out a pair of black tongs and a thin white document box. Using the tongs as if the paper was hazardous waste material, he carefully placed the sketch inside and sealed the box.

  He breathed an audible sigh of relief, then started shoving my clothing bags into a piece of paper. I stared at him, suddenly wondering why my sketches repulsed him, since he had a similar object himself. I reached toward the storage paper, but he yanked it away as if my leprosy would spread. “It's priceless. Don't touch it.”

  I curled my fingers into my palm.

  He brusquely handed me a turquoise. “Put this in your pocket and leave it there.”

  I slowly stuck the rock in the small pocket of my jeans.

  Marsgrove gave my parents a two-way journal that connected to one he gave to me and said that maybe I could visit at the end of term.

  I took off to check last minute items and spaces in my room as they discussed school fees. He was trying to convince them that magical education was free in the Second Layer for everyone under age twenty-two. I was all for this seemingly magical way of bypassing fifty reams of scholarship and admittance forms.

  And then it was time. They hugged me as if they didn't think they'd ever see me again. It was all too fast. I took one last glance at my parents, who were clutching each other, and said a soft, “Goodbye.”

  I'd be back, I mentally promised. With Christian in tow.

  ~*~

  Thirteen minutes later, we entered the twenty-four hour coffeehouse near my high school. I scratched the skin near my new wrist cuff.

  The ladies at the counter were helping customers. Mages living in the First Layer, Marsgrove had said, on the quick walk here. They looked like normal humans, just as they had every time I had come. But now I knew they were other, and I could see the cuffs I had dismissed previously. It made me nervous, where I had never been nervous here before.

  “Go sit.”

  Marsgrove's quick glances around us and at his tablet were starting to freak me out. Following his instruction, I hunched over a table at the far end of the shop. Few customers were sitting. Just a guy with a Stetson, a girl with a thousand orange bangles, and a couple smooching in the corner. None of them looked magical. Though, who knew? The Stetson could be a cloaking device, the bangles might jam someone's hearing, and the lovers might turn into frogs at any moment.

  Marsgrove ordered two double layer mochas. His cuffed arm rested on the counter. One of the women glanced at the cuff, but the other was clearly flirting as if she knew or recognized him.

  As soon as he had the cups, his eyes met mine and he jerked his head toward the bathroom hall. He handed me a cup as soon as we were alone and out of view. I looked nervously around the hall. There were three doors—two with standard restroom stick figures and one stating authorized personnel only. I shifted on my feet and the shimmer of a fourth door slid into view. Then it abruptly disappeared. I leaned back just a measure, and again, like a mirage, or a perspective anamorphosis where I could only view the desired image from one particular angle and location, it came into view once more. The image looked like water steadily flowing between two panes of glass.

  That had to be the entrance. I opened my mouth to ask Marsgrove, but he waved me off.

  “Hurry. Drink up. You have to absorb magic in order to see the door and to get out of the First Layer,” Marsgrove said in a low voice. “Only registered establishments have permits.”

  I shifted position again, and the waterfall door slid into view, like sidewalk art presenting another world in a single perspective. I could see it already, or at least the thin edge of it, but I followed his lead and drank from my cup.

  Seconds later the waterfall doorway pulled into full glorious view.

  “Lucky to have a shop with a permit so close,” I said nervously, as we moved toward it.

  He snorted. “Shops are everywhere. And they don't all sell coffee.”

  Without pausing he walked right through the cascade. I took a deep breath and followed—butterflies battering against my stomach, knees slightly knocking.

  A light mist swept over me.

  A closed, industrial-styled hall with twelve doors and a large trash can was on the other side. There was some form of writing above each door, three of them were written in glyphs I had never before encountered.

  Marsgrove threw his cup in the trash can, so I followed suit and parted with mine as well. I tried to remember what Will had said about traveling. Pinch or absorb into another layer; port or ride within the layer. Which meant I was in the Second Layer—another dimension of the world—right now.

  As Marsgrove approached a nondescript door, I looked above it and the text shimmered into readable words—Main Depot.

  He opened the door and I carefully stepped through after him...and right into something straight out of one of my black-and-white patterned three-dimensional designs. I now knew what Will had meant when he'd asked me if I'd ever traveled to the Second Layer Depot. I stepped forward, entranced, and the door shut behind me. It opened again, admitting a man who had not been in the coffeehouse or hall. Which meant he had come from somewhere other than the coffeehouse, but had entered here using the same door that I had. No wonder Will was such a travel maniac—how cool were the possibilities?

  Tubes crazily looped in the cavernous sky. Colors and objects whooshed through the clear pipes that overlapped and curled around each other like the rats nest of wires at the back of our old stereo system. One of the largest tubes was whooshing things through faster than the others. I could barely make out tones as each shape flew past.

  A woman flew by on the back of a stork. A man passed riding what looked like a mechanical spider. Two kids shouted from atop a flying carpet. It was madness. Wonderful, chaotic, magical madness.

  I turned to ask Christian how we were going to snag one of those carpets, the first word already curving my lips.

  But the space next to me was empty.

  Of course it was. I pressed a hand to my ribcage, trying to stop the pain from spreading. Would I ever stop doing that?

  Christian? I tried reaching out again to the voice that had spoken in my mind, but no voice answered.

  I clenched my eyes closed, then opened them and strained to focus on the sights in front of me. Dozens of arches peppered the landscape and led into domed rooms labeled with descriptors like gates, threads, pools, shimmer pinches, steps, archways, doorways, sheets, and planes. Signs pointed to long, dark hallways with other words—glimmer travel, vertical transport, plate transfer.

  The letters on the signs shimmered as my eyes passed over them, then cleared into readable text.

  A long line of people were queued up in front of a large dais where people were throwing down portal pads, then disappearing into their depths.

  “Thinking of what you gave him?”

  I turned to see Marsgrove looking grim. He was tucking items into his pockets. A hat, a bracelet, a handkerchief—none of them had been on him in the coffeehouse. I looked behind him and saw a stand labeled “Checkpoint.” People were swapping things over the counter with a harried, bald-headed man who looked like he should be wearing a visor and taking bets. There was a large liquid pump behind him.

  “No, I wasn't thinking of that at all.”

  “Come on. Let's get this over with.” He walked under a sign saying “School Transport,” and I quickly followed. Inside the room were nearly fifty doorways. The one labeled Excelsine was an interesting combination of classical Corinthian columns wrapped in v
ines twisting toward Gothic. Marsgrove used a skeleton key in the lock.

  A gorgeous atrium of modern architecture spread before us and a woman in a crisp business suit nodded at Marsgrove as she walked by, heels clicking. Unexpected. I looked behind me at the busy depot station, then stepped through to the new world.

  The atrium was wide and open, and a long ramp spiraled upward along the rectangular edges of the walls. Doorways dotted the sides of the wall to my right. Groups of students were gathered in front of dozens of the doors. Others passed by carrying bags and packs, and their clothing occasionally, remarkably, changed from one outfit to the next, rippling like waves.

  Hanging in the middle of the atrium was a giant compass surrounded by five concentric silver rings, each rotating in various directions around the ones inside it. The edges of the rings were rippling in an asynchronous, nonuniform pattern as well. The inmost ring lay mostly flat, with just a bit of a slow ripple. The outermost one was wildly changing, even in its thickness.

  A smile started to unwillingly spread my lips.

  On the floor, directly beneath the enchanted gyroscope, was a large stone with Rosetta styled carved markings. The view through the windows showed the building edged a large circular grassy space. Hundreds of students lounged on the grass. Endless sky appeared through spaces between the buildings across the grass circle. Were we at the top of the mountain?

  “Turquoise.” Marsgrove motioned with his hand.

  I blinked, then dug the turquoise nugget from my pocket. As soon as it left my fingers, words on signs grew hazy and people started speaking in languages and tongues that I had never encountered. I hadn't noticed it before now, but had everyone in the depot been speaking English?...or I had been hearing English?

  “Give me your finger.”

  I held out my hand, and quicker than I could react, Marsgrove punctured the tip of my pointer finger with a small knife that was glowing blue. I tried to pull my hand back, but he held firm.

  “Hug the Shinar Stone and press your blood against it.” He pointed to the large engraved rock in the middle of the atrium floor.

  People were passing us, and the only second glances were appreciative ones toward Marsgrove.

  Unnerved, I walked awkwardly over and wrapped my arms around the rock, bloody finger pressing into its surface. I held the position for a few seconds, then decided that I had provided a good enough sideshow. As I let go, the writing on the stone grew brighter, shimmering, and a nearly invisible layer of something pulled away with my movement, then snapped from the rock and settled on me. The writing dulled to stone-cut gray again. I walked quickly back to Marsgrove.

  A girl passing said, “Toot oreet wamput,” to her companion. Something in my brain shifted. Then shifted again, like tumblers slotting into place.

  “It is my favorite parufferie,” the other one answered, her shirt changing from red to blue, then back again.

  I blinked. I could understand her. Though, what was a parufferie?

  Another tumbler scraped and slotted.

  “They sell the best perfume,” the first girl said in clear English.

  I almost stopped walking. I had hugged the Rosetta Stone.

  Marsgrove was doing something complicated with his tablet.

  “I can understand everyone,” I blurted out.

  “Of course you can.” He seemed preoccupied.

  He didn't seem as elated as I was at the suggestion that magic truly might be able to do anything.

  “This is a good thing.” Christian sounded relieved.

  I could see students throwing balls of colored light where I hadn't been able to before.

  “I can see magic.”

  “You'll have to renew the enchantment again in a few months, or learn how to see magic without aid.” He didn't sound as if he cared which I chose.

  I looked around me in awe and anticipation. As soon as I raised Christian, I was going to do some serious learning. I watched as a woman walking across the atrium cast a jet of red at her feet. Immediately, she started moving at least forty miles an hour across the floor, disappearing down a hall.

  Magic could do anything.

  “Good. You are now enrolled as a student.” Marsgrove made a sweeping motion with his hand. Something settled on top of me like a liquid shell, then absorbed. He repeated the motion three more times with lips pressed firmly together. “This will have to do so you can't paint, just in case.”

  The man was a lunatic. I was totally going to paint.

  He turned on his heel. “Follow me.”

  We entered a room containing seven arches, strode through the one second to the left, and emerged onto a section of flat grassland about three football fields long.

  A grassland that then dropped sharply about twenty feet to lay flat for the next three football fields of land, then dropped again—giant terraces continuously spreading and descending thousands of feet, buildings of all varieties, styles, and sizes clumped together in places, open fields in others.

  And the view...

  The mountain was awe-inspiringly huge.

  If the Tower of Babel existed, surely this was it. Or an anti-Tower—a strange enchanted fortress where people spoke in thousands of tongues yet still understood each other.

  I breathed in a deep gulp of air. A fortress without altitude sickness. Boys played a football-like sport one terraced level—no, what had Will called them? Circles?—one circle down from us. A perfect sport for Christian. Euphoria bloomed. Soon. Soon.

  The mountain was surrounded by expansive flat plains and towns stretching out for miles. I could see clouds surrounding mountain tops in the distance, but none lingered here, making the view utterly unspoiled and fantastic.

  My feet had slowed, trying to take in the visual thrill. Marsgrove motioned impatiently in front of another arch. “Hurry.”

  I kept waiting for him to say, “I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date.”

  That arch led us into a cozy Midwestern street. I blinked. It was almost too normal after seeing such a wondrous place earlier, but the mountain still stretched high above. A look down showed more mountain below, so we were still on Excelsine, just nearer to the bottom. Maybe this residential area was where students lived?

  Everyone walking by was a businessperson, a parent, or a small child, though. Maybe this is where professors lived?

  We eventually turned onto a slate path leading to a lovely two-story brick house.

  “Through here.”

  I followed him inside and was surprised by the warm tones and stylish decor. The man obviously had money, although he was in need of a housekeeper. The house was immaculately clean in some places, irreparably cluttered in others. Marsgrove unlocked, then poked through a large wooden secretary. He grabbed a few items, then started climbing the stairs.

  When I didn't immediately follow, he turned and said, “Come on, then,” with a harried wave.

  He walked into a bedroom, opened the closet door, and stepped inside.

  I stepped over the threshold of the room, wondering where the closet might lead. The thought fled as a weight pressed down upon my cuffed wrist, then spread over me, constricting—like a fish caught in a net then hauled to land. I bent over, trying to catch my breath. The closet door slammed closed, as well as the door behind me, and I could hear a lock engage.

  I closed my eyes, betrayal quickly pressing upon me again, as I breathed heavily in the pinched air. I was so stupid. If Marsgrove hadn't been acting so much like the White Rabbit with a tablet instead of a pocket watch...

  The weight of the air lifted and I backed myself against the wall across from the door, eyes searching for weapons. There was a bed, a desk, an armoire, a black box attached to the wall, a wall screen, and some full bookshelves.

  No scissors.

  “It is the best I could do on such short notice.”

  I looked up to see Marsgrove's face, peering through a little barred window in the door that had not been there previously.
>
  “Let me out, now,” I said. I would even forgive him the joke, if he did it right away.

  “It is for the best, really. For you.” His face was almost sympathetic. “I can't let you loose on the world, but I also didn't take you to the Department. The man in charge makes Raphael look like a gregarious border collie. And my cousin...she would dissect you in an instant. Raphael runs free with whatever tool of mass destruction you gifted him with—in the midst of the treaty negotiations. I'm darkly tempted to circumvent Raphael's spell and yank the information from you, but he would have put in protections against me. Better for you not to be in the world at all, but matters have gone beyond that.”

  I swallowed my emotion with difficulty. Crying hadn't yet helped me deal with Christian's loss, and it wasn't going to help me now. “You told my parents you were taking me to school. I felt the magic of the oath. You told Will you wouldn't harm me.”

  “And I fulfilled my pledge, all of it. You are here. You are not hurt. You have extremely enviable shields, as promised, you just won't need them. You are enrolled as a student. Your class transcript, however, is blank until you have a start date, which you never will.”

  Will had stressed the idea of intentions mattering in magic, but Marsgrove had just taught me that words held power.

  “Food will be delivered through the black box. Read, watch television, look out the window. Draw with the ordinary pencils in the desk. Magic cannot be performed inside this room, but too, no one can feel you here. Nullified.” I could feel the net of the energy—magic—around me. “There are suppression and encapsulation fields on the room. It will protect you from yourself and also from anyone else. No one but the two of us can be in this house.”

  “I don't need protection, I need out. Now.” I thought of Will's comment on time thresholds existing with black magic. “You can't keep me prisoner.”

  “You have no idea what is happening in our world.” His expression was dark. “And I have no time for explanations. I'll check on you in a few weeks. And maybe I will teach you magic someday. When you will be useful, and I can control the risk.”