Mark had been searching the room surreptitiously for Digby while Sandy spoke, but he couldn’t see the rat anywhere. He glanced at the slightly ajar door.
“So, are you going to help me, Mark?”
Mark whipped his head back and realized that Sandy was expecting an answer. He glanced at Jake. Could they possibly make a break for it while they were helping Sandy solve the puzzle? Should he show Sandy how to access the room? Maybe she was trying to help Mr. Sinclair and Ms. Beckham, who, if their apparitions were any indication, were clearly trapped somewhere and in need of help.
He looked back at Sandy. She still smiled at him in that terrifying, forced way.
But then there was the issue of Mr. Sinclair’s message that he had only partially read. “Don’t trust S…”
S… Who did Mr. Sinclair mean? Selena? Sylvain? Sandy?
“Mark!” Sandy’s tone had grown short again.
“I will need Jake’s help,” Mark said. “He’s my helper.”
Sandy turned and scrutinized Jake with her eyebrows pressed together, an angular V of wrinkles between them.
“I need Jake’s help with something else,” she said. “Camels are hard to come by, and the unfortunate thing about camels is that they keep dying on you. It just so happens that your friend—Charles, was it?—killed my spare. So I was hoping you would help me with some necessary transportation. I’m feeding the people who still live in this future until they can get their agricultural operations established. They’re depending on me. It’s really important. I just need to get home so I can collect some provisions. Just one jump, and then you can be on your way.”
Jake hesitated. “Mark said he needs my help.”
Sandy’s teeth appeared to grind together for a second, but then she smiled. “Of course. We can do that first.” She rose from the table. “Shall we?”
Mark heaved to his own feet, which were sore and blistered on account of hiking all day and spending the last two hours in soaking wet shoes.
They followed Sandy out of the office and back down the hallway. Mark couldn’t help but notice that the man with the gun was following behind very closely. And Digby was nowhere in sight.
*****
The sand pelted Abbey’s face and arms like tiny needles. She tried to open her eyes, but they were immediately filled with grit, and she cried out in pain. Only Ian’s hand, still firmly clenched in her own, reminded her that she was not alone. Where was the bubble? Had they arrived in the middle of the desert in a sandstorm? Had she not pictured it correctly? Again, their travel had felt strained. She bent without letting go of Ian’s hand and touched the ground beneath her feet. Sand had already gathered around her shoes and ankles.
“We have to get out of here!” Ian shouted. “Hand me the branch, and picture the treed future. When you’re ready, I’ll hand it back to you.”
Abbey imagined the tall, silent trees of Caleb’s future. “Ready.”
She felt Ian shove the Madrona at her.
She took the branch, and the pelting sand abruptly ceased. Then she and the others were standing at the edge of the beaver pond in the humid, but cool, air of Caleb’s future. Where were the docks? If they were at the beaver pond, they were near the docks, but they obviously weren’t standing on them.
Abbey tried to orient herself. Darkness surrounded them, and the trees looming above them cut pointed silhouettes against the deep blue, almost-night sky just starting to wink with stars. In the distance, a beaver slapped a warning. They were at the other end of the long pond, at least a kilometer away from the docks. How was that possible?
Then Abbey noticed the man clutching Caleb’s hand.
Damian.
“I couldn’t just leave him there,” said Caleb as he released Damian, who slowly backed away. “Can’t we turn him in somewhere? Shouldn’t we turn him in somewhere?”
Ian pursed his lips. “You forget that if he was in Nowhere, he was probably there for a very good reason.”
“I wasn’t,” Russell said. “It was self-defense.”
“Got it,” Ian said. “I somehow doubt that was the case for Mr. Short here. As for turning him in, we could try, but I’m afraid we’re having a bit of a crisis of leadership at the Council level.”
Caleb turned to Damian, who had already moved up to the tree line. Caleb followed him, his body tensed into a fighting stance. “You said you’d tell us about our parents. Now spill.”
Damian gave a sly sort of smile. “You could ask your friend Ian there the same thing. Everyone knows that your dad is the Alty, and that it runs in families. Everyone except you two. You’re being used. They know your parents aren’t coming back, at least not without help. They’re trying to keep that from you as long as they can, when it’s possible that one of you is the only one who can rescue them. Work with us and we can help you find them, and then we can build a real future for people of witching heritage.”
“Right, a glorious future in the parallel universe,” Ian said.
Abbey assessed the situation. First of all, she was able to use the docks—or not-quite-docks, it seemed—which meant she was dead in the future, a fact that Ian already seemed to know. And now she was being told that her parents weren’t coming back and that her dad was in fact the Alty—and therefore apparently capable of traveling to parallel universes.
And she had a horrible sinking feeling that the fact that they had not arrived in the bubble in her future meant that there was no bubble, no city, and no people. Only desert.
And probably no Sam and no baby.
Change the future, but don’t change too much. Apparently it was quite easy to completely obliterate one’s future.
Damian’s teeth flashed against his dark skin as he and Caleb circled each other. Russell jumped off the dock and went to stand behind Caleb.
“And what are you working toward, Ian?” Damian said. “Other than trying to stop us, of course.”
“I’m just not convinced that your glorious future in another universe should come at the cost of this universe.”
Damian snorted. “What has this universe ever done for us? The Council is on our side. They’re making a ruling at the end of the week.”
Ian’s face turned bleak and he lifted his fingers to his lips as if to remove a cigarette before shoving his hands deeply into the pockets of his pants. “Maybe. But right now we have some more basic problems, like how we’re all going to get back to the present to go to that meeting. And unless I’m mistaken, you still don’t have a working wormhole.”
“Peter obviously made the jump.”
“Why, because he’s not here? You have no idea where Peter is. I could have him locked in a basement somewhere for all you know. I wouldn’t hitch my plan to save the entire witch clan on assumptions.”
Damian looked back at Abbey. “Anyway, thanks for the lift. You kids should come to the Council meeting. I think you’ll find it very educational as to who the real renegades are.” He pulled a sharp hunting knife out of his pocket and waved it at Caleb.
“Let him go,” Ian ordered.
Damian backed away, holding the knife out in front of him.
“Good luck,” Ian called, removing his shoe and dumping a pile of sand onto the ground. “Remember the trees around here get confusing. It’s hard to see any landmarks.”
“The stones always take you home,” Damian called back.
“Only if they’re working,” Ian replied in a sing-songy voice, but low, so Damian couldn’t hear him. Damian had turned and was now running through the trees.
“Why aren’t we stopping him?” Caleb demanded.
Ian shrugged. “He’s more of a dead man here than in Nowhere. It may be unpleasant, but Nowhere is actually pretty safe—”
Abbey interrupted. “If the stones aren’t working, how are we going to get home, and why were the docks still working?” She pictured Farley lying by himself at Sylvain’s cabin door with nobody to greet him or fe
ed him.
Ian replaced his shoe and removed the other. “From what I understand, the energy required to move between the futures is less because the futures are strongly energetically connected. There are some who believe they’re only separated by a thin membrane and are in fact juxtaposed—in superposition with each other, so to speak. Anyway, I suggest we get a move on. We don’t want to be standing here if Dr. Ford decides to pay us a visit.”
“Where are we going?” Caleb said.
“For the time being, away from here,” Ian said.
Abbey stared at the little Madrona sapling growing in the spot where they had arrived. Hunger hit her like a feral dog gnawing at her stomach. She’d eaten a sandwich at the hospital, but dinnertime had long come and gone, and with the loss of Caleb’s backpack, they had no food.
*****
“We need to figure out how to open the door,” Sandy said.
Mark stood once again in the small antechamber inside the base of the dam in front of the heavy iron door with the sign written in a different language. Sandy had pulled the lever to drain the water from the room. Two men with guns stood behind them. The smell of gunpowder marked the air, and spent casings lay on the floor. Clearly, they had tried to use force to gain access to the other room, which explained the loud blasts that he and Jake had heard earlier. Mark hoped the integrity of the dam structure hadn’t been compromised.
He’d hoped to devise a plan en route to the room. But he hadn’t, and so now he stood looking dumbly at the door. He knew the combination. He could just open it for them. Then maybe he and Jake would be let go. But he doubted it. Maybe once they were inside the room he could create a diversion, and he and Jake could escape. He doubted this too. He wondered what Warrior Mark would do.
Sandy tapped her foot on the cement floor.
Mark felt sweat gathering in his armpits and across his forehead. He squinted his eyes at the sign again, looking for hidden information, for signs of authorship, for suggestions on how to get out of this mess. But he couldn’t make any sense of the characters, apart from their groupings in the form of the combination. He was also worried about Digby.
The foot-tapping continued.
Mark grasped at a fleeting lie. “The sign says that water needs to be flowing from the two lower spillways for the door to open.”
Sandy’s eyebrows dropped and drew together, and her mouth got all puckered. “How do you know? How can you read that?”
“I see patterns,” Mark said.
Sandy turned and glared at the sign, her hands on her hips, and then back at Mark. “I don’t believe you.”
It took all of Mark’s focus not to clench his fists, seize up, and drop into a protective crouch. He shrugged and hoped she didn’t notice that his left leg was trembling.
She shook her head, a severe, jerky sort of a movement. “It’s impossible anyway. There isn’t enough water in the reservoir.”
Mark shrugged again, the way he’d seen Caleb do with his shoulders relaxed and a bright smile on his face. (Mark doubted his own smile had the appearance of being bright.)
Sandy walked to the wheel and spun it in an agitated circle. “Why would there have to be water in the spillways?”
“Maybe the mechanism is hydraulic,” Jake said.
Sandy flung the wheel the other direction and yanked on the door again and again, stomping her foot and letting out bleats and swears as it refused to budge. Her eyes were narrowed and her face flushed when she turned to the two men with guns. “We’re going to have to let some water into the dam reservoir.”
One of the men shook his head. “But the diversion was meant to be permanent. There are no outlet valves or spillways. The only way to refill the reservoir would be to bust a hole in the diversion.”
“Then do it,” Sandy said.
“It could destabilize the whole structure. And if it lets go, it could destabilize this structure.”
“I don’t care. I need to get into this room.” Vibrant red spots had appeared on Sandy’s cheeks. Archipelagos of rage. (They kind of reminded Mark of the Galapagos Islands.)
The man regarded her warily and took a careful step backward. “Wouldn’t it be better to wait until morning? When we can see, and the workers come back? I’m just thinking of your safety, ma’am.”
Mark watched the volley between Sandy and the man. Maybe she really did want to save Mr. Sinclair and Ms. Beckham. Maybe Mark was standing in the way of that right now by not giving her the combination. But he had a bad feeling about doing that. Of course, he had bad feelings about a lot of things, so his bad feeling sensor was probably not as finely tuned as it could be. However, it was always better to err on the side of caution where bad feelings were concerned. At least that was how Mark had always lived his life. (He suspected that Caleb went the opposite way. Or maybe Caleb just didn’t have bad feelings. Mark didn’t know.)
While he had been thinking this, the air seemed to be gathering around Sandy in an odd way. It felt a bit like the energy that Mark could sense around the stones, except that was good energy, and this was bad energy. Very bad.
“Now,” Sandy barked. A surge of the bad energy arced through the room, and the man who had been suggesting that they should wait until morning lurched backward and into the cement wall of the dam, hitting his head against the hard surface. He staggered forward, then he and the other man opened the door to the outside and ran out of the room, leaving the frigid water to gush in over Mark’s already cold and wet feet.
The whole thing took only seconds, and Mark shook his head, wondering if he’d imagined it. Jake’s open mouth and white face suggested otherwise, but he couldn’t be sure.
Sandy turned to Mark and Jake. “You’d better not be lying, Mark, because if you are…”
She left the consequences of his deceit unsaid, which, for Mark, was much worse than an explicit statement regarding the nature of his upcoming doom. He was easily able to conjure all sorts of very unpleasant outcomes, such as being tossed in the reservoir and forced through the turbines, being thrown off the front of the dam, or being dashed to bits by that bad energy. The dreadful food Mark had consumed less than an hour before rolled over uncomfortably in his stomach.
“Move it!” Sandy yelled, and Mark and Jake both scurried out the door and into the river, where moonlight now painted a rippling white reflection on the water.
10. Return of the Light
After some argument, they decided to head to the stones at Salisbury Swamp, just in case they were still working. Ian quizzed Russell as to what Sylvain had meant by “looking for a point of power.” But Russell said a bit testily that he didn’t know, and that it was evident that he was not going to get a rabies shot in time, so if he started foaming at the mouth they should just leave him behind. He said this with the air of a martyr and gave Abbey a mopey look that caused Caleb to roll his eyes. Ian snapped that he was fairly certain that they had another twenty-four hours for Russell to get the vaccine and that if he couldn’t get them home by then, they would go back to Simon’s future and go to the hospital.
When this was settled, at least in Ian’s mind, they set out walking.
The path they had once followed down Coventry Hill was overgrown and indiscernible, but they stayed on a north bearing according to Caleb’s compass.
The moon hung high in the starlit sky, and a chill had thoroughly worked its way through Abbey’s clothes by the time they reached the outskirts of what had once been Coventry City and started to pass the crumbled foundations of houses and the remnants of old, buckled roads with trees growing up the center.
Abbey stared at the basement shells with some dismay. What had happened that could level every single house in Coventry? She saw no remnants of building materials, furniture, or belongings, like she would expect to see if there had been some sort of natural disaster. After all, they were only thirty years in the future. Instead, it was like the houses had just been picked up—occupants, con
tents, and all—and whisked away to another world, leaving behind only their foundations.
Perhaps they had.
But how had the trees grown so big so fast?
“Where did you go while we were at the hospital?” she asked Ian.
“I was visiting an old friend,” he said.
“You knew that I was dead,” she said. “That I’m going to die, soon.” At this point it might be of starvation, she thought. Or from rabies. She eyed Russell, who seemed to be following her very closely, like an ever-present shadow.
“This is temporary,” Ian said. “A blip. We’re going to figure out a way to undo this messed-up future so you don’t die. We have to.”
“Where are our parents, Ian? Why haven’t they come back?”
Ian sighed and once again lifted his fingers to his lips to remove a phantom cigarette. “We’re not sure. We think your dad went to one of the wormholes to try to destroy it, and that he somehow got pulled to a parallel universe. At least that’s what your mom thought, and we know your mom tried to go after him, but we have no idea how she planned to get through, since she’s not an Alty. There is rumor of another Alty, but that’s unconfirmed.”
“And when were you going to tell us that our dad is an Alty?” Caleb demanded.
“In good time,” Ian replied tersely. “There are reasons we didn’t.”
“Like what?”
“Like that it’s hereditary, so as Damian suggested, one of you is likely an Alty too. If you had known that, you might have attempted to travel between worlds, and that’s extremely dangerous to try without training. In case you haven’t noticed, your parents haven’t come back. Sylvain, your mother, and I didn’t want one of the three of you deciding to head off to save the day.”
Abbey’s eyes filled with hot tears of frustration and starvation. “Please stop reminding me that my parents haven’t come back yet.”
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