Mark sat up rubbing his head. Caleb was asking Sandy how many men there were and about the location of the entrances to the building. Sandy was lying outright.
Caleb looked over at Mark. “Are you okay, Mark? Can you find your way back down the river with Sandy to the old dam? We have to go help the others. Then I’ll meet up with you there.”
“She hit me,” Mark declared, pointing at Sandy.
Sandy addressed him in the slow clear speech that she used with him when she was in front of others. “Oh, Mark, it all happened so fast. The man hit your head really hard. You’re just not remembering correctly.”
Caleb cocked his head at Mark. “Listen, I need to let them know we’ve found you. The whole operation was to rescue you.”
The man in the beaver hat stood up and scratched his head, looking from Caleb to Mark and then back again. “I don’t know, sir. Everyone’s been talking about how you look different… you know, younger. No offense, sir. You look good… just like you might have tripped over the fountain of youth or something. But Mark here… I’m in his squadron, and he looks way different than his usual self. I’m not even sure this is Mark. Maybe the real Mark is still being kept prisoner.” The man turned back to Mark. “No offense, sir, if you are Mark, but you sure don’t look like him,” he concluded.
Mark blinked at him. Was Warrior Mark actually addressed as “sir” by these men? Did that mean his future self was actually a leader in addition to being a warrior?
Caleb flicked his gaze at Mark and his lips tightened. He seemed to be trying to ask Mark something, but Mark couldn’t tell what.
Sandy fluttered her eyelashes like she always did when she was around Caleb. At first, Mark had wondered if she had something in her eyes, but now he suspected that it was some sort of tic. “Well, they’ve probably been up to visit the magic fountain of youth, of course. Don’t the rest of you know about it? It’s just up past the diversion.” Then she widened her eyes and pressed a hand against her chest. “Or, oops, was that a secret? I’m sorry.”
Caleb’s eyes narrowed fractionally, and the rest of the men’s eyes went sort of buggy as they looked both Caleb and Mark up and down.
“I thought you said you didn’t use magic, sir,” beaver-hat man whispered. “Except for just the once to move the people to the promised land.”
“I don’t,” Caleb said. “I don’t know what Sandy is talking about.”
The yells on the diversion had escalated, and when Mark looked up he could see that several of the fur-clad man had managed to climb the stairs and take down the two men with guns on the platform. The door to the building opened, and another man with a gun started shooting from behind the cover of the door.
When Mark turned his attention back to the people around him, he realized that the air felt like it had been electrified. There was a surge of energy like Mark had felt before, but this time it wasn’t directed at him, but at Caleb’s men. They were thrown backward, away from Mark and Caleb. Two of them shrieked, and the other two swung their fists and arms at the nothingness. Then all four of them turned and ran away, their faces wild and distorted. Mark swung his gaze back to Sandy, but she hadn’t moved.
“Wait!” said Caleb, calling after the men. “Wait!”
But the men only picked up their pace.
Caleb turned and shook his head at Sandy. “Why did you tell them that? What just happened?” Mark squinted his eyes at Caleb. Hadn’t he felt the surge of energy? Didn’t he know what she’d just done?
Sandy fluttered her eyelashes (again). “I’m so sorry, Caleb. I was trying to come up with a plausible explanation for why you and Mark look so young. I didn’t think you wanted to tell them about the stones and docks. I was trying to help. I don’t know what just happened. It seemed like a strange gust of wind or something.”
Mark studied this new Sandy, with her smooth skin and bouncy blond hair. This was not the Sandy who had demanded the combination to the door, imprisoned him and Jake, and nearly pushed him off the diversion. It was, however, the Sandy who had just punched him in the temple. So both Sandys were bad. But when had the Sandys changed, and how?
Sandy darted a look at the action on the dam, and Mark followed her gaze. So far the man with the gun by the door seemed to be holding his position, but more of Caleb’s people were making their way across the diversion.
Caleb lowered his eyebrows. “I have to go catch up with them. Are you two okay making your way down to the dam alone? You can wait for me there. Then we need to go find Ian, Sylvain, and Abbey.”
Mark blinked at him. Had Caleb not felt the surge of energy? Did he not understand that Sandy was dangerous?
“NO!” The word finally exploded out of Mark. “NO!” But he was so frustrated that he couldn’t seem to string any words together, and just started repeating “no, no, no,” while rocking back and forth.
“Oh dear, he’s having an episode again,” Sandy said. She extended her hand to his wrist, and an invisible bolt of charge seemed to come from it, making Mark’s teeth chatter. “I’d feel so much safer if you stayed with us,” Sandy said.
Mark tried to say something, but his lips felt immobilized from the jolt of electricity. He noticed for the first time that the injury on Sandy’s wrist from the arrow had vanished, making him doubly sure that this was a different Sandy. The younger Sandy. But where had the older Sandy gone?
Caleb looked hurriedly at Mark and then over his shoulder. “I really should go. The plan was to rescue Mark, their Mark, but if Selena was holding the two of you captive, I’m not sure if older Mark was even a prisoner. Did you see him?”
“No, it was just us,” Sandy said. “Please don’t go.”
The water pouring off the diversion had finally created a sufficient flow in the river. They could open the spillways on the dam now… and then Sandy would know that Mark had been lying, which in light of the fact that she could throw energy, give electrical charges, and punch him out, was quite terrifying.
Caleb now had his back to the conflict and was looking with concern at Mark, clearly (even to Mark’s limited sensing capacity) trying to decide what to do. Mark thought he felt another surge of energy farther away up on the diversion, and men fell off the diversion left and right like little ants, the plummeting water too thunderous for their cries to be heard.
Sandy grasped Caleb’s arm (in addition to eye fluttering, she did a lot of arm grabbing) and pressed her body close to his, speaking in a soft, almost mesmerizing tone. “I really need your help with Mark, and I didn’t want to tell you, to get your hopes up, but I think I’ve found your parents. I came here with your mother to help her, and then she disappeared. This isn’t your fight. It’s in the future, and depending on what we do now, it may not even happen. It would be better if it didn’t happen. But we can’t change it today, here, without endangering ourselves. What matters now is getting your parents back and getting home. Mark and I were on our way down to see if we could unlock the door to the second derivative point—the wormhole. We can save them. Come with us.”
13. Derivatives
Abbey trotted along through the trees, her throat like sand. She needed water, badly, but Sylvain refused to check his pace, wanting to put as much distance between them and Caleb’s people as possible. Her face felt bruised and scratched from the incessant thrash of tree branches, and her legs ached. Maybe she was coming down with Russell’s illness. Maybe her death would be an ignominious one, here in the forest as a result of dehydration.
“The chapel isn’t too much farther,” Sylvain mumbled. “Just another half mile.” He’d been offering encouragements like this for the last several minutes as if aware that Abbey’s energy was failing. They were going to retrieve the stone and some rations, which apparently were stored in the chapel, and then go and try to liberate Russell and find Jake. Sylvain assured her that he had a sixth sense like a homing beacon for finding other people with witch blood, kind of like the doorbell that rang
in his head when someone used the stones.
“The future is meant to be observed and understood. Those who do not learn from the mistakes of the future are bound to create new ones, and so the cascade of futures begins,” he said, almost absently, by rote, more to himself than to her.
“What?”
After doing a shoulder check, Sylvain slowed down a bit, and after a few seconds Abbey found she could breathe again. “It’s just an old saying I learned as part of the trials. This is all my fault. If I hadn’t been so determined to achieve a win-win when I helped Caleb, your mother never would have gone to Nowhere and rescued all those witches.”
“But shouldn’t they have been rescued?” Abbey replied. “If someone could rescue them?”
“It was against the rules of the Guild,” Sylvain said. “It was generally believed that if someone went to Nowhere, they should stay there, because they had a tendency to meddle inappropriately in the timeline. But I don’t think your mother ever believed that about Sandy. And it wasn’t Mark’s fault that he ended up in Nowhere. There were exceptions. And your mother isn’t one for rule-following generally, especially since the membership in the Guild, until the mass exodus from Nowhere, had become a little thin, so nobody had been following rules much. I’m afraid I may have been guilty of a few missteps myself, very minor of course. A few lucky investments. A few right guesses in terms of my business development—”
“Getting rid of your competition,” Abbey muttered.
Sylvain scrunched up his face and looked blank for a second. “Hmm? Oh yes, right. That. Like I said, don’t assume that was personally motivated.”
Abbey snorted. “You didn’t want to ruin Simon’s company so your own operating system had a better chance at competing against his? Is that why you hired him this time around? To prevent him from ever creating his operating system in the first place? And it sounds like it was a double win-win, because Caleb’s people said you dug up their camp after they left. Was that to get your aluminum? But it looks like you didn’t win after all since Sandy now owns the mining company and your operating system isn’t nearly as good as Simon’s because space travel doesn’t seem to be going anywhere in this new future, and it’s all under the control of Transplanetary.”
Sylvain halted and looked at her. “What? What do you mean? Simon works for me? For Salvador Systems? Transplanetary? Frank Simpson’s startup? What are you talking about?”
Abbey cocked her head. “When I went to your future just now, Simon was working for your company, and nobody, except for Transplanetary and a few other people, were allowed to travel in space. And there seemed to be lots of… accidents. I assumed that was because the new operating system wasn’t as efficient or safe,” she said, thinking of Sylvain’s crash. It was probably best not to mention that right now.
Sylvain listened to her, licking his lips with a wild and wide-eyed look of alarm. Then he raked his hands through his hair repetitively until it fell forward into his eyes in messy shanks. He spun around and walked away from her. “Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear. This is much worse than I thought. Much worse.”
He continued walking and shaking his head, and Abbey sauntered after him, unsure what to say.
Finally he flipped a few strands of his hair behind his ear. “I used my future knowledge to make a few small prudent adjustments, but nothing dramatically different from my intended future path. But it seems that others don’t have the same restraint. My investments and companies have already been hit very hard, and now this. These changes of which you speak affect not only me and my personal wealth, but the wealth of all the people in the new world. Space travel was essential for the acquisition of new resources and the repopulation of our planet. This has to be fixed.”
Abbey found it a bit ironic that they were talking about the future as if it were the past. She wondered if she should tell Sylvain how involved Sandy Ford seemed to be in Coventry’s future. “Sandy saved Mom’s life, right?”
Sylvain’s eyes narrowed. “Sandy had the appearance of saving your mother’s life. Why?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean Sandy hit someone with a car who was ostensibly trying to take your mother’s life.”
“Ostensibly?”
“Well… there were some questions. Anyway, it will never be proved one way or the other unless we could go back in time. Your mother believes Sandy saved her life. And that’s neither here nor there. As I was saying, not totally following the rules was okay when there were so few of us and we were careful. There was less likelihood that we would negatively cross each other’s timelines.”
“Is that like crossing the streams?”
Sylvain arched one of his thin silver brows. “What?”
“Never mind,” said Abbey. “What do you mean by crossing each other’s timelines?”
“Because witches have knowledge of their future, they don’t take well to someone changing their timeline, especially if their future becomes worse. Whereas if we stay within our own timelines, a few little careful tweaks generally go unnoticed, and don’t change the future dramatically. Seriously affecting the timeline of another witch generally results in interventions from both parties, and each little change can cause its own little cascade of changes, and eventually the future as we know it, or knew it, is no more. So it’s a rule not to interfere with each other’s timelines, intentionally or otherwise. But it’s evident that some of the witches from Nowhere don’t care about the rules, and it’s causing huge instability.”
“Do you think that’s what caused the split… of the futures?” Abbey said.
Sylvain cocked his head. “Possibly. But whatever split the futures occurred in our present, not in the future, although I suppose that since the time periods are entangled…” He trailed off, and then pursed his lips and continued. “There’s a belief that as the line of zero magnetic declination moves across the center, our abilities and the energy of the points will intensify. The line of zero declination is due to cross through Coventry later this year, so that could have something to do with the split as well.”
Abbey thought of Mark’s talk of zero declination a few days ago. She should start paying more attention to him. She imagined the drawing of the pentagram and Agrippa’s cross they’d created using the maps Dr. Ford had given them, with the stones and docks at the points and the statue of Quinta Francis Merry in the center. Except in the future, the statue wasn’t in the center anymore.
“By the center, you mean the center of the pentagram?”
Sylvain nodded.
Yet the power of the stones and docks appeared to be diminishing, not increasing.
“Why didn’t you tell me my dad is an Alty?” she said, switching tacks since Sylvain suddenly seemed uncharacteristically chatty. “That’s where they went, isn’t it—a parallel universe?”
Sylvain sighed. “Well, yes. That’s where Ian and I think your dad went. Your mother thinks he was actually trying to destroy the points that allow second derivative travel and accidentally ended up traveling instead. We’re not sure if your mother was able to follow or not. She’d need an Alty for that. But the fact that she’s not here suggests that she was successful. There have long been rumors of a second Alty…”
“What do you mean, second derivative travel?” Abbey’s voice had become sharp.
“Travel between universes. Travel to the futures is zero derivative travel—anyone with witch blood can do it, provided they have access to stones and they contain the energy. Travel between the futures is first derivative travel, because only camels can do it. Travel between the universes using the wormhole vertices is second derivative travel, due to its increased complexity and the fact that only Altys can do it. Each derivative of travel has the capacity to increase the rate of rate of change in the universe, which is why the higher derivatives should be used sparingly. Anyway, second derivative travel is two-way travel. Your parents should be able to return.”
Second derivative travel…
The second derivative of displacement was acceleration, the rate of change in velocity. The last twenty-four hours had felt like nothing but acceleration: mind-numbing, neck-breaking acceleration. But acceleration was only the second derivative of displacement.
A sick feeling of probability washed over her. There were five commonly used derivatives of displacement.
“Is there third and fourth derivative travel?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“What are they?” Abbey said.
“Third derivative travel is travel to the past. We expect that, like first and second derivative travel, only certain people can do it.”
“Like people who have spent time in Nowhere and whose future is theoretically the past?”
“That’s what Ian thinks. But it’s never been proven. Nobody has been able to identify any vertices or vectors that mark the locations for travel to the past. They don’t fit the pentagram or the cross. There are some historical riddles that make reference to using the golden mean to find them, but only fragments of them have been preserved, so nobody has been able to figure it out. So at this point, third derivative travel is only hypothetical, I think.”
“And fourth.”
In the gloom of the forest, Sylvain’s deep-set eyes seemed more shadowy than usual, and his expression had grown quite macabre. “According to our historical records—which, as I said, are pretty spotty—fourth derivative travel can only be done by one person, and that person can engage in all four other derivatives of travel as well, which makes them very powerful, and potentially dangerous.”
“Quinta,” said Abbey.
Sylvain’s tone was bleak. “Correct. The only thing we have going for us is that because nobody’s been able to figure out the locations for third derivative travel, any Quinta in recent history inclined to toy with the past hasn’t—to our knowledge—been able to do so.”
A Grave Tree Page 20