A Grave Tree

by Jennifer Ellis

  Caleb sat on the couch, texting madly with Anna. He looked at least two years older than he had four days ago. So did she. Simon had recoiled when he saw them, and he still flicked wary glances their way while he ate. Physically, Simon was no longer their older brother. Emotionally, who was he? Emotionally, who were they?

  Mark’s pentagram drawing was spread out on the coffee table, as were two of the maps that Mark had retrieved from the office in the dam. The third map—a map from the future—was not in Mark’s bag when they got home.

  “You can bring things from the present to the future,” Sylvain explained, “and things that are from the present back from the future—like your mother’s handbag and the two older maps Mark has here. But you can’t bring things from the future back to the present, which is why the other map, if it was dated 2035, stayed.”

  That was why the soil Abbey had placed in her pocket for later study was gone, and why Caleb had been in his underwear when they got back. Apparently losing one’s clothes was a known problem in time travel; Sylvain explained that he always had his future clothes (like the jumpsuits from his locker that they’d worn back from the future several months ago) made in the present, so he could get around in the future without the potential inconvenience of arriving back to the present unclothed.

  Sylvain’s previous reluctance to tell them anything had dissipated with the events of the previous days. In fact, he now seemed almost anxious to share as much as possible. This sudden turnaround scared Abbey a bit, as if he might be planning to go away and leave them to their own devices.

  The topographic map showed two of the new points of power in the area of the Granton Dam, based on the shift of the center from the Square of the Mother to the roof of the library. One of the new points of power was the location of the diversion.

  The points of power were connected through time, according to Sylvain, because time wasn’t linear, so if they were moved in the future, it had an influence over where they were in the present, as the points strived for coherence. And these points would remain weakened until either the statue in the future was returned to the center, or the statue in the present was moved to the location of the future library. Mark had calculated location of the future library to be somewhere near the cube library on the current Coventry College campus. Abbey found it odd that the libraries looked so much alike.

  But the statue of the present was gone, stolen two nights before, while they were in the future. So there would be no moving it.

  They were still arguing about whether to try to return the statue to its original location in the future. According to Sylvain, the original points of power were more powerful, having had hundreds of years to work their energy into the soil and ecosystems around them. The new points of power were barely established, and the Madronas that marked them were younger, making travel more precarious and the reassembly of their particles on the other end more uncertain. But as Sylvain noted, this might not be a bad thing, as it might restrict the number of people using the stones and docks. And Sylvain was convinced that it was not going to be as easy as simply returning the statue to the train station. Something about Abbey’s parents’ message to return the statue “to center,” not “to the center,” bothered him.

  However, if they hoped to rescue Ian, Jake, or their parents—and stop Sandy—they needed to be able travel. The cable, by enabling them to draw upon their own energy, would help, but their journeys would still be perilous. Of course, on many levels, they always were.

  They didn’t know what the isostatic residual gravity map was for, although given that their abilities were related to gravity, Abbey was sure everyone was incubating hypotheses. Mark seemed very agitated regarding the loss of the map showing the dramatic shift in magnetic declination. Abbey could hardly believe that such a map even existed. Had a geomagnetic jerk caused the rift between worlds that made people, things, and elements leap to superposition? Had one of them caused the geomagnetic jerk? Was that what was to happen on July 12, 2013—the date, according to Abbey’s list, of the bomb that was not a bomb?

  The question of why Sandy had moved the statue—at least they assumed it was Sandy—had been discussed at length, with Sylvain favoring the hypothesis that she did it so she could have a point of power in a location convenient to grow her grave tree and divert water and energy to her plant in the future Coventry City. Caleb believed she did it to trap their parents in a parallel universe by disabling the wormholes. Mark, in an uncharacteristic offering, suggested that the diversion had been built so the very bad woman (Sandy) could have access to both sides of the dam to look for the entrance to the pentagram room.

  They were all possibilities.

  It occurred to Abbey that the files of Sylvain’s that referenced the center might have some answers. They still hadn’t told Sylvain that they had his files, and Simon had indicated that he had made limited progress in deciphering the strange language. They should probably tell Sylvain. After all, he might know how to read it. But something was making them all hesitate.

  The other new point of power on the map was only two hundred meters from Sylvain’s cabin, at the spot where they’d seen the ghosts—a rather convenient location. More importantly, based on Mark’s calculations of how far northeast all the old points might have shifted in response to the statue being moved to the library, the point right outside Sylvain’s cabin appeared to be the same wormhole point of power that had once been under the Granton Dam. Sylvain hypothesized that the ghosts that had appeared in that area had been Abbey’s parents, trying to return from the parallel universe into which they’d disappeared.

  A new Madrona, already a strapping two meters tall, marked the spot. Sylvain believed that by recreating the pentagram around it, with the wood of a Madrona, and the markings that Mark had so carefully drawn, they could build another wormhole on this nearby point of power. That was why Sandy had wanted the drawing.

  They also discussed the fact that at least one and possibly two of them were Alties. It always ran in families, and if Mrs. Forrester was in a parallel universe with Abbey’s parents, and Mark had already been able to partially teleport through the pentagram, there was a good chance that he was.

  Abbey glanced from Caleb to Simon, trying to see through their skin into their veins, to zoom into their cells and chromosomes and view their genes. One of them was an Alty too. But their genes also potentially harbored other, less desirable secrets. If their mother had Huntington’s, as Abbey suspected, then each of them had a fifty percent chance of carrying the disease. She thought about future Caleb and his pallid demeanor, and Sarah’s warnings about him being unwell. She looked back at her robust twin.

  It wasn’t fair.

  Then she thought of Jake, whom she’d failed to save, and Russell, who’d been vaporized trying to save them. That wasn’t fair either.

  Was she still a camel, still scheduled for death herself? Or had Ian made the ultimate sacrifice, entombing himself in that terrifying grave tree and releasing her from her own sentence? She wouldn’t know unless she went to her own future and found herself alive and well, with Sam and a baby on the way. But her own future seemed to have been obliterated, left in a swirl of sand on a desolate desert. Was that because she’d died? Because she was no longer around to invent the membrane that protected the desert city from the heat of the sun?

  Caleb had still had some bits of the grave tree membrane on his clothes when they got back—did that mean the tree was from the present? Or even the past? The prospect made Abbey want to look over her shoulder every few seconds. But like any good scientist, she had taken samples of the membrane and looked at them under her microscope. They looked remarkably similar to the cells in the membrane that had covered the desert city.

  Abbey took another bite of her mushroom soup, her stomach fluttering like the home of a thousand butterflies. Tomorrow was the Council meeting, and Sylvain expected it might go badly, that he might be taken away. So today, they wo
uld recreate the pentagram on the point of power, and they would see if they could go to the parallel universe to rescue her parents.

  She studied the older man as he ate his own soup, his silvery hair curled around his collarbone. He seemed gaunter than he had three days ago, like he too had aged a few years. Was he really Mark’s father? On that topic he’d said nothing more, and Mark had not asked, unless he had done so privately.

  “Do you think Sandy was telling the truth about our mother being Quinta?” Abbey said. “Or did she just say that to try to convince us to help her?”

  Sylvain raised his bony shoulders. “I don’t know. Sandy’s abilities suggest that she herself is Quinta, especially her seeming ability to travel at such a distance from the point of power. But some of those abilities could have come from the power she was drawing from the tree.”

  “And where did she go? With the tree.”

  Sylvain laid down his spoon. “Well, remember what I said about the docks being used to “travel between”? Before they were used to travel between futures, some say they were used to travel between dimensions. That was mere speculation. What those dimensions look like, I don’t know.”

  Abbey contemplated the fourth dimension of spacetime and the myriad of dimensions associated with string theory, superstring theory, and M theory. Were Jake and Ian off somewhere floating in one of those very hypothetical dimensions? She was really beginning to prefer Newtonian physics.

  “So she could reappear at any time?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “With the tree?”

  “I would say so, yes.”

  “And where is the Sandy of the present? Do we know?”

  “Like time is not linear, and the points of power are connected, it’s believed that Quinta is also timeless and energetically the same in all time periods. So if she is Quinta, there is no present Sandy, and no future Sandy.”

  “Is there a past Sandy?”

  “Since the past is as yet inaccessible to us… yes, I believe so. I hope so,” Sylvain added more quietly.

  Abbey’s mind-feed began reciting automatically:

  The zero derivative of displacement is position. The zero derivative of travel is travel to the future.

  The first derivative of displacement is velocity, the rate of change in position. The first derivative of travel is travel between futures or dimensions.

  The second derivative of displacement is acceleration, the rate of change in velocity. The second derivative of travel is travel to parallel universes.

  The third derivative of displacement is jerk, the rate of change in acceleration. The third derivative of travel is travel to the past.

  The fourth derivative of displacement is jounce, the rate of change in jerk. The fourth derivative of travel is unknown.

  They’d proceeded through velocity and acceleration in less than a year. How long would it take for them to get to jounce, and what would it mean when they did?

  Her brainiac mind-feed had been quieter lately. Like her brain had been rewritten when the physics rules she’d once shaped her life around had shattered and spun off into a shadowy and uncertain realm of relativity, parallel universes, grave trees, other dimensions, and magic.

  Lots of magic.

  Ian might not want to call it magic, but she could find no other name. It was magic, and it was completely changing their lives and her perspectives on everything. She wasn’t sure if there was even any point in keeping lists anymore, or consulting old lists. After all, the future could be rewritten again and again.

  She thought of her future self and the list that she had typed… perhaps in an effort to save her baby. Her and Sam’s baby.

  But was there ever a baby? Was the baby in the box with Schrödinger’s cat waiting for the wave function to be collapsed?

  Her future self was now a ghost. A cipher as indistinct as the ones she and Mark had seen in the woods a few days ago.

  Maybe she was no longer Inquisitive Abbey. Maybe she was Adventurous Abbey.

  But her list had already proven correct, and she’d already failed. She hadn’t saved Jake on March 9. What of her advice not to listen to her mother and not to let her mother use the stones on May 6? Did that mean her mother would be home by then? Was July 12 still the date of the bomb that was not a bomb?

  Perhaps she’d keep the list.

  They gathered out in the woods after Mark had sent one last email to some Luanne person, and Abbey had uploaded all her ideas regarding the Burton extraction process, as well as some of her hypotheses regarding the physics of magic, to Sam’s dropbox.

  They’d packed their new backpacks for travel, with the cable, gun, various keys, flashlights, compasses, maps, and food scattered among their various packs as per Mark’s suggestion. They were all going, even Sylvain, since he didn’t seem to think he was going to have much luck at the Council Meeting. Mark had taken a little convincing, as he had been determined to go in search of the fifth map. But he was by far the most powerful of them, and they needed him. Ultimately the prospect of rescuing his mother had won him over.

  Mark had already carefully reconstructed the pentagram in the dirt in the spot they had cleared of shrubbery earlier that morning. They had left the new Madrona at the center and placed the slivered wood of a few carefully harvested limbs in the outlines of the pentagram. The star-shape already pulsed with the familiar energy.

  They had decided that they would all hold hands, to avoid the risk of someone being left behind or ending up somewhere else. Simon had Farley on a leash.

  Abbey thought about the Selena of the future still trying to get to a parallel universe. That Selena probably wouldn’t exist when they got back. The future would rewrite itself again. And probably again.

  She had looked up the curious four-leaf symbol with a circle that was on the magnet, the stone, and the cable. It was a witch’s knot, a pagan symbol of protection. Abbey drew the symbol in her mind, praying for protection. There were millions of potential parallel universes out there. How would they find the right one?

  She thought of Ian’s statement that jumping to parallel universes was extremely dangerous without training, and that if done incorrectly it could result the release of a burst of energy big enough to rip apart the universe. But Sylvain had reassured them that it would all be fine—that some universes were more entangled or connected to each other than others and that they would be drawn into the correct one by virtue of their genes. That he knew what he was doing.

  She glanced at him standing in the circle with his hands in Mark’s and Caleb’s, his silvery locks falling over his shoulders, and an unsettling thought occurred to her. They had assumed that her father’s message not to trust S had referred to Sandy.

  They had never considered that it might refer to Sylvain.

  She remembered her note to herself, from herself. Beware of false prophets.

  “All right,” Sylvain said. “Who’s going to try first?”

  Author’s Note

  If you are interested in looking at the maps provided in A Quill Ladder, please go to the reader bonuses section of my website and check them out.

  Readers have a lot of influence over what succeeds and what does not. The most helpful thing you can do for a writer is leave a review. A single review carries a lot of weight, so please, if you enjoyed this story and want to read more, go and provide your thoughts on Amazon.com, or Goodreads, or wherever you like to talk about books. I will be ever so grateful.

  Other Books in the Series

  A Pair of Docks

  Derivatives of Displacement Book 1

  Get it here

  Siblings Abbey, Caleb, and Simon discover a set of stones that allow them to go back and forth between their world and what appears to be...the future. Unfortunately, they’re not the only ones who know about the stones, and they soon realize their lives are in danger from a man known only as Mantis. Abbey, Caleb, and Simon must follow a twisting tra
il of clues that will lead them from their neighbor with Asperger's to a strange professor who claims to know the rules of the stones, and to multiple futures.

  A Quill Ladder

  Derivatives of Displacement Book 2

  Get it here

  Abbey Sinclair just wants to return to her quiet life of chemistry experiments and physics textbooks. But life is anything but quiet for the Sinclairs. Abbey’s mother is taking secret trips to the stones with Caleb, Simon has been arrested for hacking into the City Hall computer, and to really complicate matters, the witches from Nowhere have moved in across the street.

  Book 4 of The Derivatives of Displacement coming in June 2016

  Also by Jennifer Ellis

  In the Shadows of the Mosquito Constellation

  Get it here.

  In a world torn apart by economic collapse, Natalie and her husband Richard establish an island of relative safety on a communal farm. Death—by starvation, raiders, and sickness—stalks them daily, and their survival hinges on working together for the common good. But in a lawless land with no shortage of suffering, good is a malleable concept.

  Apocalypse Weird: Reversal

  Get it here.

  Contrary to Sasha Wood’s expectations, the isolated International Polar Research Station on Ellesmere Island turns out to be a dangerous assignment. After researchers and sled dogs go missing in a freak storm, their distress calls go unanswered from the outside world. Cut off and stalked by polar bears, Sasha and station caretaker, Soren Anderson, search for their missing colleagues in the frozen tundra as their instruments reveal a shocking truth: magnetic pole reversal has occurred and the north has become the south.

  Novellas in Anthologies