Clash of the Worlds

by Chris Columbus

  “You think the family magic that protects us has gotten stronger?” Brendan asked.

  “Possibly,” Cordelia said. “But even more than that, some of the laws of science apply to magic. Based on the little bit I read in Denver’s Journal, the Lorekeepers’ magic was surprisingly rooted in the concepts and laws that govern science and quantum physics—”

  “Can you maybe fast-forward to the point, Einstein?” Brendan interrupted.

  “It’s Newton’s third law of motion!” Cordelia said, growing frustrated.

  Brendan stared at her blankly. “That the raspberry Newtons are way better than the original flavor?” he ventured.

  He may have had a flawless memory, but only for stuff that interested him. Physics was definitely not on that list.

  Cordelia groaned and shook her head.

  “Newton’s third law of motion,” she recited. “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It essentially means that all exerted energy has to go somewhere . . . it doesn’t just disappear.”

  Brendan’s eyes clicked on like a lightbulb. “So when she attacked us with her magic,” he said, “since it couldn’t harm us, then it backfired on her?”

  Cordelia nodded. “It’s the only logical explanation. Makes sense, right?”

  “You’re so boring I usually tune you out,” Brendan said. “But this time I actually think your theory sounds pretty solid. Nell, what do you think?”

  Eleanor, who hadn’t been listening to them at all, looked up, startled. Her eyes were wide with fear and recognition. She knew what had just happened, but had been trying to convince herself that it couldn’t be possible.

  “Nell, what is it?” Cordelia asked.

  “It was me,” Eleanor said. “I did it. I was the one who saved us and made the Wind Witch go away.”

  Eleanor had expected her brother and sister to be shocked. Or confused.

  But she certainly did not expect them to laugh in her face.

  “What?” Eleanor asked as they giggled. “Why is that so hard to believe?”

  “Because little girls don’t just spontaneously develop magical powers,” Brendan said, trying to reason with her.

  “But it happened!” Eleanor nearly shouted. “I was standing there, watching her come at us . . . and I . . . I felt it. It was like, I knew I had the power to make her go away. Then I wished for it . . . and she went blasting out the chimney!”

  “Nell, sweetie . . . ,” Cordelia started.

  “No!” Eleanor did actually shout this time. “I felt it. It was the same feeling that surged through me back when . . . well . . . the last two times I used The Book of Doom and Desire!”

  Brendan and Cordelia exchanged uneasy and confused glances, all traces of laughter gone.

  “Nell, that’s impossible,” Brendan said softly. “You know that. The book is gone.”

  “You made it disappear yourself, remember?” Cordelia said.

  “Of course I remember!” Eleanor snapped. “Never mind . . . just forget it. You can believe whatever you want.”

  A long and awkward silence followed.

  “Come on, let’s go up to the attic and look out the window . . . see what’s out there,” Cordelia said suddenly, trying to change the subject and the mood. “The land here is so flat, I bet we can see for miles in all directions. There has to be a town around here somewhere.”

  Brendan followed Cordelia upstairs. Eleanor sighed and then followed as well. She felt like she couldn’t be any help to them at all. She had just saved their lives, and they hadn’t even bothered to thank her. Instead they had laughed at her! She knew she was being irrational, but there was something deep inside her that pushed all rationality away. It had been happening a lot lately; Eleanor had been finding it difficult to reason with herself anymore. Maybe it was simply that she was finally seeing the truth: Her older siblings truly didn’t respect her the same way as they did each other, and she was just now learning to actually stand up for herself.

  Once they were all in the attic, it didn’t take long to spot a small town on the prairie horizon from one of the windows. It couldn’t have contained more than a few hundred people, but they also saw dark lines that Cordelia recognized as train tracks passing through it.

  “That’s perfect,” she said. “Since we likely will need a faster way out of this book when the time comes to leave and find the Worldkeepers. Speaking of, shouldn’t you be reading?”

  Brendan pulled the Journal of Magic and Technology from the back pocket of his jeans and looked down at it. It was still unopened. The truth was, he was sort of dreading having to read it. Reading was not his thing. Especially not reading Denver Kristoff’s dry and boring musings on the origins of magic and science.

  “But we’re all starving,” Brendan said. “Shouldn’t we go into town first? Find some food?”

  “Not a good idea. The sun is setting,” Cordelia said. “We should wait until morning.”

  “Okay, fine.” Brendan said. “Maybe I can fall asleep? After all, turning into a zombie, swimming in a giant saliva hot tub, getting shot, and then coming back to life only to get attacked by a psychotic sheriff and an evil witch make for a pretty exhausting day. At least as exhausting as a lacrosse match . . .”

  As they sat in the attic that night, an electric lantern from the kitchen pantry lighting up the room, Cordelia tried to distract Eleanor from their growing hunger by talking about Fat Jagger. About how amazing it was that he had saved them, withstanding so much pain in the process. It brought tears to Eleanor’s eyes, but Cordelia reassured her again and again that they would be able to return the favor. That’s what they were there to do, after all.

  Brendan, meanwhile, was sitting in the corner of the room, trying to read the Journal. But he was getting frustrated. He finally slammed the book shut.

  “It’s hard to get through a single page of this garbage!” Brendan moaned. “It’s like trying to read Sanskrit while getting your fingernails pulled out one by one.”

  “Do you even know what Sanskrit is?” Cordelia asked.

  “That’s sort of my point,” he said.

  “Just concentrate; take your time,” Cordelia said. “Read carefully. The answers are in the details.”

  Brendan sighed and reopened the Journal. It wasn’t a very thick book, but the pages were thin, almost like tissue paper. And Denver’s handwriting was cramped and small, meaning he packed a lot of mindless rambling about a lot of pointless junk into the book. There were three whole pages just on the history of telephones. Apparently the “new” invention had fascinated Denver Kristoff enough to endlessly dissect and study telephones. Which sounded awfully boring in itself, yet had to be a lot more exciting than reading about someone dissecting old telephones:

  This new mode of communication is truly astounding. To think one can pick up this device and speak to a colleague or family member hundreds of miles across this great country is truly a marvel. Perhaps someday we can even amend this sort of technology to be able to see the people as well!

  Brendan stopped reading and shook his head slowly. That old goat was probably the first human being to have the idea for FaceTime! Brendan turned the page, and his mouth dropped open.

  “Whoa!” he said, unfolding a huge, thick piece of paper wedged into the pages of the Journal.

  “What is it?” Cordelia asked.

  “It’s like a huge map,” Brendan said.

  “A map of what?” Eleanor asked, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. She had just started to doze off in spite of her grumbling stomach.

  “I think it’s the book world,” Brendan said, looking it over. “Or book worlds. Come over and check it out.”

  Eleanor scrambled over to join him.

  “Deal?” Brendan said, looking at his older sister.

  She looked at him expectantly.

  “On second thought, you might want to leave,” Brendan said nervously.

  “It’s my eyes isn’t it?” Cordelia asked. “She’s in
my head right now?”

  Eleanor and Brendan both nodded slowly.

  “And frankly, it looks even creepier in the dark,” Brendan said.

  “I . . . I’d better get out of here then,” Cordelia said reluctantly.

  She marched down the attic stairs as if trying to punch a hole into the wood with each step. But even more than anger, she was mostly just feeling helpless and guilty that she couldn’t contribute in any way. It suddenly came to her that maybe this was why Eleanor felt insecure so much of the time.

  “It looks like all of Denver Kristoff’s books are actually connected,” Brendan said to Eleanor up in the attic. “They’re like one giant map and you can travel between them seamlessly. . . .”

  “Cool,” Eleanor said, looking over his shoulder. “But it’s so huge, how will we get to all the places we need to go?”

  Brendan hadn’t considered that yet. Eleanor was right, though, and it was a real problem. He found the book world for Savage Warriors. And it was tiny; it took up just a small chunk of the map, barely the size of a quarter. It had seemed so huge while they had been inside of it. It had taken them almost two days to travel across a small section in a horse-drawn cart when they were Slayne’s captives. And there were hundreds of book worlds, each roughly the same size. Some were in water, some on land, and some had water and land. The entire book world was truly massive. It’d probably take a few days to go all the way across it in an airplane. On foot or horseback, it would take years, if not decades.

  The realization was a like a gut punch that just sucked all the air right out of him.

  Once he discovered where the Worldkeepers were located, how would they ever get to them in a reasonable amount of time? Even if they could somehow get access to a jet or plane, it certainly wasn’t going to be inside whatever book they were in now. They were in the middle of a prairie in the eighteen hundreds; he highly doubted there were any airplanes nearby.

  He finally looked up at Eleanor, whose worried face matched his own.

  “We’re in trouble,” he said.

  Eleanor frowned. Usually, she had an answer to her brother’s pessimism. There was no such thing as an unsolvable problem. At least, that’s what Dr. Walker had always told them growing up. It’s what had made him such an excellent surgeon. And Eleanor had always believed him.

  But this time, she could think of nothing else to say. There was no positive spin. It seemed to her that their chances of succeeding looked bleaker than ever.

  None of the Walker children slept well that night. In part, because their “beds” in the attic consisted mostly of bundled blankets collected from the furnished rooms within Kristoff House. And so all three of them were awake and ready to head to town at the first sign of sunlight on the eastern horizon.

  “What about that psycho sheriff?” Brendan asked as he rooted around in the kitchen drawers, looking for any scraps of food the movers might have missed. “You think that’s his town?”

  “There’s a good possibility,” Cordelia admitted. “But we don’t have much choice. We can’t just stay out here forever.”

  “I did not like that man,” Eleanor said, remembering his fur coat. She despised anyone who wore another animal’s skin as clothing.

  “None of us do,” Cordelia agreed. “But it’s a chance we’re going to have to take.”

  “We could wear disguises,” Brendan said, pointing at his face. “Check it out!”

  While they’d been talking, he’d found a black Sharpie marker in the kitchen drawer and had proceeded to draw a fake moustache on his face. And he’d actually done a pretty good job. Cordelia had to admit that for a second it almost looked real. Well, if it weren’t for the fact that he still had the face of a twelve-year-old kid.

  “That looks ridiculous,” she said with a begrudging grin. “Now we’ll definitely get noticed!”

  Eleanor giggled.

  “Okay, okay, I’ll wash it off,” Brendan said. He spun around and turned on the kitchen faucet. No water came out. “Uh-oh.”

  “Bren, you idiot!” Cordelia laughed. “We’re in the middle of a prairie predating running water and modern plumbing. Duh!”

  He wiped desperately at the fake mustache on his face. But his dry fingers didn’t even so much as smudge the ink. Even after he licked his fingertips and tried again, the mustache remained.

  “That’s why they call it permanent,” Cordelia said, still laughing.

  “Come on, guys, I’m hungry,” Eleanor pleaded.

  “Fine,” Brendan said, giving up. He glanced at himself in the mirror one last time. “At least it’s a pretty sweet looking ’stache. All the hipsters in the Mission would be superjealous if they could see me now.”

  He tucked the Journal into his back jeans pocket. It was a tight squeeze, but it just fit. Then he headed toward the front door while pretending to stroke his fake mustache with his fingertips. Cordelia and Eleanor couldn’t help themselves from cracking up as they followed him out into the cool morning air.

  The tall grass and wild grains growing across the prairie made for slow going. The morning dew practically soaked their jeans. But eventually they found a small horse path, just as the sun finally cleared the horizon.

  Eleanor was in the lead, humming softly as she walked. She was at least ten or fifteen feet out in front. She couldn’t stop thinking about the energy she had felt surge through her when she’d banished the Wind Witch. Even if her older siblings didn’t believe her, she knew what had really happened. And deep down, all she could think about was just how much she’d been craving that feeling again. Even more, though, she was craving ice-cream cake or Cheetos, the thought of which was enough to nearly bring her to tears.

  A few dozen paces behind Eleanor, Brendan pulled out Kristoff’s Journal and paged through it as he walked, slowing him down even more.

  “Why is it taking you so long to get through that?” Cordelia asked.

  “I’m concentrating,” Brendan said. “I don’t want to miss anything. Maybe one of the Worldkeepers is in the town we’re going to.”

  Brendan was at a section in the Journal where Denver was speculating on the true effects of using The Book of Doom and Desire, talking about how use of the book corrupted souls the way it had for him and his daughter. The Walkers already knew that, of course, which is partially why Eleanor had wished the book out of existence using its own power against it. But what Brendan read in that section of the Journal frightened him even more. Denver Kristoff’s more detailed conclusions did not bode well for Eleanor. He looked up at his younger sister twenty yards in front of them.

  “Hey, Deal?” he said softly.

  “Yeah?”

  “Have you noticed anything weird about Eleanor lately?”

  “What do you mean?” Cordelia asked.

  “I mean . . . well,” Brendan started, not sure he could bring himself to say aloud what he’d just learned. “According to the Journal, here, it’s . . . never mind . . .”

  “What is it?” Cordelia asked.

  “I can’t tell you right now,” he said.

  Recognition spread across Cordelia’s face. She frowned and then averted her icy blue and possessed eyes down toward the ground, hoping not give the Wind Witch any glimmer of what they were up to at the moment. She tried not to think about how helpless she felt. If she did, she might start crying, which would only make this whole situation even worse.

  After over an hour of walking, they found themselves at the edge of a small, dusty town that consisted of two crisscrossing dirt roads and several dozen buildings. The path they were on connected to a wider, larger dirt road. Near the road was a small, wooden hand-painted sign: “Welcome to Van Hook, Dakota Territory.”

  A small girl, perhaps around Brendan’s age, wearing a bright yellow dress, was picking wildflowers among the tall grass and weeds next to the road.

  She looked up at the sounds of the approaching footsteps and smiled at them.

  “I’ve never seen a boy with such a
fine mustache before,” she said, laughing.

  Brendan covered his mouth instinctively with his hand. He had forgotten about his fake mustache.

  “Uh, it’s just a joke,” he mumbled.

  “I figured,” the girl said, looking them up and down slowly. “I’m Adlaih. My friends call me Adie. You three don’t look like you’re from around here. Are you lost?”

  “Sort of,” Cordelia said quickly. “But we’re mostly just hungry and thirsty. . . .”

  “Well, I’ve got some food and water,” Adie said, pointing at a large picnic basket nearby. “My dad always makes me bring food when I go out picking flowers. Sometimes I end up staying out all afternoon and don’t even realize it!”

  The Walkers eyed the large basket greedily. Brendan licked his lips.

  “Help yourselves!” Adie finally said. “We got plenty more back at home.”

  The Walkers hesitated again, but only for a second. The true nature of their hunger hadn’t hit them until the offer of food and water materialized. They rushed forward and Brendan ripped open the top of the basket. Inside were stacks of warm biscuits and a little jar of freshly whipped butter. A canteen of water lay nestled next to them.

  It took the three Walker children just a few short minutes to completely empty the picnic basket and drain the canteen.

  Near the end of the feeding frenzy, Brendan let out a large belch. He smiled at first, taking satisfaction in Cordelia’s disapproving and disgusted expression. But then Adie’s soft giggle reminded him that there was a cute girl still watching, and he covered his mouth quickly.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  “You sure were hungry,” Adie said, looking into her empty picnic basket like she was looking down into a dry well.

  “Thank you so much,” Cordelia said. “We haven’t eaten in what feels like days.”

  “My pleasure,” Adie said. “My dad always says it’s our responsibility to help the less fortunate.”

  “I’m Cordelia. This is my brother, Brendan. And my sister, Eleanor.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Adie said with a smile that Brendan already found impossible to look away from.