Worldshaper

by Edward Willett

  After that, I didn’t dream at all.

  * * *

  I woke to the sound of a helicopter.

  Normally I wake up slowly and gently, open my eyes, yawn, stretch, lie quietly for a while thinking about what I’m going to do that day, get up, have a shower, put on my dressing gown, have coffee while I sit and read a book, brush my teeth, get dressed, and only then feel I have come fully awake enough to cope with the day’s exigencies.

  This time I went from deep sleep to upright wakefulness, adrenaline rushing, heart pounding, in a time interval that felt too short to be measured. Karl stood by the window (had he even slept?), peering out through the curtains into the dim gray light of predawn morning. “It’s a long way off, but I can just make out big white letters on it,” he said. “NBI?”

  “National Bureau of Investigation,” I said. My heartbeat showed no sign of returning to normal, and my head ached . . . again. “They’ve found us!”

  “I believe they are flying a search pattern,” Karl said. “I do not think they have seen anything.”

  The sound of the rotors was already fading, but that didn’t make me feel any better. “But the car. Even if they haven’t seen it yet . . . their next pass may be closer and they will, even under the tree. Even if they don’t, if they’re searching this area, and we drive away in it, they’ll catch us for sure.”

  “Probably.” Karl let the drapes fall closed. “Therefore, we can no longer use the car, and we must ensure it cannot be seen.”

  “Did you see a shed big enough to hide it in?” I said. “I didn’t.”

  “No,” he said. “Not a shed.” He crossed the room to the other window, whose curtains we hadn’t yet drawn, and pulled them open. I got to my feet and looked past him, over a stand of low bushes, to the boathouse. Beyond it, mist wreathed the smooth gray surface of the lake.

  “But . . .” My car, I wanted to say, but that was stupid, and I knew it. They knew my car. If there were helicopters searching the sky, there must also be patrols on the ground, cars on the roads.

  All the same, I’d loved that car.

  “If we can submerge it, it might buy us time,” Karl said.

  “But then we’ll be on foot,” I pointed out. “In the woods. With no food, no tent, and only the clothes on our back. That was a bad idea when we were in that clearing yesterday where I smashed my cellphone. Why is it any better an idea now? It’s autumn. It probably frosted last night. How long will we last?”

  “Long enough, I think,” Karl said. “The Portal is not nearby, but it is not impossibly far away, either. It is in the mountains, but on this side of the first range of peaks.”

  “You can find it on foot?” I said doubtfully.

  “I can feel it,” he said. “Always. I am surprised you cannot.”

  I couldn’t feel anything except for that nagging ache in my head. “So, the plan is, we sink my poor car in the lake, take a boat to the other side, and disappear into the woods, in the hope that we can walk through the wilderness to this Portal of yours before we die of exposure?”

  He nodded. “Succinctly put.”

  I swung my feet over the edge of the bed. “Great. Wonderful way to start the day. Gets the blood pumping.”

  I went into the bathroom. When I came out Karl was gone, along with his hat and duster, but he hadn’t gone far: as I stepped out through the cabin door I saw him entering the main building. I closed the door behind me to try to hide from casual observers—although if anyone happened by in the next few hours, they were unlikely to be casual—the fact we’d broken into the cabin, and then hurried to join him.

  I found him in the employees’ locker room. “There’s a jacket in there,” he said, pointing to an open locker. “You’ll need an extra layer.”

  I nodded, and pulled on the lined red nylon jacket I found in the locker, while he opened a set of tall cabinets at the back, revealing about a dozen backpacks. “These are already packed with camping equipment,” he said. He pulled out a bright green one and handed it to me, then took a blue one for himself.

  I hefted the pack. It was heavy, but not unbearably so. I shrugged it on over the jacket. “How did you know . . . ?”

  He smiled without answering and went back into the dining room. I followed, and found him standing in front of a bulletin board I’d largely ignored, pointing to a sign: “ENJOY THE GREAT OUTDOORS! Rent a SUPER LIGHT Backpacking Package! Only $163/night!” Beneath that were listed the contents of what I presumably now carried on my back (though I thought “super-light” was stretching it a bit): one ultralight two-person tent, one down-filled sleeping bag good to 15 degrees, one sleeping pad, one Rocketboil Flash Cooking System, one Finn Water Filtration System, one canteen, one flashlight, one compass, a butane lighter, waterproof matches, a hunting knife, a collapsible shovel, a tiny fold-up rainproof poncho, and a trowel.

  “Only $163 a night,” I said. “Sounds like a steal. In our case, literally.”

  I didn’t even get a smile.

  From the kitchen, we took as much food as we could, concentrating on granola, nuts, and chocolate, and forgoing the chips. We also filled our canteens.

  Before we tried to deal with my car, we went down to the lake. In Karl’s hands my tire iron did double duty as a burglar’s tool once more, and we discovered that a) there was a motorboat inside the shed, hung on the wall, and b) there was no motor for it. “Out for winter maintenance,” I guessed.

  “No matter.” Karl pulled a paddle from a blue plastic barrel full of them near the entrance, and handed it to me. “We will use a canoe.”

  “I don’t canoe,” I said.

  “There are many things you have not previously done you will soon be called upon to do, I suspect.”

  Out into the frosty morning again. The sun still hadn’t cleared the hills at the eastern end of the lake, but fiery orange lit the tips of the pine trees atop the much higher hills to the west, which blocked the view of the mountains we might otherwise have seen. The light crept downward. It wouldn’t be long until we were in full sunlight—and easy to spot from the air if the helicopter returned. Karl walked to the end of the pier. I followed him cautiously, the boards swaying under my feet on tire-tube floats, and, like him, looked down. Rocks glimmered beneath crystal-clear water, stretching away into the lake, sloping very, very gently down.

  Too gently: there was no way we could hide the car in the lake. We’d have to launch it from a ramp to get it far enough out for the water to even cover it, and the lake was so pristine that even then the car would surely be visible from the air. Even though I knew we really didn’t want the car found, I still felt relieved my beloved Fjord would not come to such an ignominious end. I just hoped I wouldn’t come to one instead.

  “Unfortunate,” Karl said, lifting his gaze from the water and turning to look back at the giant oak tree, whose golden top we could see clearly from the lakeshore, though not the trunk or the car nestled beside it. “At least the oak has not dropped its foliage yet.”

  He walked back along the pier to the boathouse and the stack of canoes beside it. Together we manhandled (personhandled?) the top one off the rack and lugged it to the water, pushing it down the sloping shingle beach until it floated next to the pier. Karl placed his paddle in the boat, then his backpack. Ah, I thought. Good point. Wearing something that will drag you straight to the bottom . . . not a good idea in a boat. I took off my pack and put it next to his, then steadied the canoe while he climbed carefully into the stern. Then it was his turn to steady it, holding on to the pier while I climbed in at the bow.

  He looked up at the brightening sky. “We’ll row close to the shore, as much beneath the trees as possible.”

  “Suits me,” I said. “Preferably close enough I can wade if we capsize.”

  He frowned at me. “Can you not swim?”

  “I can swim,” I said defensively. “
Well, sort of. A little.” Not a lie: I could manage two lengths of the pool on a good day . . . but I’d never done it wearing a ski jacket.

  “There are no lifejackets,” Karl said. “Let us concentrate on not capsizing. Push the bow away from the pier.”

  I pushed, then took up my paddle and looked over my shoulder at Karl. He began paddling, switching sides like clockwork. “I will tell you which side to paddle on,” he said. “Try not to catch a crab.”

  I blinked at that. “There are crabs?”

  He actually laughed, for the first time since he had come so precipitously into my life the day before. It made him look years younger . . . not that I had the slightest idea how old he was. I’d originally guessed fifty, but it was impossible to tell for sure. If he really had been moving among multiple worlds for months or years, maybe his age was a meaningless number, anyway. “To catch a crab is to fail to clear the water with your paddle as you reach forward. The momentum of the canoe means you will suddenly encounter great resistance, with results that can be . . . disconcerting.”

  “Disconcerting,” I said. “Wouldn’t want anything ‘disconcerting’ to happen. Not on an otherwise perfectly normal day like today.”

  He laughed again, then stopped paddling for a moment, his paddle ready on the port side. (Port and starboard and bow and stern I knew: I’d never spent much time in a boat, but some of my favorite books as a kid had been the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome, all about English kids having adventures in sailboats. In fact, now that I thought about it, I seemed to remember something in those books about “catching crabs” while rowing. I was ashamed I had momentarily forgotten it.) “Face forward,” he said.

  I turned around, looking past the canoe’s pointed prow into the tendrils of mist now beginning to lift from the water. At the western end of the lake, the sunshine was sliding down the slope, nearer and nearer to the shore.

  “Paddle starboard,” Karl said behind me.

  I dipped my own paddle and pushed hard three or four times while he held his paddle still. The bow moved to port, so that in a moment we were pointing east, toward the dark trees atop the gray stone cliff at the lake’s foot. The first blazing sliver of sun chose that moment to appear above their spiky tips.

  “Alternate port and starboard,” Karl said. “I’ll look after steering.”

  We paddled away through the rising mist, the ripples of our passage spreading across the still water all the way to the far shore . . . a rather glaring betrayal of our presence, should anyone be looking. Fortunately, for the moment, at least, no one was.

  I had never been much of a camper, and even on those rare occasions when I had camped, I was not one to rise with the sun (see my previous comment about liking to wake up slowly and luxuriantly), so I had seldom been up at dawn in countryside of any description, much less countryside as beautiful as that revealed by the growing light. Only a few birds were calling, of the lonesome-sound-of-wilderness variety (that was about the limit of my ornithological knowledge), and I felt a strange sense of peace and wonder rising in me as we slid silently through the water. A girl could get used to this, I thought. Brent and I should . . .

  And then I remembered. Brent and I would never come to this lake, or any other. I would probably never see Brent again. Or my mom, or any of my friends. I would definitely never see Aesha again, shot down in cold blood by the same man who had sent men with helicopters and guns to find and possibly kill me.

  The lake went from beautiful to frighteningly exposed in an instant. “Can’t we paddle faster?” I said over my shoulder.

  “This is a good pace,” Karl replied. “You may need strength to run once we land.”

  “Need strength to run” implied he thought there was a good chance someone might be chasing us. More of the bloom faded from the wow-isn’t-nature-beautiful rose.

  It vanished completely when I heard the distant beat of helicopter rotors from the direction of the resort. I twisted around to look, but couldn’t see anything. “Keep paddling,” Karl said. “Starboard for a bit.” We moved as close as we could get to the north shore, where gray rock now rose sheer from the water. I looked ahead. That stone cliff only grew taller, until it was twenty feet high in places. There was nowhere to land, all around the east end of the lake. Above the rock, the trees formed a protective wall against the sky. The cliff and the trees would hide us unless a helicopter came directly overhead, but they also ensured we were trapped on the water until we could get around to the south side, where the rock dwindled and we might find a place to clamber out.

  I paddled and paddled, hoping against hope the approaching helicopter would just fly on past, like it had the last time. That would mean whoever was aboard it hadn’t spotted the car, and we’d have a chance to . . .

  The sound of the rotors changed, but the volume remained the same. The helicopter was hovering. And that probably meant . . .

  “They’ve seen the car,” Karl said grimly. “Paddle hard!”

  A superfluous command: I was already driving the paddle back as hard and fast as I could, port, starboard, port, starboard, fatigue building fast in my shoulders and arms. The high rock wall crept by with agonizing slowness, but the helicopter still hadn’t appeared over the lake. Maybe we had a chance . . .

  The sound of the rotors changed again, roaring, then suddenly subsiding.

  “They’ve landed,” Karl said.

  I nodded. I didn’t have breath for anything else. Sweat, turned instantly icy by the near-freezing air, ran down my face. I couldn’t tell if the shiver down my spine was from a drop that had found its way down my back or if I was just terrified.

  Probably both.

  What are they doing? I wondered as we finally turned south, though we were still at least ten minutes of paddling from anywhere I thought we might be able to climb out. Would it take them that long to check the car, confirm it was mine? What would they do then? Draw weapons, cautiously go cabin to cabin . . . ?

  No. They’ll start with the main building. They’ll see it was broken into. They’ll find it empty. They’ll come out. They’ll look toward the lake. Will they notice a canoe is missing? If they do . . .

  I twisted around.

  The pier was visible.

  So was the man standing on it, staring at us with binoculars. He wore a bulletproof vest, emblazoned with NBI in white block letters, over a black uniform. He turned and ran up the bank and out of sight.

  After that, the only thing that ran through my mind for a few minutes, in time with my pulling of the paddle, was shit . . . shit . . . shit . . . shit . . . shit . . .

  “Stop,” Karl said, backing water.

  I obeyed, shoulders cramping, but twisted around to stare at him. “Stop? Are you nuts? They’ve seen us!”

  I could hear the rotors spinning up again. In a minute, the helicopter would sweep over the lake. The NBI agents aboard it must have already radioed that they’d found us. They’d simply hover, keeping us in sight, until ground reinforcements arrived, probably with dogs. Even if we got in under the trees and out of sight of the helicopter, we couldn’t escape for long. But it was our only chance. And Karl wanted us to stop?

  I held my dripping paddle parallel to the water, and for a second toyed with the idea of hitting him with it.

  “We cannot escape,” Karl said. “Unless we change things.”

  “I’d love to change things,” I snapped. “Lots of things. Like everything that’s happened since yesterday morning.”

  “You cannot change things back to the way they were,” Karl said. “You cannot even create the illusion of time skipping back anymore, not now that the hokhmah of this world is shared between you and the Adversary. But you can still change some things. More than he can, at least for now, since you Shaped this world first.”

  I lowered the paddle. “Are you saying I can just . . . wish the helicopte
r away?”

  “Probably not,” Karl said. “But you may be able to influence the men aboard it, convince them to help us instead of pursue us.”

  “But . . . how?” The helicopter roared. It was taking off.

  “Imagine it,” Karl said. “You Shaped this world to begin with. The men in the helicopter only exist here because you imagined them into existence, by copying so much of the original reality. If you imagine them to be a little different than they now are, it may become true.”

  I stared. “I can . . . do that?”

  Karl hesitated. “You should be able to do that.”

  “Should?” I cried.

  The helicopter burst into sight above the trees.

  We were out of time.

  EIGHT

  THE HELICOPTER ROSE above the trees beyond the pier, then turned toward us, cockpit glinting in the morning sun. It swept low over the lake, and hovered, the blast of the rotors sweeping a skiff of spray across the still water, which fractured into millions of tossing wavelets. The sound, so loud it felt like an assault all its own, echoed off the rock cliff to our right. With the sun shining on the cockpit, I couldn’t see inside the helicopter, but whoever was in there could certainly see us.

  “What if they have a machine gun aboard that thing?”

  “They are police, not military. The helicopter is only a transportation device, not a flying weapon. They are simply watching you until reinforcements arrive.”

  “The men on board must have weapons.”

  “Indeed. So perhaps you would care to hurry up?”

  I stared up at the hovering copter. Hurry up and do . . . what? Imagine, Karl said. The insipid tune of the pop song ran through my mind. I hoped I wouldn’t have to sing it, because I’d always hated it. I much preferred “When You Wish Upon a Star,” but the only star in sight was the sun, and it didn’t look likely to grant me anything.

  Imagine.

  A game of make-believe, then. I closed my eyes, picturing the inside of the helicopter . . . an inside drawn from movies and TV shows, since I’d never been in a helicopter myself, but clear enough in my mind’s eye. Two men, surely. A pilot, an observer. I imagined them staring down at me. I imagined them thinking, We have to help her. The people chasing her are evil. We have to help her. We have to help her. The people chasing her are evil. We have to help her. We have to . . .