Worldweavers: Cybermage

by Alma Alexander

  “Oh, lovely,” said Ben.

  “Shut up,” said Terry, his eyes suddenly alight. “I know what this is. It’s Tesla’s laboratory in Colorado. This is where he did some of his most amazing work. Are we going to be able to see inside that…”

  The building’s roof gaped open underneath the tower antenna. For a moment it looked as though they might swoop right underneath the tower and through the gap, but just as they banked toward the side, the onion-shaped bulbous covering on top of the tower suddenly woke with a crackle. A bolt of bright blue-white lightning whipped around the outside of the bulb with a sizzling sound and then snapped together into a column of fire as thick as Thea’s wrist, shooting off sparks and reaching straight from the top of the antenna into the sky.

  The friends veered away abruptly, as though this lightning had been accidental and unplanned for, and circled the building slowly until they came to a half-open barnlike door on the side. They slipped in through the opening and hovered just inside the door, gaping with their mouths open at what was going on inside.

  Tesla, bareheaded, his hair in wild disarray, stood with one hand stuck straight into a pillar of fire that must have been the root of the lightning bolt they had seen outside.

  As they watched, a bird circled in through the gap in the roof, just barely sidling between the lightning bolt and the edge of the roof beam, and dropped into the room where Tesla’s apparatus stood. Despite making the effort to avoid the fire as it entered, it then flew straight into the pillar of flame.

  And disappeared.

  They all saw Tesla recoil; they saw his eyes widen as he stared into the fiery circle before him; they saw his other hand rise, apparently reaching for a switch.

  Then they saw him freeze as the bird reappeared in the fire. No, two birds.

  “What’s going on?” Ben whispered.

  Both birds hung suspended in the fiery circle for a moment, and then they both vanished.

  Tesla appeared to be saying something—his mouth was moving, but Thea and the others could not make out what he was saying over the snap and crackle of the pillar of flame.

  The two birds reappeared.

  No, three.

  And then vanished again.

  Tesla’s hand was inching upward, toward the switch, as though he was fighting a great resistance, but before he had a chance to reach it, the birds were back.

  Four of them.

  With a superhuman effort, Tesla touched the switch. The pillar of fire instantly died.

  Where it had been, a bird lay on its back on the ground, its feet in the air. Quite dead.

  They saw Tesla fall to his knees and take the bird into his cupped palms with infinite gentleness. He lifted it up toward his face, and they could see that his blue eyes were full of tears. His lips were moving, but only the faintest of sounds came out—a whisper that might have been, “Please…oh, please…”

  And then he threw his head back and screamed, a cry of inconsolable loss, of devastating pain, of something too deep to be put into words.

  “It’s a pigeon,” Magpie said, staring at the bird cradled between Tesla’s hands. “It’s dead.”

  This time, the scene didn’t fade into a two-dimensional image of itself, as the previous ones had done. It shredded, as though something had clawed through a piece of tissue paper and sent ribbons of it flying into a sudden high wind.

  The wind exploded like a tornado, slamming into the five of them, and they were torn apart by the unexpected force of the gale. They scattered like autumn leaves even as the wind dropped and a solid white fog descended on them all—the same impenetrable fog that had been there at the beginning.

  “Where are you guys? Hey? Anybody?” Thea called out after a moment of breathless silence.

  There was no reply. It was as though they were far apart now, too far apart to gather themselves up again as they had done the first time around.

  Suddenly afraid, Thea glanced at her wrist. She had to bring it practically up to her nose before she could see the gadget’s keypad and its tiny screen.

  The professor’s office, she typed in as fast as she could, with a trembling hand. All of us. Back in the office. Right now.

  Something changed in the fog around her. It began to grow damper, more solid, as though she were pushing her way through a substance that was more water than air, and then she was lifted off her feet as if kicked.

  She landed against something hard, and heard her head crack against a solid object. Pain flooded her consciousness; she realized her eyes were closed, and made herself open them.

  Thea was lying against the professor’s bookshelves, with a couple of books scattered on the floor around her. Mrs. Chen swiftly crossed the room and knelt beside her.

  “Are you all right?” Mrs. Chen demanded, reaching to touch Thea’s temple, slipping her hand to the back of Thea’s head. “I don’t think you broke anything, but you…you flew over here as though you’d been kicked by a horse.”

  “The others?” Thea asked, trying to struggle upright.

  “They’re fine. They’re here. Sit quiet for a moment.”

  “Thea?” Humphrey May, looking very white, came down into a half crouch on Thea’s other side. “What happened? We saw you get inside. And then—you suddenly—you—Are you sure you are all right?”

  “Now you ask,” Mrs. Chen muttered.

  “I’m fine. Really. Where are the rest of them?”

  “Everybody is here,” Humphrey said, mystified. “They’re all—”

  “We’re okay,” Terry called from across the room.

  “I’ve got such a headache,” Thea said, reaching to rub her temples with both hands.

  “I don’t doubt it,” Mrs. Chen said, eyeing the bookshelf behind her. “You’re lucky you didn’t crack your skull open. Do you need a glass of water?”

  “No. I think…let me sit up.”

  The two adults moved back, allowing her to get into a sitting position; Thea blinked, trying to get her eyes to focus properly.

  “Thea,” Humphrey said, and there was a tone in his voice that was almost pleading.

  “Will you let the child have some air?” Mrs. Chen snapped. “Perhaps you’d better get her that glass of water. And let’s get her to that armchair.”

  “I feel as though it’s all my fault,” Humphrey said, scooping Thea up and carrying her over to the armchair that Mrs. Chen had specified.

  “You don’t say,” Mrs. Chen muttered.

  The twins came hurrying around the great desk to the armchair in the window; Magpie followed, and Ben brought up the rear. Rafe materialized from somewhere else with a glass of cool water in his hand.

  “Here,” he said, bending over to hand it to Thea. “I’ve got hot tea coming. With plenty of sugar. In the meantime, take a sip of that.”

  Thea flushed as her fingers brushed Rafe’s; he didn’t notice, or pretended not to. Thea took several large gulps of the water, dropping her eyes from the concerned expression on Rafe’s face. She saw Terry biting his lip; glanced at Magpie, who had tears in her eyes; saw the apprehension that hovered on Tess’s and Ben’s faces—saw the concern, the fear, the open questions in both Humphrey May’s expression and Mrs. Chen’s.

  She drew a deep breath, her hands tightening on the armrests of the chair.

  “Something’s very wrong,” she said.

  5.

  “MAKES SENSE,” HUMPHREY MAY said. “By all the accounts I’ve seen, Tesla was given the opportunity to go to Colorado and pursue his work there after his New York workshop was lost to fire, and when he eventually returned to New York from Colorado he was…changed. Different. Some even say marginally insane. The things that had interested him before suddenly didn’t anymore. It was as though some of his most extraordinary achievements in Colorado—had diminished him.”

  “But how does a dead pigeon diminish him?” Magpie asked.

  After the five Academy students had returned from their journey to the inner spaces of the white cub
e, Humphrey suggested that they adjourn for an early dinner at which they all discovered that they were hungrier than they thought. Now they were back in the professor’s office after dinner. Any ordinary room would have felt crowded, but the Elemental house seemed to have taken care of that problem. The room, which definitely had not boasted so many chairs before, provided a comfortable seat for everybody present, and Thea could have sworn that the room had somehow gotten bigger since the last time she had been in it.

  “Well, he did go a little nuts for pigeons later, when he returned to New York,” Humphrey said. “Apparently he fed them for years. Until the day he died, actually.”

  “He was looking for his dead pigeon? In a different state? In a great big city?” Ben said, frowning.

  “How long do pigeons live, anyway?” Tess asked. “Surely if he was looking for any specific bird it would have been long gone by the time he died?”

  “He was in his early forties when he went to Colorado,” Humphrey said. “He was nearly ninety when he died.”

  “No way a pigeon can live fifty years,” Ben said.

  “Did Tesla?” Thea asked unexpectedly.

  “Did Tesla what?” Humphrey said.

  “Live. Really live. Or was he just marking time? Maybe he wasn’t looking for a specific bird, but instead…”

  “Yes?” Humphrey said when she petered out in midsentence.

  “I don’t know. I thought I had something, but now I’m not sure.”

  “Well, that’s more than enough for today. We might all get a few more ideas if we take a rest and think about it. Margaret, do you want to take them all back to the school tonight?”

  “No!”

  That was a chorus of four: Thea, the twins, and Magpie. Only Ben said nothing.

  “We’ve only just started to figure it out,” Thea said. “Maybe we could try—”

  “The computer angle,” Terry said at the same time. “I could try and track down—”

  “You can deal with the computer stuff back at the school,” Ben said. “That’s a Nexus too.”

  “I thought maybe we could go back into the cube at some point,” Thea said. “If we could find out how to control the flying, perhaps we could stand still long enough to actually talk to Tesla. Find out if he really is in there.”

  “That would be valuable information,” Terry chimed in.

  “Uh-oh,” Magpie said. “We’d have to skydive again?”

  “You have classes in the morning,” Mrs. Chen said.

  “We can make the work up,” Thea said. “It’s just another day.”

  “Cutting school, eh?” Humphrey May said, with a grin.

  “I’d have to clear it with Principal Harris,” Mrs. Chen said. “And if he okays it, it’s one day, mind. Tomorrow we’re back at school.”

  “I’ll get Mrs. Emmett to show you to your rooms,” Humphrey said. “I’m certain that the house has already taken care of what’s necessary.”

  “It’s an Elemental house,” Terry said, in response to Ben’s obvious confusion. “It takes care of your needs as soon as you utter them out loud. And sometimes all you have to do is think them.”

  “And you spent the summer in this place?” Magpie said, her eyes sparkling. “Awesome!”

  “Ah, Mrs. Emmett,” Humphrey said smoothly as the door of the study opened to reveal the housekeeper hovering on the doorstep. “I’m afraid we’ll all be imposing on your hospitality a little longer.”

  “I’m already aware of that,” Madeline Emmett said. “I just wanted to let you know that your rooms upstairs are ready.”

  “Well, then. We’ll pick it up after breakfast tomorrow,” Humphrey said.

  They filed out of the office and followed Mrs. Emmett up the stairs. Thea, the last out the door, turned to cast a lingering look at the white cube that sat on the professor’s desk. The sense of wrongness persisted in her, with that last image they had seen replaying itself over and over in her head. There was something very important about those pigeons. About Tesla’s connection to them. About the fact that one had died.

  Something very important.

  If only she could pin any of it down to something—anything—specific.

  Mrs. Emmett showed them to their rooms. The boys were in the room that had been Terry’s the previous summer, the girls in the one that had been Thea’s. The Elemental house had rearranged and refurnished the rooms to accommodate its visitors.

  “This is so cool,” Magpie said, coming back into the girls’ room after an inspection of the entire area. She kicked off her shoes as she settled cross-legged onto her bed. “I just went into the bathroom, and I saw five brand-new toothbrushes arranging themselves on the vanity counter. It’s as though the place was expecting us!”

  “It does even weirder things than that,” Thea said.

  “Like what?”

  “Shoes,” Thea said.

  Magpie glanced down to where her shoes had been. She did a double take as she realized that they had been neatly placed on the floor by the foot of her bed.

  “But I didn’t…” she began, perplexed.

  “This place tidies up after you,” Thea said, laughing. “Your half of our room back at the school would send the Elemental house into a complete tailspin. It wouldn’t be able to rest until it had found a place for everything.”

  Magpie grimaced. “I don’t know if I’d survive here for long if it insisted on putting things where it thinks they should go—but it’s still awesome.”

  It seemed to Thea that her roommates fell asleep almost before they were fully horizontal in their beds. She herself could not seem to go to sleep that easily, haunted both by the memories of the past summer and by an insistent gnawing sense of having missed something important in the visions the cube had showed them.

  When she finally did drift off to sleep, she had a chaotic dream in which she stood talking to a young man whom she recognized instantly as the young Tesla. Then she was standing by the bedside of an old man with white hair whose thin skin stretched tightly over his high cheekbones, revealing the shape of the skull underneath—and this, too, was Tesla. Then Tesla was a little boy, standing beside a homemade water mill in a tumbling creek, a large cat padding in his wake. Then it was the old Tesla again, his astonishingly blue eyes flickering open and looking straight at her. A slow smile spread across the wasted, skeletal face, and his lips moved as though he was speaking to her. But the dream didn’t come with audio, and all she heard was silence, the deep white silence of falling snow. Indeed, when Thea flicked her gaze to the nearby window, there was snow coming down outside, drifting white veils of it. And there, on the windowsill, sat the shape of a luminous white pigeon, glowing with a strange inner fire.

  Thea woke with a start.

  Her roommates were sound asleep, faces buried in soft pillows. Magpie was snoring gently. Thea briefly considered waking them, and then thought better of it. It would be better if she didn’t drag anyone else into it.

  She reached out to her bedside table for the wrist keyboard gadget that Humphrey had given her, grimacing at the thought of his inevitable reaction when she eventually had to confess that she had gone off on her own again. She pulled the keypad back under the covers with her as she toggled the on-switch, and the screen filled the blanket tent with a soft greenish luminescence. It reminded her forcefully of the light with which Diego de los Reyes had filled his world in an attempt to trap her there, as well as the light she had used to weave herself an escape route, the light that she then walled in with him when she turned the mirrors in on him and buried him alive in the world of his own illusions. She felt queasy at the memory. But this wasn’t the same, and she firmly told herself to pull herself together.

  Somewhere in the memory of this little machine she had saved a few phrases she had typed in when the five of them had been inside the cube. Her original idea had been to weave herself back to that place, but as she stared at her tiny screen, she frowned in indecision.

  It had taken a
ll five of them to get the white mists to dissipate enough for something to actually happen. Thea hesitated at the thought of being stuck in the mists by herself. There was the Barefoot Road, which had taken her to hard-to-get places before, but this time she didn’t think she had anything specific enough to give the Road as a pointer to where she wanted to be.

  Which left only the computer-linked worldweaving: the purely creative effort of re-creating the space she required through sheer force of will and imagination.

  Space and time.

  If she needed to talk to Tesla, if there was a trace or remnant of the real Tesla left behind at all in the cube-universe, it would have to be a time-weave. The last time she had tried that, she had gone back only a few moments to reverse the immediate effects of a spellspam. This time she would have to go back years, and she would have to be extremely specific about it. Failure could mean becoming unstuck in time, much like Tesla himself might have been trapped—and there was nobody at all to send after her.

  “I’ll just have to take the risk,” she muttered to herself, strapping the keypad to her wrist. She could barely make out the keys in the green-tinged gloom underneath her bedclothes, and she had to type slowly and carefully and then double-check what she had written, because computers were literal and unforgiving and she might find herself transported to some screwy part of the universe with no clue how to get back.

  Maybe I should have left a note for the others….

  The thought was there and gone, even as her index finger touched the ENTER key and she felt the room begin to dissolve around her. Just before it all winked out, she thought she heard a small voice, very far away, that might have been Magpie’s.

  “Thea? Thea, you okay? What are you doing?”

  And then it was gone. She was standing in a city street, in the cold light of early morning, staring up at a brownstone. A tendril of black smoke curled out of one of the windows. Fire. Or the aftermath of one.

  Beside her, bareheaded, his long-fingered hands hanging by his side in a manner that spoke far more eloquently of his devastation than any anguished hand-wringing might have done, stood a man who could only have been Nikola Tesla. His hair was dark, and his features smooth; Thea judged him to be somewhere in his thirties at this point. This was the famous New York fire, the one that had driven Tesla from the city and into the mountains of Colorado.