by Eoin Colfer
Chevie felt instantly lighter, and not just physically.
I have done all I needed to do. More than most will ever do. It’s time to go.
She did not know where she wanted to go, or, more specifically, when.
Surprise me, she beamed out to her old friend the wormhole, and though she had evaded its folds and meanders for almost a hundred years she could remember its embrace as though it had been this morning, before her first espresso of the day.
Chevie stayed where she was until dusk, snacking on cashew nuts from a pouch she carried everywhere. She was extremely gratified to see a pick-up truck pull up to the front of the cottage around seven and load up her father’s beloved motorcycle.
Hah! I was quite an operator. Riley would be proud.
She half expected something earth-shattering to happen then. Some kind of quantum rip or brain detonation, but there was nothing. Not a single wrinkle in time. She still remembered Riley and Garrick and all they had been through.
‘Yep,’ she said softly. ‘Time to go.’
Down she trudged, taking care on the uneven terrain. A pity to snap a bone after all this time. A few centuries of fractured femur would be zero fun whatsoever.
Don’t even think about it, she warned herself. Don’t think about anything.
Because she knew now, with the quantum foam flowing through her neural pathways, that the wormhole was an emotional construct just as much as a physical one. It would heed her wishes, even her subconscious ones, and take her where it thought she wanted to go.
Jeez, how’s an old lady supposed to catch a break?
And so Chevie tried to clear her mind as she had learned to do all those years ago on the commune. She tried to simply be.
The quantum tunnel came for her as she navigated the stepped path down to the Pacific Coast Highway. The orange sparks cycloned above her head, then settled on her like a fairy cloak, and though Chevie tried to think of nothing, nothing at all, a single word drifted behind her eyes just as she disappeared into the ether.
And the word was:
Riley …
Epilogue
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The Inter-Dimension
Chevie kissed Riley and he felt himself dissolve.
No! he thought. I will not accept this.
‘Chevie!’ Riley called, and again: ‘Chevie!’
But the second shout was infected by a spiral of orange sparks that followed the curl of the sound wave, spiralling into the collapsing version of the Orient Theatre.
Riley felt like Old Testament Jonah as the mouth of the whale shut him off from all he knew and loved. Though he had not loved the wormhole or the seventeenth century, he had at least loved being with his dearest Chevron Savano, whom he now felt he would never see again. The only girl he had ever kissed and it had made his heart glow as brightly as the Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse.
To never see Chevie again seemed intolerable after all he had endured.
Never? Does that word hold any meaning in my topsy-turvy life?
A life that could very well be about to end.
Nothing was certain in the wormhole. Even though Riley had only a cursory knowledge of the science at work here, relatively speaking he knew almost as much as any being who would ever live, apart from Chevie herself. Riley knew that he could not be certain of anything from this moment on.
Welcome, the foam whispered to Riley as it closed round his atoms, phase-shifting as he watched. Welcome home.
Riley fought it as he would the effect of Garrick’s ether-soaked rags.
No. This ain’t my home. I don’t belong here.
The wormhole wanted him, it was true, but it was as a cat wants a mouse to toy with. It would bat him between its quantum paws for aeons before ejecting him into the world, utterly changed and out of his time.
No, thought Riley. It don’t have to be that way. All I need to do is hold fast to myself and Chevie will put me where I need to be.
Riley punched at the cloying foam with fists that were barely more than imaginary.
Release me, you darn time stream. I ain’t ready to be absorbed.
But the quantum tunnel would not relinquish him just yet as it had spare parts it wished to give him. A set of wasp wings that would sprout nicely on his back, and the tail of a lizard, which would graft just dandy on to his rear end.
Riley, though, fought all the tunnel’s advances, thinking: I am Riley. I am Riley, I am. Human boy and that is the size of it and the whole of me.
He thrashed mentally and cleared a space to his own time – and not only that but to his own moment, to the one golden synchronicity when all possibilities coalesced like the irregular wooden wedges of a jigsaw.
I see a light, so I do, thought the last neurons of Riley’s conscious mind. He did not see a light in reality, as he could not see anything. His senses were more remembered than experienced, and even then the memory was fading as the wormhole coaxed his elemental side to the surface, drawing it up like a hungry trout to the bait, tempting him back to a primordial state.
But Riley was made of sterner stuff and he turned his mind from the tunnel and concentrated on the light, which he was determined to perceive and strive towards.
The wormhole offered him eternal peace and answers to all the questions of the universe. It wiped his brow and draped him with love.
No, thought Riley. You ain’t having me. My brother is not murdered and yet lives.
Tom lives, thought Riley, bearing down on it and making the words his mantra. Tom lives.
As he projected those words, it seemed to him that the entirety of his surroundings, which he could never have described, sighed a little and whispered, Very well, then, human child. Tom lives. So be it.
The light drew closer and grew till it filled what was once again his vision, and Riley thought he could see faces beyond. Rows and rows of upturned faces, their mouths round with wonder as something occurred, something to slacken their jaws and bug their eyes.
Something magical, thought Riley. And what is magical if not myself?
Orient Theatre. Holborn. London. 1899
Truth be told, the punters and puntresses crammed like so many dollied-up sardines into the circle and stalls of the Orient Theatre were not expecting much of a show for a single penny. What could a penny buy these days? A couple of pigeons pulled from a hat mayhap, or a flash-bang or two? Not much more surely. Nothing of any quality. Especially since it was common knowledge that a mere strip of a lad was wearing the cloak. The Great Savano, he might call himself and good luck to him, but he was a boy making his way and no doubt there would be stumbling and fumbling along the path. Speaking of paths, it was the footpath outside that bore the advertisement.
COME ONE, COME ALL, AND WITNESS
THE SPECTACULAR DEBUT OF
THE GREAT SAVANO.
RAISED BY THE NOBLE AMERICAN INDIANS.
PRIVY TO ALL THEIR MAGICKS.
EVERY NIGHT FOR THIS WEEK ONLY.
EIGHT O’CLOCK SHARP.
Was a tomahawk too much to hope for? For a single penny, probably yes.
The boy was late. Eight o’clock sharp, the chalk advertisement had promised, and was it not now fifteen minutes past the hour? Unrest was growing. Bustles were rustled and feet stamped, and growing nervous in the front row was young Bob Winkle, Riley’s chief bottle-washer, boot-polisher and investigator. It was he who had picked up the Ginger Tom trail in Newgate and was now gloomily aware that he had been fed a sack of lies.
And me a clever boots. And me a survivor of the rookery. It’s shame I have brought on the Winkle name.
He knew that the Newgate tip had been bogus because one of his rookery snouts had come in with the real gin not an hour after Riley had set his course for Newgate.
That weren’t no Ginger Tom in the Gate, Bob thought. For I have that geezer beside me now.
His snout had brought not only the news but the gent himself into the bargain, who had
been nervous as a kitten at the thought of meeting his long-lost kin. And you only had to take one look at this gent’s mush to see that he and Riley shared a mother.
Spitting image. Two bottles on a shelf.
And wasn’t it a small world, as they say, for Tom Riley had been working not a stone’s throw away as a stoker in Saint Pancras. He’d been a doddle to find once the railway track had been followed.
Sobbed like a baby, the man did, when he got the news. Fell to his actual knees in the rail yard. In fact, Bob was getting a little embarrassed by the continuing snuffle.
But I loves me little brothers too, right enough, he reasoned. So perhaps Tom Riley is entitled.
Now, though, wasn’t Riley missing? And there were rumours of some commotion in Newgate this very morning. Something about magic and a poleaxed attorney, and Bob had a cramp in his gut from fretting over his boss and pal.
Come back to us, Riley. Come back.
Then something truly extraordinary happened, something the reports of which would spread across the country like wildfire until the number who claimed to have seen it would swell to the thousands, in spite of the fact that the cramped theatre could barely accommodate two hundred souls. Though the accounts were exaggerated, for they could not realistically be so, they would ensure that the Great Savano’s reputation was solidly stamped in the register of great stage illusionists.
A hole opened in the air, ridged with a milky ring of sparks, and it was immediately obvious to the Orient’s patrons that this was more than a mere workaday hole from which such things as sewage or bilge would spill. They witnessed the stars that lived inside this hole, and as it grew to the dimensions of a whale’s maw it was clear that other things lived there too. Things that were multi-tentacled and vari-tusked flashed across the space within, and many gave thanks that they did not make it their business to investigate without. A noise emanated from this otherworldly aperture, which some veterans would later describe as the sound of a battlefield’s entire complement of cannons, and others would swear sounded exactly like the drone of countless foghorns during a pea-souper.
Panic would surely have ensued had not a figure appeared in the hole and transfixed the audience with its radiance. Humanoid in shape but composed entirely of swarming orange sparks, as though a man were being held aloft by golden bees.
Bob was the first to twig.
Nah, he thought. We ain’t got the budget.
But his instincts proved correct and the figure solidified.
‘It’s a man!’ shouted a drunken swell a bit off his turf. ‘It’s the Great Savano!’
If this was the Great Savano, then he was indeed great and, as the figure took on more of a real aspect, it was clear that he wore the high-collared cape of a magician and his face, though young, burned bright with intelligence and triumph.
‘Savano!’ said another, and commenced a-clapping. ‘Savano!’
The assembly took up the chant and the clap, some with trepidation, but this changed to genuine rapture when the illusionist closed the terrifying hole with a snatch of his fist, hung for a moment in the air, then dropped neatly into the glow of the footlights. Orange sparks trailed him down and gathered at his feet as though awaiting the illusionist’s command.
In the audience Bob was on his feet with the rest of them.
Go on, boss! he thought. Tie a ribbon on it!
And Riley did, bowing low and sweeping the folds of his cape before him like the wings of a great black swan, dispelling the last of the quantum sparks.
‘The Great Savano,’ he said, and his voice carried to the rafters in spite of the tumult.
It seemed as though the applause would never end, and some claimed to have heard it clear across the river.
Though he had travelled through the centuries, to Riley the journey had seemed almost instantaneous and, though he was glad to be home and grateful to be fully human, as far as he could tell, his joy would not have extended to theatrical flourishes had it not been for three persons his keen eyes spotted among the audience members.
There, beside faithful Bob, a red-headed man sporting his own serious brow and high cheekbones.
Tom! he thought – no, he knew. This time there was no doubt and his senses, amplified by the wormhole (a gift that would serve him well throughout his long career), heard his brother’s voice cry, ‘Redmond! Redmond! Is it you, brother?’
Redmond, thought Riley, and the name fitted him more snugly than a baker’s apron; he felt the rightness of it and remembered how his mother had told him he would carry the name of her Wexford clan as his own Christian name.
Redmond Riley, he thought, and felt himself whole at last.
There was another who Riley saw, standing in the wings and seeming as surprised to be there herself as she was to see him. It was his own dear Chevie, dressed out of character in a sunflower-yellow dress, woven bonnet, with silver on her neck and wrists, her clear brown eyes returned to her. Somewhere in his bones, which were still tingling with quantum magic, Riley knew that this day would be the first of many happy ones, and so he dropped to the boards he would tread so often over the years, bowed low, cast his glance sideways to his Native American princess and said:
‘The Great Savano at your service.’
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First published 2015
Text copyright © Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl Ltd, 2015
Cover photography by Fred Gambino.
Design by James Fraser
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-36110-9
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