Negative Film

by Leonard Petracci

  “You seem to know a lot about them, don’t you?” I asked, my voice suspicious.

  “Hang out around power long enough and you’ll know the type. But you forget, I worked along Lacit. I investigated Siri. You hear things when you listen long enough. We know something is up, but we don’t know enough to fight it. And when we do, our hands are tied in one way or another from the bureaucracy. Rules that seem all too convenient to their cause.”

  “If you consider yourself an ally, then you would have acted out long ago,” I said, shaking my head in disapproval, “instead of simply standing by.”

  “Not all of us have a death wish,” Roland answered, the muscle in his jaw tightening. “But even if I did, do you think I’d be more useful six feet under after having laid waste to one of their plans? Or here, where I watch and listen, and wait for the right chance to strike? It’s about who wins in the end, not the moment. But about allies, I’ve never called you that.”

  “Are you saying we aren’t?” I asked, tensing suddenly and feeling Lucio and Slugger mirror me.

  “I’m saying that perhaps it’s time we should be. Because the one thing we do know right now is their next move. And we need you to stop it.”

  Chapter 5

  “You’re thinking of helping them? They’re who we should be fighting!” said Lucio, shouting towards the ceiling. “When have the cops ever helped us?”

  We stood inside the contraption that Peregrine had constructed in the subway, the teleportation machine, as we waited for Arial to arrive. I squinted, looking out through one of the eight doors that surrounded us, one that was just as dark as the tunnels. Through it, I could just barely see train tracks running perpendicular through a bend in the corridor, and once a day, a train would come screeching down it, the sound entering through to our side of the door. But these sounds were typical down in the subway, and from the distance of our bedrooms, were indistinguishable from the natural others.

  Since Lola was not around to assist, it had taken me some time to manipulate the portal doors of Peregrine’s contraption. With her help, we had been able to connect one of the doors to the Amazon rainforest thousands of miles away. But on my own, I’d managed to connect another door to a section of the subway track nearest to Arial’s house. It was adjacent to a room filled with electrical transformers and cabling, and to my best guess, Peregrine had intended it for the production of Electrosparks. But most important was a wire that ran up the wall towards ground level, one that the rats had chewed through long before—and that we discovered lit the rusted over lights that provided under glow to the subway entrance.

  We’d patched the wire with a length of thin copper pipe, the piece suspended in midair and showering small blue sparks whenever we connected it.

  “Eh, not good, but good enough,” Slugger had announced when we connected it the first time, after we ran outside to check if it was working. Though we always flipped a coin to determine who had to connect it and risk the inevitable electrical shock as copper met copper, the contraption served its purpose.

  Whenever the lights were on, which Arial could just barely see in the distance from her window, it meant we needed to meet that night. Earlier, Lucio had lost the toss and connected the pipe, escaping with only a mild burn, so Arial should already be on her way. She’d remember that today was the first time we’d be opening the portal to the Amazon since we had left Darian behind, the first time we’d see him in a month and hear about the recovery of the Worldwalkers. Together, he and Lola had stayed behind to ensure her early reign as queen was successful, that the tribe could rebuild from Lacit’s assault, and, well, some more personal reasons.

  As I stared through the portal, I saw Arial’s shape materialize from the tracks. Effortlessly, she glided forwards, and no matter how many times that I had seen her power, I was always astounded by the grace of the motion. When she was in the air, it seemed like nothing could hold her—not gravity, not the rules of everyday life, not reality itself. It was as if she was truly free.

  When her face came into focus, I felt my mouth go dry again and my heart rate quicken. Only three days had passed since I had seen her last, but it always felt like I was meeting a stranger again, as if she was crossing some thick divide, and the words evaporated from my mind before they could reach my mouth.

  “So,” she said, crossing through the portal and alighting in front of me, her brunette hair swaying slightly on the impact to momentarily cover one eye. “Are we ready?”

  “Ready?” I asked, blinking.

  “To see Darian? Of course!” she said, planting a kiss on my cheek as she strode past me, and I flushed. “Doesn’t look like the portal is open yet?”

  “I don’t like leaving it there—without me controlling the elevation. If someone slips through, it could be trouble,” I said, turning to follow her. “But first, there’s something we need to talk about. There’s been a development.”

  “More than a development!” Lucio interrupted, taking Arial by the shoulders with both hands. “The police found us and they’re trying to make us cops!”

  “Have you been hiding something from me again?” Arial demanded, stopping short, her tone accusatory.

  “Not quite,” I said as Arial’s eyes widened. “But not far off either. We need to fill you in, and we may need Lola’s help on this one. Having someone who can cross through walls would be a huge advantage for this situation. But first, let’s get this portal working so I can rest before sending us through.”

  I closed my eyes and reached out to the machine surrounding us. From where we were standing, it simply looked like eight television screens, one showing where Arial had just emerged, the other seven showing static. Back when Peregrine had built it, it had been intended to emulate rare environments, greatly raising the chance that anyone born within was born with desirable powers and giving him the ability to raise an army of rare Specials.

  Behind the doors, I could sense the infrastructure he had left behind, a mass of twisting darkness that extended away in every direction, splitting like tree branches as they neared their targets. Each of them was a node, a tunnel through space he had created using his Teleportation powers, and now survived after his death. Somehow, Peregrine had found a way to make the contraption permanent —something that Lola, our prior resident book nerd, had declared a rarity if not completely lost knowledge. How he had discovered that possibility remained a mystery to us, and I shuddered to think of the other contraptions that might be in progress if Siri also knew the secret.

  With Lola’s help, we’d mapped out a portion of Peregrine’s nodes, and over the past month, I had returned, mapping even more as I grew more and more accustomed to the machine. In the past, simply working with the ripped open space made nausea wash over me, but now I barely felt any queasiness as I manipulated the strands of twisted reality, searching for the particular one that led to the Amazon. Every time I returned, the machine grew more and more familiar, and now it felt as if I was operating a switchboard, until with a snap, I made the connection and one of the doorways in front of me flickered to life, revealing the cliffs.

  “And now,” I said, relaxing my power and stretching, surprised at how easy it had been to make the connection. “It’s time to fill you in on Roland.”

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