The Edge of the Ocean

by L. D. Lapinski

  “How long have we been away?” Flick asked as Jonathan dug out the suitcase that led to the lighthouse.

  He looked up and checked the clock. “Just over a week,” he said.

  Flick choked. “That long?”

  “Indeed.”

  The clock’s hands continued to progress around the circle, too quickly. Flick had the urge to put a finger on them to stop them.

  “We need to move fast,” Jonathan said. “You try that case and find out if it’s suitable.” He pulled another case toward himself. “See you back here as quick as you can,” he said, before jumping into it.

  The lid shut behind him, and Flick was left alone with the suitcase that led to the dead, silent world of her dream.

  She stepped over to it.

  The suitcase looked as unassuming as it had before. Flick put her thumbs to the catches, remembering how stiff they had been to open before.

  This time they flicked up as easy as anything. Flick stared into the suitcase, the sandy air blowing up at her, and felt sick. She hadn’t planned to return here. The place frightened her. It had then, and it still did now.

  But she couldn’t afford to be selfish about this. It might be just the kind of world her new friends needed.

  She stepped into the case and, with a newfound elegance that she would swear blind she wasn’t copying from Jonathan Mercator, took hold of the handle and pulled it through after herself.

  27

  Flick staggered out of the suitcase, emerging onto the beach she had tried not think about for so many weeks. The stillness of the air, so different from the constant winds and cold blasts of the Break and the warm familiarity of the Strangeworlds Travel Agency, seemed to steal her breath away.

  She tried to ignore it, picking up the suitcase. She didn’t pull it through with her—if she went too long without going back to Strangeworlds, she wanted Jonathan to be able to come and rescue her. The last thing she wanted was to be sealed away in this place.

  The sun was casting pale light down onto the sea and sand. Flick shielded her eyes as she looked around. She was farther from the lighthouse than she remembered being last time, but there was a low crop of sandstone to her right and a crunching grass verge above it. She climbed up onto the verge quickly. Somewhere here she knew there was an abandoned picnic. She kept one eye on the sand as she walked, watching out for the gingham blanket and broken glass and those awful drag marks that led down to the water.

  But, somehow, this time she reached the lighthouse without seeing any of that. As she walked toward the lighthouse, she noticed the vast ocean, the land with sparse patches of grass, and what might be trees in the distance. This could be a good world for the pirates of the Break. She might have found the place for them.

  That should have made Flick feel better, but it didn’t. She hadn’t seen the abandoned picnic this time—where was it? The other side of the lighthouse? It couldn’t be—she’d come the same way as before.

  Perhaps, a creaking little voice in her head chuckled darkly, someone else has been here and cleared it away.

  Flick attempted a Jonathan-style eye roll, cursing her imagination. Who else could have come here? Who else had a suitcase? Flick pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead. There were too many questions. Who was taking the magic from the Break? What had Daniel Mercator been doing here? And who had last seen him? Had it really been the people who ran the Strangeworlds Outpost in Five Lights, Greysen and Darilyn Quickspark, who saw him last? And now that she thought about it, who was the man who had wandered into Tam’s forest with a gun, scaring the children?

  She reached the lighthouse and leaned against the side. The Strangeworlds Society should be solving those mysteries, not trying to work out how to get a galleon through a suitcase. This was the problem with the multiverse, she realized. You tried to fix one problem and then another one comes up and you’re so busy trying to fix the new one that the first one gets forgotten about. And that could be dangerous.

  In the quiet of this empty world, all of Flick’s held-back worries were rising to the surface. And the words of Glean, that sinister leader of the Five Lights Thieves, suddenly rang in her memory louder than a church bell.

  “…why was the Strangeworlds Society formed in the first place? To protect the worlds? Protect them from what? From whom?”

  Something, or someone, had been stealing magic from the world of the Break. Not the pirates—they were innocent (at least in that regard). And the Thieves were locked away in another world, so they couldn’t be to blame. But… the Thieves of Five Lights had been afraid. They had been running from something. Something they thought Flick and Jonathan ought to know about.

  “…We have never been safe, not for one single moment. The multiverse is in more danger than you realize.”

  What if whatever the Strangeworlds Society had been formed as a protective force against, and whatever was taking the magic from the Break…

  What if it was the same thing?

  Flick pushed herself off the wall of the lighthouse. She couldn’t see the whole picture yet, but she felt as if she had been handed several puzzle pieces. She just needed time to sort them out.

  And right now she didn’t have time. She needed to get back to the agency and tell Jonathan the world seemed suitable, even if it was still very unsettling.

  She looked up at the lighthouse.

  Last time she had been here, she had gone inside, seen the emptiness of the place, but also the pictures on the walls, the paper-covered desk with its boxes and frames.

  She could go in again.

  She could also go straight back to the travel agency.

  Flick bit her lip guiltily as she turned toward the door of the lighthouse and pushed it open.

  It swung inward with less resistance than the last time.

  The interior of the lighthouse didn’t feel as creepy as the beach. Whether that was because it was warmer, or the fact it had thick protective walls, Flick wasn’t sure. But as she wedged the door open with the suitcase, she felt her shoulders relax a little.

  “Hello?” she called.

  Obviously, there was no answer.

  She stared around the empty space, her eyes resting on the black iron spiral staircase in the center. The sight of it nagged at her, like she ought to remember something about it, but she didn’t know what. She walked over to it and touched the cold metal. She had been too nervous to climb it, the last time she was here.

  The memory of her dream stirred, like a cat stretching in its sleep.

  She put one foot on the bottom step. She shouldn’t be nervous. Hadn’t she broken out of a locked world? Hadn’t she stood on the hand of a gigantic mer-queen? She could climb this staircase.

  Gripping the banister, Flick went up. The staircase coiled tightly, and the steps were slim, but it didn’t take long to reach the top. She stepped up onto solid floorboards.

  No one had been here for a long, long time. Her shoes left marks behind in the undisturbed beige dust. Above her, the roof curved like a little cap on a too-large head. The space where a lantern or bulb would sit was empty. The glass of the dome itself, which looked like a single curved pane from the outside, was revealed to actually be several dozen slices of glass neatly pieced together and sealed.

  The lighthouse tapered upward as it rose, so the space at the top was no bigger than the box room back at Strangeworlds. There was a dusty pile of sheets and clothes, a small collection of empty glass bottles, and a woven basket containing some old toys.

  One of the toys—a stuffed rabbit—glared at Flick with its one remaining glass eye. Flick had an urge to turn it to the wall. Then something clicked in her head.

  She went quickly back down the staircase and into the main room. She went over to the desk. The evidence of her sending things clattering to the floor on her last visit was still clear. There were papers, that slim wooden box, and framed photographs stacked up haphazardly on the desk. She went through them quickly.

  T
here they were. The two photos she had remembered.

  In one photo, a father and mother stood outside a shop, holding a baby each. In the other, the same father and mother sat on a beach with just one child, a young daughter, all laughing together. Behind the child, lying on the beach blanket, was the very same one-eyed rabbit Flick had just seen upstairs.

  And then Flick’s heart seemed to stop.

  She hadn’t expected to stare into a face she knew in the pictures.

  His hair was darker and his face sharper, but it was definitely him. Holding a baby in one photograph and his daughter’s small hand in the other was the man who had patched up Jonathan’s wounds after they had escaped the City of Five Lights. The man who Flick had thought she’d recognized.

  She had seen him before then, but in a photograph.

  Smiling out of the pictures at her was the apothecary, Tristyan Thatcher.

  28

  Well? We’re running out of time and options,” Jonathan said as Flick stepped back through the suitcase.

  He’d clearly been back for a while—the wet towels and clothes had been piled into the kitchen area, and the travel agency floor was now only slightly damp. “Mine was a waste of time—there was plenty of water, but the land was solid rock, no soil or plant life at all. How was yours?”

  “Same as before,” she said, closing the suitcase lid with her foot. She was carrying the photographs.

  Jonathan was facing away from her and looking at the bookshelf. “I’ve been trying to find the guidebook to your lighthouse world and get some more information,” he said. “I’d like to know some of the history, at any rate.” He paused. “My dad might have taken the guidebook with him, of course…” He stopped, curling a hand into a tense fist.

  “Jonathan,” Flick said, coming over to the desk. “You need to take a look at this.” She put the frames down.

  Jonathan turned and raised his eyebrows in surprise. He touched the picture of the family of four. “Tristyan!”

  Flick pointed to the other photograph. “Tristyan said he lost someone because of Strangeworlds. I wondered… Well, there’s only one child in the second photograph,” she said quietly.

  Jonathan was looking troubled. “How did these come to be in an empty world? He said he didn’t travel by suitcase.”

  “Maybe he was lying.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps these photos belonged to someone else.” Jonathan dragged his hands down his face. “We don’t have time to think about this now. Is the world suitable for the evacuation, do you think?”

  “I think so,” Flick admitted. “It’s got what we’re looking for.”

  “Then we can at least begin to rescue people from the Break. That’s what matters now, not whether Tristyan has been there.”

  “Rescue some of the people, you mean.” Flick picked Tristyan’s younger family picture back up and looked at it. Her time in the quiet world of the lighthouse seemed to have amplified all her feelings. She was tired and angry and disappointed all at once, and she didn’t know how she was managing to feel it all without dissolving.

  Jonathan sighed. “Some of the people are better than none,” he said, though he sounded as bleak as she felt.

  Flick couldn’t take the hurricane of feelings anymore. “It isn’t fair!” she exploded. “Why should some of the people be rescued just because they’re fortunate enough to fit into our suitcase, and others not?”

  “It’s the only plan we have!” Jonathan retorted.

  Flick clenched the picture frame in her hands. “We’re failing them. And we’re supposed to just be okay with that? What about all those mer-folk who will be left behind to die? Those people who—who don’t fit into our plan? We are leaving them! And they’ll know! They’ll have to watch while everyone else goes to a safer place, and then—and then…” Flick’s whole body was fizzing from the inside. She gripped the picture frame so hard the glass shattered in her fingers, falling to the floor of the travel agency. Her arms tensed, and her chest was so tight she felt as if she would explode, but then…

  “Get me,” she forced out between her teeth.

  “What?” Jonathan said.

  “Suitcase,” she said. “Get—me—one.”

  Jonathan moved fast, grabbing the suitcase that led to the world of the tall trees. He opened it in front of Flick, not even bothering to kick the broken glass away.

  Flick exhaled…

  … and the sides of the suitcase began to strain. The leather-stitched edges creaked and bent. They pulsed and stretched. Then… they gave way, collapsing open. The schism inside—a dark red magma flow—became edged in white. It swelled out of the suitcase and kept on widening. It was growing.

  “Oh my god,” Jonathan breathed, backing away.

  Flick could feel the edge of the schism in her hands, in her mind, pulling at something inside her, wanting to make her fly, vanish, explode.

  “I have to stop,” she gasped. She released her mental grip on it, and the schism snapped shut.

  The bright red and white light became a thin glowing line, hovering in the middle of the travel agency, before it gave a final glow of desperation, then vanished, leaving nothing behind. Not even the suitcase it had risen from. There was simply a space on the floor, and pieces of broken picture frame.

  “Felicity?”

  Flick could hear Jonathan, but it was as though he was a voice on the TV. Something that could easily be ignored. It wasn’t important.

  “Felicity, can you hear me?”

  The voice was strangely insistent, though. She stared, slowly realizing that she wasn’t really seeing anything.

  Something shook her arm.

  She turned her head to look, each tiny movement feeling as difficult as trying to shove a tractor through mud. There was a hand on her arm. And her arm was on the floor.

  And so was she.

  “Flick!”

  She took a deep breath, her chest rattling like it was throwing off an illness. She wanted to cough. It felt like someone was sitting on her chest. “Hhrr…” she managed to say.

  A puff of relieved breath cut through the air. “Come on, Felicity, that’s it.”

  Jonathan.

  Flick raised a hand. Or, she tried to. It felt like her body was made of lead.

  Slowly the ceiling of the travel agency sharpened into relief, and she sat up shakily.

  Jonathan was kneeling next to her, a look of wonder and horror on his face.

  “You—you vanished that suitcase,” he said. “You made the schism inside it move. And—and get bigger. How did you…?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I—I was just so angry.” Flick put a hand to her chest. The ache had gone, but she suddenly felt bone-tired. She could have put her head down on the floorboards and gone to sleep. She swayed and caught herself on the floor. “I’m really tired,” she said stupidly.

  Jonathan grabbed a cushion off the closest armchair and put it behind her in case she should fall backward. “I don’t understand how you did that. Where did the magic come from?”

  Flick pressed a hand to her forehead. “It was like, I knew there was energy—magical energy—in the world inside the suitcase. And I could use it. So, I did.”

  “You used magic from another world to expand a schism?” Jonathan looked as though he was losing his grip on reality. “How did you know what to do?”

  Flick couldn’t answer. In the moment, it had felt as natural as breathing. She had torn a hole between two worlds before using magic. Now she had used it to expand a schism. Magic was a multiuse tool, like a Swiss Army knife that could be used to cut or saw or magnify.

  She looked around the travel agency. She had always felt as though the place buzzed with potential. Now the cases seemed to literally vibrate. She didn’t need to ask whether Jonathan could feel it too; she knew he couldn’t. She put a hand into her pocket and took out the little brass magnifying glass. She held it up close to her eye.

  The travel agency looked the same as it
always did. The suitcases they had recently traveled through glowed a brighter gold than the others, and there was a fine mist of magic in the air, but nothing to show that anything extraordinary had just taken place. Flick lowered the magnifying glass, wondering.

  Jonathan picked up the photograph that had fallen out of the broken frame. He turned it over. “There are names on the back of this.” He handed it to her.

  Flick looked at the neatly written names.

  Aspen, Tristyan, Clara, and I

  She turned the picture back over, feeling a penny drop. “And I. Whoever wrote this, it wasn’t Tristyan,” she said. “It did belong to someone else, after all.” Flick’s eyebrows went up as she remembered something else. “Aspen! Wait—” She snatched at her backpack and dug out her copy of the Strangeworlds’ Study of Particulars. She turned to the first page and jabbed a finger at the names written there.

  PROPERTY OF:

  Anthony Mercator, 1900

  Juliet Mercator, 1970

  Aspen Thatcher, 1982

  “Aspen Thatcher.” Flick sighed. “They must have been married, her and Tristyan.”

  “And she was a member of the Strangeworlds Society,” Jonathan said. “Oh, that’s very sad.”

  “Sad? Why?”

  “Remember what I said about living in a world that isn’t your own? If she was from our world but chose to live with Tristyan in another…” He pulled a face. “They wouldn’t have had long together. Not the lifetime they would have wanted.”

  Sorrow welled up in Flick’s chest. “What about the babies?”

  “I suppose that would depend on where they were born,” he said. “You can only live in the world you’re meant to be in, after all. And if Aspen owned this handbook nearly forty years ago…” He let the implication hang unpleasantly in the air.

  Flick clutched at the only straw she had available to her. “Tristyan said he had lost someone, right? Not that they died. She might have just come home, to our world.”

  It was still heartbreaking. To not be able to see someone you loved, ever again?