by Jade White
Macy gave his shoulders a squeeze. “I want you both back. Understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rudd said.
She put her arms all the way around him and pressed herself against his chest. Rudd returned the hug, understanding everything she was feeling, telling her he felt much the same.
Presently, the technicians replaced all the panels on the walls, covering the hidden intricacies once again, and the triplets stepped down from the stools at the columns. The technicians took away the stools and all but three of them exited one way, while Sam, Andrew, and Kate passed through another door that led to the observation room. In a moment, Macy saw the kids enter.
“Are you ready?” Macy asked. “Do you think you’ve got this?”
“We’ve got it, Mom,” said Kate. “We’re gonna get Daddy back.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Rudd, giving each child a high-five in turn as they all took seats in the first tier. “We are bringing back your dad.” He looked inside the chamber and saw the three remaining technicians taking their places and four of the Dragon Watch, armed like Rudd and led by Mark Weathers, entering. He said to Macy, “I’m on. I’ll see you soon.”
“Hurry back,” said Macy.
“I will,” Rudd replied, giving her a thumbs-up. “With your husband.” He quickly exited, leaving Macy with the children, tablets in their laps, and Duncan standing by.
“Kids, put on your Bluetooths in case the technos need to ask a question,” Duncan instructed.
Each of the triplets had been assigned a Bluetooth along with his or her tablet. They plucked the devices from their pockets and put them on their ears.
“I think we’re ready,” Duncan announced, putting on a Bluetooth of his own. Facing the glass wall, he called, “Everyone ready in there?”
Acknowledgements of readiness came over the connection as Rudd stepped into the chamber with the others.
“All right, then,” Duncan called. “Begin initializing now.”
Macy stood to one side of the first tier, near Kate, watching the three children tap out sequences of commands on their tablets. She peered into the chamber and saw the three technicians tapping out sequences in response, emulating the kids. She felt an anxious heat in her bosom as the process of activating the Beacon and opening the warp gate began. In a few moments, a golden glow began to fill the chamber and gleam its way into the observation room. Macy looked at the Beacon and saw the lens glowing brightly, the source of the new glow. She pressed her lips together. Superstition aside, crossing her fingers would not have been out of order right now.
Her eyes fixed on what was happening in the chamber, Macy heard Duncan say, “If we’re ready…open the warp gate.”
At a series of commands entered by the triplets and repeated by the technicians, a beam of light leapt out like a striking snake—no, a striking dragon—from the lens of the Beacon and stabbed down towards the stage. The response came instantly. A blossom of light appeared over the stage and soon expanded to fill the entire area of the platform with what looked almost like an enormous, shimmering soap bubble. Its surface churned and rippled with golden light, making it look almost like a gigantic, ghostly jewel.
Macy watched Mark Weathers gesture to Rudd and the other Dragon Watch members. They joined together and walked forward between two of the control columns. As one, they stepped toward the stage platform and up through the surface of the glowing bubble. As soon as they passed through the shimmering surface, each one vanished into it as if he were a ghost stepping through a wall. Macy saw Weathers go first, then a couple of the others. Rudd was next, and before he stepped through, he looked back over his shoulder at Macy. He gave a little half-smile, which Macy returned with an anxious wave. Then, he stepped up and through and was gone, with the two remaining Watch members stepping up right behind him.
“They’re off,” said Duncan. “We’ll have to maintain the warp gate at this power level while they’re gone. We don’t know how long that’ll be, but we won’t need the kids that much until it’s time for them to come back. If the kids need to rest until then, it should be okay. The technos will be on top of this.”
“We’re fine,” said Sam.
“We can just sit here and watch for a while, can’t we, Mom?” Andrew asked.
Macy shrugged. “I don’t see why not. But there might not be a lot to see for a while.” She gave the three of them a wry look, breaking the mood. “You guys are staying up pretty late on a school night, aren’t you? How do you like that?”
The triplets smiled three identical smiles at their mother.
Long moments passed in silence. Duncan stood near the glass wall, watching. Macy started to pace back and forth in front of the seats. There was really no way of knowing how long they would be here, just waiting. It could be all night. It could be into tomorrow. Macy began to wonder what kind of phone call she would have to make to the kids’ school in the case of their absence in the morning.
And then, Kate called out, “Something’s happening!”
Her daughter’s voice snapped Macy to full attention. She bounded over to where the kids were sitting, each of them tapping intently on their tablet and gazing up with quiet alarm into the Beacon chamber. Macy looked there and found that on the other side of the glass wall, the energy bubble of the warp gate had begun to flicker, to pulsate and throb. Her eyes widened. Frantically, she called to Duncan, “What’s wrong? What’s happening?” She dreaded the answer.
Duncan said the one thing she did not want to hear. “The power levels are fluctuating—rising and falling randomly. Something’s happening.” He checked his tablet. “But it’s not happening here. It’s something on the other side of the gate. Something’s happening over there; we don’t know what.”
An edge of terror sliced into Macy’s voice. “Is this the same thing that happened before?” Again, she dreaded the answer.
“It’s similar, but it’s not quite as powerful. We need to get this under control before…”
Before Duncan uttered another word, the observation room and the Beacon chamber were both flooded with a light far more powerful than the strobing and pulsing of the bubble. With the light, a feeling passed through the room like a wave coming in from the ocean, or like a hard, moving wall of something that could not be seen but only felt. It struck Macy and Duncan, knocking them flat, and spread out and up over the rows of seats where the children were. Macy, blinded and stunned, feeling herself go down hard on the floor, heard three young voices cry out, “MOM…!”
Then, it all went dark.
After how long she did not know, Macy gathered her senses and her wits, and anchored her mind on the last thing she remembered, the outcries of the children. A mother’s adrenaline pumping, she scrambled to her feet and got the three seats in her sight. Kate, Sam, and Andrew were still seated but unconscious. Kate and Andrew’s tablets rested in their laps, Sam’s was on the floor near him. With a gulp, Macy half-staggered and half-ran to the kids. She got them sitting upright one by one, and gentle taps on their cheeks got them awake again. Thank God, she thought, they’re waking up, and they don’t seem to be hurt. “Kids, talk to me,” she said breathlessly. “Talk to Mommy. Are you okay? Does anything hurt?”
Sam was the first to find his voice. “No, Mom, nothing hurts. It’s just like…something hit us. What was it?”
Ascertaining that the other two triplets were in the same state as Sam, Macy replied, “I don’t know, honey. Something happened in the…” She glanced over at the Beacon chamber and bolted upright from crouching by the children. Eyes widening and pulse pumping, she watched more intently the scene on the other side of the glass.
The three technicians were crumpled on the floor. The bubble of the warp gate was still there, filling the stage. But something had changed. It no longer appeared as a large, hollow blister of energy. There was something inside it—or some things. Shapes had appeared, moving and shifting. Some of them she could recognize: dragon shapes, wings beating,
tails thrashing. They were only silhouettes at first, but they began to take on dim details. She recognized patterns of color and scales. And she saw one pattern that she recognized, one body of bluish-green scales and plates that she knew very well.
Macy shouted his name. “AARON!”
But there were other shapes in the bubble, forms that Macy did not recognize. Or perhaps forms that she did know, which were jumbled and cobbled together in strange, alien ways. Whatever they were, when the dragon forms in the bubble thrashed their tails and snapped their jaws and slashed their talons, it was at the other shapes.
Macy did not know what was in the bubble with the dragons. But she knew danger when she saw it.
The sound of Duncan groaning softly as he pulled himself up from the floor diverted Macy’s attention. Lips creased, she looked from the scene in the Beacon chamber to the recovering head technician, who dragged himself groggily into a chair by the triplets. A decision took hold at once. She went over to Duncan and put her hands on his shoulders once he got himself sitting upright. “Duncan,” she said, “look at me. Can you talk?”
The techno looked up at her, awareness coming back into his eyes. “I can talk, yeah. Are you all right?”
“Yes, I think so—mostly.” She was forming an idea, and it hinged on saying exactly the right thing at this moment. “And the kids are okay. I need you to do something for me.”
“What?”
“Stay with the kids. Watch them for me. I have to go out for a minute.”
“Why? Where are you going?”
“I think I’m going to be a little sick. I have to run out, just for a minute. Just stay with the kids, please.”
Duncan nodded. “Okay, I’ll stay with them. But hurry back; we have to get the system stabilized again, or we might not be able to…”
“I understand,” said Macy. “I’ll be right back.”
She took off with a last glance over her shoulder at Duncan and the triplets. Kate, Andrew, and Sam were all transfixed on what was happening in the energy bubble. A pang of guilt gnawed at Macy. Let them stay just like that. Just don’t let them see me going out. And with that, she bolted for the door. The last thing she heard before she closed it behind her was Kate calling, “Mom, where are you go…?”
Frenzied moments later, Macy threw open the door to the Beacon chamber and sped inside. The technicians at the control columns, who had been closer to whatever force came pouring out from the stage, were only just starting to recover and pick themselves up. She stepped around one of them and between two of the columns and approached the platform. Macy stood there for a moment, hands knotted into fists, peering into the strange display of thrashing bodies, dragons and “others.” She heard groggy voices inside the chamber asking, “Ms. Jacobs, what are you doing?” and saying, “You shouldn’t be in here now, Ms. Jacobs.”
She heard other voices—muffled voices; little, young voices—calling, “Mom! Come back! Don’t!” Macy looked in that direction and saw her children huddled at the glass wall, watching her with three looks of horror on their little faces. A knife twisted in her heart at the sight of them.
I’ll be back, kids. Mommy will be back. I promise.
Then, as the dragon men did before her, Macy stepped up onto the platform and disappeared into the energy formation of the warp gate, and was gone.
THE FINAL CHAPTER
Macy recalled the old line about no longer being in Kansas. But geography was now the least of her worries.
There was nothing recognizable about the place where she found herself. She was outdoors—and outdoors extended as far as she could see in every direction. It was a vast, seemingly unending plain that reminded her of Death Valley, but it was not unbearably hot. The soil beneath her feet and all around her, off into the vast distance, was dry and looked like a cracked, parched riverbed. And that was the only familiar thing about her surroundings. Macy was not the only thing occupying this endless, dry flatland.
The plain was filled with towers, spaced at regular intervals. She judged the distance from one to the one nearest it was the same as the distance across Fifth Avenue back in Manhattan. They were everywhere. Macy wondered if perhaps the entire surface of the planet were covered with them, or if they took up a space the size of a continent or a city. She looked up to the tops of them, guessing that possibly there were people—or beings of some sort—living there. It was then it struck her that there was one familiar thing about this place after all.
Each tower was topped with a formation holding a huge crystal. Putting the shape of the structures and what was mounted on top of them into context, Macy realized that these were gigantic versions of the Beacon back in the chamber in Aaron’s building. She gasped at the fact that she was now in an actual forest of Vonsahlan Beacons.
Unable to react to her situation in any other way, Macy let pure instinct take over. At the top of her voice, she called out, “Aaron!”
She had seen him in the energy bubble of the warp gate, she was sure of it. If the fluctuating warp had brought Aaron here, there was a chance that she could somehow find him, if only she could make him aware of her presence or he could find her. The pain of another realization stabbed into her heart: she had left the children back on Earth. They had called to her, asked her to stop, to come back—and right before their eyes, she had climbed through the surface of a bubble of energy that led to Lord knows where. What had she done to her children? What kind of mother was she?
A mother desperate to find their father, that was what kind. And she cried again, making her throat feel raw. “AARON!”
Macy’s voice carried into the alien air. Please, let him be somewhere near. Please, let him have some way of hearing me. Please…
A sound came back from the distance—a sound of roaring. It was small but getting bigger and nearer. Perhaps it was a dragon’s roar. When Macy saw him in the bubble, he had been in dragon form. Perhaps he still was—her husband, in his winged reptile body, flying towards her, calling back to her with a dragon’s roar. The roar sounded again, more loudly—closer. Macy’s hopes made a smile blossom on her face. Yes, it must be Aaron. She spun around in the direction from which the roar was coming, turned and looked.
There was a shape coming towards her—and her smile of relief contorted into a look of utter horror when she saw it.
At the moment she caught sight of it, a thundering sound assailed her ears and a shock of impact shook the cracked and parched ground. The thing coming through the grove of Beacon towers was the size of a truck. The only way Macy could have described it, if the horror that it struck into her allowed her any words, was that it was an enormous, fanged mouth with an elongated body like the abdomen of a colossal insect. It had four appendages that seemed as much like tentacles as legs, and when it set one thunderously down, the ground shook. So did Macy’s heart as it drew nearer.
Terror flung her into action. Macy ran. She ran through the spaces between the towers, gasping, choking back screams, scrambling in her head for what to do when being chased. She had never in her life heard anything to cover what to do when fleeing from an enormous monster that one could not even name, but there had to be something. There was nothing around her but ground and towers, and neither could offer her any cover and place to hide. Her breath burning her lungs with every step, her legs starting to ache, a sweat breaking out all over her body, Macy could do nothing but take a zigzag course from one tower to another, hoping to keep the nightmare closing in on her from lashing out with its immense mouth and devouring her in one gulp—or biting her in two in mid-stride. Its roaring and the thunder of its footfalls boomed in her ears. She didn’t dare look back. If she did, she might fall or freeze in her tracks. Then, she would be doomed for sure.
In spite of herself, Macy could not help but look behind her when another sound ripped at her, the fearsome sound of something tearing and cracking and crashing, and another terrible impact, as awful as the footfalls of the creature. She saw that the thing had bu
lldozed its way into one of the towers trying to get to her. The crash of its body against the tower had uprooted it from the ground and knocked it over. The hole of torn earth left by the uprooting of the tower, and the crystal-bearing structure at the top of the tower, both now gushed fiery light and sparks that hissed and crackled loudly from the ground. In response to the outpouring of energy from the sundered tower, the crystals in the other structures all around her emitted strobing flashes that made Macy wince and look down. The creature reared back and away from the ruin it had made of the structure it knocked over, and charged at Macy again. With a desperate whine, Macy broke back into her zigzagging run. The thing was gaining on her. She would not be able to flee much longer.
It was only a few strides behind her now. The crash of its legs into the ground felt like the first taste of what would happen when it finally bore down on her, which was sure to be any second. Running from side to side, practically feeling the creature upon her, Macy also felt the tears pouring down her face. She sobbed as she ran, her mind echoing with the words, Goodbye, Aaron. Goodbye, my babies. I’m so sorry…
