by Peter Telep
I glance up at the house and shout, “Dad? What is this? Are you in there?” I run up the driveway with the letter in my hand. I wrench open the door—
And step back into the sooty darkness of the lab.
The door slams behind me, and when I turn back, it’s gone. So is the wall.
In fact, I’m not even standing anymore. I’m lying on my side next to an overturned desk with the letter still clutched in my hand.
Steffanie and Meeka are yelling at me at the same time, but I’m not sure what they’re saying. I slide back and sit up, and they’re still rattling off question after question.
I raise a hand. “Can you please? I’m not sure what I’m doing here, either. Just tell me what happened!”
“You were running around like a maniac, digging through all this burned up junk,” Steffanie tells me. “And you were screaming at Mrs. Bossley.”
“I was doing that here?”
“Uh, yeah,” Meeka says, frowning in disbelief. “Did you go somewhere else? What did you see?”
“I was back at my house in Florida, and I got some mail.” I hand her the envelope and the slip of paper.
“It’s from your father?” she asks, running a finger across the return address. She hands the envelope to Steffanie, and then reads the slip of paper. “So weird. Arabelle… that’s my last name.”
“Oh, it gets weirder. I think I was connected to that viskk thing, the trace of the curator who was here. She wanted me to find this letter, so she used my memories or something. She sent me back home, and I just pulled the letter out of my mailbox, but you said I was going crazy looking for it. I don’t remember any of that.”
“Doc,” Steffanie begins, her tone already scaring me. “This place has been here for over a thousand years, and according to your grandmother, no one’s been inside—until today. So… what’s a letter from your father doing here?”
“She’s right,” Meeka says. “Your dad couldn’t have left this for you—unless he already knew you were coming. But how could he know that? He’s already dead.”
Steffanie’s about to add something when a flash of light near the main doors seizes our attention.
It’s Tommy. He’s in his persona and wearing his Marine Corps dress blues and white hat. He clutches his chest as he staggers toward us.
“Guys, I’m sorry. The Wrrambien’s not working anymore. I need y’all’s help!”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
We grab Tommy’s hands. Meeka takes lead, guiding us in an aggressive jump to the surface.
As we arrive on the scorched ground, just a few feet away from the truck, we rock forward, nearly losing our balance.
“Damn,” Steffanie complains.
We stand there in the bitter cold, with Tommy hunched over in his body and persona.
Hedera and Cypress run over to us.
“Toe-me is sick,” Cypress says.
“Not exactly,” I answer.
“I can’t… stop it,” Tommy groans, speaking from his body now.
“What do we do?” cries Meeka.
“Tommy, just pull back your persona and project Val. You need to do that right now,” I tell him.
“Can’t, son. Too… hard…”
“Nothing’s too hard! You’re a Marine!”
Tommy drags his feet a few steps back—
Just as his persona begins to stand more upright, raising his shoulders proudly and removing his white hat.
He bows his head.
“Tommy, what’re you doing?” I demand.
“I can’t… hold it back… no more,” he answers. “Feels like I’m suffocating. Meeka, come here.”
Meeka glances worriedly at me, and then hurries over to Tommy as he reaches out and takes her hand.
“No, no, no…” Meeka says, her eyes widening in shock.
“What’s happening?” I scream.
“Do you have an immortal?” Steffanie asks Tommy. “Are you giving it to Meeka?”
“No,” Meeka answers for him. “He’s giving me Val’s. He doesn’t want her to be lost.” Her eyes crease in pain until she closes them completely and begins crying.
“I’m sorry, son,” Tommy says. “I got an immortal, too, but I can’t give it up. Won’t let me. Just need to say good-bye.”
Almost on reflex, I jump in my persona and stand in front of Tommy’s persona. Meeka and Steffanie leap into their personas and arrive at my sides.
It’s insane to think we can block him from pushing his essence into his persona and becoming a Mask of Galleon—
But we have to do something.
Anything.
“I don’t want y’all to get hurt,” Tommy manages. “Please get back!”
We all connect with Tommy, and with a violent chill his guard comes down, and I feel his agony.
He’s right. There’s nothing we can do. The force drawing him out toward his persona is inescapable.
And for just a few seconds, memories flash through my thoughts—
But they’re not mine. They’re gifts from Tommy.
I’m seven years old, and we’re on a kayak. I’m sitting up front while he paddles down the Wekiva River in Florida. I glance over my shoulder.
He winks and points to a giant alligator sunbathing on the shoreline. He makes a monster face and growls. I giggle.
I’m ten, and he’s picking me up early from school because some kid brought a lighter into the boy’s bathroom and tried to set my pants on fire while I was taking a pee. “Now you listen to me, son,” he says. “You tell them bullies you’re glad they’re picking on you.”
“I am?”
“Yeah, because they make you stronger.”
“I guess so. But won’t that make it worse?”
“Look at me, Doc. They don’t know who you are, but I do. You got lots of people who care about you. You’ll always be all right. And those bullies, they’ll never get the best of you. Know why? Because you’re wearing the man pants—even if they try to set ‘em on fire.” He winks.
I sniffle and nod.
He gives me a hug before we climb into his truck.
Now I’m sixteen. He’s lying in his cell in the Palladium, and we’ve just come to rescue him.
He can’t believe it. He wants to cry but he’d never do that in front of us. He feels loved…
And then I hear his voice just one last time saying, “I hate to get all sentimental, but I can’t help it. I’ve never had a son. But if I did—
“No, don’t say it!”
“Then just be strong, Doc. Be strong.”
With an almost electric jolt, he breaks the connection.
Suddenly, he wrenches back, fully upright, and his arms extend in the air, forming a cross.
His head lolls back.
It’s going to happen, and, seeing this, we all pull back our personas.
My own arms go up, anticipating the explosion—just like the one on the island when Solomon became a mask.
Tommy’s body starts glowing with sparks like tiny blue fireflies shooting off in all directions.
At the same time, my heart’s being ripped from chest. I try to breathe… but I can’t.
I reach out for him as everyone screams.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
You ever wonder if the smallest decisions you make might have the most extreme consequences?
For example, one night you forget to brush your teeth… or you play a game instead of doing your homework… or you order a pepperoni pizza instead of plain cheese.
And then you find out that just one of those insignificant decisions has changed your life forever.
Maybe everything’s connected in some incredibly complex way, and if you change one piece, you affect a billion others.
And if that’s true, then you would’ve grown up to become a billionaire rock star—but you sold your guitar to pay for textbooks, and now you’re a Freshman in community college with a 2.3 GPA and driving around in an old Hyundai Elantra that’s burning oil and n
eeds a new alternator, but you don’t have the money to fix it because you just got fired from your job at Chipotle for giving free food to your friends.
Can you imagine that?
And if everything’s connected, then what decisions did Tommy make that led him here?
How many of those decisions were affected big time by me and my family? If Tommy didn’t know us, he might’ve had a great life and become one of those ancient warriors telling stories of heroism and bravery to all the young Marines gathered around him.
But now, because he loved us and cared about us so much, he’s being turned into a slave, and there’s not a damned thing in the world I can do about. Nothing.
I can’t change the future—
But Cypress thinks she can.
As we shield our eyes from the glare of Tommy’s body, our friend from Halsparr does the unthinkable:
She activates her shields.
And before Tommy’s persona can jump away, the shields shatter into swarms of hexagons that tumble onto their sides, exposing razor-sharp edges.
In the next flash, they swish and rip through Tommy’s persona, shredding off his arms, his legs… and before his torso even hits the ground, they devour his head.
At the same time, Tommy hunches over in his body. He throbs with a light that grows dimmer and dimmer—
Until he falls face forward onto the ground.
Across from him, his persona trickles down like gray ash as the last of the hexagons vanishes.
No one moves. No one breathes.
And then… the hot anger explodes in my chest, and I start running toward Cypress, screaming, “What’d you do?” I grab her by the jacket collar. “You just killed him!”
“No, Doke!” She rips off my hands and charges away from me, dropping down next to Tommy.
“Don’t you touch him!” Meeka screams, leaping into her persona and looming over Cypress. Steffanie jumps next to Meeka, and they both glare at Cypress, ready to fight.
“Quiet!” Cypress yells, and then she rolls Tommy over, onto his back. “I know this!”
I shove her aside and drop down to check Tommy’s neck for a pulse just the way he taught me.
And there it is: thump-thump. Thump-thump.
“He’s still alive,” I tell the girls.
“Everyone, listen,” Cypress begins. “I know what Toe-me was doing. Some of the grren on Halsparr do it when they are afraid to die. They call it the Path to the Seventh Realm.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, Doke. The Galleons learned to become masks from them.”
“And when the grren do that, something happens,” I say, widening my eyes for Cypress to keep talking.
“Yes, they go to the Seventh Realm, but no one has seen it. One day I saw Halsparrans stop a very old grren from doing it because they loved him so much. They used syncarr to kill the grren’s persona and hurt his wreath, but he lived. And he healed. They didn’t want him to leave.”
“Well that’s a pretty big chance you took with our friend,” I remind her. “Without even telling us!”
She growls. “Terrans… always talking.”
“Let me see him,” comes another voice.
I glance over my shoulder to find Val’s glowing immortal leaning down past me. She puts a hand on Tommy’s cheek, and then pulls back his eyelids, staring deeply into his eyes. She examines his ears, and then checks his wrist for a pulse. “His wreath is draining the rest of his body as it tries to repair itself,” she says. “It’s put him in a coma.”
“Will he be okay?” I ask.
Val frowns. “I’m not sure. This wreath is synthetic, and I’ve never sensed one so aggressively trying to save itself. It could still kill him.”
“But if it dies, then he’ll die, too, right?” I ask.
“I’m not sure about that, either.”
“Can we get it out of him?” asks Meeka.
Val shakes her head. “That surgery is complex and rare. Before the withering, there were only two recorded cases of wreaths being removed and the patient surviving for more than a few days. But even those two became psychotic.”
“So we do nothing?” I ask.
“We monitor him,” she answers. “And we pray that his wreath repairs itself without killing him.”
“But if his wreath heals, it might create another persona, and then we’re back where we started. He’ll try to push out again,” I say.
“I tried to protect him, Doc, but I couldn’t. At least she saved him from becoming a mask.” Val regards Cypress with a thin smile. “Thank you.”
“I didn’t try to kill him,” Cypress says.
“Okay, we get that now,” I tell her. “You just scared the hell out of us. But that’s… whatever…”
“You need to get him out of this cold,” Val says.
“Roger that.” I stand, feeling a dozen new aches and pains. I turn around to study the truck. It’s banged up and lying on its side, but we’ll roll it over and see if it still works.
I share that thought with the others, and we all use our bodies and our personas to heave once, twice, a third time, driving the truck back, onto its tracks, with a loud ka-thump.
While Steffanie and I carry Tommy over to the cab, Meeka pulls back Val’s immortal and gets into the driver’s seat. The engine creaks a moment before finally starting.
Meanwhile, Hedera climbs onto the roof and examines the solar panels, many of which have either busted off or hang loosely by wires. Cypress hops onto the truck’s flatbed and begins helping her reattach a few of the panels.
The engine starts, and Meeka turns on the heater. The warm air feels good as we strap Tommy into his seat, guiding his head onto the cushion. I squeeze into the cab, and Meeka throws the truck in gear. We rumble out of the valley, toward the mountain pass, with Hedera, Cypress, and Steffanie bundled up in the back.
“So where are we going?” Meeka asks.
“Uh, back to the outpost, right?”
“Don’t we need to find this Dr. Arabelle guy?”
“Yeah, we do.”
“Then can I show you something?”
I nod. She puts her hand on mine…
We project our personas and jump away.
I blink and find myself standing on the powdery shoreline of a pink ocean. The waves race out past clusters of islands, and beyond, the sun slides below the horizon.
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
Meeka snorts and grabs my hand. She yanks me around toward the seaside cliffs behind us.
The walls of bluish gray rock rise for hundreds of feet and stretch for miles in both directions. They remind me of the California coastline I’ve seen in pictures and on TV shows, only these cliffs are much taller.
The stumps of dozens of towers and spires, along with the remains of domes, pyramids, and stone-and-metallic gates stand along the top. They’re covered in vines, stained with rust and mold, and creaking with loose beams that sway in the wind.
The place feels ghostly and weird, like a ruined ancient fortress mashed up with a modern mansion. Heavy stone walls run against sleek panels and shimmering steel plates, along with rows of broken windows.
Meeka jumps us again.
We stand on a truss jutting from the highest tower, which was probably twice as high before it was sheared in half. We stare down at the devastation below.
This fortress is bigger than all of Florida’s theme parks combined, and what’s left of the perimeter walls disappears into a dense forest and the snow-capped mountains beyond.
I imagine how the nuclear blast wave came in from the south, hammering through the place with enough force to topple walls so thick they remind me of ancient Rome.
The domes cracked open like eggs, the tips of pyramids were sheared off, and the skyscrapers simply toppled like the ones in Violet. Every avenue, street, alley, and service road is heaped in rubble and impassable.
Meeka lifts her chin to the east, where columns of black smoke rise over t
he mountains. “The Galleons,” she mutters. “Digging into the second lab.”
I swear, shaking my head. “So this is Larkspur. And you were born here.”
She nods and tears up. “The Royal House of Arabelle.”
I pull her into my arms. “It must’ve been awesome.”
“It was.”
“Can you show me?”
“I just… I don’t feel like it right now.”
“That’s okay.”
I point to a leaning tower where a faded symbol appears between rows of shattered windows:
It’s a flower pattern of six hexagons with a seventh in the center. “Those symbols keep coming up,” I tell her. “Even the shells of the driffs are shaped like that.” I remember how we rode our bikes across the backs of those incredible and loyal creatures.
“Yeah,” she says. “And that symbol down there… it’s the royal crest.”
“That can’t be a coincidence,” I say.
“Doc, we didn’t come so I could torture myself.”
“So why’re we here?”
She pulls out of my arms, shakes her head, and then jumps us again—
Back to the Hood and our rooftop dance club.
The music plays.
But no one’s listening.
Because no one’s here.
She rips us away to the Highlands, to the river valley and home of Mama Grren, Brave, and all the other grren who’ve helped us. We jump inside Mama Grren’s cave. It lies still and quiet. Meeka shakes her head again.
And then we’re off, landing on that stone balcony built into the side of a mountain in Faldareach. This is where we addressed the entire community, where Meeka wore that incredible dress—
And where Keane dressed up like Willy Wonka.
The wind howls across the empty valley.
“They took them all, Doc,” Meeka says, her voice cracking. “Everyone on Flora—even the grren. They’re all up on that ship.” She turns to me and shivers. “Solomon was right. Everything we did was for nothing.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
I feel as helpless and depressed as Meeka—
