“We don’t know. They’re holding him right now because… well, because your mother is the mayor and there’s some question as to whether she benefited from the files he hacked. They say they can’t release him into our custody until she resigns.” Abbey’s father glanced over his shoulder at her mother. “Your mother is going to resign tomorrow. Then Simon can come home for a bit until his hearing.”
Caleb eased himself into the armchair next to their mother and nibbled on his sandwich. Her mother reached out and patted his knee.
“For a bit? What do you mean?” Abbey heard the sharpness in her own voice.
Her father sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “The evidence against him is pretty damning. I don’t think we’re going to win in court. We can only hope that the sentence is short.”
“It isn’t his fault,” Abbey said.
Her father’s eyes were intent as they bore down on her. “Did you know about this?”
“No. Yes. No. I knew a bit about it after the fact. But not before.”
Farley started barking into the dark woods above their house, swerving back and forth in the glow of the single porch light, the fur on his back standing up in stiff tufts.
Peter Sinclair crossed the hall, pushed Abbey inside, and craned his neck out the door and up into the darkened forest.
“Where’s Sylvain?” he said.
“He had to go. He said he had a meeting. He just left a few minutes ago,” Abbey said. “We were fine. We don’t need a babysitter.”
“Farley! Come!” her father snapped. Farley continued to growl over his shoulder while he skittered to the door, lunging at imaginary things in the dark. Her father caught him by the collar, hauled him inside, and closed the door.
“Right now, you do need a babysitter,” he said. “It’s time for bed.” He walked across the living room and went to sit on the couch with Abbey’s mother. Farley remained stationed by the door, a low growl emanating from his belly.
“Wait. When are you going to tell us what’s going on?” Abbey said.
Her mother’s eyelids fluttered. “We’ll talk tomorrow, honey. Go to bed. We all need some sleep. Please.”
Abbey sulked in her room. She could hear the hushed voices of her parents arguing in their room. She felt bad for abandoning Sylvain in the future, and for not telling her parents that they had been there and that he might be in trouble. But Ian and the two Franks wouldn’t hurt Sylvain, would they? And why was she worried about Sylvain anyway?
She thumbed listlessly through her Physics 12 textbook, as if basic Newtonian physics could give her any answers right now. She worried about Simon spending the night alone in a cell surrounded by hardened criminals, drunks, and drug dealers with too many tattoos, although her parents reassured her that he was in was a nice enough juvenile detainment center.
She almost didn’t hear the faint rap on her wall. Caleb. The knock system that they hadn’t employed for years. Three knocks. Are you up?
Abbey answered with three knocks of her own, and within seconds Caleb had crossed the threshold into her room, his red hair rakishly askew. He withdrew the envelope Ian had given them from his pocket and laid it on Abbey’s desk.
“You haven’t opened it yet?” she said in a whisper.
“I wanted you to.”
“What? Why? It probably won’t work for me anyway.” She narrowed her eyes at her twin. “You’re lying. You did open it. What does it say?” They were both keeping their voices as low as possible, shooting frequent glances at the door.
“Just open it, Abs. Please.”
“Fine.”
Abbey gingerly picked up the envelope as if it might be alive, flipped open the unsealed flap, and withdrew the small cream card.
In the center of the card, “1.61803398875…” was written in elegant script.
Abbey stared at it. “It’s phi,” she said.
Caleb scrunched up his eyebrows. “You mean pi? I thought that was 3.14 or something like that.”
“No. Phi. The Golden Ratio. In math, two numbers are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities.”
“Like that makes any sense.”
“It does. It’s used in architecture and design and music and it’s—” Abbey said hotly. But Caleb held up his hand.
“Don’t bother, Ab, I’ll never get it. What exactly do you see?”
“I told you, phi.”
“No. Read to me exactly what it says.”
“It says 1.61803398875 dot dot dot.”
Caleb smirked a little. “You can’t read anything else?”
Abbey gave an exasperated sigh. “Is this another one of those clear your mind things where there’s hidden script that apparently only I can’t read?”
Caleb shrugged, unaffected by the anger in her tone. “It would seem so. You should really learn to clear your mind, Ab.”
She glared at him. “I think that’s easier for some people than others.”
Caleb ignored the dig. “Well, there’s more written there. A bunch of other numbers in a series underneath the number that you just said. I think they’re important, but I think you need to be able to see them yourself to figure it out.”
“What? Why? Just tell me what the numbers are.”
“I don’t think I’m supposed to. There’s some instructions written above the phi number. I think they’re saying that you need to be able to read the numbers yourself. Just try to clear your mind and then look at it.”
Abbey stared at the cream card, her eyes tracing the black curves of the numbers of the golden ratio, but the rest of the card was infuriatingly blank. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine blackness, just blackness, nothingness. But in physics there was debate as to whether nothing even existed, if anything could be nothing, that even empty space, devoid of all particles, was not nothing, because it still had shape and was a physical object. But then there were debates about a deeper nothing, with no space, time, particles, or laws of nature. Theoretical physicists hadn’t resolved this of course and…
Abbey blinked her eyes open to realize that Caleb still stared at her hopefully and that the card remained completely cream, save for the single number in its center. She ground her teeth together in frustration. She was completely incapable of thinking of nothing, clearly. Or incapable of thinking of nothing in a nothingy sort of way.
“I still can’t see anything,” she said.
“Keep working on it. I’ve made another list.”
“Of course you have,” Abbey said.
Caleb spread a folded piece of paper on her desk. “Okay, so it seems to me that a lot of the dates on the list in your phone were quite a ways in the future, in the spring and summer. So, it strikes me that right now we need to focus on the most promising ones that we can address now.”
Abbey peered at the list.
Russell Andrews/ALICE
Sam
Mom’s files
Quentin Steinam
“The Matrix guys—Nathaniel and Damian—kept grilling Sylvain about files. Maybe they’re talking about Mom’s files. I think we need to conduct a search of the house, especially the basement.”
“Fine,” Abbey said, suppressing a faint smile at Caleb’s reference to the two men’s style of dress. “But… remember that night a few weeks ago, when we went and used the stones, and Dad found the basement door open? I know I closed it.”
“You’re thinking someone broke in?”
Abbey nodded. “So, if there’s something to be found here, maybe someone’s already been looking for it. Maybe someone’s already taken it.”
Caleb pulled his hand through his hair. “Hmm. Well, still worth a search, as soon as Mom and Dad head off to get Simon tomorrow morning. I wonder who’s going to be our babysitter this time.”
“Let’s just hope its not Nathaniel and Damian.”
Caleb chuckled. “You know wha
t, Ab? You’re becoming funnier.”
“I guess stress turns people into a real laugh a minute,” Abbey mumbled under her breath.
Caleb ignored her. “Okay: Russell Andrews, that’s easy. I’ll start following him at school. I never liked the look of him anyway.”
“He’s the one that put Simon up to hacking into the city computer system.”
“What?” Caleb’s eyes got really wide, and then suddenly narrowed, as if he was once again evaluating how much Abbey knew and hadn’t told him.
“Russell gave Simon the passwords. His cousin works at City Hall. He told Simon the other councilors were working against Mom. That’s why Simon did it. He didn’t just do it for fun. But I think Russell was lying because Simon didn’t find anything. Maybe it had something to do with his aunt, Gretchen Leer, who’s now on council too. But I don’t know what. And then when we were in the future, your—future…” Abbey stumbled because she had almost said your first future. “Dr. Ford said something about that Andrews character, like Russell had been using the stones too.”
“So why doesn’t Simon just turn in Russell and his cousin?”
“I don’t know. He still did it. He’s still the one who hacked.”
Farley erupted into a cacophony of wild barks in the living room. This was not an uncommon occurrence. Farley often growled and barked at even the slightest movement on their street, but still, a slight tremor descended Abbey’s spine, and she looked over her shoulder at her drawn blinds. She could hear her father speaking soothingly to Farley.
“All right, well I’ll follow Russell for sure then. You do some research on him online. See if you can figure anything out.”
“His dad owns a mining company,” Abbey said.
“What? Ab, how much are you not telling me? Can we agree to share everything from here on?”
“Well, you haven’t told me anything about your trips to the future with Mom.”
Farley sounded like he was going berserk, and Abbey wondered if she should go out and see what her parents were doing, who might be passing by the house, what was going on, but she felt strangely reticent around her parents now. Like they were keeping secrets and didn’t want their children involved. Like questions were no longer allowed.
Caleb looked over his shoulder at the door to Abbey’s room, as if he was thinking the same thing. “I did tell you. We were just wandering around. It was weird. I have no idea what we were looking for, and Mom wouldn’t answer any questions.”
Abbey again tried to quell the terrible feeling that perhaps these trips meant that her mother feared the future Caleb dead. She tried to focus on what Caleb was saying.
“So, a mining company…” Caleb continued. “Do you think it has something to do with Aluminum Ice?”
“Maybe. I don’t know anything about aluminum mining though,” Abbey said.
“Look it up then. I’ll do some research on Quentin Steinam. I know we thought he was Sylvain at first, but now I’m not so sure.” Farley finally quieted down. “The only one I can’t make heads or tails out of is this Sam reference.”
Abbey sighed. “I think I know who that is. Sam Livingstone is a physicist. He was one of the counselors at science camp last year.”
“Sam Livingstone… Livingstone Labs… Dr. A. Livingstone,” Caleb said slowly as if he was making all the connections. “You don’t think...”
“I don’t know. It seems too weird. He’s like, way older than me.”
“It says he can help.”
Footsteps moved past Abbey’s room, and Abbey heard a bedroom door closing. She wanted her dad to remain in the living room, to be on alert for whoever might be upsetting Farley.
“What am I going to do?” Abbey said. “Email him and say: ‘Hi, how’s it going? By the way I’m a witch, and I’ve found some stones that go to the future.’”
“I don’t know, but whoever wrote this list clearly thought he could help.”
“Who do you think wrote the list?”
“Well, it says it was from you.”
“Yes, but anyone who had the phone could text the phone itself. It could be from someone trying to lead us astray.” Except that the future Caleb told me where to find it, Abbey thought.
A door opened, and footsteps made their way back up the hall. They paused for a few seconds outside Abbey’s room.
Caleb dropped his voice to a whisper. “It’s all we’ve got right now, and investigating the four priority items isn’t going to do any harm. I better go to bed. You keep working on trying to see the other writing on the card. And in the morning, you need to tell me what happened in my future.”
Caleb slipped out of her bedroom, and Abbey retreated to her bed, card in hand. Try as she might though, she could not turn the cream paper into anything but cream paper, and she eventually fell asleep with the card on her chest and dreamed of infinite parallel universes lying atop one another in membranes like the pages of a newspaper. Except someone had cut a hole in the page that their universe occupied, and people and things were dropping through to the page below.
8. Deeks and Dogs
It wasn’t Sylvain who showed up to babysit them the next day when their father shuttled their grim-faced mother off to the news conference at which she was to resign as mayor. It was a perky-looking Sandy, with a new more up-to-date hairstyle, dressed in tight jeans and an equally tight white top. She rang the doorbell and greeted them just after the blue bullet, as they called their family van, descended the hill.
Caleb looked gobsmacked as she slipped off her loafers, made her way into the kitchen, and proceeded to start assembling the ingredients for banana bread.
Mark, who had begun to ascend the stairs from the basement for his breakfast, took one look at her and wheeled around to return to his room. Sandy was in the middle of chirping something at Caleb regarding the location of measuring cups, and didn’t notice.
Caleb and Sandy were already deep in conversation regarding Maroon 5 and the Star Wars prequels, Caleb’s eyes resting alternately on Sandy’s face and chest, when Abbey announced that she was going to take Mark some breakfast.
Sandy glanced at her and offered a pretty little smile. Abbey tried to read some form of threat into the expression, but it seemed genuine enough. “Tell him to come up. I’m dying to get to know him.”
“I will, but you know. Mark can be a little… awkward. He has trouble with other people sometimes.”
Sandy wrinkled her nose, winked, and flipped a batter-covered spoon in the air. “I’m sure we’ll do just fine. I get along with everyone.”
“I’ll see if he’ll come up,” Abbey murmured, retreating downstairs. They certainly couldn’t look for the files with Sandy in the house. And anyway, Caleb seemed to have forgotten all about them—and about Abbey’s promise to tell him what happened in his future.
*****
Mark hunched over his desk, poring over the maps in the green file. He snapped the file closed when Abbey poked her head in the door, but then relaxed slightly when he saw it was her.
“Hey, Mark. Are you hungry? Do you want some breakfast?”
He shook his head vigorously. He didn’t want to go upstairs, and have to smile and be asked questions and act like he was interested in his half-sister. It’s not that he wasn’t. He just didn’t want to have to act like he was. (And her eye and body movements were a bit rapid for his liking. They made Mark nervous, and when he was nervous, it was even harder to try to pretend he was even the slightest bit normal.) He would rather stay downstairs with his maps.
“Well, Sandy is going to be here for most of the day, so you’re going to have to come up sooner or later.”
Mark looked at the ceiling for a few seconds, then pulled open the top drawer of his desk to reveal his cache of granola bars and cracker boxes.
Abbey’s wide green eyes sometimes seemed too wide for her waifish face. She withdrew from the room at the sight of the bars, but then loomed in again. �
�Don’t you want to meet her? She is your half-sister.”
How could he explain? Abbey lingered in the doorway, the circles under eyes dusky in her pale face.
“I’m not good with new people, especially in settings where I have to talk to them directly regarding no set topic.”
She smiled. “Hmm. Neither am I, really.”
“I need to see Kasey Miller’s map.”
“Sorry, what?”
“The map. He said he had the other map in his private collection. He said I could come back and see it. It would be very helpful if I could see Kasey Miller’s map. I also need to go pick up my map photocopy at the library. It will cost ten GCCs. I need a shifter account.”
Abbey hesitated, then spoke carefully, as if she was afraid he might freak out. “Well, that’s going to be a bit of a challenge. We aren’t allowed to use the stones. I don’t know what a GCC is, and you don’t have a shifter account.”
“I need the maps to figure out what the dots mean,” Mark insisted.
“What dots?”
Mark flipped open the file folder and pointed at one of the dots on the map. Abbey entered the room and looked quizzically at the photocopy. “Those flecks? Aren’t they just from the photocopy?” She leaned in closer, and Mark tried not to lurch away. “Hmm, I guess not. They seem to be in a bit of a pattern, don’t they? The angles look the same, and these two are equidistant from that one. Weird.” She brushed the strands of her hair behind her ears and started using her fingers to measure the distance between the dots. Mark passed her his aluminum architect triangular ruler.
Abbey accepted the ruler, scooped up a pencil, and jotted a few measurements on a scrap piece of paper. Then she let out a hmpf-ing noise. “Of course the distances between these dots would be in the golden ratio,” she said, almost to herself. “Where do you think the library was on this map?”
Mark pointed to an area slightly east of the center of the map, where, based on his estimation, the library in the future stood.
A Quill Ladder Page 12
