Helen wonders if it was her fault. Was she too slow? How could she have messed up so badly? She was so close to pulling Henry back, but she didn’t react quickly enough. That might have been her only chance. The thoughts spin around in her head.
And then she thinks: If that really was Henry.
Helen no longer trusts anything she sees, and with good reason. Since the moment she came to the coordinates Monder gave her, the world has done nothing but change. She started out in some sort of dirt tunnel that grew and shrank as she moved, and after a few tries she got the hang of that. But then she found herself in a deep cavern where she could not see the beginning or the end, and now she is wandering in a barren landscape. It’s as if Helen’s world is disappearing a little bit at a time. Something about this place is very wrong.
Helen considers what that Mr. Goode person said when he rudely invited himself to visit Henry on the rooftop. Something about maps, and rifts, and how Guild kids like Henry could see them and write them down. Helen has no idea what a rift is, but she is beginning to wonder if perhaps Monder dropped her into one.
Is it possible that somehow Helen has entered into Monder’s prison, out of time? No, that couldn’t happen. Helen has heard her parents say over and over that Monder was banished to a unique place, inaccessible to anyone. You can’t just travel to a set of coordinates and—fall into it. If that were true, what would prevent Monder from marching out of the rift any time he chooses?
Or has Monder figured out how to do just that, and he brought Helen here to demonstrate?
Helen draws an “X” in the dirt with her foot at the spot where she thinks she last saw Henry. But she knows that this mark, like everything else, will soon disappear. Everything disappears, or transforms into something else. Underground, aboveground. Tunnels, caverns, landscape.
Helen can see a faint ring of mountains on the horizon, but she can’t make out how big or far away they are. She is starting to believe that it does not matter, because as soon as she tries to move toward them they will disappear or turn into a forest or a lake or perhaps another underground tunnel.
She sits down on the dirt next to her X, which is already beginning to fade. She takes a few deep breaths, and like that, the mountains are gone and the horizon simply ends. Perhaps this is the moon. Maybe the air will disappear next. Maybe Helen had better not think that way in case it really happens.
Super Logic Mode only works when there is something to think about, facts to sort and information to organize. This place offers a whole lot of nothing, along with one single glimpse of Henry. A glimpse that may or may not have been real. There’s just not enough here to come up with a plan.
“Well, self,” Helen says out loud, “this is a moment in life when it sure would be great to have an old wise person magically show up and share some kind of deep wisdom that helps me find Henry and get out of here. But based on how things look, that doesn’t seem likely. I guess it’s just me and me. I’ll have to serve as my own wise person. Just not so old.”
What Helen’s got is not much. There were those connections she saw in the tunnel walls, the ones that moved around with her, but she fears that was just her own thoughts, herself talking to herself. She can’t get her brother back by looking inside her own head.
Or can she?
Helen closes her eyes and touches the fragment around her neck. She’s got to pull herself together. What was it she saw before, in those dirt tunnels? The lines and connections mimicking her own movements? Can she find her way back to that place somehow, even with no walls to work with and nothing to pull apart?
Is there anything left here to hack into?
The fragment is one thing that has not changed. Helen takes this as a sign that she is at least managing not to move any closer to Monder. If she were moving closer, the fragment would look smoother and brighter, its spiral pattern more defined. And that has not happened.
Maybe Helen does have some information to work with, after all.
She takes a few deep breaths and tries to quiet her brain. She won’t be able to figure anything out with such a mess of thoughts flying around in her head. She narrows her mind down to one single idea: getting her brother back. She pictures Henry’s face.
Helen notices that Monder has been quiet. In fact, she hasn’t heard him say anything at all since she spotted Henry, and then he disappeared into the ground. What does that mean?
And then, as if on cue, she hears the deep Tromindox voice: “Ah! There you are.”
How did Monder find her? Why can she hear him?
“Where have you been?” Helen says, looking over both shoulders as if expecting to find Monder there.
“I could ask the same question of you,” the unseen Monder says. “But I’ll go first. I was visiting with your brother, to impress upon him, if you will, the gravity of his situation and the importance of him finishing his Guild work.”
“What have you done with him?” Helen says.
“Your little brother is safe,” Monder says. “You saw him; you know he is in one piece. Which is more than I can say for him if he doesn’t get busy. Now, let’s discuss you, Helen, shall we?”
Helen instinctively touches the fragment. She assumes Monder can tell that she hasn’t brought it any closer to him, due to the fact that the metal of his own half of the portal has not healed any further. But she doesn’t understand why he seemingly knows her whereabouts.
“Helen, you also have a job to do. And you know what that job is. Bring me the fragment, and do it now.”
Helen goes quiet, says nothing. Now why did Monder have the capability to snatch Henry like that, but not her? Why doesn’t Helen fall through a hole in the ground and have a ‘visit’ with the Tromindox? This doesn’t add up.
“You know what?” Helen says, “I don’t think you have any intention to let me have Henry. And I don’t think you plan to let me go, either. But my biggest question is, how come you can’t find me? How come you haven’t got the fragment yet? I mean, this is your home field, isn’t it? What’s wrong with you? Are you afraid of something? Why don’t you just come and get it?”
“Maybe I should do that,” Monder says. “That’s a very good idea. Because you know what? I don’t think you have any intention to let me have the fragment, either. You disappoint me, Helen.”
Dust rises from the horizon. Is it a storm? Helen can’t tell. There’s a deep, rumbling noise seemingly from all directions at once. Helen stands and looks around her into the distance.
The ground convulses under Helen’s feet, and she stumbles. The clouds loom much bigger now, almost filling the sky. Black. Dense.
Helen knows that shape. She saw it in the desert with her dad. What she sees up there is a massive Tromindox swarm. Soon she can hear the screeches of millions of tiny scorpion-like winged creatures, descending with their claws out.
The ground convulses again, and to her horror Helen sees it split apart. A chasm opens and the crack runs toward her feet at lightning speed. She braces herself. The only way to avoid falling and breaking all of her bones will be to keep to one side. She runs for it, but the crack follows her.
Follows her?
Now the swarm has reached Helen and claws and wings tangle in her hair. She puts up her arms to protect her eyes, leaving them vulnerable to hundreds of puncture wounds.
But Helen’s mind remains firmly on the crack in the ground—and its strange behavior. And this strange behavior reaches into the core of Helen’s mind and makes her angry.
Helen’s anger rises through her, burns up her spine, balls up in her fists. She stands up straight, oblivious now to the stings of tails and scraping of claws. She raises her arms up into the air with both hands out, and screams:
“You will STOP this!”
The crack stops short of her feet. The swarm retreats. The stings and punctures cease. It’s as if Helen has opened a force field around her body.
“Now, get away from me!” Helen screams again, and throws her
arms out in front of her. The swarm convulses backward and the nearest of the creatures dissipate into puffs of dust.
The break in the ground reverses direction, beginning to close and move away from her.
Her arms fly in arcs in every direction, forcing the swarm to retreat into the distance. The ground heals and Helen stands on solid footing.
Now she screams like a madwoman and takes off running toward what is left of the swarm. She waves her arms over her head. Her black hair flies behind her. “All of you get away from me! Leave this place and never bother me again!” She punches the air, each blow sending the creatures farther into the distance until there is almost nothing left.
“From now on, this is my space. Do you hear me?” Helen yells, turning in circles. “Mine!”
The landscape falls silent. No more swarm; no fissure in the ground; no rumbling.
“Now if I have to, I will take this place apart piece by piece until I find my brother,” Helen shouts toward the sky.
Monder says nothing. Is he still there? Did he see what just happened? Helen no longer cares.
She sits down on the ground, closes her eyes, and begins the work of imagining a new landscape in which to find her brother and bring him back home.
Henry sits, knees under his chin, on his bed. Here he is, back in this blank room again. No matter what he does, or how fast or how far he runs, or how he changes the walls or the ceiling or the floor, he ends up right back here.
His hands ache from drawing, and he’s sick of sandwiches. He’s sick of everything.
The tiny rectangle in the wall opens and light shines through.
“I don’t really feel like talking, Renata,” Henry says without moving.
“Renata? Who’s Renata?” a voice says.
Henry jumps up. “Helen?” He falls to the floor on his stomach and peers through the hole. “Is that you?”
He sees a head of black hair hanging down, and then his sister’s face. The world through the little door looks like a desert of some sort instead of the usual room next door. It’s as if his sister has been installed in a miniature terrarium.
“What are you doing here?” Henry says. “Where is Renata? Did you see her?”
“I haven’t seen anybody, Henry,” Helen says. “There’s nobody here but me.”
“But where did Renata go?” Henry says.
“Henry, there is no one else here,” Helen says. “Look, we’ve got to work together to get out of this place. You see this?” She points to the opening. “This is a common space between you and me. If we concentrate, maybe we can hold onto it and make it bigger.”
“Common space? What does that mean? Where are you really? Is this a trick?” Henry says. “Where is Renata?”
“Henry, it’s just me!” Helen says. “And it’s not a trick. You and I are connected. I realized that when I saw you before. I was trying to get to you, you were trying to get out, and…Somehow we contacted each other for a second. And then Monder grabbed you away.”
“He says he’s gonna chew me up and throw me in a hole when he gets done with me,” Henry says. “ Helen, I keep trying to leave, but I can’t. I’m scared.”
“Listen,” Helen says. “I’ve got the fragment Monder wants.” She holds out the chain and dangles it to show him. It spins slowly. “I used it to get his attention so he would let me in here. Now I have to keep it away from him until we can get out of—whatever this place is.”
“You brought the fragment? Helen, you are crazy,” Henry says. “You have lost your mind.”
“Hey, it’s working so far, isn’t it?” Helen says. “I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”
“Sort of,” Henry says. “Through a dumb little hole.”
At that moment, for a split second and out of nowhere, everything changes as if someone flipped a TV channel and then immediately flipped it back. Henry’s room disappears. Henry is sitting on dirt. Helen is there in front of him, not ten feet away. There is nothing between them—no walls, nothing but air. And then it flips back and he’s in his room again.
“Helen? Did you see that?”
“See what?” Helen says.
“That! You were right there. There was nothing there. You were…”
“Henry, now you’re the one babbling like a crazy person,” Helen says.
“I’m not!” Henry says, slapping his hands on his thighs and bouncing. “Seriously, for like a millisecond. You were there. It’s like, there was a flash of the building not there. My room flashed away. It’s like what would happen if there were all these people in a hotel, in their rooms, and then the walls disappeared, and they were all,’ Hello, I didn’t know you were there.’ You didn’t see it?”
It happens again, the channel change. Henry’s room disappears, for a blink of an eye, and he sees Helen right in front of him. But again his room reappears. The channel flips, the channel flips back.
“Helen, you’re right there! You’re not far away!” Henry is shouting now.
“Okay, calm down,” Helen says. “Let’s think this through. Maybe we are in the same place, but what we see is different. You see your room and all that, and I see the desert for some reason. But we can talk, and sometimes we can see each other. Right?”
“Right!” Henry says. “So how do we get in the same place together? And how do we get out?”
“Another question to ask is, where is out, exactly?” Helen says. “And what are we in? If we’re in a rift, as I suspect we are, we’re outside of time. How do you escape from something where there’s no time?”
“Wherever this place is,” Henry says, “Monder’s here. Or he can see us and talk to us. So it has to be part of the rift. It has to!”
The channel flips again. This time, though, Helen sees it.
“That was you!” Helen says. “I saw you; you were right there!”
“See!?” Henry yells. “I said so!”
“Now how can we get it to stay that way?” Helen asks.
“Well,” Henry says, “when I figured out how to move the walls in my room around, it was super quiet. There was nothing going on and I was thinking about how bad I wanted out. And how I would blow this place up if I could. And then…stuff started morphing. And then, I saw writing. On the wall. It was telling me my room isn’t what it seems. Messages, stuff like that. Maybe if we concentrate super hard…”
“Maybe that’s the key,” Helen says. “Maybe we are creating what we see in some way. So if we concentrate instead on being in the same place…”
“Yes! Yes, you picture me, I picture you,” Henry says. “Ready? Oh, wait, hang on a second.”
Henry scrambles to his feet and runs to the tiny desk to grab as much paper as he can fit in the pocket of his pajama shirt. He stuffs pencils and pens in there, too. When he runs out of room he sticks some paper in his pants as well. Then he snatches one more pen and holds it in his fist.
“Okay,” Henry says, getting back down on the floor. “I’m ready now.” His pajamas crinkle with the paper.
“Deep breaths,” Helen says. The two of them stare straight ahead. Sure enough, the channel flips begin again, slowly at first and then faster and faster, Helen and Henry alternating between their own reality and each other’s. Helen moving toward her brother looks like a time-lapse movie, getting closer and closer, the scenery now snapping back and forth like alternating pages in a flip book.
And then, they join hands.
The flipping stops, and now they are in the desert together. Finally. In the same space.
Brother and sister grab each other and hug tight. “I am not letting go of you this time!” Helen says. Her chin fits right on top of his blond head.
“Okay,” Henry says quietly. “Okay.”
Henry pulls back. “But what about Renata?”
“Henry, I didn’t see anybody,” Helen says. “The only person I have seen in here is you.”
“But she was there! She was…” Henry’s face darkens. “I promised I wouldn’t leave without
her.”
Helen takes Henry’s hand. “Henry, we can’t go back. Not now. Are you sure Renata was, you know, real?”
“I didn’t make her up!” Henry says, more frustrated than angry. “I promised…” He falls silent. Is Renata real? Is any of this real? Now he feels doubtful but guilty at the same time. He can’t abandon his friend, if she really is there. But is she?
“Um, Henry?” Helen says.
“Yeah?”
“We’ve got a more immediate problem. You brought a little something with you,” Helen says. “Look.”
Henry turns. Fifty or so figures in robes, all fitted with digital faces, stomp toward them like angry schoolteachers about to reprimand an unruly student. Their pixels display scowling, wrinkled expressions with heavy eyebrows and ugly teeth.
“Woa, woa!” Henry yells, jumping up. “Those things! I hate those things. They were the ones who made me draw. Helen…” he stumbles backward.
Helen stands up and faces the digital army. Then she throws her hands out in front of her.
“Leave us alone!” Helen shouts.
The figures blow back like paper dolls, robes flapping and tearing. Then they fall apart into fluttering pieces, like torn up paper. The pixel faces dissipate. And they are gone.
Henry looks at his sister. “That was cool.”
“Yeah,” Helen says and looks down at her hands. “It kind of was.”
“Kind of?” Henry says. “You blew them away! You have super powers here.”
“Maybe,” Helen says. “If I can figure out how to use them to stay one step ahead of Monder.” She holds up the half-coin on a chain. “This is the big prize, and I don’t know what to do with it. I used it to get Monder to give up where you were, but now that we’re together, how do we get out? How do we keep him from getting this one and then reuniting it with its other half? If he does that, the portal will open, and he’ll be free. And if this really is the rift, and we’re not in real space or time, how do we know where to go?”
“I can help with that,” Henry says, sticking his chin out. “I know how to draw maps. That’s all I’ve been allowed to do in here. They made me draw these maps on the floor. And then they took them away and made me make more. It sucked.”
Silver Shard Page 16
