Even back then, as Kate turned and walked away from the site of Monder’s banishment, his voice still rang in her ears and she knew she would always have to take his threats seriously…no matter where – or when – Monder might be. She can still hear his words clearly now, in her head.
“There’s got to be a way to accelerate our progress,” Anna says. “These attacks are slowing us down too much. Every five minutes there’s another batch of ‘toms. And we don’t even know where they are all coming from.”
“Here’s a question,” Kate says, “why do all of these creatures want this axe so bad? I know it’s famous, and it’s been hidden for a long time, but is that a reason for every metal-and-flesh contraption far and wide to come running after us? This isn’t just collectors or bounty hunters. This is someone with an agenda. Someone with a use for it.”
“Or,” Anna says, “someone who knows that we have a use for it. We are pretty sure that Monder’s got influence outside the rift now. He knows the Shard has the reputation for being the only thing that can destroy the fragments and close the portal for good. Or that’s what he believes. So maybe this chase is meant to keep us busy.”
“Well, they’re doing a terrific job,” Kate says. “We’re gonna run low on power pretty soon. We’ve got to find somewhere to hide for a minute and recharge. And then we’ll lose even more time…”
“Let’s find someplace underground,” Anna says. “That way we can lay low, for real. And then we can try to call up the boys. Who knows what experiments they’ve conducted using the time maps Daniel discovered. I shudder to think.”
“Okay,” Kate says. “Suppose we can get underneath solid rock, how much time would that buy us? Can we at least avoid detection by airborne sensors for awhile?”
“I would guess a little while—maybe an hour,” Anna says.
“That’s enough,” Kate says. “Let’s try it. I’ll find us a masked communications channel on the way and see if we can get through to Chris and Gabriel.”
The two motorcycles accelerate across a wide valley between two enormous rock formations. It’s growing dark. The road stretches all the way to the other side. A line moves up and down the screen on Kate’s dashboard, searching and searching for channels that will let her talk to her husband away from the prying ears of seemingly every ‘tom in the world.
A huge rock formation shaped like a melting mushroom looms on their left, not too far away from the road. They pull over so Kate can scan it through binoculars. The rock looks to be about the width of a football field with one side eroded away by the wind. The erosion creates a kind of cave that may be just big enough for two women and their bikes.
“That outcropping should be sufficient,” Kate says. “Let’s get under there and then we can try to call the boys.”
Anna checks her heads-up display. “That’s outside the route Winston gave us,” she says. “Only by a few hundred yards, but still it’s a deviation from the path.”
“Another thing to slow us down,” Kate says. “I know Winston warned us we can’t bring the Shard in contact with any open portals or rifts. So we’ll have to pay attention, choose our route carefully. But we’ve seen nothing out here, so far, except clouds of ‘toms. And we’ve got no idea what Christopher and Gabriel are doing. Radio silence is great when you need to lay low, but we can’t just fly in there blind. If this situation is anything like what we dealt with when Monder was first banished, we will have to think fast. And that means, we’ve got to know what we are facing before we get there. “
“Spoken like a true agent,” Anna says. “I’ll put more power into creating a concentrated dampening field up against the rock. It might not last too long, but it will give us a little window of peace and quiet.”
“You know,” Kate says, “it’s possible those guys are parked in the desert somewhere building a fort and playing bass and Helen and Henry are free and everyone is singing camping songs.”
A girl can hope.
The two motorcycles drop off of the main road and head toward the mushroom-shaped rock, trailing dust. Soon they will have hidden their location completely, if only for a short time. Meanwhile, ‘toms and Tromindox huddle in groups and clumps throughout the valley, watching and waiting for the Shard’s position to reappear on their scopes.
A four-way intersection in a frontier town. Horseless carriages maneuver around one another, intermingling with pedestrians and horses with their riders. It is hot out, and everyone is in a hurry to finish their business and retreat to the shade.
An interstate highway. At the side of the road sits a historic marker. A tractor-trailer hauling two containers rolls along at a steady speed. Its driver listens to country music and chews on what’s left of a box of mini-doughnuts purchased at the last truck stop.
A carriage crash. Frightened horses and vehicles careen in every direction, people scatter and scream. How did this happen? Who ran into whom and started the chain reaction? No one knows. It’s as if a sudden storm of chaos dropped down from the sky. Carriages now lie on their sides, wheels spinning. Worried riders check their horses. The center of the street, though, remains empty. The accident has somehow cleared a wide area right through the middle of the intersection with nothing there at all but a set of wheel ruts far too wide to have been made by carriage wheels.
The truck takes an impact from the right side, knocking the tractor onto its two left wheels. The driver throws his full weight into the steering wheel, desperate to regain control. Mini-doughnuts fly all around the cab. Rubber skids and the trailers nearly jack-knife, but the driver manages to right his rig. With all wheels back safely on the ground, the driver now pulls over to collect himself. This is an empty road; there is nothing he can see anywhere that he might have hit. He sets the parking brake and leaves the engine idling, climbing down from the cab to take a look. He can smell the rubber burned onto the pavement and feel the heat from the brakes.
But the driver sees nothing except a wide area just off the road in the dirt, that appears marked with narrow wheel ruts, skid marks, and indentations shaped like horseshoes.
Daniel feels it in his gut: He is sure he has been in this place before. Why can’t he remember? The Brokeneck Hotel across the street from his uncle’s bookstore lies in ruins, but this place is different. And Daniel can clearly see that he is no longer in Brokeneck. He’s on some hilltop in a desert somewhere. The sky is a mixture of tangerine and blue with smears of white clouds. Dirt and clumps of sparse grass stretch into the distance on all sides. Occasional dust devils stir up and then die out. The only sound Daniel hears is the wind whistling past his ears.
And no matter how much he pushes the buttons on this stupid device, he can no longer communicate with Gabriel or Christopher. The signal is totally dead. This little experiment with a supposedly out-of-the-way rift was either a success, or a horrible failure. Daniel realizes that he does not know which.
He looks over what appears to be the former front steps of the structure, a stone zigzag now leading nowhere. He walks up and down them a few times; perhaps he can trigger some memory. Any memory. It doesn’t seem to work. He peers down at the stone; no inscriptions or stamps anywhere either. What is this place? Why does it feel so familiar?
Daniel pretends to walk through the front door. The shape of the foundation suggests there was a spacious front room, perhaps a lobby or grand entrance. There is the stub of a staircase, and bare gaps in the stone give away the spots where doors would have been.
Daniel walks through the outlines of the rooms like a giant in a maze. There are crumbled fireplaces and a few pieces of floor left, sections of worn wood and cracked tile. The walls themselves, though, are only memories.
None of this walking around is helping Daniel to remember. Instead, he is beginning to feel very, very alone. Daniel is generally okay with being by himself; he has spent many hours by himself in the Brokeneck Bookstore, absorbing book after book and marinating in his own thoughts. He has gone exploring in the wo
ods outside of town many times, carrying nothing but a flashlight and a sandwich. But this is different. Instead of a living, breathing world, this place feels dead.
At the center of the ruins a wide, flat area of floor remains pretty much intact. It is constructed of gray stone cut into pieces that fit together like a large-scale puzzle. It seems strangely out of place; not like something normally found on the inside of a house. Daniel steps up onto the puzzle and traces the shapes on the floor with his feet. The lines take him around and around in a circle, drawing ever closer to the center. He feels like a mystic, there in his sandals and dreadlocks, walking in circles. Where has he seen this before?
Daniel recognizes the pattern; these stones form a labyrinth, a series of back-and-forth paths culminating in a round flat stone at the center. He has read about these in many of his uncle’s books. He steps to the center to get a better look at the circular stone; it is well-worn, but appears to have been carved with winding lines that resemble roots of a tree.
From his vantage point at the center of the labyrinth Daniel takes a slow turn around, surveying the expanse of ruins. This is a big place, and ancient. Was it destroyed, or did it fall apart over millennia? And when in his life has he ever been to a big ancient building with a labyrinth built into the floor? Why does it feel familiar, and why can’t he place it?
“Daniel?”
Daniel spins around. Who was that? The voice sounded like it came from right next to him.
“Daniel! I’m right here!”
It’s Helen’s voice. Maybe he isn’t alone after all.
“Can you see me?”
“No, I can’t,” Daniel says, spinning around. “Where are you?”
Nothing. Is he hearing things? Perhaps his mind is creating company for him.
Something flashes at the corner of his eye and he turns, but now it’s gone again. What was that?
“Daniel!”
Okay, this place is haunted. This is a haunted ruin.
Another flash. This time Daniel does catch the tiniest glimpse. It’s Helen; he recognizes the long black hair right away. But she’s not all there; she’s a hologram, or maybe a low-resolution movie.
“Helen? Is that you? What is going on? Where are you?” He steps out of the circle, hoping to catch sight of her again. Silence.
Daniel jumps. There’s a giant bug in his shirt pocket, crawling around. He reaches in, grabs the creature and tosses it out on the ground.
But it’s not a bug, it’s the time stone. The stone lands with a clunk on the stone circle and begins to jump around like an insect that’s been flipped on its back. Its facets seem to be moving all at once.
“Woa, little guy,” Daniel says. “What’s got you all freaked out?” He crouches down and picks up the stone, which isn’t easy; it takes several tries before he can get hold of it. He cups it in both hands so as not to drop it and steps out of the circle again. The stone seems to slow down a little, but it’s still moving.
Daniel has an idea. He holds the stone out toward the center circle again. Sure enough, the stone starts popping and Daniel nearly drops it. He pulls it back toward him, and the stone calms down.
Keeping a firm hold on the stone now, Daniel steps back into the circle. “Helen?”
The stone responds, but Helen does not. He waits. Nothing happens.
And then it hits him. The stone in his hand, the big structure…he runs back out the front steps and turns around to take a fresh look at the area that would have at one time been the front facade of the building.
“That’s what this is, isn’t it? You’re trying to tell me,” Daniel says to the stone. And then: “Why am I talking to a rock—again?”
Daniel backs up one step, and another. He looks up and to the right. He traces a rectangle in the air with a finger, a pretend window on the second floor. Finally it hits him: This is the ruins of the building where he climbed up and saw Henry sitting on the floor, drawing. He’s sure of it. Same size, same gray bricks. This is the exact same place.
But now it’s in ruins. What happened to it? What happened to Henry?
“I’m in the rift again, aren’t I?” Daniel says to the stone. “I’m in the same place, but this is a different time. A different time! That’s it! I’ve hit a different layer of time. A time when this building isn’t here anymore.” The stone just pulses.
Daniel pulls the map book out of his back pocket and looks at it with new eyes. The circles and intersections, those are not just two-dimensional, flat maps; they represent overlapping spirals that sit atop one another like a stacked-up blueprint. They depict the same space but at different times, and where portals and rifts between these times overlap and connect to one another. The overall effect is something not unlike…a labyrinth.
At first, Daniel is excited at this insight. But then he considers that if he has, in fact, traveled to some other time, and if he can’t get a hold of the people who sent him here, it’s possible that he may have accidentally split off into the future by himself. And possibly by thousands of years. This would explain why he feels so extremely alone.
Or is he? Daniel walks back toward that center stone in the labyrinth, determined to find a way to see Helen again.
“That was Daniel!” Helen shouts. “I saw him! Why would we see Daniel?”
“You mean why would you see Daniel,” Henry corrects his sister. “I didn’t see anybody. What was he doing?”
Helen and Henry are in a nondescript landscape made of dirt and rocks and ringed by the vague shape of rolling hills far in the distance. It’s like a huge, empty crater with the two of them at the center of it.
“Well,” Helen says, “he wasn’t doing anything, really. Just standing there, looking confused. I tried to get his attention. It seemed like he could tell I was there, but he couldn’t see me. Now he’s gone again.” She walks back and forth as if to re-enact the incident. “He was right here, somewhere…”
“Weird,” Henry says. He’s sitting cross-legged on the ground with bits of paper covered in maps all around him. On top of each sheet he has placed a rock to keep the drawings from blowing away.
“Wait! There he is again! Daniel!” Helen starts waving her arms. All Henry can see is a crazy girl in the middle of a desert yelling at nobody.
“Nope, he can’t hear me,” Helen says. Then she adds, “His dreadlocks are really long.”
“Maybe you’re just thinking about him and that’s how come you see him,” Henry says. “You know, like the way you and I did before, the way we linked with each other. Only now with Daniel. I guess you think about Daniel, don’t you?” Henry grins.
“Shut up, Henry,” Helen says. “I saw him. But how? He’s in Brokeneck. I sent him a message, to warn him about the swarming Tromindox. That’s the last time we talked.”
Henry frowns at his drawings. Something about them doesn’t make sense. It’s bothered him ever since he got pulled into the big white room and was made to draw on the floor with a pen. The maps are filled with symbols that repeat and always seem to show up in the same relation to each other. But sometimes the lines and the circles don’t meet up. There are gaps. Backwards or the right way around, it doesn’t look complete. Why is that? Why can’t Henry make sense of it? What is missing? He can’t shake the feeling that there’s a clue in there somewhere. If he can just find it.
At first, Henry thought that perhaps his drawings looked strange because he didn’t really know what he was doing. After all, he had been drawing from a compulsion that he didn’t understand. Maybe he had left off parts of the maps, lost in some deep area of his brain. But he couldn’t get around the fact that the omissions felt purposeful. Like they were meant to be there from the beginning. This was driving Henry nuts. Why would a person draw a map and then purposely leave holes in it?
A gust of wind hits the papers and a few of them come loose from beneath their rocks, skittering across the ground. “Oh no!” Henry yells, and jumps up to chase them. He is not going to lose all this
work.
Henry manages to retrieve most of the drawings right away, but a couple of them elude him. He runs along, doubled over with hands out, loose papers flipping along just in front of his toes. Finally, he grabs hold of one and then stomps his foot down on the other.
“Got ‘em!” Henry says. He bends down, grabs the drawings in his hands, and stacks the two sheets of paper on top of each other.
That’s when he sees it.
“Wait…” Henry mutters to himself. He stuffs the rest of the drawings in his shirt pocket so he can take a better look at just these two. He holds them up to the light and lines up the edges of the paper. The sun shines through them, revealing the two maps combined. Sure enough, where one line ends another begins, and where there were gaps before, now there is a completed shape. A map without holes in it.
“Helen, check this out!” he yells, running back toward his sister. “Look at this! Look what happens when I match these two pieces up.”
“Um, what?” Helen says, trying to follow. She’s still pacing around trying to figure out exactly where she was when she saw Daniel.
“See?” Henry holds up the drawings in front of Helen’s face. “The pictures I was drawing all looked like they had stuff missing—but look!” He lines up the paper edges and points to a spot where a circle has a chunk out of it, like an incomplete pie chart or a radar signal that doesn’t go all the way around. “If you put these together, they fit. That’s how you put them in order. That’s how it works, I’m sure it is! I mean, I knew, I knew there was something wrong with them, like they weren’t right, but this…No way!” Henry is jumping up and down and Helen has to grab the papers out of his hand in order to hold them still and see what he is talking about.
Silver Shard Page 18
