by Sharon Hinck
“I gotta tell you, I get tired of hearing folks whine about their problems.” Janet’s voice jarred me back into the conversation. “If people obey God and keep a positive attitude, things always work out.”
Indignation surprised me like a sudden pinch. “That’s a little simplistic, isn’t it?”
Corina stared in my direction, open-mouthed.
Careful, Susan, don’t say too much. But I couldn’t hold back. “Even when we’re following God, we aren’t immune to the suffering that’s part of this world.” Not to mention other worlds, but that was another issue.
Janet crossed her arms. “I think people cause a lot of their own pain.” The smug tone reminded me she’d had few experiences that wrenched the soul.
My irritation faded. I didn’t need to argue about the reality of pain in a Christian’s life. Janet would face her own dark valleys one day. And Lord, when that time comes, give me the grace to show her compassion and never say, “I told you so.”
Beth gave me a worried look from her place beside me on the couch. She patted my leg. “Let’s go on to the next chapter.”
I turned my journal pages, looking for a fresh sheet to take notes.
Deborah. The pencil sketch on the paper stilled my hand.
Months ago, a lifetime ago, I had slipped into the attic for time alone to prepare for one of these Bible studies. Deborah, a prophetess who led her people during a time of need, had inspired the drawing.
Later, Jake had left a note in the corner. “Cool sketch, mom.”
Tonight something moved across the page.
I shrieked and dropped the notebook. “A bug!” Must have been a spider. Maybe it dropped down from the floor lamp next to the couch.
The others looked at me as if I weren’t the only one contemplating the white coats. Sheepishly, I reached down to retrieve the book as they resumed the study.
I cautiously opened the journal. No squashed bug marred the paper. My image still stood beneath the sign “Oak of Susan,” with the picture of a rough-sketched warrior approaching. The lines seemed to shiver.
Eyestrain? I pinched the bridge of my nose and dared another glance. This time I didn’t look away.
The penciled man moved across the page like a first-draft animation cell. He held out a sword toward the woman in the picture.
My alter ego took the sword. Dark shapes shaded the margins, looming toward the two figures under the tree. The sketch of the man turned to look at me from the page. Jake!
His eyes pleaded for help. The shadows surrounding him grew fangs and continued to move closer to both figures, threatening and dire.
Impossible. Pictures didn’t change themselves and move. Drawings of darkness didn’t crowd in from the edges on their own. My journal couldn’t be bringing me a message.
But then, portals to alternate worlds weren’t supposed to exist either.
My heart raced. Jake needed us.
“Excuse me a second.” I interrupted Corina in the middle of her thoughts on a verse, launched from the couch, and ran into the kitchen. I had to talk to Mark—now. Where was my cell phone? I rummaged through the basket on the counter where we tossed keys and mail. No, no, no. My purse. I found it and dumped the contents. My hands shook as I snatched up the phone and dialed. “Mark, get home now. Something—”
“Susan, are you okay?” Beth hovered uncertainly in the kitchen doorway.
I cleared my throat and tucked the phone out of sight. “I might be getting that new bug that’s going around. Do you think anyone would mind if we wrapped up early?”
Her gaze traveled to the contents of my purse. “Do you need some aspirin? You’re awful pale.”
I shook my head. “Just . . . just tell them. Please.”
I begrudged each agonizing second it took for the meeting to break up and for Mark to get home.
The second he walked in the door, I pulled him out of earshot of Jon and Anne.
“What happened? Are you all right?” He’d been asking me that a lot lately, but there was a new layer of concern in his voice. “You don’t look so good.”
I lifted my gaze to meet his. “Mark.” Fear strained my throat. I held the journal out to him. “No more waiting. Jake’s in trouble.”
Chapter
6
Susan
After we tucked our two youngest in bed, my husband and I conferenced on the couch. Mark rubbed his thumb along the sketch in my journal, picking up a smudge of pencil lead on his skin. “Susan, there’s nothing here.”
“But I saw it. The picture changed.”
He tugged the book from my hands. “Come here.” He nestled me against his side and pressed a soft kiss against my temple. “You haven’t been sleeping well since you got back.”
I pulled away from him. “You think I imagined it.”
He didn’t break eye contact, but he didn’t answer, either.
My jaw squeezed and muscles tightened all the way down my neck. “You believe in a portal and an alternate world and Restorers. So why can’t my journal send me a message?”
“It’s not that I don’t believe you—”
“Mommy.” Anne whimpered from the entry to the living room and rubbed her eyes. “I had a bad dream.” She squinted against the lamplight and took another tentative step forward.
I opened my arms, and she flung her gangly body onto my lap. Sometimes eight-year-olds still needed to be rocked and lullabied. I whispered soothing words against her hair, drawing peace from the act of comforting her. Her wavy blonde hair smelled like strawberry shampoo, and her skin was flushed from restless sleep. A few stray scabs from summer’s mosquito bites still peppered her coltish legs. She tucked her bare toes into the hem of her nightgown, curling into a tight ball on my lap. The pull toward the portal suddenly seemed ridiculous. Could I seriously consider leaving her again? And Jon and Karen and Mark? But if Jake was in danger . . .
“Maybe you should talk to someone.” Mark rubbed the evening stubble on his chin, producing an irritating sandpaper sound.
Scrape the soft places of my heart while you’re at it.
My arms tightened, and Anne squirmed. “Talk to someone?” Where exactly would I find a counselor who knew how to deal with the trauma of Rhusican torture?
He glanced at the top of Anne’s head and pressed his lips together. “Let me put her back to bed. Then we can talk.”
The last thing I needed was his oh-so-patient and rational lecture about how I wasn’t dealing with everything I’d been through. Or the probing questions born from his intuition that I’d hidden the worst. He lifted Anne from my unresisting arms. She was already drowsing.
When he disappeared down the hallway, I stared at the closed journal on the table.
The living sketch wasn’t our only problem. For days now, I’d felt an impression of danger—a low crackle of anxiety in the background like a banked fire; but tonight the worry kindled into full flame, and urgency burned in my marrow.
Mark had hidden the portal stones. Maybe in the garage. More likely in the basement. In the past he’d hidden one among the jumble of his workbench. I needed to find them. Jake needed me—with or without Mark’s help.
I shot from the couch, ran down the hall, and scrambled down the basement stairs, scraping my ankle on one of the bottom treads when I slipped. My stockinged feet found purchase on the cold concrete.
I pulled out a drawer of screws and scooped them into my hands, letting the bits of metal fall through my fingers. Nothing was hiding beneath them, or in the next drawer. I yanked a third so hard it came all the way out of the storage unit. I upended the drawer and pawed through reels of speaker wire, boxes of nails, paint stirrers, and sheets of sandpaper.
“Planning on a midnight painting project?” Mark asked from the foot of the stairs, sounding genuinely confused.
“Wher
e did you put them?” I jerked open an overhead cabinet and clambered up onto the bench so I could reach the top shelf.
“Them?” He walked over to the workbench.
I pulled out a power drill kit and handed it down to him, reaching farther along the recesses of the shelf. “The portal stones.”
Mark hissed in his breath as if he’d dropped the heavy tool on his foot. “This is your idea of discussing our options?” He reached for me.
I slammed the cabinet door closed. “What’s to discuss? Jake’s in danger. I’ve tried to tell you. You don’t know—”
“I’ll tell you what I know.” He helped me down, and his hands tightened around my waist. “They nearly killed you.”
The surge of adrenaline bled away, and I sagged, resting my forehead against his chest. “I’m fine. I made it back.”
“You say things in your sleep. You wake up screaming.” His chin leaned hard against the top of my head. “Do you really think you’ve been hiding how bad it was? I know I can’t understand it all, but I want to help. Tell me what you need. Tell me what to do.”
“I don’t know.” The hoarse whisper was the voice of a stranger, even though it came from my own throat. “I thought if I could be strong you wouldn’t worry. So that if I needed to go back—”
“Go back?” He stopped breathing.
I felt the stillness of his body every place we touched and eased back so I could see his face. “Don’t pretend to be shocked. You agreed. We need to find out how Jake is. The month is almost up.”
“He could come back any day.”
I groaned internally. Classic Mark. Denial was his favorite solution. Don’t think about a problem, and it will go away.
My brain never worked that way. “We can’t keep waiting. I can’t explain how I know, but Jake is in danger.”
“You aren’t going back. Not without me.”
“The portal didn’t let you through last time.”
He pulled a hand through his wavy hair. “If you’re right, if your journal is telling you something, then . . .” He opened a metal toolbox under the bench and reached inside. “I’ve been working on something.”
I caught my breath. When I’d first come home, he’d mentioned messing with the inner workings of the stones, hoping he could realign the portal so that it would let him through again.
He held up the smooth, grey stone in his palm, the camouflaged panel hidden by his fingers. “I thought I’d need a way through to find you. You came back before I solved it, but since then I’ve kept experimenting.”
“You could have broken them.”
He shook his head. “Jake doesn’t need them to come home. He knows where the portal is in the grove.”
“But . . .” A rush of vertigo made the walls waver, and I leaned against the workbench. “Does it work?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m no transtech. Besides, none of the transtechs I knew have seen anything like this. It’s all guesswork. If we need to go through, it might let us.”
“There’s no ‘if’ about it.”
A low whisper rose in the distance. Almost like the hiss of air through ductwork—except our furnace wasn’t on.
I gripped Mark’s arm. “Listen.”
“I am listening. You think we need to—”
“Not that. Listen.”
He frowned, but held his breath along with me. Silence swelled around us. Then scratching noises came from Jake’s room, a frightening sound I’d heard before, as if a radio were tuned between stations yet distant voices carried through the static. My eyes widened. “You hid the other stones in his room?”
An electrical tingle brushed my skin like a breeze. I let go of Mark and walked toward the open door of Jake’s basement bedroom.
“Wait.” Mark grabbed my arm. “We need to talk about this. What about Karen, Jon, Anne? You’d just leave them?”
I tugged away from his grip. “That’s not fair.”
“No, it’s not. But it’s real. What if we can’t get back?”
Turning to face him squarely, I put my hands on his biceps as if touch alone could convey the desperation flooding my heart. And not just about Jake. I hadn’t forgotten the dangers, the loneliness, the fear. The first time I’d been pulled through the portal, all I could think about was finding a way home, frantic about what was happening to my family while I was gone. “That’s why you have to stay here.”
He crossed his arms. “Not an option.”
Mark had reverted to the guardian-trained councilmember of Rendor clan. Adamant, courageous, uncompromising.
A man I would always want by my side.
“If you’re right,” he said, “and Jake is in danger, then I’ll go. But I need you to stand by in case anything goes wrong.”
Did he think I would let him risk his life passing through the portal again? Based on some untested recalibration? Of course I’d rather go together, but even if the danger to him weren’t so clear, we couldn’t risk having us both trapped on the other side. I had to think of the other children.
I had to do this alone.
My hands tightened on his arms; then I let go. I stepped across the threshold into Jake’s room. Whispers rose in volume. Urgent, compelling—the sounds a giant might hear if he pressed a stethoscope to a city and listened to the mix of tiny, overlapping voices.
“Mark, I can’t explain it. I just feel . . . desperate. Like I don’t dare wait. This isn’t because of the nightmares, or lack of sleep. I’m not unhinged. You’ve got to believe me.”
His eyes fell into shadow as he joined me in the room, away from the harsh basement light. “Then I should align the stones and try to go through. If it doesn’t let me through, we aren’t going. Understand?” Mark’s gaze was hard as flint, and I braced myself for a long argument.
Before I could say anything, static raised the hair on my arms and the walls of Jake’s room rushed away and disappeared into an unseen horizon.
Mark’s mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear him through ears plugged by swelling air pressure. I tried to ask what was happening, but my breath was trapped in my throat.
No, no, no! We need to make plans. I need supplies.
An implosion of wind seemed to rush at us from all directions. Mark fought against it and grabbed me in a bear hug with the one portal stone still clutched in his fist. I had a brief impression of his arms around me, but then he dissolved, as insubstantial as the rest of the room.
Had he been swallowed by the portal—stolen from me forever?
Lord, no! You can’t take him!
The energy field danced a current across my skin. I was no longer in our basement, but tumbled and spun through a vast nothingness. Curled against the noise and chaos, I blindly reached out for my husband, but touched only emptiness. I screamed but heard nothing over the shrieking wind.
Finally the universe stopped spinning. The jet-engine roar in my head stilled, and I felt ground beneath my feet. Summoning a dreg of courage, I straightened and opened my eyes.
Utter blackness surrounded me. I stretched my hands out into the void, turning, floundering for something to hold. Blind, disoriented, I took a step forward and slipped, crashing to my knees on a hard surface. Wet. Cold.
“Mark?”
Silence, darkness, and the smell of decay were my only answer.
Chapter
7
Linette
In the morning, I struggled to plait my hair into the many thin braids so typical in Sidian. Since coming here, I’d adopted Hazorite styles to show my respect for their culture, but that didn’t mean I’d mastered the tiny strands interwoven with metallic fibers. I could have asked Ria for help, but she was still sleeping—exhausted from her tearful conversation with me last night.
My fingers tired of knotting strands of hair, so I stopped with only a few c
ompleted and rummaged in a cubby for my clothes. I picked up a long satin tunic with elaborate silver threads woven around the edges, an appropriate choice for meeting with Zarek today. But the lush colors seemed to symbolize everything harsh and unfamiliar about this land. I tossed aside the tunic and instead put on a brown, fine-woven sweater and trousers, and the unadorned robe I wore for informal gatherings in Braide Wood.
As I knotted the fabric belt, a light tap sounded at my door. Kieran always reminded me to keep my door locked, and I’d made it a habit. He might be hopelessly paranoid, but his advice had saved me several times from drunken soldiers who stumbled down the halls at night.
This morning the door slid aside to reveal Nolan. He ducked his head—awkward and endearing at the same time. “G’morning. Kieran sent me with a message: ‘Zarek asked me to meet with a division of the soldiers camped outside the walls, and I may be gone until the rains. Don’t go to see the king until I’m back at the palace and can come with you.’”
His words rushed out in one breath, with the inflectionless delivery typical of messengers. He sucked in a gulp of air and looked at me, waiting for my answer. After a quick scan of my informal attire, the worried pinch around his forehead relaxed. “Oh, you’ve already decided not to see the king. I’ll tell him.”
“Have you eaten? Would you like something?”
He grinned, sauntered into the room, and grabbed a small melon from the bowl in my common room. As a guest of the king, I was provided with more food than I could eat.
Nolan sliced a wedge of fruit with his bootknife and talked around a large bite of melon. “Where’s Ria?”
“Still sleeping.” I sat across the table from him and poured some juice for each of us. No bitter Hazorite clavo when I had a choice. “Nolan, I’m sure your father has talked to you about this, but we need to treat Ria with respect.”
“She’s a shrine girl,” he said dismissively as he wiped juice from his chin with his sleeve.
“Yes. And she’s precious to the One. Like every person, slave or king . . . or messenger.”
