by Ted Sanders
Horace decided to go back to basics. He pulled his thoughts away from the silver sun and instead prepared his mind for opening the box again. He thought about his long day—his mother, the harp, Gabriel, Brian, the daktan, Chloe sleeping. He thought about how tomorrow night, he and the other Wardens would be headed out to track down the mysterious Keeper. He reminded himself, though, that there were no guarantees. The Box of Promises made no promises.
When he was ready, he pointed the Fel’Daera at Chloe lying curled on the covers, and then he opened the lid. He peered through the blue glass at tomorrow’s room, blue and crisply rippling—his own barely touched bottle of root beer sitting on the desk; a pillow slumped over the back of his chair; the three empty spots on his bookshelf full again; the clock with its sharply knifed numbers reading 11:55; an empty, rumpled bed.
Tomorrow’s bedroom was empty, he assumed, because he would be out with Chloe and the other Wardens by this time, dealing with the unknown Keeper. They’d be out dealing with it whether Horace solved the mystery of the silver sun or not. He glanced over the top of the box to where Chloe lay snoozing peacefully in the here and now. Sleeping was about the only time when she didn’t look ready for a fight. He shifted his gaze back and forth between today and tomorrow. Chloe here, Chloe gone, Chloe here, Chloe gone.
As he looked, Horace asked himself questions about the Fel’Daera. Why blue? No idea, but presumably unavoidable. Why oval? It was a good shape for looking through, clearly. Why so small? Maybe this was as big a window into the future as was possible to make. Why one day exactly?
He paused and thought about that one. He couldn’t think of a reason why the gap would be a single day. And it was strange, really, how everything that happened between now and then was unknown to the box. For example, even though the box told him that Chloe would get up sometime in the next twenty-four hours, Horace had no sure way of knowing exactly when she would get up—or how, or even why. A lot could happen in twenty-four hours that the Fel’Daera couldn’t see. It was like having a map where everything between where you were and where you wanted to go was blacked out.
But maybe that wasn’t quite fair. Maybe a better analogy would be human eyes. After all, his own mother saw things fine when they were far away, but she struggled with close-up things. She was always having Horace read labels for her when she couldn’t find a pair of reading glasses. With the reading glasses on, though, she could focus on things much—
“Closer,” Horace said aloud.
The realization came to him fully formed, with so much utter surety that his heart did not even skip a beat. “Closer,” he said again. He shut the lid of the box. He shut his eyes. He took hold of the silver sun with his mind. Concentrating hard, he slowly became aware again how the sun’s rays seemed rich, dense with potential and change. The silver rays—brimming with all the coming day’s unseen possibilities—were so full. But maybe they didn’t need to be so full. It was as simple as that.
The box seemed to hum in his hands, welcoming his understanding, tuning itself to him as he learned. Closer, not farther. He didn’t have to push. He didn’t even have to pull. He felt his thoughts catch on that tiny dimple he’d been poking at all evening. Not a fingerhold, but a gateway. He gripped it with all the confidence he could muster, and he began to close it.
Almost immediately, something gave. It was as if a great rusty wheel, long stuck, surrendered at last beneath an unexpected weight. The subtle gateway began to shrink, and the flow of power moving through it started to slacken. Horace breathed, deep and slow, eyes still closed. He was doing it. This was what the box wanted. He kept going, narrowing the gap fraction by fraction, cutting off the flow. It became harder as he went, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to cut the flow off entirely, but there was so much sheer pleasure in the act, exercising a muscle that hadn’t been used in . . . well, as Brian said, years.
He shrank the opening until it would shrink no more. Only a trickle of power flowed through it now. Instinctively he pinned the opening in place—he couldn’t even have said how, but he locked the gap where it was. Eyes still closed, he probed at the box. It felt . . . different. It felt empty. Not bad empty, just . . . simpler.
He opened his eyes. He stared. The silver sun wasn’t silver anymore. Every ray had gone as dark as the center.
Every ray but one.
The topmost ray still gleamed brightly.
Horace’s heart swelled. He thought he understood. He opened the box again, knowing precisely what to look for next. Experience—and logic—told him that every clock looked the same through the Fel’Daera as it did in real life, because he was looking exactly twenty-four hours ahead.
But not now.
He turned toward his clock, its glowing numbers reading 12:02 in the present. He lifted the box and looked—into the future, yes, but not into tomorrow.
Through the box, the clock and the table it sat on were almost painfully sharp. And his clock read simply—incredibly—12:42.
Straining to keep calm, Horace snapped the box closed. This was it. This was what Brian had seen—what Mr. Meister had probably known all along. Yes, the Fel’Daera could look one day into the future. But it could look nearer to the present, too! He’d adjusted the Fel’Daera so that it was seeing only forty minutes into the future, a dizzying thought.
He brought the box close to his face, looking again at the single silver ray that still shone brightly. He realized now that it wasn’t completely silver—a small portion of the ray had also gone dark like the rest of the sun, leaving only two-thirds of it shining and silver.
Horace clutched the box to his chest, grinning. The silver sun was a kind of dial after all, complete with its own system of measurement. If each ray represented an hour, he could tell how far into the future he was looking by counting the number of silver rays. Right now, only a single ray was shining—actually, only two-thirds of a single ray.
Two-thirds of an hour. Also known as forty minutes.
Horace blazed with a satisfaction so deep and affirming that he was sure there was no word for it. The box was so logical, so ordered. Never had he felt more strongly that the Fel’Daera was his, and his alone, no matter how many Keepers had come before him. He stood there, marveling, thinking he would explode with the knowledge. He had to tell Chloe.
Chloe.
Horace looked over at her. Still asleep. He opened the box again, and through the glass—Chloe here; Chloe sleeping; Chloe as she was now. But not exactly now. Forty minutes from now. He compared the two sights of her, inside the box and out. Inside the box—her head tilted slightly skyward from where it was now, her mouth a half inch farther open.
Horace closed the box gently, hardly able to believe he could have missed this for so long. “All this time,” he whispered to himself, and then looked down at the box and laughed. “All this time.”
He looked over at Chloe again, aching to wake her. But he wasn’t about to contradict this new future he’d seen, a future that was so close!
He would wait. If she was still asleep in forty-one minutes, he’d wake her then. He sat down on the floor, suddenly ravenously hungry, and started in on what remained of the pizza. It was cold, of course. He couldn’t help but think that two hours ago—if he’d known what he knew now—he could have taken Chloe’s suggestion and sent some warm pizza through to this exact moment in time.
He froze, clutching a stiff remnant of a slice in his hand. If he could see forty minutes in the future, surely he could send something, too. Right?
And he knew just what to send. Chloe wanted time-travel food? Well, she could have some. He peeled the last remaining pepperoni from the half slice in his hand, then crept up onto the bed beside Chloe as gently as he could.
Horace settled his mind, thinking about the path he was on and where he wanted it to lead. Then he opened the box and looked, forty minutes into the future. Through the blue glass he saw the future beginning to unfold, the future he was already planning—Horace’s own hand, shaking Chlo
e awake; her eyes opening, confused and angry; Horace’s hand again, putting an empty plate into her lap. Horace had to stifle a laugh.
He knelt carefully over the still-sleeping Chloe of now, over where her waking self would be forty minutes from now. Through the Fel’Daera—Chloe’s mouth opening in a cranky snarl, unheard words forming on her lips—this was the moment. Horace rose up on his knees and put the pepperoni into the box, aiming carefully, holding it directly above the plate in future Chloe’s lap. It was 12:08.
He closed the box. He felt the tingle that meant the pepperoni was gone. Chloe stirred a little in her sleep, her lips falling slightly open. Horace eased himself off the bed, watching her carefully. If the box worked like it should—and he knew that it would—the pepperoni would arrive at 12:48. He’d wake Chloe up, just as he’d witnessed, and then she’d see. Time-travel food, extra rush delivery.
He sat back in his desk chair to wait, feeling exhausted and invigorated all at once. He’d done it. He’d figured out the silver sun. He lay back for several minutes, looking up at the ceiling’s glow-in-the-dark stars, and just reveled in the idea. But soon enough, as always, he found that having the answer just led to more questions. In particular, how had he changed the time, exactly? And could he change it again?
He spun around and set the box on his desk. Once more he let his thoughts settle across the sun’s snaking rays and into that tiny passageway, knowing better what to feel for now. When the box was set at twenty-four hours, all of the silver rays were shining. The passage was wide open and the power—the Medium, of course!—was at full force. But when he turned that power down, the box saw less far into the future. That only stood to reason. Fewer things could happen in forty minutes as opposed to a day or even a few hours. Fewer branching paths, fewer possible outcomes. So now if he wanted to see farther into the future again, he had to widen the channel, increasing the flow of power. He hoped it would be as simple as that.
It was now 12:13. “Let’s try four thirteen,” he murmured to himself. “Four hours. Four rays.” With his thoughts, he found the same subtle hole he’d latched on to before. Instead of closing it, he began to pry it open. He assumed it would be hard, but it began to widen almost at once. He watched the silver rays begin to fill, like mercury rising. He could almost feel the power flowing—all the change and chance and probability and possibility coursing outward into the sun. A kind of inertia took over, a heavy movement like a slow, wide river. Horace waded in it, let himself be taken away by it, sure he knew where it was going, sure that he—
The flow came to an abrupt halt, so sudden and jarring that he could have sworn it made a sound. He realized his eyes were still open, but that he wasn’t seeing anything. He squeezed them shut hard, making himself see stars.
He checked the silver sun. All twenty-four spokes were full and shining. He tried to hit four hours and had overshot it by a mile. He felt disoriented, strangely displaced. But why? And then he checked his clock and got a surprise.
It was 12:16.
“Whoa, what?” he said aloud. He’d started pushing at 12:13, and his inner time sense told him that only a dozen seconds had passed. But apparently two or three minutes had gone by. For a moment, he was sure there was something wrong with his clock. That it had malfunctioned. But of course that wasn’t very logical. It wasn’t the clock; it was himself. Something about pushing the box forward in time had messed with Horace’s own inner clock, normally accurate down to the minute.
The clock blipped to 12:17, snapping him out of it. He looked down at the Fel’Daera. “What did we do?” he asked it, but he got nothing in return. No reassurance, but also no alarm, either. Maybe this was just a side effect. Maybe he could learn to adjust to it.
“We’ll figure it out, right?” he said to the box. “We are figuring it out.” He let his mind drift through the Fel’Daera, and he felt the passageway—a kind of conduit or valve, really—that caused the silver sun to brighten and dim.
He felt ready now to face the coming day, and the reappearance of the daktan—in fact, he felt more ready than ever. Think of it! With any luck, he’d be able to reveal not just what was going to happen in twenty-four hours’ time, but within just a few minutes. He couldn’t wait to show Chloe what he’d learned.
But he would have to wait. He checked the clock again, relieved to find that his sense of time was returning. It was 12:20. He set the Fel’Daera aside and waited for another twenty-five minutes, until at last it was 12:47. He grabbed an empty plate and climbed onto the bed, shaking Chloe awake, just as he’d seen himself do through the Fel’Daera. Finally she sat up, her face cross.
“You’re a terrible person,” she snarled.
“Here,” Horace said, putting the plate into her hands.
Chloe looked down at the plate, puzzled. “What?” she slurred sleepily.
“Watch the plate. Trust me.”
She yawned grumpily. “This better . . . be better.”
“Than what?”
“Dream,” she breathed with a smile, but she kept her sleepy eyes on the plate. A second later she startled as the pepperoni materialized with a soft pop! right in front of her face. She watched it flop down onto the plate.
“Hey . . . ,” she said agreeably. “Future food.” Then she frowned. “Wait,” she said, blinking and staring. She sat up straight. “Wait.” Almost giddy with anticipation, Horace waited for her to figure it out. She checked the clock, then checked the window with the dark night sky outside. She looked up at Horace, her face full of dawning wonder. “Wait, is this . . . did you . . . ?”
“Yes,” Horace told her simply. He held the box out toward her with one hand, shaking it gently. “Not farther,” he said, still trying to catch his breath. “Closer.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Falling
APRIL WOKE INTO COLD. COLD AND DARK. SHE TRIED TO STAND but couldn’t find her feet. She couldn’t find . . . anything. She shot her hand up to the vine curled around her ear. It was there, but she couldn’t sense it.
She was severed.
Where was she? Shivering, she looked around desperately. Trees. Night. It was so dark and she was so lost and confused and slipping, falling, sinking into a place far from everything she’d ever known. But what did she know? She knew the vine. Except the vine was gone now, taken. She was alone.
No. Not alone. There—two sleeping figures. A jolt of red hair. Isabel. Isabel was doing this, cutting her off. Isabel was curled into a fitful ball on her blanket, murmuring and muttering with eyes closed, apparently dreaming. Had the woman severed April in her sleep? Was that even possible?
April tried to call out, to wake Isabel, but couldn’t remember how to speak. She tried to crawl forward. And then she collapsed. She fell on something soft and hard. It squirmed beneath her, pushing, and then a voice.
“April?” the voice said. “April, what’s wrong?”
Joshua. She knew that voice. Some part of her did. She tried to answer it but couldn’t speak. She couldn’t breathe. She was so cold, so gone. Everything was going cold, going frozen gone.
“Isabel!” the voice cried. “Isabel, wake up!” But there couldn’t be voices here. It was too cold, too cold and lonely and—
Then the woman shot awake and April felt sudden warmth flooding her. She took a great gasping breath, filling her lungs so full her ribs ached, and there on the crest of that breath was the vine, golden and shimmering, present again. She was April. Arthur was overhead, alert and watching. Murmuring bugs wove through the air between the hum of the trees. Tiny kinetic fish darted along the shoreline a dozen yards away. A handful of toads were awake and doing their nightly deeds. Life all around swept through April, loud and comforting.
Isabel was sitting up, a few twigs and leaves caught in her curly hair, Joshua kneeling beside her. “Did she make it?” the woman asked groggily. “Is she okay?”
“You’re having a nightmare,” Joshua said somberly, as if that explained everything. He shook her shoulder
gently.
“But is she—” Isabel blinked and caught sight of April, still drinking deeply from the vine, and hurried closer. She reached out for April’s shoulder, but April drew away. “You,” Isabel said. “I’m sorry.”
“You severed me . . . in your sleep,” said April, hardly believing it.
Isabel worried her wooden ring. “I’m so sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“In your sleep,” April repeated. She sat in silence, gathering her thoughts as best she could. “You said you were the only one who could control Miradel. But you can’t control her at all, can you? This is the third time you’ve severed me, and I think only one of those times was really on purpose.”
Isabel sank back onto her haunches. “It happens sometimes when I get angry. Or scared.” And she did look scared, her knees huddled against her chest like a little girl’s. But somehow April had the impression that for Isabel, angry and scared often went hand in hand.
Keep calm, April told herself. Keep still. “What were you having a nightmare about?” she asked.
“Old times. A bad day.” She dragged a hand down her face. “And then Wardens were there, and an Auditor.”
“You’re afraid of the Auditors.”
“Yes. But they’re exactly as afraid of me as I am of them. That’s how they work.”
Still awash in the aftermath of being severed, April found it hard to summon up much worry about the Auditors just now. She was far more worried about the woman sitting right in front of her, and her own terrible powers. But of course April couldn’t just come out and say that. She came at it gently, sideways. “No offense, but you don’t really know how horrible it feels,” she said.
Isabel scowled silently at the reminder that she wasn’t Tan’ji.
April said, “I would like to be told if it’s dangerous.”
“It’s not. Not in and of itself.”
That sounded more like a yes than a no. “Okay, but maybe there are . . . related dangers. Dangers I ought to know about.”
