by C. A. Gray
“Oaxaca,” corrected the nimbus, who suddenly appeared ephemeral, though his transparent form still shimmered even in full sunlight. “Monte Alban, to be exact. It’s a site of ancient Zapotec ruins.”
“Zapotec? I thought it looked Aztec. What’s Zapotec?” Cole whispered to Lily.
“Nobody cares, Cole,” Lily whispered back.
The nimbus announced, “Come on – this way looks less crowded.” Cole and Lily followed the nimbus, not sure where he was headed.
“He’s right. None of these people have penumbra!” Lily said to Cole in amazement. A few seconds later, she called out to the nimbus, “What’s your name, anyway?”
“Achen,” he called back. Then he gestured at Cole, who was standing nearest a gawking teenage girl, and said, “Ask her if she saw another boy who looks like you not too long ago.”
“Me? I don’t speak Spanish!” said Cole, forgetting that to the girl, he would look as if he were talking to himself.
“Here,” said Lily, and then she turned and said to the girl earnestly, in broken Spanish, “Estaba otro niño aquí como nosotros… um, hace como diez minutos?”
Cole raised his eyebrows in amazement as the girl nodded at Lily.
“Si, estaban dos niños,” she said, “y aparecieron como fantasmas!”
“What’s she saying?” Cole demanded, as Lily’s face fell.
“She said yes, there were two boys, and they just appeared, like ghosts,” said Achen. “I think she means she saw them appear out of nowhere.”
Cole shot Achen a cross look. “Well, if you speak Spanish, you could’ve mentioned that.”
“I speak every language,” said Achen. “They all sound the same to me.”
“Who was the other boy though?” said Cole, perplexed.
“Guys!” Lily snapped, and turned back to the girl. “Y donde están los niños ahora, sabes?”
The girl thought for a moment, vaguely, as if she were recalling a scene from a dream. “Pienso… que se fueron allá y se desaparecieron…” Then she shook her head as if that couldn’t be right.
“What? What?” said Cole anxiously.
Achen looked at Cole gravely and translated the only part that mattered.
“We’re too late.”
Chapter 28
The entire company of penumbra vanished the moment Peter and Kane arrived, so they stood on the banks of the Lake of Avalon alone. The castle before them seemed like a dead version of the one Peter had seen in Mordred’s memory. Peter shivered, though he did not exactly feel cold. He would have thought he felt dead, if he hadn’t been so terrified at the same time. He gulped the air hungrily as if to assure himself that his lungs still worked.
“It looks… like a tomb,” said Kane in a very odd voice. Peter glanced at him involuntarily; he sounded like he was trying not to sound scared, but doing a poor job of it. The thought gave Peter a fleeting sense of camaraderie.
“What’s wrong with the air?” Peter asked.
Kane inhaled. “It’s just thin. We’re halfway between their world and ours. Maybe some of our atmosphere bled into this place.”
“Good thing, I guess,” Peter muttered, “or else we’d suffocate before we ever got in there.” Neither of them moved for a moment, each waiting for the other to go first. Finally, Peter said, “How do you know this is a halfway point? How do you know we’re not still on earth, or else in their world entirely?”
“Because that’s not how it works,” said Kane, reluctantly taking a few steps towards the precipitous bridge over the forbidding water. “Avalon used to be on earth. Anything that starts out in our world can never fully belong to theirs, and vice versa.”
“So what is this place, like purgatory?” Peter asked, purposely dragging his feet as he followed Kane.
“If you believe in that stuff.” Kane turned around and flashed him what Peter was sure was meant to be an arrogant smile, but it came out looking more like a grimace.
“At this point, I’m not sure there’s anything I don’t believe in,” said Peter. Then he looked down when he got to the place where the bridge met the marshlands, and he cried out involuntarily. “My feet!”
“Yeah, I know,” said Kane.
“They’re transparent!” Peter added unnecessarily.
“Halfway point, remember?”
“What will that mean when we get inside?” Peter asked anxiously. “Will our weapons even do any good?”
“It’s possible that they can kill us and we can kill them. It’s also possible that we’ll each be invulnerable to the other. Could go either way, really.”
“Or some weird combination of both,” Peter murmured. “Maybe that’s why there’s hardly any air here, but somehow I don’t feel lightheaded. Maybe our lungs don’t need it as much because they’re only partially here.” Then he shook his head and added, more to himself than to Kane, “That makes no sense at all.”
Kane gave a short, humorless laugh and stepped onto the bridge. “You never stop, do you?”
“I can’t,” said Peter, understanding what he meant. People were always telling him he thought too much. “Thinking calms me down.”
Kane rolled his eyes, though Peter could not see him do it. “That was supposed to be rhetorical, you moron.”
Peter stared at Kane’s back. “Are you even scared?” he demanded.
Kane hesitated. Then he said, “We’re about to meet the Shadow Lord face to face. Of course I’m scared.”
Peter was silent in his turn. Then he said sincerely, “Thanks for coming with me.”
Kane didn’t reply.
Then they stopped talking. Crossing the bridge required all their concentration. Peter wasn’t sure why, but he knew falling into that water would be very, very bad.
“Why aren’t the penumbra here?” Peter asked finally. “Why did they just disappear when we arrived?”
Out of the top of his vision as Peter continued to watch his feet, he saw Kane shrug his shoulders. “Why bother escorting us? They know we’re not going anywhere. Where could we go?”
Peter felt a sinking sensation in his stomach as the idea hit him for the first time. Where could they go? Once they rescued Bruce and Brock, how were they going to get back to earth when they didn’t even know where it was?
Suddenly Peter remembered how Mrs. Jefferson had found Carlion again, and felt an almost overwhelming wave of relief. “We can call for help!” he exclaimed. Then he bellowed with all his might, “FIDES DIGNUS!” But the sound of his shout fell flat, and he did not hear the corresponding crack that he had anticipated. In fact, nothing happened at all.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Kane. “The nimbi can’t find this place any more than the penumbra can find Carlion.”
Peter’s heart sank. “Why not? I thought the whole reason we couldn’t say the Shadow Lord’s name in Carlion is because we didn’t want him to be able to find it.”
“Yeah, well, Carlion is on earth, isn’t it? And we’re not. Not exactly, anyway.”
“Fides Dignus said speaking a name creates a disturbance in the superstrings, just like breaking the laws of physics does, and they can follow the disturbance to its source –”
“Only if we’re in the same universe,” said Kane. They were almost at the entrance of the castle now, and his breath was coming faster, his voice higher. “Here, calling them would be just like if you shouted my name, but I was too far away to hear it.” He stopped, and sucked in air like it was his last breath, fingers flying automatically to the place where his clothes concealed the machete. “Face it, Peter. We’re on our own.”
The portcullis of the Fata Morgana gaped wide. From a distance, it looked as if the inside was black as pitch, but now that they stood outside of it, Peter could see the faint glow emanating from within. For the first time, he wondered by what light he was able to see the marsh, the bridge, the water, and the castle. Is the light coming from their world or ours?
“Wait a minute,” he said to Kane anxiously. “
What are we going to do when we get in there?”
“Well,” said Kane, flashing him another grin of false bravado, “considering we have no idea what we’ll find in there… we’ll improvise.”
“Improvise,” Peter repeated incredulously. Before he could say anything else, Kane had disappeared, and Peter had no choice but to follow.
What he saw inside left him breathless.
They were not in a castle at all. It was as if they had passed through a portal into another world, only Peter knew they hadn’t because by now he knew what portals felt like. There had been no hook, no dragging sensation – he had simply crossed a threshold, and suddenly found himself… lost at sea. The bridge burst into a labyrinth upon the surface of the water, but the same water and the same labyrinth expanded laterally around and above them, as if they were enclosed in an underwater sphere. Is there no gravity here? he thought desperately, and then said aloud, “How is this possible?”
Then he heard a sound that made his heart stop.
“Peter?”
He did not immediately see the speaker, but he would know that voice anywhere. It was Bruce.
“Dad!” he cried, locating him at last. Then he added, “Brock!” when he saw him standing beside Bruce. Something about the fact that they were standing still and made no attempt to move toward him struck Peter as odd, but he didn’t have time to consider it. He kept one eye on the gossamer footbridge below him, but moved towards them as quickly as he could.
“Peter, no, turn around!” cried Bruce, and leaned forward. He spread his palms as if pressing against a pane of glass… only there was no glass.
Peter was confused. Why aren’t they moving? It seemed all wrong somehow.
As Peter ran towards them, Bruce shouted all the more frantically, “No, take Kane and get out! This is exactly what he wants!”
“Eyes on the water!” Brock shouted, and then immediately followed it with “Leathnú cloch!” Peter looked down again not a moment too soon. Another step and he would have run right off the edge – but where he nearly fell, suddenly new stones appeared at Brock’s command, paving his way ahead directly towards Bruce and Brock. Peter stopped for a moment as his heart flew to his throat, and then redirected his course, not bothering to wonder where the new ground was coming from and ignoring his dad’s shouts and pleas with him to head in the opposite direction.
When he got close, he opened his arms to embrace his father, and Bruce suddenly changed what he was shouting. “No, stop, you’re going to –”
Peter felt something smash into his face.
He fell backwards, seeing stars, and Bruce finished, “– run into the forcefield.”
“Forcefield?” Peter winced breathlessly, suddenly understanding what had not made sense a moment before. He looked back at his dad, and reached out a hand tentatively to touch the edges of the forcefield as if he expected to be electrocuted. It felt like a solid wall. “You’re trapped?”
“Peter, listen to me,” said Bruce, making a valiant effort to sound coherent. “The whole point of kidnapping us was to get to you. Listen to me!” Peter looked up sharply at the urgency in his father’s voice. “This is big, Peter. Bigger than me, bigger than Brock, bigger even than you. Our individual lives do not matter, but you two must stay alive!”
“Dad, it’s not me,” Peter shook his head. “I know all of you think it is, but it’s not me, it’s Lily! Just trust me on this!”
“They will kill you both!” Bruce cried. “Do you understand that?”
Peter felt something tremble deep inside of him at his father’s words. He had no idea how to respond, so he did the only thing he could do: he ignored them. “Kane!” he shouted without looking over his shoulder, purposely distracting himself from Bruce’s intense gaze by pressing his hands all around the forcefield, looking for the place where it was vulnerable. “Little help here?”
“What’s he doing here?” said Brock in an odd tone. “Why is he staring at the water like that?”
“Is he?” said Peter distractedly.
“Yeah. He’s… speaking to it,” said Brock, perplexed. “I think he’s speaking the Ancient Tongue.” Peter looked up, startled at first to hear Brock referring to the Ancient Tongue. Then he remembered that Brock had been the one speaking when the stones suddenly appeared beneath his feet. Brock continued with a frown, “I thought Kane had the gift of air, not water…”
“He does,” said Peter. “I don’t know what he’s doing. Maybe he’s trying to find a way out of here.”
“Peter, please,” Bruce begged, “Take Kane and run!”
Peter wished desperately that he would stop saying that. He couldn’t think about it. He just couldn’t. He ignored Bruce on purpose and said to Brock, “Any idea what the forcefield is made of?”
“Your dad said this whole place is made of something called… dark matter?”
Peter paused and gaped for a second, and then looked at his dad for confirmation. Bruce was rocking back and forth with anxiety, whimpering, “Run, please run…”
“That makes sense…” Peter murmured, trying to ignore all the emotions competing for his attention, and thinking fast. “The penumbra are in a different dimension. Seventy three percent of the matter of the universe is unaccounted for, and most people can’t see the penumbra in our world… so of course, what else would they be?” After Peter had assimilated the information, he turned to his dad and said, “Is that helpful?”
“Your dad can create light particles,” said Brock, “so –”
“– if this place is made of dark matter, then that means photons here will behave essentially like antimatter!” Peter finished, looking at his dad in amazement.
“Er, right,” said Brock, looking a little confused. “Your dad thinks that means he can blow this place to bits.”
“Trouble is he’d blow us with it,” Peter murmured, thinking hard, “so we have to get out first. Which brings us back to the issue of the forcefield. Dad,” he said, more sharply than he had intended, but just below the threshold of yelling, “I’m not going anywhere, so you might as well help. If this whole place is made of dark matter, what does that mean about the forcefield? Is it dark matter too?”
Bruce stopped rocking and took a deep breath, trying to steady himself enough to focus. “Has to be,” he said at last. “It blew up when it came in contact with a photon I created.”
“There’s light coming from every direction, though,” Peter said, indicating the soft glow all around that seemed to come from nowhere in particular. “Why isn’t that enough to destroy the whole castle?”
Bruce shook his head to clear it. “That light… it’s not really here, I don’t think. I know we can see it, but it’s not here in the same way that the penumbra aren’t really in our world, even though we can see them. Most people can’t, though. Does that make sense?”
“Sort of,” Peter frowned, thinking of the thin air and his half transparent lungs. “Okay, then, do you think you can blow a door in the forcefield big enough for you guys to get out?”
“I’ve never made that many photons at once before…” Bruce murmured anxiously. Then he stopped, and with a determined expression on his face, he sat down cross-legged in a lotus position with his first two fingers pressed against the thumb of each hand, and closed his eyes.
Brock looked at Bruce incredulously and then back at Peter. “Is he seriously doing yoga right now?”
“Shh,” said Peter, remembering their conversation over dinner one night, about how meditation could increase the number of photons his dad could speak into existence at a given time. It felt as if that conversation had taken place in another life.
Suddenly Bruce moved his hands out in front of him, and a tiny ray of illumination sprung from his palms, which erupted several feet away in a blinding flash of light. Bruce recoiled from the backlash, sprawled at Brock’s feet.
Peter immediately moved to the spot where the flash had been, and flattened his hand against it, but his
face fell when he realized the hole was only large enough to insert two fingers into the forcefield. Bruce had probably just conjured millions of photons at once, and under ordinary circumstances that feat would have been remarkable. But here, it wasn’t enough. “It’s no use!” said Peter. “There’s got to be another way!”
Then a voice cut through the stillness of the fortress.
“Pe-ter.”
It was sing-song and whimsical, which made it all the more ominous.
“Kane?”
Peter turned in his direction, hoping it had been him. But Kane had also stood erect at the sound of the eerie voice, his muscles tense and poised for action. In a flash, Kane held a machete in one hand and a scimitar in the other.
“He’s here!” Bruce hissed.
Suddenly they heard the creaking of metal. Before Peter could register what was happening, the portcullis slammed shut with the force of a guillotine, and then it seemed to disappear from existence altogether, swallowed in the endless sea.
Then, the soft glow of distant illumination went out, as if obscured by a shadow.
“Get away from the water!” Bruce cried shrilly.
“I can’t, there’s water everywhere!” Peter shouted back, but he fell backwards and pressed the weight of his body against the forcefield, bicycling his feet against the precarious stones of the floor as if he might be able to force his body inside its protective sphere.
All at once, though he could not see them, Peter could feel the sudden density of penumbra in the room, but they did not move to attack. Instead, their presence seemed to tingle with an electric sense of anticipation. He could almost feel their ice-cold breath on the back of his neck.
Suddenly laughter sounded in the room, high and cold. The profound lack of an echo combined with the pitch darkness made it feel as if Peter had been buried alive with the sound, like there was nothing left in existence but him and that voice.
