by Garth Nix
Deep in the heart of the mountain, he found something tiny but detectable. It made his heart race and his mouth water. He could practically smell the air of Earth in his nostrils.
Jack opened his eyes.
“That’s it,” he cried. “I’ve got it!”
“Where?” asked Tara excitedly. “How far? Kyle has built a sled thing for Lottie. It’ll slide over the sand and we can take turns pulling her.”
That was the bad news. “It’s a long way from here. We’ll never make it on foot.”
“Uh,” she said, falling back on her heels. “So what do we do?”
Jack sat in silence for a minute, possibilities turning in his mind. It didn’t seem fair that they could have found the way out but weren’t able to get there in time. There had to be a way. They had one Warden, one troubletwister, two resourceful children, and a very wise Hyacinth Macaw, not to mention a bloodthirsty skull and some random pages from the Compendium. There was nothing they couldn’t do back home, if they put their minds to it. Why not here as well?
“My Gifts are stronger here,” he said, an idea slowly occurring to him. “Lottie never explained why. But maybe we can use that to our advantage.”
“You’re not seriously thinking of bringing the mountain to us, are you?” said Tara.
“Wouldn’t that be amazing?” He grinned at the thought. “But not quite. Let’s go tell Kyle and Lottie that we found it. And then you can tell me if I’m crazy or not.”
“I don’t care about crazy,” said Tara, helping him to his feet. “Just as long as it works.”
* * *
The deck was really shaking underfoot by the time they were ready to leave. Jack was the only one who could feel it, which amazed him. It was like an earthquake, rising and falling in waves. There were times he had to stop and hold on to something until it passed. No one else felt it, though. It was just him, thanks to his second Gift.
“I’m going to miss this place,” said Lottie softly. They’d propped her up on Kyle’s sled and put her on the foredeck. “It’s been my home all these years.”
“Wait until you see what’s waiting for you,” said Tara. “There’s the Internet and HDTV and cell phones and …”
“All I want is a bath, dear. And a cup of really hot tea that I don’t have to coax out of the plants by force of will.”
Kyle came up the ramp with a double armload of fruit. “That’s the last of it. Do you think it’ll be enough?”
Lottie nodded. “Put some here and the rest where Jack can reach it. He’ll need every calorie he can get.”
Jack was standing on the bow, trying not to feel nervous. The circle of greenery surrounding Omega seemed very small, and the distance they had to travel was very large. The horde of Evil aliens that had chased them appeared to have dispersed, but that didn’t mean they weren’t hiding somewhere, waiting to pounce.
It was going to work, he told himself. It had to work. Tara had declared herself captain and ordered him to not do it wrong.
Said captain was making one last inspection to ensure nothing had been forgotten. When she was done, she stood behind Jack and put her hands on her hips. With her sword tucked into an old belt she had found belowdeck, and Cornelia on her shoulder, she looked like a young but very fierce pirate.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Jack closed his eyes and woke his Gifts. They came easily, rushing out of him in an explosion of energy. The sunlight flickered, but that was just a passing glitch from his first Gift. It was his second that he needed, the one he had inherited from his step-grandfather, Joe Henschke.
There was a long, drawn-out creak. The deck shifted under him. He braced himself and pushed harder.
With a great ripping and tearing of roots, the ship began to move. Only it wasn’t really the ship that was moving, but the ground under it, rising like a wave, carrying the Omega high on its back.
“Anchors aweigh!” Cornelia squawked in triumph.
“Yee-ha!” shouted Kyle. “It’s working!”
It was indeed. The ship was moving, carried along on the crest of a slowly building wave of soil, bringing a large number of trees and lots of tangled vines along for the ride. The wave, and the ship surfing with it, was heading in a straight line across the desert, aiming more or less at one of the suns hanging low over the horizon. That was the direction the mountain lay. But the ship needed to move much faster than this if it was to reach the mountain in time.
Jack’s stomach growled.
“Don’t forget what she said.” Kyle thrust an orange banana into his hand. “Eat it or you’ll burn yourself up.”
Jack didn’t argue. He knew Lottie was doing the same. It was her job to keep the ship hidden as it traveled across the sand. He stuffed the fruit into his mouth, swallowed, and felt a tingling sensation down his throat as the pulpy flesh was instantly absorbed.
He felt a new surge of energy, and the wave of soil responded to his urging. The ship ran down ahead of it a little, and Jack heard things clattering below deck. Another fruit and the wave accelerated again. He opened his eyes and saw great plumes of sand spouting in high arcs on either side of the ship, like water spray from a speedboat. He turned his head and gasped at the vast wall of swift-moving dirt he had raised up. It was at least a hundred feet high, but it was surprisingly narrow, only thirty or forty feet wider than the ship itself.
“Woo-hoo!” shouted Tara, waving the sword above her head. “Here we go!”
Jack bared his teeth and reached for another orange banana.
* * *
The sun ahead began to set. Jack had no idea how fast they were going, but he sensed the mountain coming steadily closer. With both wave and ship hidden safely within the bubble of invisibility Lottie provided, they passed several outcroppings of The Evil at work in its realm. Huge swarms of bugs tilled the soil, searching grain by grain for anything living. Vast gray honeycombs housed the eggs the Evil bugs hatched from. Overhead, occasional flocks of Evil birds scoured the land. Jack wondered if they were looking for the escapees. The Evil must surely have noticed the empty oasis by now.
Jack ate constantly, absorbing energy contained in the fruit directly into his Gift. The pile beside him grew steadily smaller. Just as he was beginning to wonder if there would be enough, the horizon ahead changed from a perfectly straight line to a line with a slight blip in it. Silhouetted against the setting sun, which turned a muddy orange that was only slightly eye watering to look at, the mountain looked like a single tooth in an aging alligator’s bottom jaw.
“Is that it?” asked Kyle, who was sitting next to him, holding the umbrella above Jack’s head to keep the burning light of the other suns from him.
Jack nodded. His mouth was too full to talk.
“Land ahoy!” Kyle shouted back to Tara. It seemed appropriate, even though they were surrounded by nothing but land. The mountain rose as the sun inched below the horizon, uncannily like an island rising into view from an endless sea. Jack pulled mentally on the wave, making it shift course slightly. The hint of life was coming from the other side of the mountain, to the left.
“No sign of that snake thing,” said Tara.
“Maybe it lives inside,” Kyle said.
Jack wished he hadn’t said that. The sides of the mountain were pockmarked with holes, like gaping mouths. If the mountain was hollow, it could house a very big snake indeed.
The far side of the mountain came into view. It was strangely lopsided, and there weren’t any holes that he could see. Perhaps there had been a landslide, Jack thought, although that didn’t make sense, either. The rear of the mountain was a different color to the front, too. The stone on the near side was reddish-orange, whereas the landslide was gray-white. It was the same color as the insects, in fact….
A queasy feeling swept through Jack. He let the wave get smaller, earth tumbling away to either side, the ship slowing as he did so. It was much quieter now, with less soil being displaced.
“How’s Lott
ie doing?” Jack whispered to Kyle.
“Fine, I think.”
“Go check, and be quiet about it. Tell Tara we need to be absolutely invisible. Everything depends on it.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
“See that entire side of the mountain? Where it looks like someone poured wax down the side of a model? That’s all bugs, and we really don’t want them to know we’re here.”
Kyle gulped.
“No,” he said. “I’ll pass that on.”
* * *
Weirdly, it was harder to keep the smaller, slower wave going than it had been to go fast, and Jack’s brow was soon covered with sweat. He let Kyle steer: one tap on the right shoulder to go right, one tap on the left to go left. It worked well enough until they reached a shoal of bones at the base of the mountain, a huge mass of bones that Jack simply couldn’t raise up. Unlike the soil, it resisted his power. The wave petered out and the ship slowly came to rest, as if it had truly been beached upon an alien shore.
The sound of the swarming mass of Evil bugs on the mountain was like a waterfall, unceasingly busy and full of the hint of violence.
“Is our way out under there?” Tara had come forward to whisper in Jack’s ear.
Jack nodded. Of course it was. That was where The Evil most wanted to be. “I think I can get us up there, but I don’t know what to do about the bugs. Trying to use both of my Gifts at once might break my brain, and I’m almost out of fuel as well.”
He had been trying to go easy, and was already feeling woozy as a result.
“What does Lottie think?”
“She’s pretty sure she can’t get us through all of that without The Evil noticing,” Tara said, confirming his fears. “We need a distraction.”
“What kind of distraction?”
“For The Evil to be interested, it’d have to be something living….”
They both turned to look at Cornelia, and they both shook their heads at the same time.
“What about the vines?” asked Kyle. “They’re alive, and it would be easy to make a kind of planter for them. It wouldn’t have to last long. If we stopped the ship, Jack could send them one way, and we could go the other when The Evil pounces on it.”
“Brilliant!” said Tara. “That’s exactly what we’ll do. Jack, get around this reef and take a rest. I’ll see if Lottie can keep us invisible for a while longer. Kyle, you get started on that planter and I’ll join you in a sec.”
Jack nodded wearily and raised a new wave. It was much smaller, but it did propel the Omega around the tangled boneyard to a sandy inlet at the base of the mountain. There he brought Omega around in case they needed to make a quick getaway, let the wave of soil go, and eased himself back until he was stretched out flat on the deck, with his hands folded across his stomach. He was exhausted. If he just closed his eyes for a moment he was sure he’d feel much better….
“Jack, Jack, wake up.” Kyle was whispering, but he was doing it right into Jack’s ear, so it seemed very loud.
Jack sat up, blinking. How long had he been out? There was an entirely different sun in the sky above him, and the ground was booming and rocking like the Titanic ride at MovieWorld.
“We’re ready.” Kyle pointed over the side, where a strange craft awaited its launch. It was little more than four barrels tied together, from which protruded an enormous tangle of vines and branches. They hadn’t uprooted everything — there were still plenty of trees remaining on the ship — but nothing easily movable had been spared. The resulting miniature forest had the same shape as a chef’s hat, but many, many times larger.
“Okay,” said Jack, reaching for more fruit. He felt hollow with exhaustion, but if Lottie was still hanging in there so would he.
“Go that way,” said Tara, giving him what seemed like a random direction. “Lottie will protect the raft as far as she can. When it pops up on The Evil’s radar, get ready to move…. You’re sure you can take us where we need to be?”
“One hundred percent,” he said, although he thought it was actually about seventy percent. He’d never tried anything like this before. Who knew what would work and what wouldn’t? But there was no point worrying anyone when they had no other options.
Jack lifted the ground under the vine-raft and sent it moving out across the sand. It wobbled a bit, but another lift set it straight and back on course. He watched it go, farther and farther, and at the last minute thought to lift the wave that propelled it higher before it passed out of the range of his Gift.
Cornelia flapped down next to them, sent by Lottie.
“All hands on deck,” she squawked softly.
There was no visible change to the raft, but what happened on the mountain left no doubt that The Evil had seen it. A whirring shriek rose up from the mass of insects as millions of wings started to flap. Bugs tumbled and rolled, clutching at one another to form new shapes, new configurations. At first it was like watching an avalanche from directly underneath. The middle section slumped downward in one rolling mass, while two flanks separated and began a more leisurely outward descent.
The avalanche kept changing. The flanks got longer and broader, while the middle began to bulge outward. It looked almost as though the avalanche was trying to imitate one single thing, Jack thought. Could The Evil ever have absorbed something so big? It wasn’t impossible, he supposed, given it was old and had probably invaded lots of worlds. There must be creatures as big as mountains somewhere … creatures with solid, muscular bodies, long tails, and wings….
Jack gaped as a giant Evil dragon took shape, poised to leap, then took off directly above him.
A shadow swept over Omega.
“Get ready,” said Tara.
The dragon flapped its wings once, then arched its long neck, pointed its nose down toward the raft, and dived.
“Now!” Tara cried.
Jack needed no encouragement. The sand was already rising beneath the ship, curling up the side of the mountain. He encouraged it on its way, raising not a wave but more a thick tongue of soil that carried Omega where it needed to go. The hole leading to Earth was up there somewhere. All Jack had to do was follow the instincts of his second Gift and keep eating.
They passed several tunnel entrances, but none of them were the right ones.
“Are we close?” asked Kyle.
“Very,” said Jack, swinging his head from side to side. That way. The ship turned and kept going up. “Almost … almost …”
Two more holes swept by.
“There!”
Jack felt the presence of Earth like a ray of light shining through heavy clouds. It pulled at him, and the ship rose faster than ever, riding its long, thin tsunami of sand until it was level with the hole they were looking for. It was black and shadowed, but that looked welcoming to Jack after so much sunlight. He wanted to curl up in the dark and sleep for a month.
Omega eased inside the hole, losing the tip of its tallest mast in the process. Jack guided it forward, and the tunnel narrowed around them. Soon the keel was scraping on the bottom, and several of the spars snapped, raining splinters down upon them. When the sides of the boat came under threat, Jack brought the ship to a creaking halt.
“This is how it works, isn’t it?” he said in puzzlement. “The tunnel takes us home?”
“Beats me,” said Kyle. “I’ve never done this before.”
Jack peered ahead, his first Gift piercing the gloom and revealing his worst fear: The tunnel was a dead end.
“But I can smell it!”
His sensitive eyes searched the rough cave wall ahead. There had to be some way through….
All he saw was a single tiny flower growing in a puddle of sand, watered by the merest drips of moisture falling from the ceiling. A lone forget-me-not, almost impossibly fragile, its blue the blue of Earth’s skies and Earth’s oceans, grown from a seed that had dropped there and gone unnoticed by The Evil.
There had been a way, but it was denied to them now. Blocke
d, perhaps, by all of the Wardens’ most powerful wards. Or perhaps it had never been there at all.
The only direction they could go was back, and try to find another way through.
Jack reached for another fruit, but his hand found only empty deck.
There were no more orange bananas.
“Lottie’s out, too,” said Tara. “The Evil can see us now.”
“What are we going to do?” asked Kyle.
Everyone turned to look up the throat of the tunnel, where the Evil dragon was rising to face them, its immense wings and jaws opening wide.
Jaide and Grandma X confronted the glowing cross-continuum conduit constructor. It and the fragment of the Avak Lodestone it was connected to were doing everything the professor had told them they should be doing by now, except for the critical part of opening a doorway to the Evil Dimension.
“What are we doing wrong?” Jaide asked. She had to shout over the loud humming the device made. It sounded like a very large and very angry bee.
“I don’t think we are doing anything wrong,” said Grandma X. “The way is blocked.”
“Could it be Project Thunderclap?”
“I can think of no other explanation.”
Jaide had lost track of the time since she had left the tent, but at least an hour must have passed. Aleksandr’s “big push” was therefore due any moment. It made her feel sick that they might be just moments too late.
“Let’s pay them a visit,” said Grandma X. “Here, take my hand.”
Jaide gripped her grandmother’s strong fingers with all her strength. The light of the moonstone ring flared, and suddenly they were somewhere else. The blue room had transformed into the big tent, with its crowd of lightning wielders and the glowing lodestone at its heart. Only they weren’t really there: Grandma X had transformed into the glowing ghost of her former self, and Jaide didn’t appear to have a body at all.
Jaide searched the crowd. There was her father, linked by his hands to the Wardens on either side of him. Instead of individual cells, the mass of people had now lined up in one long spiral, sending their power in a chain from one to another, all the way to the person at the center. Jaide expected to see Aleksandr there, but instead it was Stefano. The air around him fairly roared with power. Between him and the bright orange lodestone, the tent looked about ready to explode.
