“That’s it!” came a voice from among the stragglers who remained at the tables. “Give her what for!” Mrs. Thistleton turned to give the speaker the full benefit of her scornful stare, and just at that moment a shape came hurtling out of the darkness behind her—a shape wielding a hockey stick.
Prossy shouldered Mrs. Thistleton to the ground, knocking her flat. The dagger flew out of her hand and across the grass. Tess stood back, mouth agape, as Mrs. Thistleton struggled to sit up. Prossy dropped one knee heavily into the woman’s midriff, completely winding her, and placed Hortense’s head on Mrs. Thistleton’s throat. Someone in the crowd cheered loudly before being drowned out by a chorus of “Shh!”
“Who in the blazes are you?” Mrs. Thistleton managed to croak. Prossy increased the pressure on her larynx and anything else Mrs. Thistleton might have wanted to say ended in a strangled, squeaking hiss.
“Tess’s family,” Prossy replied in a low murmur, leaning on the stick. Then she raised her voice. “Priss, search the ground for that ridiculous-looking knife, will you? Don’t want anyone getting the wrong end of it.”
Then Prissy, Wilf, Eunice and Millie stepped onto the lawn and Tess cried out in disbelief and delight. As Prissy began to search for the knife, Tess ran straight to Wilf and threw her arms around her, almost knocking her in the head with the Star-spinner.
“Oh, hello there. We had nothing better to do tonight, so we decided we’d come and pay you a visit,” said Wilf, her voice muffled a little by the strength of Tess’s grip.
Tess laughed and let her go. “You picked a fine night for it,” she said. “How did you even get here?”
“Thank Millie for that,” Wilf said, looking warmly at her new friend. Millie just blushed.
“I take it the sky isn’t supposed to look like that?” said Eunice, staring up at the growing void. The blue sparkling ring was growing by the minute and there was no telling how big it was going to get.
“That’s my fault,” Tess said, stepping back from Wilf and wiping her cheeks with the back of her free hand. In the other, she still held the Star-spinner. “I’ve got to fix it. And there’s someone—a boy in the other world who’s my brother. Or sort of. I have to find him and see if he’s all right.”
“Right,” said Wilf, frowning. “I didn’t understand any of that. But carry on.”
“And Violet is here somewhere. At least,” Tess said, feeling something inside her being crushed with every word, “all that’s left of her.” She turned to Wilf, her eyes filling with tears. “Will you find her for me, Wilf?” All Wilf could do was nod, her chin wobbling, as they stared at one another in silent understanding.
“But—you’ll be able to do that yourself, won’t you?” asked Eunice. “When you get back?”
Tess’s only reply was a sad smile and Eunice looked away. Then Tess glanced at the sky again, the sight of it making her brain reel. Behind her, Mr. Cleat gave a pained groan.
“Wait,” said Wilf, looking back at Tess. Her cheeks were wet. “This is all happening too fast.”
Tess took the Star-spinner in her hands. The void had closed, and the mechanism was still. She wondered if it would even work to get her where she needed to go. I’m coming, Thomas, she told herself. No matter what.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking in Wilf’s eyes. She opened the Star-spinner and it shone true and steady. With that, and with her eyes still on Wilf, Tess was gone.
After a few seconds of stunned silence, a man at one of the tables got to his feet. “Bravo!” he called, clapping heartily. “I must say, jolly good show!”
Tess arrived into chaos, right in the middle of the lawn in front of Thomas’s house. She dropped to her knees, burying her face in her hands. The pain of losing Violet and of never seeing Wilf again, or Miss Ackerbee, or any of her friends, was just too big to fit inside her. At least they’re all safe, she told herself. You did that much.
Then a boom from the house grabbed her attention and she forced herself to unfurl. Most of the right-hand side of the building was on fire. She felt sick as she watched the orange flames hungrily devour the night, sparks flying into the sky.
“Thomas,” she whispered, getting to her feet. If he’d been inside there when the bomb hit…She shoved the Star-spinner into her vest, realizing as she did so that it was all she had left of her past life; not even the clothes she was wearing were her own. Her notebook, her piece of paper with Miss Ackerbee’s writing on it and her beloved Violet—they were all gone.
She shook the thoughts out of her head and started to run, away from the house and through the open fields that surrounded it in this world. The flames lit the way for her and soon she found herself at the chapel. Her side cramped with a stitch and, gasping through the sharp pain, she pushed open the door and made straight for the bottom of the ladder.
“Thomas!” she shouted. “Are you here? Thomas!”
From overhead, she heard the scrabbling of someone making their way across the floor on all fours and the next minute Thomas’s face, wide-eyed, was staring at her. “Tess!” he shouted. “Is it really you?”
“What?” she answered, confused.
He slid down the ladder without touching the rungs and landed on the floor beside her in an ungainly heap, but he quickly bounced back onto his feet. Then, without saying a word, he grabbed Tess up in a huge hug.
“Thank goodness,” he said, sounding overcome with relief. “Thank goodness you’re all right.”
“Thank goodness I’m all right? What about you?”
“I thought—I was afraid Sharpthorn had nobbled you,” he said, loosening his grip enough to look her in the face. “I thought they’d done Protocol S on you and that you were a goner.”
Tess stared at him blankly, searching his worried face for clues. “Did—did you hit your head? Because you’re not making any sense.”
“No!” said Thomas before throwing up his hands in exasperation. “I mean, yes! I did earlier. But that’s not important.” He tried to explain to her as briefly as he could what he’d seen in Mackintosh’s workroom, and everything that had happened since they’d last seen one another.
“Sharpthorn,” breathed Tess once he was finished. “I’ll bet it’s Mrs. Thistleton.” She looked him in the eye. “She did try to nobble me, but my friends got to her first.”
Thomas nodded. “I thought it might be her. And I’m glad you got away.”
Tess frowned. “I don’t think we’ve seen the last of her yet, though. Anyway,” she continued, grabbing his arm, “we’ve got to get out of here. I’m not sure how to break it to you, but your house is on fire.”
Thomas shrugged, adjusting something under his jumper as Moose peeked over his shoulder. “I’ve got everything I want right here. What about the hole in the sky?”
“I know. I have to close it but I’ve no idea how.” Tess licked her lips as she tried to think. “I could reverse the steps,” she said, looking up at Thomas with worried eyes. “With the Star-spinner. Couldn’t I? Just do what Mr. Cleat told me to do but backward.”
“Worth a try,” Thomas said, shrugging.
“Then I need to find the North Star,” Tess said. “Probably best to do it outside, at least that’s where—”
Thomas cut her off. “No need,” he said. “Come on.” He charged back up the stairs, and Tess followed on his heels. As soon as their feet hit the floorboards, Thomas made for the back wall. A large iron wheel was built into it, which Thomas began to crank by hand. The wheel soundlessly started to spin—and then Tess was surprised to hear a low rumble start up all around her. She turned, trying to figure it out, and then she noticed that the patch of sky outside the hole in the roof was changing. After all that had happened, it was disorienting—but a few seconds later everything became clear.
“The—the roof is turning!” she said, incredulous.
“Yep,” Thomas said, and even through his breathless exertion Tess could hear his grin. “The telescope isn’t just for show, you know.”
They shared a smile and Tess turned back to watch the view. “This is incredible,” she said just as the North Star—clouded somewhat by the smoke from the house but still visible—came into view. “There it is!” she cried. “Stop!”
Thomas allowed himself a grin as the observatory came to rest. He locked the wheel into position and joined Tess at the foot of his father’s telescope. “Come on,” he said, climbing the stairs that led to the opening in the dome. Tess followed him and soon they were standing at the opening, the night air in their faces. It was tinged with the smell of smoke from the burning house. The fire was throwing strange orange shadows into the night.
Tess fished in her vest for the Star-spinner. “Now,” she said, holding it tightly. “Time to undo all this, I think.”
Thomas watched as she opened the void, but the blue light was faint. “That doesn’t look good,” he murmured as she raised the Star-spinner to her eye.
Tess could see the North Star sparkling amid the gusts of smoke from the fire and she gingerly began to turn the Star-spinner’s face—but the markers didn’t click into position this time. She soon realized it was moving too freely; there wasn’t enough resistance. Then, with a sickening crunch, its upper face began to come loose. Tess gasped, and the next thing she knew, the blue glow of the void sputtered and went out and the whole device came apart in her hands.
Something fell out of the middle of the Star-spinner and landed with a distant smash on the floorboards below. Tess, her heart thundering, peered down—and there it was. A tiny circle of glass, now in a million shards, lay shining in the glow of the lamps. The void at the Star-spinner’s heart was now a true void—empty of anything but air.
“That was unexpected,” Thomas said. Moose scampered up his arm and perched on his shoulder, his nose twitching as he watched.
“It wasn’t starlight at all,” Tess said. “It was a solid thing!”
Just as Thomas started to reply, the air was torn in half by the roaring sound of the airplanes overhead once more. Thomas and Tess clung to one another, searching the sky, as a blood-chilling sound wailed through the night: a long, thin, high-pitched scream, growing louder as it went. Another shriek joined the first, and then another and another.
“Those are falling bombs,” Thomas gasped, holding Tess so tightly she could feel him trembling in fear. A chilling crump sounded out like distant thunder, followed by an orange-yellow blossom rising from the streets of Dublin. In the next breath there was a second and then a third explosion and Tess felt her throat fill with bile. This is my fault, she thought, numb with shock and grief.
Then a noise caught her attention—but after a panicked moment she realized it sounded completely different from the bombers. She searched for its source, looking back toward Thomas’s house; there was movement amid the smoke. Just before the flat roof of the house collapsed inward, something lifted away from it and sailed off into the night. She blinked, confused, but before she could ask Thomas about it, he’d begun to scramble down the ladder. Almost before he’d landed, he was sprinting across the room.
“Watch out for the trapdoor!” Tess called, starting her own descent, but Thomas made no reply. He reached a set of drawers on the other side of the room and began to rattle through them, muttering impatiently to himself as he went.
Tess hopped down and hurried to join him at the drawers. “What are we looking for?”
“My dad called it starglass,” Thomas said, still searching. “I always thought he was being fanciful and that he didn’t literally mean it had anything to do with stars, but he also said this glass came from Tunguska. Where the big impact happened.”
Tess’s eyes widened. “So does the Star-spinner,” she told him. “Mr. Cleat said my dad built it, from things he found at the impact site.”
Thomas stared at her. “Your dad?” Then he shook his head. “Of course it’d be your dad. Anyway, my dad had this starglass for years but never knew what to do with it. He just knew it was valuable.” He picked something up hopefully, then tossed it aside with a grimace. “It’s in a wooden box. Dad said it needed to be kept out of the light.”
“Why?” Tess asked.
“No idea,” Thomas answered with a shrug.
“It mightn’t mean anything,” Tess said, raking through the drawer beside Thomas. “It being from Tunguska, I mean.”
“Maybe not,” Thomas agreed. “But it also happens to look a lot like the stuff that fell out of the Star-spinner.”
Tess felt a surge of hope in her chest. Mrs. Thistleton said that dagger was the only thing that could destroy the Star-spinner. We have to try! “Are you sure it’s still here?” There were springs, wires, objects made of metal and plastic in the drawer, but nothing that felt like a wooden box.
“No,” Thomas said. “But I can’t imagine Dad getting rid of it. He barely threw anything away.”
They kept searching for a few moments in silence and then Tess felt it: something smooth and cool, with four corners. “I think I have it,” she whispered.
Thomas hurried to help, and together they prized the box out of his father’s drawer. Tess held it up and flipped open the clasp to reveal a shard of glass sitting on a velvet cushion. As soon as it was free of the dark confines of the box, the fragment of glass began to glow blue. Tess smiled so widely she felt like she’d never be able to stop.
“This is it,” she said, her fingers starting to tremble. She suddenly remembered a note she’d made in her experiments notebook—it seemed like forever ago. “Solid starlight. I knew it.”
“Quick,” Thomas said, his voice tight. “Where’s the Star-spinner?”
Tess fished its halves out of her pocket with her free hand. “But I don’t know how we’re going to get it in,” she said, frowning at the broken mechanism. The void was a perfect circle, but the new piece of starglass was larger than the old one, and irregularly shaped. “Or even if this thing will work, if we can.”
“Of course it will,” Thomas said. He gave Tess an encouraging nod as she brought the Star-spinner right up to the glass—but nothing moved. She tapped the metal gently off the starglass, making it chime.
“Well, that’s experiment one out of the way,” she said, trying to think what to do next.
Then the starglass, which had been glowing a steady blue, began to sparkle at the edges as it softened, vanishing into the darkness. Tess gasped, staring at it. In a matter of seconds, it would be gone.
“Quick!” Thomas said. “Do something!”
“I don’t know what to do!” Tess cried.
Thomas took the halves of the Star-spinner out of Tess’s hand, and in desperation, Tess simply laid the shard of starglass between them as Thomas closed the Star-spinner—and then, after a moment in which nothing happened, the starglass seemed to melt, becoming something that looked a lot like sunlight shimmering on water. In one breath it was there and in the next it had been sucked into the mechanism, where it shone blue and steady once again. Tess allowed herself a cry of triumph.
“Well, blow me down,” Thomas said, shaking his head. “I guess being a genius runs in the family.”
She looked up at him and grinned. “I guess it does,” she replied, and Thomas beamed with joy, looking slightly bashful.
“Now come on,” he said. “Let’s get up to the roof and get this done.”
Tess kept the pulsing Star-spinner in her hand as she climbed, until finally she could lean out of the observatory window. She steadied her breathing and then she placed the Star-spinner’s void over her left eye.
And there it was—the North Star, as it looked in this world, surrounded by its spreading ring of fire. The ring had gone so far by now that Tess couldn’t see its highest point and it was like a stra
nge thin rainbow with only one unnaturally radiant color. The tunnel of spinning, flickering stars within it was unnerving, and Tess tried not to look too closely as she began to turn the top half of the Star-spinner back the way it had come. She met with resistance, but she didn’t stop. It’s working, she told herself, hoping Mr. Cleat was watching in his own reality and that he was screaming at the sky in frustrated anger.
“Keep going,” Thomas said, though she barely heard him through the rush of her pulse in her ears. Vaguely, she was aware of Moose coming to sit on her shoulder, burying his flickering nose in her hair. She was comforted by the sensation, even if she felt like she was floating in midair and all this wasn’t really happening to her—just to her body, far below.
Then her eye began to water and she realized she desperately wanted to blink, but she was afraid of losing her hold on the rift if she did. A piercing pain started in her pupil, shooting back into her head like a whip. She gritted her teeth against it.
“The circle is shrinking!” Thomas called. “The stars are slowing, Tess. They’re stopping and the tunnel’s closing. You’ve got it!”
And then Tess blinked. She had to. A tear ran down her cheek and her eye stung with exertion. When she opened her eye again, all she could see through the window was the North Star, rotating slowly, bringing its own world back around it. The ring of blue fire grew smaller with every second, until it vanished into the heart of the North Star once more.
Finally the Star-spinner stopped moving and Tess closed her eyes, exhausted. The void’s blue light flickered and then faded to gray once again. A shiver of shattering cracks snaked their way across the glass and all the energy drained from Tess as though someone had switched her off. She would have fallen had Thomas not grabbed her by the arm. “Hey now,” he said, gently taking the Star-spinner from her limp fingers and stowing it safely in her pocket. “Let’s get you down from here.” He helped her numb feet to find the rungs as she descended and finally they both sprawled out on the floor of the observatory, just breathing. Moose skittered between them, never still for a moment.
The Starspun Web Page 22
