A Grave Tree (40 page)
Authors: Jennifer Ellis
She thought of her future self and the list that she had typed… perhaps in an effort to save her baby. Her and Sam’s baby.
But was there ever a baby? Was the baby in the box with Schrödinger’s cat waiting for the wave function to be collapsed?
Her future self was now a ghost. A cipher as indistinct as the ones she and Mark had seen in the woods a few days ago.
Maybe she was no longer Inquisitive Abbey. Maybe she was Adventurous Abbey.
But her list had already proven correct, and she’d already failed. She hadn’t saved Jake on March 9. What of her advice not to listen to her mother and not to let her mother use the stones on May 6? Did that mean her mother would be home by then? Was July 12 still the date of the bomb that was not a bomb?
Perhaps she’d keep the list.
They gathered out in the woods after Mark had sent one last email to some Luanne person, and Abbey had uploaded all her ideas regarding the Burton extraction process, as well as some of her hypotheses regarding the physics of magic, to Sam’s dropbox.
They’d packed their new backpacks for travel, with the cable, gun, various keys, flashlights, compasses, maps, and food scattered among their various packs as per Mark’s suggestion. They were all going, even Sylvain, since he didn’t seem to think he was going to have much luck at the Council Meeting. Mark had taken a little convincing, as he had been determined to go in search of the fifth map. But he was by far the most powerful of them, and they needed him. Ultimately the prospect of rescuing his mother had won him over.
Mark had already carefully reconstructed the pentagram in the dirt in the spot they had cleared of shrubbery earlier that morning. They had left the new Madrona at the center and placed the slivered wood of a few carefully harvested limbs in the outlines of the pentagram. The star-shape already pulsed with the familiar energy.
They had decided that they would all hold hands, to avoid the risk of someone being left behind or ending up somewhere else. Simon had Farley on a leash.
Abbey thought about the Selena of the future still trying to get to a parallel universe. That Selena probably wouldn’t exist when they got back. The future would rewrite itself again. And probably again.
She had looked up the curious four-leaf symbol with a circle that was on the magnet, the stone, and the cable. It was a witch’s knot, a
pagan symbol of protection. Abbey drew the symbol in her mind, praying for protection. There were millions of potential parallel universes out there. How would they find the right one?
She thought of Ian’s statement that jumping to parallel universes was extremely dangerous without training, and that if done incorrectly it could result the release of a burst of energy big enough to rip apart the universe. But Sylvain had reassured them that it would all be fine—that some universes were more entangled or connected to each other than others and that they would be drawn into the correct one by virtue of their genes. That he knew what he was doing.
She glanced at him standing in the circle with his hands in Mark’s and Caleb’s, his silvery locks falling over his shoulders, and an unsettling thought occurred to her. They had assumed that her father’s message not to trust S had referred to Sandy.
They had never considered that it might refer to Sylvain.
She remembered her note to herself, from herself.
Beware of false prophets.
“All right,” Sylvain said. “Who’s going to try first?”
If you are interested in looking at the maps provided in
A Quill Ladder
, please go to the
reader bonuses
section of my website and check them out.
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A Pair of Docks
Derivatives of Displacement Book 1
Siblings Abbey, Caleb, and Simon discover a set of stones that allow them to go back and forth between their world and what appears to be...the future. Unfortunately, they’re not the only ones who know about the stones, and they soon realize their lives are in danger from a man known only as Mantis. Abbey, Caleb, and Simon must follow a twisting trail of clues that will lead them from their neighbor with Asperger's to a strange professor who claims to know the rules of the stones, and to multiple futures.
A Quill Ladder
Derivatives of Displacement Book 2
Abbey Sinclair just wants to return to her quiet life of chemistry experiments and physics textbooks. But life is anything but quiet for the Sinclairs. Abbey’s mother is taking secret trips to the stones with Caleb, Simon has been arrested for hacking into the City Hall computer, and to really complicate matters, the witches from Nowhere have moved in across the street.
Book 4 of The Derivatives of Displacement coming in June 2016
In the Shadows of the Mosquito Constellation
In a world torn apart by economic collapse, Natalie and her husband Richard establish an island of relative safety on a communal farm. Death—by starvation, raiders, and sickness—stalks them daily, and their survival hinges on working together for the common good. But in a lawless land with no shortage of suffering, good is a malleable concept.
Apocalypse Weird: Reversal
Contrary to Sasha Wood’s expectations, the isolated International Polar Research Station on Ellesmere Island turns out to be a dangerous assignment. After researchers and sled dogs go missing in a freak storm, their distress calls go unanswered from the outside world. Cut off and stalked by polar bears, Sasha and station caretaker, Soren Anderson, search for their missing colleagues in the frozen tundra as their instruments reveal a shocking truth: magnetic pole reversal has occurred and the north has become the south.
Novellas in Anthologies
“The River” (in
Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel
)
“Resistance” (in
Tales of Pennsylvania
)
“Manufacturing Elvis” (in
Tales of Tinfoil: Stories of Paranoia and Conspiracy
)
“The Poetry of Santiago” (in
Tails of the Apocalypse
)
Jennifer lives in the mountains of British Columbia where she can be found writing, hiking, skiing, borrowing dogs, and evading bears. She writes science fiction, romance and dystopian fiction for children and adults, including
Apocalypse Weird: Reversal
in Wonderment Media's Apocalypse Weird world and
A Pair of Docks
, which was a bestseller in children's time travel fiction. She has also contributed to several anthologies, most notably
Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel
, which hit #16 in the Kindle Store.
She blogs at
www.jenniferellis.ca
and can be found on Twitter at
@jenniferlellis
.
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Photo © Carmen Adams FRESH Photography
As always, this novel was written in a blur of work, writing, and promoting my other books, not to mention keeping house, exercising, and cat and children tending. I used to throw grand dinner parties all the time, but since taking up writing, I’m afraid my dining room table has been vacant more often than not. I am very grateful to my friends for still remembering who I am when I meet them in the street. Someday the parties will return… when I make enough money to hire a caterer.
Thanks as always to my editor, David Gatewood, whose reliable and hilarious corrections always improve my work, and to my cover designer, Andrew Brown of Design for Writers.
Thanks also to my indie friends Kristene Perron, Chris Pourteau, Hank Garner, Stefan Bolz, Kim Wells, Michael Bunker, and Nick Cole. You all make this a ride worth taking. Too bad you can’t come up to Canada for dinner. The three amigos deserve a particular mention. You know who you are. I wouldn’t get through this without you.
And to my family of men and boys, thanks for believing in me, or sort of believing in me, or at least dealing with the cats while I lock myself in the writing garret. You guys are the best.