Broken Quill [2] (16 page)

“How is this encouraging?” Sophie
asked. She was fiddling with her Polaroid camera and retrieved a fresh
cartridge of film from her shoulder bag and slammed it home.

“If he’s worried, if Forget’s on
edge, I’m more likely to be received without them leveling a death sentence on
my head.” Still, grim news across several worlds today, it seemed. “I used to command
the Cascade Fleet, remember.”

“It’s in English,” Annie said,
surprised, scanning the newspaper. “Have we really left Earth, Declan, or is
this some sort of joke?”

“Why’d you say that? Just because
it’s in English?”

“Well, yeah. That’s a bit convenient,
isn’t it?”

I shrugged. “English, a rough
dialect of it anyway, came to Earth
from
Forget, not the other way
round, Annie.”

Annie played with that thought for a
moment and then threw up her hands. “I guess I’ll keep taking your word on
these things.”

I read the rest of the article in
silence, as Annie watched the crowds and Sophie snapped pictures of Ethan
making weird poses and eating his ice cream. No doubt he was planning his next
status update or whatever in the seven hells he and Sophie did on those damned
computers.

Nothing of much use in the rest of
the article. The weather in Ascension City was a sunny but humid eighty-two
degrees. Shorts and T-shirt weather.

“What are you up to, brother?” I
said, putting the paper aside. “Family, huh? Come on, team, let’s find a vendor
and get this over with.”

I kept my head down and shoulders
hunched. Again, this place was a thoroughfare of every culture under every sun,
but I was still worlds-famous for all the wrong reasons. The last thing we
needed was a brawl. So Sophie and Ethan bought us tickets on the next train to
Ascension City while I hung back with Annie and explained a few more things
about the Lexicon.

“Next train leaves from Platform 47
in fifteen minutes,” ’Phie said, handing us each a ticket. “Almost at the point
of no return, Declan, you know?”

I gave her my most reassuring grin
and squeezed her hand. Her concern, her long loyalty, was always a source of
warmth and strength. “You see me doing anything silly, make sure you tell me,” I
said, and she rolled her eyes.

We stepped out of the station and
into a mini-city.

A wide, redbrick promenade stretched
from the terminal and away into the distance. Silver skyscrapers, home to the
hundreds of technicians that kept this place operational, and part of an
intricate system that powered the thousands of doorways linked to the Lexicon
network, ran parallel to the promenade. The Pillars of Creation, as they had
become known. Three skyscrapers on either side of the inter-dimensional
highway, standing tall like sentinels guarding the way between the worlds.

“Oh my,” Annie breathed, a hand on
her chest. Her mouth hung open, agape at the wonder, and her jaw nearly hit the
floor when she looked
up.

In the sky overhead spun a globe reminiscent
of Earth—a blue and green marble, turning softly. But the landmasses were
wrong. Golden sparks leaped across the surface of the globe as if they were
shooting stars. A similar globe, miles across, hung in another corner of the
sky, among the clouds, wreathed in golden sparks. Another claimed the western
horizon, and shimmered in the sun from on high. The globe faded away, and
another took its place. Then another.

The Atlas Lexicon—a living,
breathing network of worlds, flaring and dying, as gateways between them were
utilized for travel.

Most of the globes spun in the sky
for only seconds before being replaced with another, often stranger, world.
Worlds as red as Mars or ringed like Saturn. Small worlds, large worlds, worlds
of pure diamond or of smoke and starlight, and worlds devoid of water. The
globes constantly changed, sometimes faster than the eye could follow. Only one
world remained constant—unchanged and unmoved. Countless golden sparks danced
across the surface of this particular globe, and I smiled softly at the sight
of it. So did Sophie, as she gently squeezed my hand. We were looking at our
old neighborhood. The home world of the Knights Infernal.

Ascension City.

“Oh my,” Annie said again, a touch
breathless. “It’s like there’s a dozen moons in the sky. Are they... they’re
not real, are they?”

“They’re real projections,” I said,
“of people traveling between worlds using the Atlas Lexicon right now. Hovering
in the sky above us are dozens of crystal spheres, and the Lexicon projects the
pathways onto the surface of the spheres. Rather pretty, I’ve always thought.”

“That’s freakin’ beautiful,” Ethan
said and finished his ice cream. He raised his smart phone and snapped a quick
pic of the Globescape, as the crystal spheres were known.

Our train to Ascension City was
leaving in ten minutes, Platform 47, which was on the left side of the
promenade and down a flight of steps into the network of subway tunnels running
beneath the Lexicon. We shuffled through the crowds, swiped our tickets at the
turnstiles, and mingled with the throngs of daily commuters just as though we
were in any train station back on True Earth.

Annie was still marveling at how
absurdly normal the process was when we boarded the train—a steel carriage with
comfortable velvet booth seats—and sat. Not five minutes later, the train
pulled away from the platform and picked up a great deal of speed.

“So how does this work now?” Annie
asked. “Like the portal at McSorley’s?”

“Not quite, no. The most amazing
thing about this world, the world of the Lexicon, is that it exists as a sort
of nexus point for hundreds of pathways through the Void. Natural pathways,
really, that we built train tracks on. The Pillars keep them constantly cycling
and from... crossing over.”

“What would happen—?”

Sophie drove her fist into her palm.
“Splat,” she said. “But this is no more dangerous than a normal train.”

“It’s just up ahead,” I said,
craning my neck to get a look alongside and down the darkened tunnel. “See that
light? That’s the path through the Void.” I couldn’t keep the excitement out of
my voice. “On the other side is Ascension City!”

The train slowed as it approached
the barrier, enough so that we had time to watch the forward compartment of the
train disappear over the horizon of the wall of light. Annie gasped as the
rippling puddle raced toward us, swallowing the train whole.

“Does it hur—?”

When the barrier of light struck
Annie and me, the brand on my arm flared to life with sickly, red flame. I
cried out in pain, and Annie grabbed my shoulder. Strange, ethereal light shone
in her eyes, but she looked afraid and uncertain, and then the cabin was
plunged into darkness. Something went wrong.

The train—Ethan and
Sophie—disappeared, and Annie clung to my wrist, dug her nails into my skin, and
gasped as we were wrenched back, as if hooked through the navel, and sent
tumbling into the black, endless Void.

Heading home, indeed.

You used to be someone...

“Books are the plane, and the
train, and the road.

They are the destination, and
the journey. They are home.”

~
Anna
Quindlen

Pulled across the Void, I gripped
Annie’s hands hard, lest we spin apart and lose each other forever.

Annie’s eyes did a strange thing.
They changed color.

Jade-green blurred to sapphire-blue,
to ruby-red, and finally settled on amethyst-purple. She seemed to have no idea
this was happening as we fell through white nothing. Only moments had passed
since we were on the train, and if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say we were
sliding across the outskirts of the Void. Caught between worlds and universes
and left stranded—two sailors thrown overboard without a life jacket.

Annie gasped and blinked rapidly. A
trail of luminescent smoke
bled
from her ever-changing eyes, and we were
jerked to a sudden halt in midair. A bright flash of cerulean light later,
reality reasserted itself.

My brand flared and spiked with
pain, and the white nothing disappeared. Annie and I hit the ground hard,
gasping in warm air, blinking against the glow of the mauve sky, and listening
to the gentle swash of a tide moving in and out.

I took a deep breath and choked on a
mouthful of sand. Spluttering and cursing, I managed to stand and helped Annie
to her feet. As unexpectedly as we’d been thrust into the Void, we had escaped.
But damned if I knew the how or the why of it.

“How did you do that?” I asked. “We
were unanchored, spinning through endless
nothing
. You found us a port in
the storm. Everything I’ve ever known about the Void tells me that should not
have been possible. And your eyes...” were jade-green again, back to normal.
Did she even know what had happened? I’d known a girl once before with
ever-changing eyes. Sweet Clare Valentine. Just a quirk of Will, we’d always
thought, but Annie had done
something
. She was not Willful; before my
brand, I would’ve sensed her power if she’d had any. What
had
I sensed
in Kings Park two days ago?

“Declan, you’re staring at me,”
Annie breathed. “Look at this place...”

Putting aside my concerns for now, I
did just that, and my jaw dropped.

We stood on a beach of purple sand.
Gentle waves of lime-green water lapped calmly against the shoreline. About a
hundred billion stars shone overhead, caught in bands of fiery interstellar
cloud. Three moons hung in the sky, one as red as a ripe cherry, and two a soft
amber, like runny honey.

Annie found my hand and clasped it
tightly as we stared at our surroundings, utterly at a loss for words. I’d seen
a lot of amazing sights in my life—worlds of such beauty and splendor, horror
and tragedy—but never anything like this. I didn’t know who or
what
could dream up such a sight, but it was more than that. Something was different
about this place.

This world, wherever it was, felt…
soft. Intangible. Like a dream or somewhere in between. Yes, that was it. This
world felt
in between
. Like the first few seconds after waking.

Paper lanterns of warm candlelight
were strung underneath the leaning boughs of tall palm trees away to our right,
and looking what felt like north with the ocean on our left, we saw some
strange things. An astronaut, garbed in his spacesuit and holding a surfboard,
appeared on the edge of the shore and disappeared. A three-headed dog the size
of a minivan galloped through the sand and into the thick palm trees, chasing
after a rabbit wearing a waistcoat and bowler hat. Spheres of wraithlike light
danced along the surface of the water, and as the spheres drew close, riding
the swash, I saw that they were alive—little tiny people, fae creatures, riding
glowing dragonflies. They dipped below the surface of the water and were gone.

“Where are we, Declan?” Annie asked.
“This is…”

“… absurd.”

“Yes.”

I gestured vaguely with my free
hand. “But wonderfully so.”

Annie squeezed my hand and let it
go. “Oh, yes.” A black woman with no arms appeared half-buried in the sand. She
smiled and faded away. “Is this… is this Forget?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and that was
the truth. “There’s True Earth, the Void, and Forget. Three states of
existence, but this doesn’t feel like any of them. We’re... off the map here,
sweet thing.”

“So how do we get home?”

I barked out a rich and genuine
laugh. “I don’t know. Isn’t that something?”

Annie mulled this over for a few seconds.
“So what do we do? What happened to us?”

“We were thrown from the pathway
through the Void. When the barrier at the Atlas Lexicon hit us, we were...
knocked back, for some reason.” I massaged my forehead and sighed. “I think
this damn brand on my arm had something to do with it. What I don’t understand
is how you got dragged along with me.”