Sea of Silver Light (107 page)

When she was gone Daddy went off to the next room to talk to Mister Ramsey. Christabel tried to watch the wallscreen, but nothing was interesting. Even Uncle Jingle seemed stupid and sad, a story about Queen Cloud Cat's new baby, Prince Popo, getting lost at the circus. Even the best joke in the whole thing, when Uncle Jingle got his foot caught by an elephant and it started swinging him around and around and around in a big circle, only made her smile.

Feeling bored, but also like she was going to cry, she opened the connecting door and went into the next room. Her daddy was talking to Mister Ramsey, both of them looking at Mister Ramsey's pad so they didn't even see her. She walked down the hall to the bedroom where Mister Sellars and Cho-Cho were lying side by side on one of the beds, still quiet, still not moving. She had gone to look at them a lot of times, always hoping that she would see Mister Sellars' eyes open so she could run to her parents and Mister Ramsey and tell them he was awake. They would be very proud that she had noticed, and Mister Sellars would sit up and call her "Little Christabel," and thank her for watching over him. Maybe Cho-Cho would wake up, too, and would be nicer to her.

But Mister Sellars' eyes weren't open, and she couldn't even see his chest moving. She touched his hand. It felt warm. Didn't that mean someone wasn't dead? Or were you supposed to touch their neck? People were always doing it on the net, but she couldn't quite remember how.

Cho-Cho looked very small. His eyes were closed, too, but his mouth was open and a little spit was on the pillow. Christabel thought that was pretty yick, but decided it wasn't his fault.

She leaned in close. "Wake up, Mister Sellars," she whispered, loud enough for him to hear if he was listening, but not loud enough for her daddy to hear in the other room. "You can wake up now."

But he didn't wake up. He looked bad, like something that had been run over and was lying by the side of the road. She felt like crying again.

Uncle Jingle didn't get any better. She tried a bunch of other shows—even
Teen Mob
, which her parents didn't like her to watch because they said it was "vulgar," which meant bad or scary, she wasn't sure which. Maybe both. Her daddy came back then so she had to change to another show fast.

"Why on earth are you watching lacrosse, Christabel?" he asked her.

She guessed that was the name of the game. The people were swinging sticks at each other. "I don't know. It's interesting."

"Well, I'm going to lie down for a few minutes. Your mom should be calling in a quarter of an hour, so if she doesn't call, come wake me, okay?" He pointed at the clock in me corner of the wallscreen. "When that says 17:50, okay?"

"Okay, Daddy." She watched him walk into the bedroom, then switched back to
Teen Mob
. The people on the show always seemed to be talking about who was dancing with who—dances she hadn't heard of, like "Shoeboxing" and "Doing the Hop." Someone said "Klorine will play Bumper Cars with anything in sprays," and Christabel wasn't sure if they were talking about another dance or real bumper cars, even though there hadn't been any on the show, because someone else said, "Yeah, and that's why she's always getting hurt," which sounded more like cars than dancing. She turned off the wallscreen.

It didn't seem fair. Mister Sellars was sick, maybe dying, and they didn't even call a doctor. What if he needed some medicine to get better? Mommy was at the store buying things, but Christabel knew you didn't get real medicine at the grocery store, just fruit-flavored cough medicine and things like that. When you were really sick, like Grandma Sorensen, you had to have medicine from the drugstore, or even go to the hospital.

She wandered around the room, wondering if she could go and talk to Mister Ramsey. Mommy wasn't supposed to call for another ten minutes and Christabel felt like that would be the longest ten minutes ever in the world. And she was hungry, too. And even more bored than sad. She thought she should have gone to the grocery store with her mother.

She was looking in her daddy's coat pocket for the pretzels he had taken away from her that morning because she wasn't supposed to have pretzels for breakfast, when she found the Storybook Sunglasses.

She was surprised a little, because she had thought Daddy had left them behind back at their house. As she thought about the day when they had left, she had a really bad homesickness. She wanted to see the other kids again—even Ophelia Weiner, who wasn't
always
stuck up. And sleep in her own room again, with her Zoomer Zizz poster and her dolls and animals.

She took the sunglasses back to the couch and put them on, just looking at the black for a moment, because it was more interesting than anything else in the stupid, sad hotel. Then she touched them to turn them on, and although the sunglasses stayed black, Mister Sellars' voice was in her ear.

At first she thought it was one of his old messages. But it wasn't.

"If this is you, little Christabel, tell me our code word. Do you remember?"

She had to think for a moment. "Rumplestiltskin," she whispered.

"Good. I want to tell you something. . . ."

"Where are you? Are you okay? Did you wake up?" She was already halfway across the room, heading for the connecting door to go see him, but when the questions had stopped jumping out of her mouth he was still talking. He hadn't even heard her.

". . . And I can't really explain it to you, but I'm very, very busy. I know it looks like I'm sick, but I'm not—I just can't be in my body right now. I hope you're not too worried."

"Are you going to get better?" she asked, but he had started talking again and she finally understood that it was only a recording, that he hadn't called her up to tell her he was awake. He hadn't even called her. It was just a message.

"I need you to listen very carefully, little Christabel. I don't want you to be frightened. I have only a few moments, then I'm going to be very busy again, so I want to leave this for you.

"I suspect Cho-Cho is in just the same situation that I'm in—that he looks like he's sick, or sleeping. Don't worry too much. He's here with me."

She wanted to know where "here" was, but she knew it wouldn't do any good to ask.

"I'm leaving this message for two others reasons,"
Mister Sellars' voice went on.
"One is that no matter what we say, grown-ups can't always make things come out right. I hope I will see you again and talk to you, and that we will be friends for a long time. But if something happens to me—remember, Christabel, I am very old—I want you to remember that I think you are the bravest, kindest little girl I have ever met. And I've been around a long time, so that is not small praise.

"The other thing I want to tell you is that if I manage to . . . to stay well for a little while longer, and some of the other things I'm trying to do also work out, I may need you to help me one more time. I'm not quite sure I understand it myself yet, and I don't really have time to tell you anyway—I'm as busy as the night we burned my house down and I went into the tunnels, do you remember?—but I want you to listen to me now and think about what I'm saying.

"When you first met Cho-Cho, I know he scared you. I think you have come to see that he is not as bad as all that—perhaps you understand that he has had a difficult life and does not trust people, that he is worried that only bad things will happen to him. His life has made him different than you, but there is a lot of good inside him.

"I want you to remember that, little Christabel, because I may need your help. If I do, I will be asking you to . . . to meet someone. That is the only way I can explain it. And that someone may seem even more different and frightening than Cho-Cho. You will have to be as brave as you have ever been, Christabel. And that is very brave indeed. . . ."

CHAPTER 37

NETFEED/NEWS: Suing Do-Gooder Parents for Doing too Much Good

(visual: Wahlstrom heirs entering Stockholm courthouse)

VO: The four children of the late Gunnar and Ki Wahlstrom, famous Swedish environmental activists, are suing their parents' estate, demanding that the Wahlstroms' substantial bequests to environmental organizations be given to them instead.

(visual: Per Wahlstrom)

WAHLSTROM: "Everybody thinks what we are doing is so terrible. But they didn't have to live with parents who paid attention to everything but their own children. Not a one of us cared a fig for whales or rain forests. What about us? Don't we deserve something for putting up with absentee parents for all those years? They cared much more about snails than they did about us."

Paul ran up to the front of the temple praying that the Wicked Tribe had exaggerated. As he skidded through the door the heat and light hit him like a small explosion and for a moment he could only stand, blinking against the dazzle.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw it first as a homeless shadow—something black sliding swiftly along the desert sands. Even though he had been prepared, warned by the children, it was only when he saw it climb one of the nearby hills in just a few steps, the dust of its seismic footsteps billowing behind it, that he realized how terrifyingly huge it was.

It paused on the hilltop, a colossus come to life. The doglike muzzle lifted as it howled and seconds later the air outside the temple, kilometers away, surged and snapped. Then it lowered its head and began to run once more.

Paul stumbled back through the door on legs that felt like burned matchsticks.

"He's coming! Dread's coming!" He lurched to a halt just inside the inner chamber. Florimel and T4b and the others looked up at him, eyes wide and faces slack from terrors that seemed to have no end. "They're right—he's huge!"

Only Martine had not turned. She was facing the pure white human silhouette that had appeared to them moments earlier and now hung just above the ground like something out of a puppet show. "Tell me," she asked it, "can you talk to Sellars?"

"El Viejo?"
The thing squirmed, making its outlines hard to distinguish. "Sometimes. I hear him. But he's all busy right now. Said I was supposed to stay with you."

"Then he gave you a death sentence!" Paul heard something close to utter despair in Florimel's cracked voice. A distant sound like a monstrous drum being pounded—boom, boom,
boom
—sent faint vibrations through the massive stones of the temple floor.

"Gonna step on us!" T4b shouted.

"Silence, please." Martine turned away from them to face the great black sarcophagus lying at the center of the chamber. "Stay together," she called. "Someone get the little monkeys."

"What are you doing?" asked Nandi Paradivash, even as he summoned the Wicked Tribe down out of the air with urgent gestures. A few of them settled on Paul, clinging to his clothes and hair.

"Just be quiet. Martine s eyes were closed, her head down. "We have only moments."

The floor was shaking in earnest now, as though bombs were being set off deep beneath the temple. Each titan footfall was louder than the last.

"Hear me!"
Martine called out. "Set, Other, whatever your name is—do you remember me? We have met before, I think."

The sarcophagus lay secretive as an unhatched egg. The shuddering made Paul stagger to keep his balance.

"What
is
this psycho place?" demanded the white silhouette fearfully.

Bonita Mae Simpkins was praying. "Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. . . ."

"Listen! I am Martine Desroubins," she said to the low black box. "I taught you the story of the boy in the well. Can you hear me? I am trapped here in this simulation world, and so are many others that you brought into your network. Some of them are children. If you do not help us, we will die." The moment stretched. They could hear the roar of the approaching monster's breath, hissing like a sandstorm. "It will not listen to me," Martine said at last, her voice raw with despair. "I cannot make it listen."

The ground shivered so violently that the whole temple seemed to shift around them. Trickles of rock dust filtered down the walls; Bonnie Mae and T4b were knocked off their feet. Then the footsteps stopped. Even the monstrous sound of breathing was stilled.

Paul licked his lips. It was almost impossible to speak. "Try . . . try again, Martine."

She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and put her hands to her head. "Help us, whatever you are—whoever you are. God damn it, I can
feel
you listening to me! I know you are hurting, but these children will be killed!
Help us!
"

Something exploded like a bomb above their heads. There was a second concussive crash, then another and another. Flung onto his back, Paul could only stare upward in horror as huge fingers poked through the rocky walls at the top of the great temple. A moment later, with a sustained smash of sound and a rain of falling stones, the entire roof of the cavernous chamber tore free and rose up into the air. A boulder the size of a small car rolled unsteadily past Paul and crashed into the far wall, but he could not even move. Sunlight blazed in, the limitless desert sky now spread above them once more.