The Passage to Mythrin 2-Book Bundle

This book is for Vivian Katherine Bow, who came with wings.

Forever afterward they remembered it, all three of them, as the day when the world changed. But at the time, for Simon at least, it just looked like a really bad day. The first bad day in a long line of bad days to come.

He could pinpoint exactly the moment when things started to go downhill. It was at 2:15 p.m. on that first day, a Sunday between Christmas and New Year's, when Celeste got back from Pearson International Airport and the car door opened and his cousin Ammy slid out.

For a couple of seconds he didn't even know it
was
Ammy. It wasn't just that the clothes and the hair were different. It was everything else.

After getting out of the car she just slumped there, bare hands in the pockets of her short black leather jacket, chin sunk into the folds of a long red scarf wrapped around and around her neck. The tight jacket
and jeans made her look thin as a stick, and the big lace-up boots made her feet look enormous. Her short hair stuck up in spikes all over her head, red with yellow tips. Not red or yellow like real hair. Red like a neon light. Yellow like ballpark mustard.

The last time he'd seen Ammy, on a visit to Vancouver with Celeste two years ago, she'd had normal hair, plain brown just like his. It was long then, and she'd worn it in a ponytail. He'd liked it like that. Now she looked like her head was on fire.

While Simon hauled a few hundred pounds of suitcases and backpacks and gym bags out of the trunk, Celeste whisked Ammy up to the apartment. To amuse her, they took the old elevator that looked like a square brass birdcage and creaked up to the second floor slower than you could walk. At no time did Ammy look amused.

At first, Simon put it down to her being tired. She'd flown all the way from Vancouver to Toronto, and then it was two hours by road to Dunstone. Even though somebody else had done all the piloting and driving and she'd just sat, he guessed she wouldn't be sparkling much.

And then, before he'd had time to duck out, Celeste handed him Ammy as a chore. Or, as she put it, a mission. “Make her feel at home,” Celeste said. “Make her feel she belongs. I'm counting on you, kiddo.”

He did try. He brought Ike Vogelsang along to help. They started with the new mall, which Simon had
been sure would impress her. It had a CD store, and two clothing stores that kids at school said were cool — Simon himself was no judge — and a food court where you could get coffee out of a real Italian espresso machine with valves and dials and a brass eagle on top and buy stone-hard Italian cookies to dunk. He bought her one, and a coffee to dunk it in.

“Very nice,” Ammy said. “Thank you very much.” She drank the coffee all at one go but left the cookie uneaten. Ike claimed it. “Please do,” Ammy said, and she smiled, but her eyes were like two blue lights that never got switched on.

She said “Thank you” and “Very nice” at every turn. But she hardly said anything else. That was a clue, Simon realized later. The Ammy he remembered — well, you couldn't shut her up. And she hadn't been especially polite.

Ike had the bright idea of showing her Dunstone Public School, where she would go for the next six months while her parents, who were engineers, were working in South America. She and Ike and Simon would all be in grade eight together. “It's not a bad school,” Ike said. “You'll make friends.” He grinned at her. Combined with the freckles, the grin was usually effective. Not this time.

Ammy looked at the red-brick shoebox with no expression at all. “Very nice.”

Ike and Simon exchanged glances and minuscule shrugs. “What's with her?” Ike muttered, as she trudged ahead of them up the street. “You said she was fun.”

“She used to be.” Simon kicked at a knob of ice and sent it skittering.

“Maybe you don't know her all that well.”

“She's my cousin! I've known her forever.”

“One visit a year is not forever.”

“It's like she's a different person.”

“Maybe she is.” Ike brightened. “Maybe the real Ammy's been snatched by aliens.”

“I wish this one would be.”

They ended up in front of Quasars, Simon's favourite store, at dusk. The store windows all along Bain Street were ablaze with Christmas lights.

“This place is really neat,” Simon said, stubbornly cheerful. “There's millions of games and kits and models in there. You can make your own ... um...” He waved a mitt at the window, trying to think what she'd like.

“Sun catchers,” Ike said. Simon looked at him gratefully. Ike snapped another flash picture of Ammy with his new digital camera, a Christmas present. He'd been taking pictures of her from every angle, while she ignored him.

Ammy stared through the frost-etched glass at the dinosaur models and microscope kits as if they were so many dead flies. Then she turned slowly on one heel
and looked up and down the street at the rows of one and two-storey buildings. “So this is your downtown.”

“Not all of it.” Simon pointed west. “There's Dunning Street and Wallace Street, that way. And there's three blocks of King Street,” he pointed south, “all the way to the town hall —”

“Where,” Ike finished, “everybody will be tomorrow night for Dunstone's Night of Magic.”

“New Year's Eve street party,” Simon explained. “Celeste will be there selling stuff, but we can just hang out.” He watched her face hopefully.

“How come you call our grandmother by her first name? I've always wondered.” It was her longest speech yet. Maybe she was loosening up.

“She likes it. Says it makes her feel less prehistoric. You should — ”

“It's weird.” Ammy slouched on along the street. The streetlights came on and a few snowflakes slid down through the cones of light. She rounded the corner onto King Street with Simon and Ike trailing her by several glum paces. Ike put his camera back into its case.

Two stores short of the town hall square was Helen's Travel. It was closed. Ammy looked into that window and stopped. And stared.

Simon couldn't see anything there worth staring at. A poster advertised vacations in the Bahamas, with palm trees and sand. Another poster showed mountains and
llamas and people wearing those pointy knitted hats that you saw all over now.

Ammy thumped her forehead on the window. She kept it up, slowly,
bonk
,
bonk
,
bonk
. Ike stepped away from her. Simon pulled at her arm. “Ammy!”

She stopped thumping and looked at him. Her eyes were switched on, bright blue. “I should be there!”

“In the Bahamas? But —”

“No! In Peru!”

“Oh, I get it.” Now he was sorry he'd wished her abducted by aliens. “Your parents. Of course.” He caught Ike's eye, and they nodded at each other. They'd seen this news story the other day where an American businessman in Colombia had been kidnapped and held to ransom, and later returned to his family in six separate packages.

Now Ammy was only resting her forehead on the window. Simon tried patting her arm. She pushed him off. “I was so
happy
when they told me they were going to Peru to build a water treatment plant! Here was my chance to see the world. The Amazon! Jungles! Mountains!”

“The Amazon is in Brazil,” Ike murmured.

Simon was confused. “What about the kidnappers?” “Who said anything about kidnappers?” Ammy pushed away from the window.

“But isn't that what's worrying you?”

She frowned at him. “I'm not worried.”

“About your parents?”

“They're perfectly safe!”

“Then what —”

“They
dumped
me!” She waved her arms. “Don't you get it? I've never been anywhere! This was my chance and they smashed it. I
love
mountains!”

“But you have mountains in British Columbia,” Ike pointed out. “Quite a lot of them.”

“These would've been new mountains. Foreign ones.”

“Well, you're someplace new now.” Simon pointed around at the street, the sky, everything. “You've never been here before.”

“Oh, please! Dunstone? There's nothing here!” She started along the street again, only now she was stomping, not slouching.

Simon stomped after her. He was bigger and heavier than she was, and his pile-lined rubber galoshes stomped just as well as her Doc Martens.
So why don't you go back to Vancouver?
That's what he wanted to say. But Celeste had given him a mission.

“There's lots here if you'd only look!”

“Yeah, like what?”

“Well, like ... like that.” He pointed upward. “That” was the town hall, with its tower. It was the tallest building in town, if you didn't count the
Anglican and Catholic churches, which had spires, and the feed mill silo. The Welsh stonemasons who built the town hall 125 years ago hadn't been able to resist carving dragons, winged and coiling, all along the parapet at the top. The dragons, now locally famous, were floodlit in red and green for Christmas.

Ammy peered upward. “Can we go up there?” For the first time, she sounded interested.

“I'm pretty sure not,” Simon said.

“Huh.” She scuffed on. “What else?”

“Well, there's Founders Tower out on the edge of town, it's a kind of scenic lookout. And, um...” He groped for local excitement. She probably wouldn't think the curling rink was exciting. Beyond those three things, there was only...

“There's the gorge.” Ike made a snaking motion with his hand. “It goes right through town. People come from all over for the rafting and the climbing. And the caves.”

“Caves?” That perked her up.

“Yep, caves. And if you like mountains, well, the gorge is just like a row of mountains, right? Only, it's upside down.” Ike sketched a
V
shape in the air.

“And inside out,” Simon added.

“Inside-out upside-down mountains.” Ammy almost let loose a grin, then. Almost. “Caves, huh? I bet if I said ‘Let's go explore,' you'd say ‘No!'”

“It's winter, Ammy,” Simon said patiently. “Nobody goes in the gorge in winter.”

“Amelia.”

“A what?”

“Amelia. It's my name.”

“But —”

“Ammy is an idiotic name.” She jutted her chin. “It's a baby name. I don't know why I ever put up with it.”

“I always kind of liked it, along with our last name. Ammy Hammer.”

“Ammy Hammer.” Ike laughed. “It's got a ring to it. Ammy Hammer!”

Simon joined in happily. “Ammy Hammer, Ammy Hammer!”

“Ammy Hammer, Ammy Ham—”

Ammy let out a yell and tackled Ike, and next moment they were rolling around in the snow piled at the edge of the street. Ammy was shrieking “It's Amelia! Say it! Say it!” and Ike was squealing and laughing.

Simon stood back out of range. This was more like it! At last Ike gasped, “It's Amelia!” and she let him up. They struggled upright, holding onto each other, and Simon brushed the snow and slush off their backs.

“All right!” Ammy ran her hands through her gelled hair, making it stick out in all directions. She grinned at Simon and poked Ike on the arm. “Let's go see this famous gorge of yours.”

§

They walked past the new mall to Riverside Drive, left behind the fluorescent store lights and many-coloured Christmas lights, and kept on going through the bright circles under the streetlights and the dim stretches between them. They were alone. Nobody else was crazy enough to go walking in the cold and the dark on a December Sunday at dinnertime.

To their left, on the far side of the road, rose a snowy hillside patched black with pine trees. To their right was a waist-high stone wall, and on the other side of it some leafless bushes. Beyond that lay an abyss.