The Passage to Mythrin 2-Book Bundle (2 page)

“Here's a good place.” Simon stopped where the wall curved away from the road and back to enclose a semicircle of snowy asphalt. “Great view from here.”

“What view?” Ammy leaned over the wall. Simon leaned over beside her and Ike straddled the wall on her other side.

“By daylight it's a great view,” Simon explained.

A streetlight behind them struck gleams off the opposite lip of the abyss but cast the lower regions into blackness. Twisted sheets of ice draped the sides of the gorge and filled the bottom, visible only because they were so white. The only sound was the whine and rattle of wind in bare twigs.

Ammy stuck her hands into her armpits and stamped her feet.
Half frozen, and no wonder, dressed like that!
Simon resisted the urge to smack his mitts together. He hooked his thumbs casually in his pockets. “Had enough?”

“N-no. Wh-where are the caves?”

He wondered if she was putting him on. He never found out.

Ike yelped, “What's that?” and jumped down from the wall. Something was happening on the other side of the gorge, right across from them, about halfway down. Light streamed from a gap in the cliffside. Light of a sharp, electric blue.

And then the blue light flickered as something moved in front of it. Something came out of the gap and stood there outlined in brilliant streamers.

Simon shielded his eyes against the glare. He heard Ammy gasp.

The gorge was dark again. Amelia pulled in one long breath —
Well, I wanted something exciting to happen
— then pushed it out again.
And something did happen.

But what?

“My head hurts.” She closed her eyes and rubbed them. Glowing blue splotches writhed and leaped across the blackness behind her eyelids.

“What was that?” asked Simon, to her right.

“Power lines?” That was Ike, to her left. “Maybe a transformer blew.”

“In the gorge?”

“Seems funny, doesn't it? I'll ask my dad when I get home.” Ike's voice was suddenly close to her ear. “My dad's the editor of the
Dunstone Independent
. Anything happens, he gets to know about it. Um, Ammy?”

She uncovered her eyes. “Amelia.”

“Right. You okay?”

“No.” Her head still hurt. And she was freezing. Her hands and ears ached with cold. She wished she had her Peruvian hat. “What happened just then?”

“There was this blue flash down in the gorge,” Simon began.

“More like a flare,” Ike said. “It got bright slowly, then it was really bright, then it sort of faded.” He looked over the wall. “I think.”

“I remember the light,” Amelia said. “I've got this feeling there was something more. Like, something else happened that I can't remember.”

“Aha!” Ike straightened up so fast he nearly left the ground. “Then we know what this is! It's an alien visitation!”

“Ike, not now, okay?” Simon sounded tired.

“But it's obvious! Here's Ammy, with half her brain sucked out —”

“Speak for yourself! My brain's all there.”

“If it wasn't, you wouldn't know, would you?”

“I need to move,” she said. “I'm turning into a block of ice.”

They started back along Riverside Drive, with Amelia in the lead. Two steps, and the toe of her boot sent something bouncing along the ice-crusted sidewalk. It winked at her, one red gleam, as it flew. She nabbed it in mid-stride and stopped under the next streetlight to look at it.

Her first thought was that she held a lump of glass. A shiny pebble, heavy, dark, with a fiery spark at its heart. Then she rolled it over and saw the metal band.

“It's a ring!” Ike reached for it, but Amelia pulled her hand back.

“Somebody must've dropped it.” She tucked it into her jacket pocket.

“You should put a notice in the
Independent
, in the lost and found column,” Ike said. “It could be valuable. Maybe you'll get a big reward. Which you could share with us.”

“Yeah, likely.”

They walked on, passed the new mall with its wall of coldly lit windows, turned the bend onto King Street, passed stores in old brick buildings twinkling with coloured lights. There were more people here, more cars passing. Amelia felt safer.

Safer? Why shouldn't I feel safe?

Funny how tacky those lights look when Christmas is over, she thought, as they stopped at the corner of King and Peel and waited for a couple of pickup trucks to rumble past. And the red and green floodlights that splashed down the building fronts from the eaves were just plain ugly. What was worse, you couldn't see past them when you looked up. They made a ceiling of light. Anything could be up on those roofs, looking down, and you'd never know.

Peering upward under her hand, she made a sound. Simon pulled at her wrist. “What?”

“I saw something up there.” She pointed at the roofline above Smith Hardware. “On the roof. Just a ... a sort of flicker behind the lights.”

Both boys squinted upward. “Can't see a thing with all that glare,” Simon said.

“'Course, that doesn't mean there's nothing there,” Ike said. “There could be. Easily.” He looked at Amelia and his eyes brightened. “We're being followed!”

“Don't
say
that!” She darted across the street. Moving felt safer than standing still. It was like a hole had opened in the sky above her head, and if she moved fast she could get out from under it.

Only the hole's inside my head, not above it. In my memory. Something I've forgotten. Something about that blue light. And now all of a sudden I have this ring, as if it dropped out of that hole.

Amelia, chill!

She kicked a chunk of ice along the sidewalk. Ike fielded it with his boot and kicked it onward, and Simon jumped after it, and soon they were running and laughing and jostling for control of the ice chunk. They kept that up until they reached the town hall square. By then Amelia was starting to feel as if things were normal again.

Music tinkled at them as they trotted into the square. More people were here, mostly parents and
young kids, skating on a rink in the middle of the square. The sound system was playing the Skater's Waltz. Amelia dropped onto a concrete bench and watched the skaters whiz and wobble past.

“You skate?” Simon asked.

“No. You?”

“A bit.”

“Huh!” Ike snickered. “Simon's hopeless on skates. I'm good, though.” He uncased his camera and walked over to the edge of the rink.

“Is he always like that?” she asked Simon.

“Yup, pretty much. He's, um...” Simon thought about it. “Playful.”

She looked up at the town hall tower, with its carved parapet and red and green lights. You'd think they'd try different colours, like purple, or turquoise, or...

“Hey. I thought you said people can't go up there.”

“I don't think they can. Why?”

“Oh ... it's nothing.” Her hands were shaking. She hid them in a fold of her scarf. “I saw something up there again, that's all. Above the lights. A — a face. A strange face.” She heard the quaver in her voice and was angry with herself. “No, don't bother looking, it's gone.”

“Somebody fixing the lights, maybe.”

“Yeah, probably.” Weird face, though, in that half-second. Too long, shaped wrong, you'd almost think it
was one of those carvings, only it moved, and it looked right at her, and...

I must be really, really tired.

“Um, there's a coffee shop.” Simon pointed across the square. “D'you want —”

“No! I'm perfectly fine.”

He looked at her hands wrapped in her scarf, then took off his mitts and held them out.

“I said I'm fine!”

“You sure?”

“Yes!”

“Okay.” He put his mitts back on.

Ike plopped down on the bench beside her.

“Ammy, can I see that ring?”

She fished it out of her pocket and handed it over.

“Be careful with it.”

“You bet.” He held it up sideways to his eye and looked at one of the streetlights through the curve of the stone, which rose a quarter-inch above the band. “Cool!”

“Let me see.” Simon got it away from him and squinted through it with one eye. He panned the ring slowly across the square. “Neat! Everything's red. And it's all changed, all towers and mountains and things.”

“Just as I suspected!” Ike hissed. “It's an alien artifact!”

Spare me!
Amelia was suddenly too angry to be scared. That felt good. She gazed up at the black sky. “Please tell me, why, oh why am I hanging out with two geeky little boys?”

“Little?” Simon threw the ring into her hand. He looked as close to mad as she'd ever seen him. “I'm bigger than you!”

“Yes, but it's not size that counts, is it?”

“I'm older than you, too.”

“Two months! Big deal!”

“Yeah, and look at you trying to look like a teenager! You —” He bit off whatever he'd been about to say and stared straight ahead. She'd swear he was counting to ten. Ike had scuttled away to the edge of the rink again.

“You see, Simon,” she said in her kindest, most adult voice, “in the last two years I've matured, while you —” She looked him over, an outsized kid in parka and mittens and sensible boots, with his hair falling into his eyes. “I bet you still play with Lego.”

“I do not!”

“Bet you do! Ha! You're turning red!”

He got up and stamped away a dozen steps, then stamped back. “Let's go home.”

“Go home without me.” She waved an airy hand.

“No. I promised Celeste. I'll stick with you if it kills me.”

§

“Why can't she make her own supper?” Simon spread mustard on one half of a whole-wheat kaiser roll, lined it with lettuce, added a slice of tomato, and centred a piece of salami on it.

“Because she's far from home and tired and lonely. And she'll be getting hungry about now,” Celeste said. “She didn't eat a crumb when I took her to lunch in Toronto. Nerves.” She was sitting at the kitchen table wearing her black Indian caftan with the little mirrors bordered in silver embroidery, her long grey hair in a single braid. She nursed a cup of chai and watched him make his supper. Celeste never cooked, but she made sure he ate.

Simon cut cheese slices and slapped them down on the salami. “I still don't get why she has to stay with us. Wouldn't it be better for her to stay with that friend of hers in Vancouver?”

“Not while she's got us. It wouldn't be right. Family is family.”

“Tell
her
that. I don't know what's the matter with her.” He slashed another kaiser roll in half and stabbed his knife into the mustard jar. “She hates Dunstone. She hates me!”

“She doesn't hate you at all. She's just at a funny age. Probably isn't sure who or what she is, half the time.”

“I'm the same age and I'm not like that!” He hacked at the block of cheese.

“Everyone's different.” She tapped him on the wrist. “Go easy on her, okay?”

“
Me
go easy on
her
?”

Before he knew it his sandwich was ready, and so was Ammy's. He glanced at Celeste. “Will you call her?”

“No, you call her. Better yet, take it to her.”

“But she —”

“
Simon
.”

He knew that tone of voice. While Celeste poured out a glass of milk, he cut one sandwich in half and put it on a plate. Then he carried the glass and plate out of the kitchen and along the hall to Ammy's room.

The door was closed. He knocked. “Ammy? It's me. You want a sandwich?” He hoped she would say no, or, better yet, throw a shoe or something at the door, so he could go away and say he'd done his best.

No such luck.

As soon as they got back to the apartment, Amelia went to her room and unpacked. As she shoved sweaters into drawers and lined up CDs on her desk, she thought about what to do.

It ain't over till it's over
, she thought. That was one of her dad's favourite sayings.
Stick to it, girl
— that was something her mother liked to tell her.

Okay, I'll stick to it. I won't give up yet.

Her laptop was almost the first thing she'd unpacked. She sat down cross-legged on the bed, pulled the laptop close, and opened her mail. Nothing from her parents yet, but they'd given her the email address where they could be reached, once they got to their destination. She addressed a new message.

Dear Mom and Dad, I hope you get to Huaculamba soon so you can read this. Remember how you said you didn't want my education interrupted? Well, I have seen the school here and it is tiny! You probably didn't know that when you sent me here. So I am sure I can get just as good an education in Peru. I can bring textbooks and take online classes. Please let me know as soon as possible when I can come. Love, Ammy.

Then she backspaced over
Ammy
and typed in
AMELIA
, all in capitals. Her mother remembered to call her that now, most of the time, but her father still insisted on calling her Ammy. Usually Ammy the Something. Ammy the Great. Ammy the Terrible. Ammy the Barbarian, that was his latest.

“I am not a barbarian!” She scowled hideously at the computer screen and attacked the keys again.
btw, don't get kidnapped or anything and be careful driving on the mountain roads. And please write back soon!! I miss you!!! Lots of love, AMELIA.