The Passage to Mythrin 2-Book Bundle (23 page)

Simon trudged back to the circle they'd marked in the dirt of the track. Stepped into position. Nestled the dumbbell next to his right ear. Stuck out his left arm. Now: big step back, skip, turn —

He caught his heel on nothing much and sprawled. The dumbbell thumped to the ground half an inch from his ear.

Ike bent over him. “You okay?”

“Sure.” Simon climbed to his feet and whacked dust from his pants. “But, you know? I'm never going to get good at this, no matter how much I practise.”

“Never mind. Too hot now, anyway.”

The air above the playing field quivered with heat. Simon picked up the dumbbell and they trudged across the turf to Queen Street.

It was even hotter here. A couple of sweating men were fastening up a long white plastic sign across the street between the hydro poles. Simon and Ike stopped to watch.

“WELCOME — DUNSTONE AND AREA WEIRD GAMES (DAWG) — JUNE 28,” the banner proclaimed. At each end it showed a picture of the Hec Manning Trophy, which looked something like the Stanley Cup.

“Yes!” Ike punched the air. “Tomorrow we conquer!”

“Don't jinx us,” Simon said. Actually he thought they had a pretty good chance of winning. He just didn't think it was wise to say so out loud.

They walked south on Duke Street to Maple Leaf Convenience, just short of the corner of Duke and King, went in and bought bottles of orange juice, then stood outside glugging the drinks. Simon stayed in the shade of the green-and-white-striped awning, but Ike planted himself on the sun-hammered sidewalk.

“I wonder how long I'd have to stand here for my sneakers to start melting?” He lifted one foot to touch the rubber sole. “Is that tacky?”

Simon felt it. “No. Let's go swimming.”

“In the Dunn? We'd just get our ankles wet. Let's go to the mall, where it's cool.”

They started around the corner to King Street. “Okay, after we take this dumbbell back to Melissa.” Simon hefted it in front of him. “Then — oof!”

Something blurred around the corner of the building and crashed into Simon. “Ow!” it shouted, and staggered back. It was Amelia.

“Simon!” She lunged at him and grabbed the front of his T-shirt in two fists. “Simon, I had a dream. Mara needs me! She wants me back on Mythrin!” Her eyes
beamed like blue searchlights. Her whole face shone.

Simon pried her fingers out of his shirt. “Okay, but, um, you dream about Mara all the time.”

“Yeah, you keep telling us,” Ike said.

“This is different. This was a dragon dream.” She started back along King Street, hands fisted in the pockets of her grubby shorts.

They knew about dragon dreams — what Amelia called
true
dreams — because she'd shared Mara's dreams last winter. To dragons, dreams were real. “More than real,” Mara had said. Real things happened in them. Shaping dreams was a skill young dragons took years to learn.

“You can't be sure it was a dragon dream,” Ike said. “I mean, it's not like Mara's even in the same world as us now.”

“Ike's right,” Simon said.

“Oh, yeah?” She swung around and shoved a fist in front of his nose. She opened her fingers. “Look!”

Something red glinted at him. He squinted to get it in focus.

It was a ring. The band looked like old bone. The stone was smooth and dark, with a wink of blood red deep inside.

It was the ring of the Urdar chiefs. Last seen on the clawed thumb of Marathynarridin, on the day she reclaimed the Ruby Kingdom.

Simon touched it with a fingertip. “Where did you get that?”

“It came through the dream.” She tucked it back in her shorts pocket and pushed it down deep. “That proves it was a true dream, a dragon dream.” They couldn't argue with that.

She told them about the dream while they walked along King Street. That is, Simon walked, lugging the dumbbell, and Ike ambled. Amelia kept trotting ahead, as if itching to get somewhere quick, and then turned and waited impatiently for them to catch up.

“I was flying,” she said. “I mean, it was Mara flying in her dream, and I saw what she saw.”

East she'd flown from Sissarion, city of the Urdar. Over the tangled lands, with their sharp, red peaks and deep ravines. Far ahead rose a smooth, grey ridge. Up, up, and over — and on the other side a sudden green valley, and people running in panic.

“Wait a minute.” Simon grabbed her arm. “People? That can't be right. There's no people on Mythrin.”

“No. Maybe that part was just nightmare. Here's the important part. There was a building there!” A tall, narrow, stone building like a cathedral stood on a cliff overlooking the valley. The roof and the tall windows were rounded. The walls were more air than stone, the windows gaping.

“But the dragons have buildings, don't they?” Ike said. “Remember the library? What's the big deal?”

“Dragons don't build things like this.” She tossed him a scornful look. “They didn't build that library, Mara told me. They didn't build this, either. But that's not what's important.”

Not all the windows were empty. A sapphire spark gleamed in one of them. It grew into a glowing, glassy panel, a tall arch blue as a twilight sky.

“And then I heard Mara say:
Like breeds like
.”

The window swallowed her up, wings and all. She fell through endless blue.

“So it was a gate,” Ike said. “She was showing you where the gate was.”

“That doesn't help us much,” Simon said. “If we don't know where it comes out on this side.”

“So we have to find it, right? And soon!” Amelia scanned up and down the street, as if she might spot the gate in one of the shop windows. “I've got this feeling we don't have a lot of time.”

Time: that was the problem. Six months ago, they'd found out that time in Mara's universe was not the same as time on Earth. It moved — or seemed to move, Simon wasn't really sure which — at a different pace.

Last winter they'd spent, as far as they could figure, eighty minutes in the library-museum that housed a gate
on Mythrin. Then they'd come home and found that only eight minutes had passed. Ike groused about not being able to study the difference properly, but they'd roughly worked it out. An hour on Earth was ten hours on Mythrin, and vice-versa.

Simon thought he could guess what Amelia was thinking now. The ring in her pocket was the most precious object in the Ruby Kingdom. Mara wouldn't have sent it through the dream just to say “Hi, miss you, come visit.” There had to be a very good reason. Some emergency, some disaster.

And time on Mythrin was running away like water.

There are other doors.
That was almost the last thing Mara said to Amelia, the time they parted, last winter. But the only way to get to Mythrin from Earth, as far as they knew, was through a door hidden in a cave halfway up the side of the Dunstone Gorge. And now the cave was full of broken stone from a rock fall, the result of repeated freezing and thawing — or so the parks director said.

(“But that doesn't explain why some of the stones have scorch marks,” Simon told Amelia at the time. He didn't ask the parks director, because he already knew
how the rocks got scorched. In Mythrin, the dragons had burned a mountain to bury that door.)

“Like breeds like,” Amelia said now, while Ike went into the newspaper office to return Melissa's dumbbell. “That was in the dream. It meant something.” She clawed at her short brown hair as if that would help her think.

Simon guessed she hadn't even combed her hair this morning, let alone washed her face. That wrinkled top with the Girls Rule slogan on it was probably what she'd slept in. At least she'd stopped to pull on shorts. The ring was now safe in a zippered pocket.

“Like breeds like,” Simon repeated. “The cave in the gorge
was
kind of like what we found on the Mythrin side. I wonder if the people who made the doors did that?” Now, this was getting interesting. He repeated it when Ike came out of the building.

“Or maybe the doors did it themselves, automatically,” Ike said. “Maybe they changed the stuff around them to, sort of, match at both ends. Maybe that made it easier to connect those two places. Or maybe —”

“So,” Amelia broke in, “we should look for some kind of big building, in ruins, with tall windows, because that's what I saw in the dream.”

“Ruins.” Simon looked at Ike. “But where in Dunstone are there any ruins?”

Once they started asking and looking, they found plenty. First stop was a deserted barn on the edge of town. It was huge and smelled of old manure.

“Too wooden,” Amelia said. “Too creaky.”

After that they found a crumbling brick garage (“Too small”), an empty church with plywood over its windows (“Too pointy”), and a house that burned last month and was now being knocked down (“Too late!”).

The three of them ate their lunch on the roof of the Hammer Block, the apartment building where Simon and Amelia lived with their grandmother, Celeste. They sat at a round wooden picnic table under a yellow umbrella. Amelia always said she liked being on the roof. The apartment was hot and stuffy this time of day, but up here a breeze blew and herring gulls wheeled overhead.

Celeste made them wash off their coating of grime and sweat, then gave them money to buy submarine sandwiches. “I don't have to tell you not to sit on the parapet,” she said. “I know you have more sense than that.”

Simon had more sense, but Amelia didn't. “I need to see the view,” she said as she chewed. “I need to find this ruin.” Simon stood behind her, ready to grab. At three storeys, the Hammer Block was almost as tall as the town hall tower. It was a long way down to the pavement.

“Some view.” Ike waved his sandwich. Even in Dunstone, surrounded by woods and fields, you could see a veil of smog over trees and buildings. “This is all about global warming. We'll be wearing gas masks next year, trust me.”

“We should get some of the other kids to help us search,” Simon said. He was thinking of Dinisha.

Amelia gave her head a sharp shake. “No way! Then we'd have to explain about Mara and Mythrin.”

“And they wouldn't believe,” Ike said.

“Worse. Maybe they would.”

It took Simon only a moment to work this out. Amelia didn't want to share Mara or Mythrin, that was what it added up to. She thought of Mythrin as her own secret world, and Mara as her special friend. Maybe that was why she hadn't made any really close friends in Dunstone. Always missing Mara, always dreaming about going back to Mythrin. That worried him.

“Look how close the gorge looks!” She pointed. “You'd almost think you could take a good run and jump and land in it.”

“Not that you'd want to,” Ike said. It was a bad year for drought, and the Dunn River was more rocks than water.

“Huh.” Amelia stared and chewed. “What's that over there, across the gorge, next to the Dunning
Street bridge?”

“The old library,” Simon said patiently. “The one that just closed. We walked by it three times today.”

“It looks different from the back.” Amelia shaded her eyes. “Look at all those boards and ladders and things up the back wall. What are they doing, cleaning it?”

“Why would they clean it?” Ike said. “They're going to knock it down. Just as soon as they get all the good stuff out.”

“Knock it down? I never knew that. That makes it a ruin! Why didn't you tell me?”

“Thought you knew. Everybody else knows.” Ike sent Simon an isn't-that-just-like-Ammy look.

“Wait. Those tall windows on the ground floor, all boarded up. What shape are the tops?”

Simon had to think a minute. “They're curved,” he said.

Amelia tossed the heel of her sandwich to a pair of hovering gulls, swung her legs across the parapet and was off across the rooftop towards the stairwell hut as if her feet were on springs.

“Wait!” Simon yelled. “We're not finished eating!”

“Mara needs me!” She hardly broke stride. “And it's been five hours, at least — on
this
side!” She clattered down the stairs.

Simon and Ike looked at each other, calculated
briefly, then jogged after her, sandwiches in hand. “Five hours, that's —,” Ike began.

“— fifty hours in Mythrin,” Simon finished. Just over two days.

A lot could happen in two days. Even dragons could die.

Amelia could have kicked him. It was enough to make you crazy!

Somebody had already pulled the plywood off one of the basement windows in the back of the library, underneath the scaffolding, and carefully cleared out all the glass. There was nobody to see; the library had no neighbours. The front, with its big square porch and columns, overlooked Park Street. On the west it stood against the bridge. On the east there was a lane, with a tall cedar hedge, and grassy parkland on the other side. On the north was a stretch of asphalt parking lot, and a stone parapet, and then the gorge.

The uncovered window was like an invitation. Yet Simon kept them outside, arguing about trespassing and getting permission, for five minutes — “Five minutes!” Amelia was ready to pound him with her
fists. “Simon, that's nearly an hour by Mythrin time! We've got to
move!
”

Simon would have kept it up, but then Ike yipped, “We're dead!” And they heard the sound of heavy tires crunching gravel in the lane.

From the back there was no way out, besides the lane. Except inward.

Amelia shoved the plywood sheet aside, sat down, and slid through the window feet first. She landed in the dark on a concrete floor.

A moment later, Ike landed beside her and bounced up again. Simon's outsized sneakers followed, then the rest of him. He sprawled. While he picked himself up, Ike reached out and pulled the plywood back across the window. Just in time. The truck's engine rattled the window frame.