The Passage to Mythrin 2-Book Bundle (28 page)

“Um, not hours,” Simon said. “It was only half an hour.”

“Well, the salvage fellows aren't happy, I can tell you. They had to stop work on that window while the hydro boys look for the live wire. Or whatever caused that blue flash.”

“That wasn't our fault,” Amelia muttered. Simon caught her eye. “
It was
,” he mouthed at her.

He wondered how they could possibly answer Oscar's questions. But there was no time to worry about that, because next moment he herded them out the front door into the smoggy sunlight and soupy heat of the summer afternoon. Smells of dust and gasoline invaded Simon's nose. He sneezed. Then he got a look at what was outside. “Uh oh.”

Amelia laughed. “Wicked!”

Pier made a sound like she'd been hit in the stomach.

Oscar waved both arms over his head. “Hey! Celeste! Look what I found!”

Park Street outside the library was chock-a-block with trucks and people, or so it looked at first glance. At second glance there were a fire truck, a hydro truck, an Ontario Provincial Police cruiser (one of the new black-and-whites),
and a couple of dozen people on the opposite sidewalk, standing around in little knots, talking. There was Bruce, of Bruce's Coffee and Doughnuts, in his white apron. There was Ike, jumping up and down and yelling, and there (
Oh, no!
) was Dinisha and a bunch of her cool friends, all of them staring and some of them snickering.

And, yes, there was Celeste. She'd been standing beside one of the firemen with her arms crossed, frowning at the library. Now she settled her John Lennon glasses on her nose in a determined way, tossed her silver braid over her shoulder, and started pushing through the crowd.

Pier backed into the open doorway. Oscar grabbed her arm. “Whoops! No, you don't. Where're your parents?”

She shook her head from side to side and sucked in air. Sweat trickled down her moon-white face.

Poor kid, Simon thought. It's all too much for her. “Hey.” He reached for her hand, but she hid it behind her back. “Hey, it's okay!”

Then several things happened at once. The truck that had been parked behind the library rumbled along the lane and out into the street in a cloud of dust. A red Camaro zoomed down Park Street from the east end, its sound system thumping like a herd of line-dancing elephants. It squealed to a stop inches from the truck's front bumper. Horns blared. And right on top of that, somebody in the fire truck flipped the wrong switch and
started a terrible banshee wailing and a flashing of red and white lights.

Nobody was watching Pier. With a gasp she ducked under Oscar's arm, leaped off the steps, sprinted across the lawn, and dove between two kids with bicycles.

Simon yelled, “Pier, wait!” He jumped after her, took a step, and caught one foot behind the other. When he'd picked himself up and pushed through the crowd on the sidewalk, there was no sign of her.

Twenty minutes later, the fire truck and the hydro truck were gone. Most of the people were gone, too. The salvage workers had gone back to working on the stained-glass window. Another big, dusty truck had arrived and three men in yellow hard hats and no shirts were putting up a plywood fence around the front of the library.

Six people stood in a circle in the shade of a chestnut tree across the street. The police officer said, “She could have been squatting in the library for weeks, sneaking out at night. That's probably why nobody saw her.”

“But
somebody
must know who she is,” Celeste said. “A child doesn't just pop out of thin air, not in a town this size.”

Ike brightened. “Actually, she did. She's from another universe.”

Celeste frowned at him. “Cut the nonsense. Where
were
you? Simon?”

“Well, we, um,” Simon began. He was terrible at making up convincing lies, so he never tried. But the truth wouldn't go down well this time. “We were in there. Just, um, looking around.”

“Actually,” Ike said, “they weren't in there at all. They were in another world. You know that blue flare? That was when Ammy and Simon opened the gate betw— ow!”

Oscar had rapped a knuckle on his head. “Goofy! For that alone I should ground you.”

OPP Constable Lisa Nader closed her notebook and suppressed a grin.

“The three of you were darn lucky,” Celeste said. “You could've been electrocuted or buried under collapsing timbers or arrested for trespassing!”

“But we weren't, were we?” Amelia rocked from her heels to her toes in a bored way. “Can we go now?” She kept looking up and down the street. Trying to spot Pier, Simon guessed. He was doing the same, but not so brazenly.

“No, you can't!” Celeste snapped. “You're grounded.”

“What?!” Amelia yelped.

Simon's heart sank to his shoes. Ammy'd had to open her big mouth. Now Celeste had that
look
on her face.

“But we have to find Pier!” he pleaded.

“Pier. Is that her name?” Celeste studied his face.

“We have to find her. It's important!”
Important for us to find her first
, he added mentally.
Before the police do
.

Celeste's face softened. “That's my Simon. Of course we'll search. A child that age shouldn't be homeless.”

“Okay, let's go!” Amelia took a step, but only one, before Celeste caught her by the back of her tank top and hauled her back.

“The
police
will search. You're still grounded!”

Ike was grounded, too. As soon as he got home he phoned Simon and got the full story of what happened on Mythrin. All about Pier and Gram and Yulith and the Casseri, and Amelia being kidnapped by a dragon, and Pier's search for Wayland's Prism.

“So, you see,” Simon finished, “we have to help her find this thing. And we only have two days, because Mara gave them twenty days Mythrin time.”

“Two days? Yowsers! We're going to be busy. Helping Pier save her people
and
winning the Weird Games.”

“The games? But —”

“It's tomorrow! You mean you forgot?”

“Ike, the games aren't important. Finding Pier is!”

“But maybe she doesn't need our help so much. She's been a, what did you call it? A seeker. For years, right?”

“Yes, but ….” Simon heard the apartment door open and Celeste's quick step in the hall. He whispered rapidly, “but not if she gets caught. The Children's Aid will send her away somewhere, for her own good, and she'll never find the Prism, and the Casseri will never find the right door to the right world, and the dragons will come and kill them.”

“Mara wouldn't let them do that, would she?”

“I dunno. I hope not.” Celeste walked into the kitchen. “Gotta go.” He hung up.

Celeste gave him a searching look. “You hope not what?”

“Um, hope I'm not still grounded tomorrow. There's the DAWG.”

“We'll see.”

Pier had never been good at spells. That was weavers' work, anyway, and she'd had her plate full studying to be a seeker. But she'd figured out that what a seeker did was a bit like spell-weaving, only backwards.
Un-
weaving — unbraiding the twined strands of blue fire in the gates.

There was one spell that everyone knew. When Pier escaped from that place of terrible noise, she did what she'd been taught to do from earliest childhood when danger came. She found a hidey-hole and crawled into it and wove a screen in front to fool unfriendly eyes. It was meant to baffle dragons, but it worked on humans, too.

She curled up as small as possible in her stony niche and made no sound. That woman in the dark blue shirt, the one who looked like a warrior, passed her twice and looked right at her and never saw her. After a while these
people would get tired of looking, and then she would crawl out and go and get
it
.

What an awful place this was! Pier curled up tighter. Those flashing lights, like dragon eyes, and those horrible wailing, roaring, thundering things — machines, they must be, but they were everywhere, moving on wheels by themselves, without anybody to push them. Booming and clanking over the bridge above her, squalling and blaring at each other in the streets.

And the air stank, and coated her skin with greasy dust, and stuck in her lungs. She could hardly breathe. It took all her willpower not to cough and cough.

The air was full of sound, too. Not just the loud machine sounds: this was something else. A soft buzz at the edge of hearing. In fact, she couldn't actually hear it, so maybe it wasn't a sound at all. But she could feel it. It made the fine hairs on her arms prickle, it made her spine tingle. It threaded through everything, spiderweb-fine, crisscrossing, braiding.

After the sun went down, the sky was still full of light — not starlight or moonlight, but light reflected from below. All the buildings that she could see from here sparkled and blazed. She wondered if the buzz in her head came from all that light.

Pier closed her eyes tight and tried to
see
it, the way she saw the twining threads inside the gates. This buzz
was a bit like that, only it was not blue but greenish and fine as a cloud, and it was everywhere, like algae in pond water.

Somewhere in that cloud, she couldn't tell where, Wayland's Prism floated. In her mind it shone like a blade sunk deep in the ocean. It turned slowly, shooting rainbows of light through the green murk. Where? Where? Not far. Surely in twenty days she would find it.

Joy washed over her. I can do this! I will find it, this wonderful Blade of legend, and bring it back to the people. I will save them. Me, Pier! Youngest and least.

Pier couldn't remember the last time she'd slept the night through. The last few months before they passed the gate, the Casseri had been constantly moving and hiding and fighting, never two days in one place, always on the track of the gate Seeker Kwan was sure he'd found. And in the days since they'd passed that gate, Pier had spent almost all her time trying to open the one leading to the Prism World. She'd napped, or fallen into a daze, but there hadn't been time for real sleep.

Now, at last, there was time. One hour, Pier thought. Or maybe two. Then, when they've got tired of looking for me, I'll go and find it.

Pier slept. She dreamed of her mother. She never thought of her mother when she was awake, because it
hurt too much, but in her dreams her mother was there, alive, holding out her arms, and all the hurt was gone.

Amelia ate two chili dogs with extra cheese at the picnic table on the roof of the Hammer Block. She had brought her laptop up, and as she ate she checked her e-mail.
Ding!
Here came a message from her mother, who refused to use instant messaging and probably still thought e-mail was hot.

Sweetheart, we're so looking forward to seeing you again. Just two more weeks! It could be sooner if things here keep on going smoothly. Huaculamba has been wonderful, especially the people, but it will be great to get home. Are you excited about the move to Toronto in August? We'll look for a house beside the lake, okay? Dad sends his love. By the way, how's Silken? You haven't mentioned her for a while.

It was all amazingly chirpy. All too clearly, her mother was having a great time building a water-treatment plant
in the mountains of Peru and not feeling a bit guilty about dumping her daughter in dull little Dunstone for six whole months. They'd flown back for her thirteenth birthday in April, but had only stayed two days.

Amelia hit
reply
. She typed: “Since you ask, Silken has dropped me. We wrote a lot at first but after a couple of months she stopped. Too busy, I guess. Short attention span, maybe.”

Then she gnawed on her lip, deleted all that, and typed: “Hurry home, I really miss you guys. Love, Amelia.” She hit
send
, logged off, and closed the laptop.

When she finished eating she went and lay on her back on the parapet — it was plenty wide enough — and stared up into the sky.
Mara
. She'd learned a lot from her. Like how to fake brave and happy when you weren't really. That had helped a lot, these last six months, especially after Silken stopped writing.

Some best friend! Not like Mara. Mara was forever. Even if she was all grown up now and not so much fun.

The sun set, the sky turned gold and green at the horizon and blue, blue, blue at the zenith. Amelia gazed until she felt as if she was falling up. Up and up into that rich and piercing blue. Until the blue was all through her, and she was part of the sky, like a transparent fish in the sea.

When the sky grew black she sat up, crossed her legs,
and looked out over the gorge and the south half of Dunstone. In all that darkness splotched with golden light, where was Pier?

She heard Simon coming while he was still on the stairs. The wooden steps creaked, then the door hinges squealed, and then gravel crunched under his feet. He stopped behind her right shoulder.

“Celeste says it's late. Time for bed.”

“I'll be right down.” She waited for him to go away.

“You're on the parapet again. You shouldn't be there.”

“I won't fall off.”

“Just remember you're not like Mara. You can't fly. Okay?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Simon edged closer to the parapet and bent to peer. “Is that stained-glass window gone?”

“See for yourself.”

He squinted. “Can't see.”

“It's still there. I've been watching them work on it. They'll have it out sometime tomorrow, I bet.”

“And then nothing will be left but an empty space. I wonder if the gate to Mythrin will still be there. How is Pier going to get back?”

“Maybe she won't. Maybe that's a good thing.”

“What? But —”

She spun around, cross-legged. “Careful!” Simon anxiously grabbed her shoulder.