The Shimmers in the Night (9 page)

And it was definitely cooler out here.

The rest of the kids must have been moved, she thought, heading down the hall through the silence that seemed to buzz faintly. Maybe the elementals were dangerous to them, too. But the lights were still on, blazing for no one. A couple of room doors stood ajar, and through them she could see windows, once again—windows into the dark city with its spots of light that were also windows, the windows of other tall and unknown buildings.

Suddenly she felt more alone than she ever had. What if they didn't come? What would she do here, by herself?

Night had fallen.

Jax's room was more or less as they'd left it when they hustled him out, the covers on the bottom bunk still imprinted with two rounded dents where he and Cara had sat. The poisonous pen was gone, of course—the teachers must have taken it—but Jax's closed laptop sat on one of the desks, a tiny light on its side fading and brightening again.

She sat down and opened it; the screen lit up and prompted her for a password, which luckily she knew. Jax wasn't secretive the way Max was; he'd keyed in his password in front of her. Once she entered the word and its suffix of numbers, his email inbox popped up. She scrolled down, wishing she knew what she was looking for. Would he have bothered to hide what he found?

She saw emails from her, emails from Max—the normalcy of it was comforting, all Jax's everyday, kid emails. Finally there was a raft of messages from his geeky best friend, Kubler. She felt guilty clicking on the first one; like she was spying, until the thought of Jax's black eyes firmed up her resolve.

There it was: a mention of the source. Kubler's reply didn't say much except
No way, that's so incredibly weird
, but Jax's email to him, below, read
I pinpointed the coordinates. It's along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Somewhere between Greenland and Norway. The volume is massive! Black smokers, is what it looks like. But what Mom's saying is
, these
black smokers aren't your typical geological features.
These are not natural.

Black smokers? It
had
to be her vision. Her vision
had
been of the source. And Jax hadn't kept all this a total secret: Kubler knew. That meant maybe someone had intercepted
these
messages, as well as Jax's texts to her. The bad guys—Roger or maybe even the elementals.

She thought back to the vision she'd had in her bedroom: dark, billowing smoke. And the scene beneath the smoke—snatches of light, apparently under the ocean floor. It seemed impossible, light under the ocean floor. Unless there was a subterranean volcano, maybe? She knew they existed, volcanoes beneath the sea. Could what she had seen be lava?

But Jax had written: “These are not natural.” Quickly she googled “black smoker” and read
black smokers, or sea vents, are hydrothermal vents occurring on the ocean floor. They resemble dark chimney-like structures….

So normally black smokers
were
natural. But these, according to Jax, were not. Did that mean the vents on the ocean floor were manmade? Made by the Cold?

Then, from her pack, her phone made a text alert sound. She fished it out and looked. It was from Jaye.

We're here
, it said.
So come get us.

In the lobby downstairs there was no one at the reception desk. The lights were on and the phone console at the desk was blinking; beside it lay a half-eaten sandwich with a piece of baloney sticking out. The night guard must have taken a bathroom break. Cara looked around warily, half expecting to see frightening men with flames leaping in their mouths.

But all she saw was Hayley and Jaye, standing near the revolving doors and looking a little stunned.

“No way were we getting on the T. We took a cab,” said Hayley. “I had to sneak the money from my mom's purse. So you better pay me back. I'm in serious, serious crap already because of this. OK?”

“OK,” said Cara gratefully. “Come on.”

Hayley kept talking as they followed her to the elevators.

“You're lucky, by the way,” she said. “That Zee totally took the heat off you. She did a disappearing act herself! Only there wasn't anyone covering for her.”

“Really? Zee?”

Cara was puzzled. It didn't seem like Zee.

“Please. She was clearly pining for Max, after one night away,” scoffed Hayley as Cara punched the button and the doors closed in front of them. “I bet they're shacked up in a sketchy motel as we speak. Catching some bedbugs to take home.”

“Anyway,” said Jaye softly (Cara thought she was trying to blunt Hayley's meanness). “It was kind of a coincidence. Two people going off campus at the same time. But then, with Zee being older, and I guess she doesn't have a stellar attendance record anyway, they're not as worried about her. Plus, Mrs. M wasn't in charge of Zee, or she'd have
really
freaked.”

The number eight lit up, and the doors dinged open.

“This is the smart-kid think tank?” asked Hayley. “It doesn't look like much.”

“Oh, it gets weirder,” said Cara. “Don't worry.”

She led them down the bright empty halls to the other elevator, the hidden one. There was a keypad here too, beneath a switch plate again; again she slid it open and keyed in her birthday.

“Cool,” said Hayley when the wall opened noiselessly.

They stepped in, and before they were even settled the door reopened. They were inside the core.

“
Way
different,” said Jaye as they walked through the narrow hall. On the walls the sconces glowed dimly.

“It's
hot
in here,” said Hayley irritably.

“It
is
hot,” agreed Jaye. “So is this—does this place have something to do with—”

“I
had
to tell her,” interrupted Hayley, turning to Cara guiltily. “Otherwise she wouldn't have come with me!”

“You told her—” started Cara.

“I told her about August,” said Hayley. “The pouring dude. How he reached out from the mirror. And the other Cara and Jax when we were in the boat. The shapeshifting or whatever. All the bizarro stuff that happened.”

“I still think you're pulling my leg,” said Jaye. “And if this turns out to be a prank, I'm going to be really hurt that you guys were playing with me.”

Before Cara could answer, they were at the door to the huge room beneath the dome.

“Wow,” breathed Hayley. “This place is wild.”

“What
is
it?” asked Jaye as they stood on the threshold.

The heavy curtains were held back now and they could see the dome and the two wings of the room reaching out to the sides—the one with all the artifacts, on the left, and the one with all the books, on the right. There were some dim lights among the chairs and tables, but overall it was shadowy. The crannies and alcoves that were nestled into the dusty walls receded into darkness.

“You know what this reminds me of?” asked Jaye. “It's like the cathedrals my family went to in France last spring break. On that vacation where I decided I wanted to be an architect? If you look at those cathedrals from above, they have the shape of a cross. Like this room! That dome is what they call an apse, those two wings are the transept, and the big open part there is the nave. I really loved those old churches. I swear. This room is just like a church.”

Cara looked around the room. Now that Jaye mentioned it, she thought her friend must be right. The raised platform where Jax had lain would be where the altar was.

Only this church was deeply imbedded in an office building.

“It didn't occur to me,” she said, nodding slowly.

“But I don't understand,” went on Jaye. “When I say
old
…I mean, you don't see places like this in the U.S. At all. It's basically medieval. Gothic, I think.”

“There's a bunch of other stuff I could show you,” said Cara. “But we need to get going. There's a task I have, to help Jax. Come on.”

She led them to the library wing, one half of what Jaye called the transept. The large, flat book was still on the table, light reflecting off its white pages.

“I'm supposed to read this book,” she said. “At least, I
think
this is the book I'm supposed to read. I'm guessing it has instructions or something, like the prophecy from this summer. The problem is, it's completely blank! And then I…well, I asked a question. And…”

Her fingers went to her ring, and she looked up at the Elizabethan portrait on the wall. Jaye's and Hayley's faces weren't there anymore; it was just two prim-looking women in funny collars now. Beneath the painting was a plaque that read L
ADIES
OF
THE
C
OURT
.

“Anyway, the answer was you guys,” she said after a moment. “I think you're supposed to help me read the book.”

Hayley stared at her.

“You called us out in Boston in the middle of the night to
read
a
book?”
she said. “Are you
serious?”

“I
have
to, or I won't know how to get to my mother” said Cara quietly. “It's—just like it was in August. I need her again. And if I can't find her, I won't be able to help Jax.”

“You said he was
poisoned?”
asked Hayley. “So is he like in the
hospital
now? And where is everyone? How come this place is so empty?”

“Long story,” said Cara. “Later, promise.”

She leaned over the book, and the other two followed suit. Jaye touched the corner of one of the huge pages, then turned it gingerly. They saw the next page was blank, too. Hayley grabbed some pages at the end and opened the book there: still nothing.

“So what exactly are we supposed to do?”

“Maybe we need to hold a light to it. Remember when we were little, how there was this way you could do invisible ink using lemon juice?” asked Jaye. “You could write with the juice, and it didn't show up on the paper. But then the writing would turn brown when you held it up to a light bulb, and you could read it?”

“Uh,
I
never did that,” said Hayley.

“Too busy with Fashionista Barbie,” said Jaye. “Here, I'll hold this side.”

They maneuvered the book in close to the green reading lamp and tried their best to peer over at the page. Nothing.

Hayley peeled off her jacket and plunked it down on the table; Cara pushed up her sleeves. Was it getting even hotter, she wondered? Were they coming?

“I guess it might have to do with my ring,” she said.

“That good-luck ring?” asked Hayley.

“Maybe I have to ask a question again, but with the two of you here. I see these pictures, if I touch the ring. Sometimes. I don't quite know how it works. My mom called them visions.”

She touched the ring and leaned toward the book, sandwiched closely between her friends. She thought:
How do we read you?

And it seemed to her that she was just beginning to notice something shift on the white page, almost like one of those fractals rearranging itself, when Jaye shrieked.

Cara looked up—Hayley was grabbing at her—to see fire. It was leaping on the hotplate in the corner, where Mrs. O had boiled the water for her tea; an actual fire was burning there, crinkling the tablecloth, sparks and pieces of burning fabric fluttering toward the floor.

It was a small fire, at least, and Cara thought maybe she could put it out. She'd put out a fire once before when Jax, age eight, decided to conduct combustion experiments with household cleaning products. So she rushed over, looking for something to use and thinking randomly of a TV show where a man set on fire had been rolled up in a rug to quench the flames; she grabbed the corner of the Persian rug beneath her feet and pulled it up, then brought it down clumsily on the burning tabletop.

As soon as she had it on top of the flames, though, the rug got heavy in her hands. The rug seemed lumpy. Heavier and heavier, and then suddenly there was movement, the rug was resisting her, and the fire leapt up instead of subsiding as she thought it should. Vaguely aware of her friends screaming behind her, she had to jump back—because the rug was hot, and the rug
had something inside it.

She dropped it, her hands hurting, but was barely aware of the pain because now she was looking at the man from the subway, rising out of the lumps in the rug, and he opened his mouth and his mouth was flames.

Five

It wasn't only him, either.

Behind the Burner, as Cara and her friends backed up, others appeared—all of them copies, as though he was duplicating himself. They had the same face. They all opened their mouths in the same way, and in every single wide-open mouth the orange tongues of fire flickered. And then they were coming forward, and heat blasted off them in a wave.

Fear hit Cara along with the heat, but oddly she found she was thinking clearly. She had to get the book. It
had
to be the right one; she'd seen it start to respond to them. She grabbed it off the table but instantly dropped it—her hands hurt too much to hold on, a searing agony on the palms. The rug had burned them.

“Get the book!” she yelled to the others, and Jaye leaned down and grabbed it and then they were running. The three of them ran as fast as they could, through the thick drapes on the door, swerving down the hall the way they'd come in….

But the heat didn't let up. The heat stayed right at their backs. It wasn't that the Burners were running, just that they were
there
—there were no thudding footsteps but those of the girls themselves, no noise but a low crackle—the crackle of flame—and a rhythmic sound like heavy breathing. Heat pulsed from them, heat pushed at Cara's head and shoulders and forced her to run fast, pell-mell along the corridors, banging against cabinets and statues as she went.

How could they get away? They had to go somewhere the Burners couldn't go.

“We've got to get into the cold!” she yelled.

Outside it was cold, she thought, and the Burners didn't like cold. Would they follow the girls into the elevator? Could they? She didn't know where the stairs even were, in the core, and anyway this was the eighth floor…so they couldn't make it that far. They couldn't
make
it all the way outside.

Then she remembered the kitchen. It was near, and it had a walk-in fridge. Or maybe freezer. She'd passed it as they went into dinner: a door with a small window and the kind of metal handle you sometimes pulled up to open an airtight door, even a sign that read C
OLD
S
TORAGE
P
LEASE
C
LOSE
T
ILL
I
T
C
LICKS
.

“This way,” she cried out, and had to push Hayley to make a turn. She thought she knew the way—it was down some stairs, but not too many, she thought—and then, running, she realized there was too much heat on her back now. Too much to stand. Something was burning.

It was her fleece hoodie. She knew it wasn't the shirt, because her skin wasn't hurting. Yet. She shrugged desperately as she ran, frantically, and the burning hoodie fell behind, but now the shirt beneath it felt, hot too—

“Hot,” came a breathy, raspy voice, almost right in her ear. “Hot…hot…hot…”

It wasn't either of the other girls, who were beside her and in front. It was him.

“Turn! Down the stairs!” she cried out, and they did, stumbling as they fell against each other. She smelled something acrid and was suddenly afraid of her hair catching fire. Her whole body felt weak. They were scrambling against the wall, their feet were slipping on the stone, and then there was the kitchen door. They banged through it.

“Left! Left!” she yelled, and Jaye grabbed the door to the cold-storage room. And jerked it open.

“Hot…” breathed the voice, beside her.

And then they were inside, tripping over each other and a pile of big cardboard boxes right in the middle of the floor. The big book, which Jaye had been carrying, snagged the edge of a shelf and fell onto the floor; frigid air hit their dripping faces, and Cara turned and slammed the door shut.

The Burners were black now, their features almost gone except for the bright mouth-holes—the skin cracked and wrinkled and burnt up.

“Oh my
God!
” burst out Jaye as they sat on the boxes huffing and puffing.

Cara was glad this wasn't a walk-in freezer but only a fridge—lucky for them. She held her hands out in front of her. They were shockingly pink and raw.

“I can't believe this,” said Hayley.

“It's crazy,” said Jaye, shaking her head.

“I'm sorry,” said Cara, staring at her trembling hands. “I'm so, so sorry I got you into this.”

“Those look bad,” said Hayley.

“You need cold water—right away,” said Jaye. “Is there water in here?”

They were being practical, Cara realized, in order to stop thinking of the Burners. She felt grateful.

Hayley got up and started scanning the long shelves, already shivering in the cold.

“There's drinking water,” she said, and reached for a bottle.

“If we don't have running water, we need a towel,” said Jaye. “To make a cold compress. That's second best.”

“The only sink's out there,” said Cara, gritting her teeth at the pain. “We can't risk going out yet.”

“Are they just
waiting?”
asked Hayley.

“Look,” said Jaye, “here.”

There was a blue-and-white dishtowel hanging from a hook; Jaye grabbed it and poured water onto it from the bottle Hayley handed her.

“I hope it's clean,” she said, and then gently laid the wet cloth over Cara's hands. “You have to keep it there a while.”

The coolness felt good at first, but the towel was also scratchy and the textured loops of thread started to feel like they were stabbing the sensitive skin if she moved her hands even a little. Cara bit her lip and sat looking down at her trembling arms. Her heart was still beating too fast.

“You're gonna be OK,” said Jaye gently, kneeling down beside her. “It's only first degree. I'm almost sure. There aren't any blisters yet, at least.”

“Cara. What the hell
were
those things?” said Hayley.

She unscrewed a second bottle of water and glugged from it.

“They're called elementals,” said Cara. She was trying to keep from crying, the burns hurt so much; talking slowly and deliberately seemed to help. It kept her focused on something other than her hands. “They're not human.”

“Hmm, really,” said Hayley, and swallowed a big gulp. “No kidding. Those things were like CGI. They were walking special effects.”

“Too bad they don't keep aspirin in here,” said Jaye.

Looking up from her hands, Cara saw Hayley's eyebrows were singed, the top hairs black and curling, and some stray hairs on her head, too. It must have been burning hair she smelled.

Hayley put her hand up, seeing Cara's gaze rest there, and touched her eyebrows; the burnt ends came off on her fingers. She stared at them. For a long moment Cara had the distinct sensation that all three of them were in an unreality; they would wake up, like people did in a bad movie, and all of this would turn out to be a dream.

“I don't know what the elementals
are
, exactly,” she went on, shaking it off and wincing as one of her hands shifted and the tender skin scraped painfully on the towel. “But they work for this guy called the Cold One, or just the Cold. There are four kinds. The Pouring Man was a water elemental, which meant he needed water to move around in. There had to be some form of water for him to show up in a place. These guys are fire, obviously. They need fire or at least heat. It's the four elements, the ancient elements—remember that Classics unit we had in History? So there must be others, too. Earth and air, I guess.”

“Huh,” said Hayley. “Earth, that seems kind of lame. Like what are they going to do, scare us with potted plants?”

Cara tried to laugh at that, but she could barely crack a smile.

“How about
air
,” said Jaye. “I mean, if some move through water, and some through fire, they have some major limits, right? But air is everywhere. We
breathe
it. I wouldn't want to meet up with those guys.”

They sat in silence for a minute. Cara looked up at her friends; they looked small and…well, unsure of themselves. Anyone would be, she thought, and this was just
them
, three girls in junior high and those blackened things outside the door.

“Listen,” she said. “What we need to do is get out of the building, right? I'm pretty sure it's too cold for them in the night air.”

“But they could be
out
there,” said Jaye. “Right outside the fridge door. That window is too small, even if it weren't all fogged up. How could we even tell if they left?”

“I'm going to try to find out,” said Cara.

She could use the nazar, at least.

She looked down at the towel, a field of nubbly blue and white over her trembling hands.

“Jaye,” she said, “can you take the towel off? I mean, really slowly?”

Jaye shook her head. “We shouldn't lift it. Not yet. Give it five more minutes.”

“OK. But then we have to make a move.”

“Eee-yeah. And what move would that be?” asked Hayley.

Cara shook her head. She was going to figure this out; they weren't going to be stuck in here. Her mother was imprisoned; her baby brother was imprisoned, because that wasn't him behind those eyes. She refused to be trapped, too.

“What did they
want
from us?” asked Jaye.

Cara remembered the book. She'd almost forgotten it, preoccupied with the pain shooting across her palms. She turned her head carefully and looked down.

Jaye and Hayley had to pick it up, since Cara couldn't use her hands yet. They lifted the big, empty book and placed it on a box in front of her; they opened it together, one on each side of her.

Beneath the wet towel, Cara raised one shaking hand over the other, palms still up, and very gently touched her ring. Just with a fingernail.

She closed her eyes and pictured her mother, thinking the question:
Where is she?
She thought of nothing else, just her mother. It was hard at first because trying to think of her mother made her think of herself
missing
her mother… which she knew was wrong. She had to think more clearly than that. So one by one she pulled up memories of her mother. There she was when Cara was very young, smiling down with a paper mobile of seagulls behind her head; there she was at school when Cara was in first grade, putting Cara's lunchbox in a cubby, smiling at another mother over Cara's head. She always seemed to have been smiling then.

Cara remembered that smile and focused on it.
Where is she? Where is my mother?

And when she opened her eyes again, the white of the pages was moving like snow drifting across an Arctic landscape, or clouds passing each other with faint shadings of gray in the white. It was beautiful. All three of them stared; Jaye gasped.

Dark colors flared onto the page. They washed across it, unfurling into a moving scene as detailed and vivid as a high-def screen. It was night and there was a huge gray-black building with a few small lights in windows and multiple smokestacks sticking into the night sky like pillars. There were also massive white towers that reminded Cara of old pictures of nuclear disasters, wide at the bottom and curving in and then out again as they rose.

“Oh my God,” breathed Hayley.

“A factory?” asked Cara.

“Actually, I think it's a power plant,” said Jaye.

So they could see it, too. It wasn't one of her visions. Or at least, it wasn't
only
that.

“But it's—is it
animation?”
said Hayley. “What is it?”

Then Cara noticed the edges of the book were also changing. They didn't look like book pages anymore; the paper and binding faded.

What they looked like was a window frame.

“Um. It seems to be turning into a
window
,” said Jaye.

And there was something about the picture: it wasn't a picture. It wasn't 2D at all.

“Touch it,” whispered Cara to Jaye.

Jaye tentatively reached out her hand.

There was space there. Her hand didn't knock up against anything. She jerked it back.

“Just—space,” she said, awed.

“That's how we get away,” said Cara. “We go there.”

“
Go
there?” asked Hayley.

“It's where my mother's being held,” said Cara. “That was the question that I asked.”

“This is scary,” said Hayley, and sat heavily down on a box. “It's way too weird.”

“We have to go,” said Cara. “Even if I brought up a different place, the only way for us to get away from these guys is through”—she pointed down at the window that had once been a book—”this right here.”

“You want us to step into some kind of window that—that isn't really there?”

“We don't know where that place even
is,”
said Jaye. “It could be Afghanistan. It could be
anywhere.”

“We have to,” said Cara. “It's what we're supposed to do.”