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“From the Evil Dimension?” asked Jaide.
Instead of answering, Grandma X crossed the room to study the cross-continuum conduit constructor. The parchment went into her pocket, but she kept one hand pressed against the pocket as though keeping its contents safe.
“Tara,” she said, turning away from her examination, “thank you for bringing this to our attention. Please tell your father that I would like to buy it from him for a price we’ll settle later. I would also like his expertise in freeing it from the earth. I need to get this home as soon as possible, so I can examine it.”
Tara nodded and headed up the ramp.
Grandma X turned to the twins.
“Whatever you have planned for the rest of the day,” she said, “I’m afraid it’s canceled.”
“
Why?” asked Jack, exchanging a worried glance with his sister.
“What does this mean?” asked Jaide. She had never heard their grandmother sound so serious.
“I don’t know what it means. That’s why I’m going to do something that’s only happened once before in my lifetime. I’m going to call a Grand Gathering and ask them the question that for the life of me I cannot answer on my own: Why do I recognize the handwriting on that note?”
Two hours later, in an opulent palace far away, a hall full of glass came to gleaming life. Hundreds of candles flickered in massive crystal chandeliers that hung suspended on long cables from a painted ceiling far above. Down one wall hung a bank of well-polished mirrors that were famous around the world. Down the other wall, tall windows reflected the light dim yellow back inside. Outside it was the dead of night. No one near the Palace of Versailles noticed the unusual light flickering inside, or the people it illuminated.
Meanwhile, in Portland, Jack and Jaide were in the blue room, peering into a much less elaborate mirror. This mirror was lying on its side and resting on two chairs, whose backs supported its heavy weight without complaint. The mirror, which normally reflected images in a perfectly ordinary fashion, now acted as a window to the famous Hall of Mirrors, where they could see Wardens from all over the world assembling for the historic Grand Gathering of the Glass.
Grandma X was pacing on the other side of the blue room, out of the mirror’s sight, one hand pressing on the pocket where the note still sat. She had revealed nothing more since the discovery of the cross-continuum conduit constructor, but she was muttering silently to herself, which was in itself more worrying than anything she could have said. Jaide and Jack waited with impatience for the Gathering to begin in the hope that they would learn what on earth was going on.
Perched silently in her cage, Cornelia watched closely with one black eye, taking in everything and saying nothing.
“Were you at the last Grand Gathering?” Jack asked Custer, a local Warden who was watching with them in the blue room. He was a middle-aged but somehow ageless man with high cheekbones and long blond hair. His most striking feature was the ability to turn into a saber-toothed tiger at will. He had tried to teach the twins to shape-shift, but neither seemed to possess Gifts that worked that way. Everyone assured them that they would have other Gifts, possibly soon, but there was no way to tell what they would be. It was just a matter of waiting to see.
“I was present at the last Grand Gathering,” Custer replied with a formal inclination of his head. “It is good that such terrible times are long behind us.”
Grandma X shot him a look that Jack couldn’t interpret. Perhaps she was warning Custer not to give away too much. There were supposed to be no secrets between her and the troubletwisters anymore, not after the last time The Evil had attacked, exploiting knowledge that had been kept from them, supposedly for their own good. That the twins were present for the Grand Gathering suggested that this compact was being honored, but they knew there were limits nonetheless. They were troubletwisters and they were kids. It didn’t come easily to grown-up Wardens to treat them like equals.
“Look, there’s Dad!”
Jaide had spotted Hector Shield in a reflection of a reflection. He was peering out of another mirror, just as floppy-haired and crumpled as he usually looked. His glasses sat on a slight angle, and she wished Susan, her mother, was there to straighten them for him. Susan wasn’t a Warden, but like Tara and Kyle she was aware of the twins’ training. It was her job, she said, to make sure everyone remembered there was an ordinary world out there, too, full of things like homework and chores. She was an aero-ambulance paramedic who worked three-day shifts outside of Portland, and although the twins missed her, it also meant she was usually away when they were exercising their Gifts. It worked better that way.
Hector waved, waggling all ten fingers of both hands and beaming in welcome, but it was impossible to talk to him. A loud buzz of voices issued from the mirror as Wardens from all over the world joined the vast assembly through mirrors of every shape and size. Faces peered out of bedrooms, closed shopping malls, dressing rooms, and airports. Every age, race, and culture was represented. Some of the Wardens had clearly been woken from deep sleeps to attend and were still in their pajamas. One appeared to be underwater, peering into the reflection of her goggles. All of them were adults. Look though he might, Jack saw no other troubletwisters.
Sometimes Jaide could make out fragments of what they were saying to one another. It seemed to be variations on a single question: What’s going on?
An imposing figure stepped into the Hall of Mirrors, a man wearing a dark gray suit, with broad shoulders and a full, bearded face. His hair was yellow and thick, and stood out like a mane. The twins had never seen him change shape, but nothing would have surprised them less than learning that he could turn into a lion.
His name, they knew, was Aleksandr, and the few times they had met him he had seemed to be in charge, as he appeared to be now. With ringing footsteps, he walked down the gallery to its center and stood there alone, staring at the mirrors surrounding him.
When silence didn’t fall immediately, Aleksandr raised his left hand and snapped his fingers.
Jack and Jaide held their breaths. There was suddenly no sound at all. It was as though the air in the blue room had vanished, replaced by a feeling of great significance — of history, even.
“The Warden of Last Resort calls us,” Aleksandr said, “and we have come, the Grand Gathering of the Wardens of Earth, only summoned in times of direst need. We await the reason for our summoning.”
He paused, and his deep voice echoed off marble and glass, rolling and rumbling for a full second.
“It had better be good,” Aleksandr added before the last of the echoes had faded away.
Before Jack could ask Custer who the Warden of Last Resort was, a clear strong voice spoke out in reply.
“She’s alive,” said Grandma X.
Jaide jumped several inches in the air. She hadn’t noticed her grandmother coming up behind her. Grandma X put her right hand on Jaide’s shoulder, pressing her back into her seat. In her other hand she held up the note.
“Who is alive?” asked Aleksandr.
“My sister.”
“Impossible.”
“I have proof!” said Grandma X over a rising hubbub. She tried to explain about what the twins had found, but too many voices shouted her down. Aleksandr raised his hands for calm, but even he couldn’t bring order. All he could do was wait until everyone’s surprise and shock — and no little outrage, it seemed — had been vented.
“The message was from Lottie?” Jack asked Grandma X in a whisper, while he had the chance. He and Jaide had been hunting for information about their missing great-aunt, Grandma X’s twin, for months now, and had turned up nothing except that she’d disappeared long before they were born. They had assumed her dead at the hand of The Evil, but they had never been able to prove it. It was incredible that news of her had turned up like this.
If the note had been written by Lottie, and had come from the same place as The Evil, that meant Lottie was in the Evil Dimension. They had received the merest glimpse of that place the day their Gifts had woken, and it had been horrible. To be trapped there … Jaide shuddered at the thought, and Jack hugged himself.
Grandma X glanced down at the troubletwisters. She had heard Jack’s question, but for a moment she didn’t seem to see her grandchildren. Her gray eyes were full of grief and anger. This wasn’t a secret that had been kept from them, Jack understood. No one had known, not even Lottie’s own twin sister.
Grandma X sighed, nodded, and seemed to grow suddenly impatient with the racket. When she spoke again, her voice was like thunder, and it drowned out anyone who tried to speak over her, even Aleksandr.
“My sister is alive,” she said, “and you know what that means.”
The twins didn’t know. They waited breathlessly for silence to fall, in
hope and dread of finding out.
“We abandoned her,” Grandma X said in her ordinary voice. Custer reached up to take her hand but she shook him off. “We left her to die, all of us, even me — but she didn’t die. She has endured horrors we cannot imagine. Yet she lived in hope all these years. She sent us a message, and she waited and waited for rescue, and we didn’t come. She is still waiting for us, even now, after all we have not done for her.”
“She might be dead —” said Aleksandr.
“She is not. The living-mail charm dies with the user.”
“Then it is a trap, set by The Evil to sow dissent among us.”
“She would never fall.”
“How can you say that? No one is entirely immune here, let alone there, where The Evil’s power is strongest.”
“Lottie would die first,” said Grandma X. “I was the weak one, not her.”
Jack was horrified to hear his own fears coming from his powerful, confident grandmother’s mouth. The Evil often claimed that of every set of troubletwister twins one would turn to its side. Their father’s twin brother, Harold, had done exactly that, and there had been moments when The Evil’s power had been almost too strong for either Jack or Jaide to resist. Each time, they had been saved, but maybe it was a matter of time, and when their time ran out, the weaker would fall.
If Grandma X was the weak one, thought Jaide, how strong must Lottie have been?
“We must rescue her,” said an elderly Warden from the far end of the Grand Gathering. “Lottie and any others who remain with her.”
“We cannot,” said Aleksandr.
“It must be possible,” said a Warden peering through a shaving mirror. “By what means was the message received?”
Grandma X briefly explained about the discovery in the grounds next door.
“The artifact lay dormant until exposed by happenstance,” she concluded. “The presence of the troubletwisters activated it, and a Bridge briefly formed.”
Jack and Jaide felt the combined attention of the Grand Gathering fall upon them, but not for long. Their role in the events of that day was a crucial but small one.
