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Wanna bet? Jaide almost said, but this time she kept the voice in her head still. “I told you once,” she said instead, “I’m not going anywhere with you.”
Her first Gift came to life at her calling, surrounding Dr. Witworth in a rushing cylinder of air. The woman felt herself being tugged away, but instead of screaming and giving up as Jaide had hoped, she lunged for Jaide and took her into a viselike embrace. Jaide was pulled into the miniature hurricane with her and sent skidding across the sidewalk in a storm of wind and water.
“Let go of me!” Jaide kicked and wriggled, but Dr. Witworth had her arms tightly pinned.
“Call it off!” the woman ordered, her face just millimeters from Jaide’s. There was fear in her eyes, a fear that drove her anger. “Call it off, you little witch!”
Jaide was so startled to be called something like that she almost did exactly as she was told. Was that what ordinary people would think of her, if they knew what she could do? Why not, since that was exactly what she had thought Grandma X was, before learning the truth? Perhaps that was why some people fell in with The Evil — because they thought the Wardens were the Evil ones, witches and warlocks in league with the Devil.
That so obviously wasn’t the way it was, but the thought threw her off, regardless. Her concentration faltered, and the whirlwind eased accordingly. Dr. Witworth found her footing first and managed to get one arm around Jaide’s throat.
“Now, walk,” she hissed in Jaide’s ear. “And no more funny business.”
Light flared in front of them. Something growled, deeper and louder than a saber-toothed tiger. Then it roared, and the light rushed toward them. Dr. Witworth froze like a rabbit caught in headlights, and Jaide took her chance. She pushed as hard as she could and burst free of the arm around her throat. Then she leaped out of the way as a car as large as a small house ran over the very spot where she had been standing.
Brakes squealed. A door opened.
“Get in!” cried Rodeo Dave. “This is no night to be out walking on your own!”
Jaide didn’t need to be told twice. She clambered onto the car’s enormous back seat, leaving a trail of water behind. She was breathing hard and her hands were shaking.
“Where did she go? Did you hit her?”
“No.” Rennie was in the passenger seat, peering out the window. “She seemed to take off like a rocket when you pushed her away.”
“Oh.” Jaide remembered her Gift. Who knew what it had done with the woman? She didn’t have the stomach to wonder. “How did you know I needed you?”
“We didn’t,” admitted Rodeo Dave. “We were strongly advised by Officer Haigh to get out of town. She said she wasn’t leaving the porch until we did, so we got in the car and drove around the block, hoping she’d be gone when we got back. That was when we saw you.”
Rennie smiled and held out her hands. Jaide took them. Of course the Living Ward was never going to leave Portland, on this night or any other. And Rodeo Dave might have lost his memory of being a Warden, but that didn’t mean he’d lost his instincts. He’d be there for Portland if it needed him.
“Where has Haigh got to?” he said, peering through the window at the front of his shop. “Why isn’t she chasing kidnappers and looters instead of kicking honest folk out into the storm?”
His mustache bristled and his nose turned a deep shade of purple. He looked like he had a lot more to say on that subject, but then he remembered Jaide in the backseat and visibly calmed down.
“Let’s get you home,” he said. “Then we’ll see about all that.”
“Good idea, Dave,” said Rennie. “And then perhaps you can drop me at Mermaid Point. I know someone who will be able to help keep Portland safe.”
Something was stirring. Jack could feel it. He was sitting on the deck of the ship, concentrating exactly as Lottie had told him to, while the others were in the cabin, supposedly searching through the remains of the Compendium and trying to get the Oracular Crocodile to say something useful without eating anyone’s finger. In truth, they were mainly arguing. Their angry words washed over him, distracting him and making him tense.
“You can tell just by looking at this world that The Evil has sucked it dry,” Lottie said. “I was the only thing bigger than a bug left until you arrived. That’s why it was so desperate to draw you in. The Evil is starving.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Kyle asked. “It tried to eat me. Let it starve, I say!”
“And I say that it is a unique creature on the edge of extinction. It would be wrong to kill it out of hand. How do we know that it can’t learn to change? Has anyone asked it?”
“Have you?” asked Tara.
“No,” Lottie conceded with a sigh. “It tried to eat me, too. Many times.”
It was all theoretical, Jack thought. No one was trying to kill The Evil, were they? They just wanted to cut it off from Earth, so no more people would die. Human people, anyway …
He tried not to think about that part. The meditation was difficult enough as it was, without his conscience niggling at him. What if The Evil only wanted to come to Earth because there was nowhere else left to go? What if the success of Aleksandr’s plan meant that it would starve to death? Was that the murder of an intelligent being or the cold hard cost of survival?
Concentrate!
The Evil, Lottie had told him, exploited cracks in reality to cross between worlds. It couldn’t make its own cracks, the way Wardens did, but it could collect them and hold on to them, creating a kind of Grand Central Station leading to all the worlds it had taken over. She called it the Inward Facing Mandala, which Jack didn’t really understand. It was something Buddhist, she said. All that mattered was finding its location. Finding it, and then getting to it. And then getting home, if they beat Project Thunderclap to the punch.
At any moment he expected the sky to light up with lightning. If that happened, all possibility of escape would slip away. He didn’t know what time it was back home, but he suspected they didn’t have much left.
That feeling was reinforced by strange rumblings and murmurs in the bedrock of the realm of The Evil, conveyed to him via his secondary Gift, which he was using to seek the way out of the world. He could sense life through the ground, so why couldn’t he sense life through cracks as well? That was Lottie’s argument. The world was full of life, so it should be clearly visible via his Gift, if he looked in the right direction. But it was confusing. There was so much rock in the world beneath him, and it cast reflections and mirages that led him in circles or down dead ends. He could feel the opening he was looking for, just out of reach, but every time he thought he was getting close it slipped away from him.
“Nom nom nom nom,” said the Oracular Crocodile, followed by a sharp yelp from Kyle.
Jack closed his eyes more tightly than ever. His friends were doing everything they could. He should do the same. The Mandala had to be somewhere!
It was no use. The world’s bedrock didn’t show any holes or tunnels leading anywhere.
Jack felt a movement at his side. It was
Tara, squatting down next to him. There was a sheet of paper in her hand, possibly one from the Compendium. On it was a mess of diagrams and sketches of things so strange it hurt Jack’s eyes just to glance at them.
“Some of your Warden friends were crazy,” she said. “I mean really crazy. This guy lived in a barrel and never cut his hair, ever. They found him smothered one day when they came to bring him his breakfast, his hair had grown so long. Anyway, Lottie says his Gift was seeing things far away. He drew the first maps of Antarctica, hundreds of years before it was discovered. And he drew maps of a place that doesn’t seem to exist. I think it’s this place, where The Evil lives.”
“Cool,” Jack said, although the business about the barrel certainly wasn’t. “Did he say where the Mandala was?”
She held up the paper and pointed at a place where dozens of lines converged.
“Look for a mountain,” she said. “That’s the best we’ve got.”
He nodded and squinted at the picture.
“What’s that he drew coiled around the mountain? A snake?”
“We don’t know, and neither did the crocodile skull. I guess we’ll have to find that out the hard way.”
Jack took a deep breath. “Thanks, I think. It didn’t occur to me to look anywhere high.”
He closed his eyes again and forced his mind to settle. The ground was even more restless now than it had been before, as though something was worrying it. Huge echoes rolled back and forth like ripples on a giant pond, but instead of water it was the stone moving. It made him feel like he was moving, too, rocking up and down on a sluggish sea. He tried to put it out of his mind in case he started to feel seasick. He wasn’t very good with boats.
Across the surface of the world his mind went, seeking the source of the vibrations. They did seem to be converging on one spot, and it was indeed a mountain, conical like a volcano, but old and cold and riddled with empty chambers where lava had once flowed. Jack explored those chambers with his mind, and found spaces he couldn’t comprehend, including passages that were infinite and holes that looped back on themselves. None of those were helpful, but he kept looking, hoping against hope that he’d find a flicker of life.
