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Deep in the heart of the mountain, he found something tiny but detectable. It made his heart race and his mouth water. He could practically smell the air of Earth in his nostrils.
Jack opened his eyes.
“That’s it,” he cried. “I’ve got it!”
“Where?” asked Tara excitedly. “How far? Kyle has built a sled thing for Lottie. It’ll slide over the sand and we can take turns pulling her.”
That was the bad news. “It’s a long way from here. We’ll never make it on foot.”
“Uh,” she said, falling back on her heels. “So what do we do?”
Jack sat in silence for a minute, possibilities turning in his mind. It didn’t seem fair that they could have found the way out but weren’t able to get there in time. There had to be a way. They had one Warden, one troubletwister, two resourceful children, and a very wise Hyacinth Macaw, not to mention a bloodthirsty skull and some random pages from the Compendium. There was nothing they couldn’t do back home, if they put their minds to it. Why not here as well?
“My Gifts are stronger here,” he said, an idea slowly occurring to him. “Lottie never explained why. But maybe we can use that to our advantage.”
“You’re not seriously thinking of bringing the mountain to us, are you?” said Tara.
“Wouldn’t that be amazing?” He grinned at the thought. “But not quite. Let’s go tell Kyle and Lottie that we found it. And then you can tell me if I’m crazy or not.”
“I don’t care about crazy,” said Tara, helping him to his feet. “Just as long as it works.”
* * *
The deck was really shaking underfoot by the time they were ready to leave. Jack was the only one who could feel it, which amazed him. It was like an earthquake, rising and falling in waves. There were times he had to stop and hold on to something until it passed. No one else felt it, though. It was just him, thanks to his second Gift.
“I’m going to miss this place,” said Lottie softly. They’d propped her up on Kyle’s sled and put her on the foredeck. “It’s been my home all these years.”
“Wait until you see what’s waiting for you,” said Tara. “There’s the Internet and HDTV and cell phones and …”
“All I want is a bath, dear. And a cup of really hot tea that I don’t have to coax out of the plants by force of will.”
Kyle came up the ramp with a double armload of fruit. “That’s the last of it. Do you think it’ll be enough?”
Lottie nodded. “Put some here and the rest where Jack can reach it. He’ll need every calorie he can get.”
Jack was standing on the bow, trying not to feel nervous. The circle of greenery surrounding Omega seemed very small, and the distance they had to travel was very large. The horde of Evil aliens that had chased them appeared to have dispersed, but that didn’t mean they weren’t hiding somewhere, waiting to pounce.
It was going to work, he told himself. It had to work. Tara had declared herself captain and ordered him to not do it wrong.
Said captain was making one last inspection to ensure nothing had been forgotten. When she was done, she stood behind Jack and put her hands on her hips. With her sword tucked into an old belt she had found belowdeck, and Cornelia on her shoulder, she looked like a young but very fierce pirate.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Jack closed his eyes and woke his Gifts. They came easily, rushing out of him in an explosion of energy. The sunlight flickered, but that was just a passing glitch from his first Gift. It was his second that he needed, the one he had inherited from his step-grandfather, Joe Henschke.
There was a long, drawn-out creak. The deck shifted under him. He braced himself and pushed harder.
With a great ripping and tearing of roots, the ship began to move. Only it wasn’t really the ship that was moving, but the ground under it, rising like a wave, carrying the Omega high on its back.
“Anchors aweigh!” Cornelia squawked in triumph.
“Yee-ha!” shouted Kyle. “It’s working!”
It was indeed. The ship was moving, carried along on the crest of a slowly building wave of soil, bringing a large number of trees and lots of tangled vines along for the ride. The wave, and the ship surfing with it, was heading in a straight line across the desert, aiming more or less at one of the suns hanging low over the horizon. That was the direction the mountain lay. But the ship needed to move much faster than this if it was to reach the mountain in time.
Jack’s stomach growled.
“Don’t forget what she said.” Kyle thrust an orange banana into his hand. “Eat it or you’ll burn yourself up.”
Jack didn’t argue. He knew Lottie was doing the same. It was her job to keep the ship hidden as it traveled across the sand. He stuffed the fruit into his mouth, swallowed, and felt a tingling sensation down his throat as the pulpy flesh was instantly absorbed.
He felt a new surge of energy, and the wave of soil responded to his urging. The ship ran down ahead of it a little, and Jack heard things clattering below deck. Another fruit and the wave accelerated again. He opened his eyes and saw great plumes of sand spouting in high arcs on either side of the ship, like water spray from a speedboat. He turned his head and gasped at the vast wall of swift-moving dirt he had raised up. It was at least a hundred feet high, but it was surprisingly narrow, only thirty or forty feet wider than the ship itself.
“Woo-hoo!” shouted Tara, waving the sword above her head. “Here we go!”
Jack bared his teeth and reached for another orange banana.
* * *
The sun ahead began to set. Jack had no idea how fast they were going, but he sensed the mountain coming steadily closer. With both wave and ship hidden safely within the bubble of invisibility Lottie provided, they passed several outcroppings of The Evil at work in its realm. Huge swarms of bugs tilled the soil, searching grain by grain for anything living. Vast gray honeycombs housed the eggs the Evil bugs hatched from. Overhead, occasional flocks of Evil birds scoured the land. Jack wondered if they were looking for the escapees. The Evil must surely have noticed the empty oasis by now.
Jack ate constantly, absorbing energy contained in the fruit directly into his Gift. The pile beside him grew steadily smaller. Just as he was beginning to wonder if there would be enough, the horizon ahead changed from a perfectly straight line to a line with a slight blip in it. Silhouetted against the setting sun, which turned a muddy orange that was only slightly eye watering to look at, the mountain looked like a single tooth in an aging alligator’s bottom jaw.
“Is that it?” asked Kyle, who was sitting next to him, holding the umbrella above Jack’s head to keep the burning light of the other suns from him.
Jack nodded. His mouth was too full to talk.
“Land ahoy!” Kyle shouted back to Tara. It seemed appropriate, even though they were surrounded by nothing but land. The mountain rose as the sun inched below the horizon, uncannily like an island rising into view from an endless sea. Jack pulled mentally on the wave, making it shift course slightly. The hint of life was coming from the other side of the mountain, to the left.
“No sign of that snake thing,” said Tara.
“Maybe it lives inside,” Kyle said.
Jack wished he hadn’t said that. The sides of the mountain were pockmarked with holes, like gaping mouths. If the mountain was hollow, it could house a very big snake indeed.
The far side of the mountain came into view. It was strangely lopsided, and there weren’t any holes that he could see. Perhaps there had been a landslide, Jack thought, although that didn’t make sense, either. The rear of the mountain was a different color to the front, too. The stone on the near side was reddish-orange, whereas the landslide was gray-white. It was the same color as the insects, in fact….
A queasy feeling swept through Jack. He let the wave get smaller, earth tumbling away to either side, the ship slowing as he did so. It was much quieter now, with less soil being displaced.
“How’s Lott
ie doing?” Jack whispered to Kyle.
“Fine, I think.”
“Go check, and be quiet about it. Tell Tara we need to be absolutely invisible. Everything depends on it.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
“See that entire side of the mountain? Where it looks like someone poured wax down the side of a model? That’s all bugs, and we really don’t want them to know we’re here.”
Kyle gulped.
“No,” he said. “I’ll pass that on.”
* * *
Weirdly, it was harder to keep the smaller, slower wave going than it had been to go fast, and Jack’s brow was soon covered with sweat. He let Kyle steer: one tap on the right shoulder to go right, one tap on the left to go left. It worked well enough until they reached a shoal of bones at the base of the mountain, a huge mass of bones that Jack simply couldn’t raise up. Unlike the soil, it resisted his power. The wave petered out and the ship slowly came to rest, as if it had truly been beached upon an alien shore.
The sound of the swarming mass of Evil bugs on the mountain was like a waterfall, unceasingly busy and full of the hint of violence.
“Is our way out under there?” Tara had come forward to whisper in Jack’s ear.
Jack nodded. Of course it was. That was where The Evil most wanted to be. “I think I can get us up there, but I don’t know what to do about the bugs. Trying to use both of my Gifts at once might break my brain, and I’m almost out of fuel as well.”
