Torn(16)

I looked up at Clarence and shrugged. “You sure you got that incantation right?”

“I did,” he said, bouncing a bit in agitation. “I know I did. Try again. Try again right now.”

“Right.” This time, I went with the next image—the triangle. Again, nothing. “No way,” I said, thinking of Rose and the way Johnson was surely going to freak out completely if I returned to the motel without even a solid lead. “Something’s wrong. You did something wrong.”

“Try the last one,” he said, his voice tight.

I wasn’t expecting anything, but I did what he asked, slapping my hand over the tic-tac-toe board—and getting yanked off my feet by the hard jerk of an invisible thread pulling me down, down, down into the board.

“Clarence!” I called out as I clutched his hand tight. I’d done this twice before, and I still wasn’t used to it. I knew that when I was finished on the other side, I could touch my arm again, and the portal would reopen and Clarence could pull me back. I’d never actually done that, having missed my return journey both times before. But I knew how it worked, and intellectually, I was with the program.

Emotionally, though, I felt all alone and lost in the rush of wind as I moved through dark, swirling mists and thick, velvety blackness.

This was the scariest part. The nothingness. The loneliness. This was where I feared getting stuck, and until I passed through to the other side, I was pretty much a wreck.

In front of me, the darkness began to move. At first, the changes were difficult to discern, but the mist moved as well, and soon I could see the mists mixing with the black, faster and faster, until the mists and the blackness formed a vortex, and I was sucked in, closer and closer, until I was finally thrust through the middle and emerged into a blinding white light.

I blinked and realized I was looking at a huge expanse of sky. I shifted, rolling over, and discovered that I was floating above rocky terrain into which someone had carved buildings. I tried to shift to get a better look, but I couldn’t manage. Not this time.

I was looking—or trying to look—at the place where one of the pieces of the Oris Clef had been stashed. On my last two trips I’d been dumped unceremoniously into the middle of the target location. This time, however, I couldn’t even get a clear view, much less get close. Somehow, the relic was being protected even from me and my super secret decoder skin. And didn’t that suck the big one?

I frowned, trying to find some additional clue. Because if I couldn’t get there through a portal in my arm, I was going to have to use the old-fashioned method of taking a plane. But to where? Buildings carved into rock weren’t common, but they also weren’t rare, and without some idea where exactly the key was, I could be bouncing all over the globe trying to find my vision. Good for frequent flyer miles, not so good for my sanity. Or my sister.

Trouble was, I saw nothing. I was too far above the site, and yet I had no range of motion. Nothing, that was, except for flipping over and looking at the sky again. And since I had no better idea, that was what I did right then. Maybe the sky held a clue. But when I looked, all I saw was a whitewashed blue that shifted to black as the sun set before my eyes.

The stars came out, winking and twinkling, and I lay there, floating on a current of air and thinking that I had never once in all my life seen the stars so clearly. After a while, they didn’t even look like stars anymore. They looked like drawings. Like sketches. And soon all that was left as I looked was a square chunk of space that was filled with what looked like a hand-drawn map of the very stars I’d been watching.

And that, I thought, was weird.

I tried to commit the image to memory, but visual recall was never my strong suit, and before I could even take a second look to bolster the image in my mind, that damn tug was back, as if a giant hook had emerged from my gut, grabbed hold of the skin around my belly button, and pulled me back inside. Hard and fast, and there was Clarence, both hands holding tight to my own, and his face beaded with sweat.

“What?” I asked in alarm. “What happened?”

“Felt like I was losing you a couple of times.”

“I couldn’t get a good view,” I said. “It was like the place was protected or something.”

Clarence ran stubby fingers through his sweaty mass of hair. “So now we know. We’re more careful next time.”

I swallowed. Next time. And there would be no avoiding it. I had to play along because if I didn’t, Rose was dead.

“Could you see anything?”

I told him, trying hard to describe the strange image in the sky and the unusual buildings in the hillside. “They were all carved into the stone,” I said, my eyes closed so I could picture it better. “But one building seemed to emerge from the top. I think I recognized it.”