A Grave Tree (26 page)

Abbey cocked her head. “When I went to your future just now, Simon was working for your company, and nobody, except for Transplanetary and a few other people, were allowed to travel in space. And there seemed to be lots of… accidents. I assumed that was because the new operating system wasn’t as efficient or safe,” she said, thinking of Sylvain’s crash. It was probably best not to mention that right now.

Sylvain listened to her, licking his lips with a wild and wide-eyed look of alarm. Then he raked his hands through his hair repetitively until it fell forward into his eyes in messy shanks. He spun around and walked away from her. “Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear. This is much worse than I thought. Much worse.”

He continued walking and shaking his head, and Abbey sauntered after him, unsure what to say.

Finally he flipped a few strands of his hair behind his ear. “I used my future knowledge to make a few small prudent adjustments, but nothing dramatically different from my intended future path. But it seems that others don’t have the same restraint. My investments and companies have already been hit very hard, and now this. These changes of which you speak affect not only me and my personal wealth, but the wealth of all the people in the new world. Space travel was essential for the acquisition of new resources and the repopulation of our planet. This has to be fixed.”

Abbey found it a bit ironic that they were talking about the future as if it were the past. She wondered if she should tell Sylvain how involved Sandy Ford seemed to be in Coventry’s future. “Sandy saved Mom’s life, right?”

Sylvain’s eyes narrowed. “Sandy had the
appearance
of saving your mother’s life. Why?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean Sandy hit someone with a car who was ostensibly trying to take your mother’s life.”

“Ostensibly?”

“Well… there were some questions. Anyway, it will never be proved one way or the other unless we could go back in time. Your mother believes Sandy saved her life. And that’s neither here nor there. As I was saying, not totally following the rules was okay when there were so few of us and we were careful. There was less likelihood that we would negatively cross each other’s timelines.”

“Is that like crossing the streams?”

Sylvain arched one of his thin silver brows. “What?”

“Never mind,” said Abbey. “What do you mean by crossing each other’s timelines?”

“Because witches have knowledge of their future, they don’t take well to someone changing their timeline, especially if their future becomes worse. Whereas if we stay within our own timelines, a few little careful tweaks generally go unnoticed, and don’t change the future dramatically. Seriously affecting the timeline of another witch generally results in interventions from both parties, and each little change can cause its own little cascade of changes, and eventually the future as we know it, or knew it, is no more. So it’s a rule not to interfere with each other’s timelines, intentionally or otherwise. But it’s evident that some of the witches from Nowhere don’t care about the rules, and it’s causing huge instability.”

“Do you think that’s what caused the split… of the futures?” Abbey said.

Sylvain cocked his head. “Possibly. But whatever split the futures occurred in our present, not in the future, although I suppose that since the time periods are entangled…” He trailed off, and then pursed his lips and continued. “There’s a belief that as the line of zero magnetic declination moves across the center, our abilities and the energy of the points will intensify. The line of zero declination is due to cross through Coventry later this year, so that could have something to do with the split as well.”

Abbey thought of Mark’s talk of zero declination a few days ago. She should start paying more attention to him. She imagined the drawing of the pentagram and Agrippa’s cross they’d created using the maps Dr. Ford had given them, with the stones and docks at the points and the statue of Quinta Francis Merry in the center. Except in the future, the statue wasn’t in the center anymore.

“By the center, you mean the center of the pentagram?”

Sylvain nodded.

Yet the power of the stones and docks appeared to be diminishing, not increasing.

“Why didn’t you tell me my dad is an Alty?” she said, switching tacks since Sylvain suddenly seemed uncharacteristically chatty. “That’s where they went, isn’t it—a parallel universe?”

Sylvain sighed. “Well, yes. That’s where Ian and I think your dad went. Your mother thinks he was actually trying to destroy the points that allow second derivative travel and accidentally ended up traveling instead. We’re not sure if your mother was able to follow or not. She’d need an Alty for that. But the fact that she’s not here suggests that she was successful. There have long been rumors of a second Alty…”

“What do you mean, second derivative travel?” Abbey’s voice had become sharp.

“Travel between universes. Travel to the futures is zero derivative travel—anyone with witch blood can do it, provided they have access to stones and they contain the energy. Travel between the futures is first derivative travel, because only camels can do it. Travel between the universes using the wormhole vertices is second derivative travel, due to its increased complexity and the fact that only Altys can do it. Each derivative of travel has the capacity to increase the rate of rate of change in the universe, which is why the higher derivatives should be used sparingly. Anyway, second derivative travel is two-way travel. Your parents should be able to return.”

Second derivative travel…

The second derivative of displacement was acceleration, the rate of change in velocity. The last twenty-four hours had felt like nothing but acceleration: mind-numbing, neck-breaking acceleration. But acceleration was only the second derivative of displacement.

A sick feeling of probability washed over her. There were five commonly used derivatives of displacement.

“Is there third and fourth derivative travel?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“What are they?” Abbey said.

“Third derivative travel is travel to the past. We expect that, like first and second derivative travel, only certain people can do it.”

“Like people who have spent time in Nowhere and whose future is theoretically the past?”

“That’s what Ian thinks. But it’s never been proven. Nobody has been able to identify any vertices or vectors that mark the locations for travel to the past. They don’t fit the pentagram or the cross. There are some historical riddles that make reference to using the golden mean to find them, but only fragments of them have been preserved, so nobody has been able to figure it out. So at this point, third derivative travel is only hypothetical, I think.”

“And fourth.”

In the gloom of the forest, Sylvain’s deep-set eyes seemed more shadowy than usual, and his expression had grown quite macabre. “According to our historical records—which, as I said, are pretty spotty—fourth derivative travel can only be done by one person, and that person can engage in all four other derivatives of travel as well, which makes them very powerful, and potentially dangerous.”

“Quinta,” said Abbey.

Sylvain’s tone was bleak. “Correct. The only thing we have going for us is that because nobody’s been able to figure out the locations for third derivative travel, any Quinta in recent history inclined to toy with the past hasn’t—to our knowledge—been able to do so.”

The grey stone of a building appeared ahead of them through the trees. The chapel.

A faint hush of reverence washed over Abbey. They’d been walking down a narrow ravine for the last twenty minutes, and the mountains jutted up all around them on four sides. Four-Valley Gap. She’d heard that the lines of the valleys formed a perfect cross with ninety-degree angles.

The rotting timber roof of the chapel was covered in a layer of orange needles, and moss grew up around the bottom edges of the stones, but still it stood, glowing resolutely silver and grey in the dark forest. It was supposedly a sanctuary of an odd sect of monks who had lived in Coventry in the eighteenth century. In the Coventry of Abbey’s time, it was protected as a national heritage site. Even in its run-down condition, it radiated a kind of peace. She closed her eyes for a second, trying to draw in as much of it as possible.

Sylvain was sure her parents would return. She had to hold on to that, and she had to do whatever she could to
ensure
they returned. Damian had suggested that being an Alty was hereditary, which meant that either she or Caleb, or maybe even Simon, might be able to go and retrieve her parents. She just needed to learn as much as possible about this world of witchcraft first.

She turned to Sylvain.

“What’s fourth derivative travel, then?”

Sylvain flashed her a grin, ghastly in its bleakness. “It’s a secret. Only the person who is Quinta or Quentin knows, and they haven’t ever been inclined to tell.”

*****

Mark didn’t know whether to hope that Caleb would agree to stay, or not. If he agreed, Mark wouldn’t be alone with scary Sandy. But if he disagreed, maybe scary Sandy wouldn’t discover, quite so soon, that Mark had lied about what the sign said. Either way he needed to tell Caleb what was going on—about Jake, about the second scary Sandy, and about the turbines—but every time he opened his mouth Sandy pinned him with a smile and the unspoken threat of a jolt of energy.

Caleb removed the leather cap on his head and raked a hand through his hair, which stood on end like flames. One of Caleb’s eyes had twitched a bit when Sandy mentioned Mr. Sinclair and Ms. Beckham, as if he was holding back tears. But that couldn’t be the case. Caleb was like Warrior Mark. He didn’t cry.

“Please, Caleb. You’re interfering with the timeline if you go. You could be endangering yourself,” Sandy said.

“What about Ian, though? He’s up with the other men. I should tell him I’m going.”

A strange sort of smile bloomed on Sandy’s face, making her even scarier than before. “Ian can take care of himself. You do know he’s over a hundred, right? He’s been in and out of Nowhere so many times nobody knows his actual age. Please, Caleb, we’re talking about your parents here. This isn’t your fight. You’ve rescued Mark. Let it go.”

Caleb sucked in a deep breath and nodded. “You’re right. Let’s go. What makes you so sure you’ve found my parents?”

Sandy lit up with a beam so gigantic in its wattage that it terrified Mark (of course terror had seemed to become his dominant emotion since reuniting with his half-sister), and then charged ahead down the path, chittering nonsense (or what Mark perceived to be nonsense, given the speed of her speech and the almost unfocused look in her eyes) about feeling their presence and receiving a text from Ms. Beckham. Caleb was right on her heels, leaving Mark to follow behind them uncertainly.

He contemplated slipping off. But where would he go? And Sandy turned back to fix him with a stern look every few meters. Maybe Caleb would protect him when the lie was discovered, as it soon would be, unless the diversion blew apart and vaporized them all.

He had to find a way to get Caleb alone (which would hopefully eliminate the risk of energy jolts) and tell him what was going on. That Sandy was bad.

Very bad.

The diversion must have held, because they reached the old dam site without incident. Water pooled in the reservoir, creeping farther and farther up the mud-caked sides as they approached. Sandy gave a skip of excitement and ran across the top deck, flinging open the door to one of the outbuildings.

Caleb seemed almost bewitched and followed Sandy as if in a trance, not questioning why she knew her way around an old dam so easily. They entered a room with a bank of windows that overlooked the dam’s sheer cement face. The walls were lined with the switches, dials, and monitors of silent computers, and a giant control panel desk occupied the space below the window.

Mark stared out the window at the expanse of grey cement that led to the dizzying drop below. Sandy had flicked a few switches, and a couple of the computers had hummed to life (the dam probably generated its own electricity). Caleb wandered around the room examining the old computers. Mark’s eyes automatically sought out the outlines of the door with the pentagon on the wall of the dam.

“Wait!” he said. Sandy gave him a look that he knew was frosty even without the benefit of his little yellow cards. “How are we going to get in the door if the spillways are open?”

He wasn’t sure why he was facilitating this. Getting in the door would put Sandy one step closer to knowing that Mark had lied.

Sandy’s smooth brow creased up beneath her bangs. She turned to Caleb. “Mark’s right,” she conceded finally. “You and I are going to have to go down to the room now, and Mark is going to have to open the spillways for us.”

Mark recoiled. “Me?”

“I’ll set it up. All you have to do is flip two switches to open the spillways.”

Mark thought he might have detected a slight shift in Caleb’s eyebrows out of the corner of his eye, but when he flicked his gaze to Caleb, his freckled face was neutral, as if he had experienced no surprise that Sandy knew how to operate a dam.

Mark did a quick risk assessment. Remaining up in the control room would at least mean that he would be away from Sandy when she discovered that the door would not open. As an added bonus, while the spillways were open—at least for a brief period before the reservoir was completely drained again—Sandy would be unable to get out of the room, which meant that Mark could perhaps escape. On the down side, Caleb, whom Mark rather liked—despite the fact that he seemed to be in a trance or under a spell—would be stuck in the room with Sandy.

“Can you do that, Mark?” Sandy’s tone seemed a bit sharper than before.

“Um, uh…” Mark hesitated. The thing about these adventures was that he was required to make all sorts of decisions quickly—decisions he would rather mull over and weigh the pros and cons of for a long period of time.

“Mark, we’re waiting,” Sandy snapped.

Again Mark thought he caught a flit of eyebrow movement on Caleb’s face.