Broken Pixels (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 4) (3 page)

The man turned on his heel and returned to the gate, muttering, “No problem at all.”

Sam sat back and closed his window.

As the barrier arm rose in front of the car, Mara said, “You know, I’m beginning to think being a prompter might be better than all this progenitor stuff I’ve got to deal with.”

She drove into the garage and followed the signs pointing to level P2. After executing two tight turns on narrow ramps leading deeper underground, she pulled up to a yellow curb next to a wide sidewalk, along a concrete wall running the length of the garage and featuring doors spaced about thirty feet apart—the storage rooms. Mara cut the car’s ignition, opened her window and leaned out.

“Okay, that’s the elevator alcove back there,” she said, looking behind them. Pointing to the second door from that direction, she added, “That’s the room he was in on Friday, before all the dragon business started up. Let’s go.”

Ping exited his car door and stood. Over the hood, he said to Mara, “Those doors have a keypad lock. I assume you know the code to get in.”

“Not exactly,” she said. She peered at Sam. “Bring my book bag.”

“Do I look like a bellhop or something?” he said. Mara made a move to open the back door. He raised a hand and grinned at her. “Just yanking your chain, sis. Mellow out. I’ll get it.”

The garage seemed more foreboding at night. A pinkish light cast weak shadows on the concrete walls and asphalt surface. Footsteps and squealing tires echoed from the level above, but Mara couldn’t detect any sound or movement from here, the lowest level of the garage. She heard only their own footfalls as they approached the storage room door. When they stopped in front of it, Sam handed the book bag to her, but she shook her head.

“Don’t you need your tools? I figured, without the code, you could probably take apart the keypad and hot-wire it or something,” Sam said.

“I suppose if I had an hour or two to figure it out, that might work,” she said. “Just hold on to the bag. I want you and Ping to lean against the wall on either side of the door and keep an eye on things behind me. I’m doing something a little different here.”

Sam glanced over to Ping, as if he might know what Mara was up to, but he simply shrugged and leaned his backside against the wall on the left side of the door. Sam said, “Okay,” and slouched on the right side.

Standing directly before the door, Mara cupped her right hand in front of the doorknob and narrowed her eyes in concentration. Her fingers loosened and extended slightly as if she expected a ball to land in her palm.

Sam looked up from her hand and frowned. “What are you trying to do?”

“Shut up,” she said through tight lips.

Her fingers flexed again. The doorknob blurred.

“She’s pixelating it,” Sam said.

“Shush.”

Mara’s eyes tightened into a squint, and her fingers opened. The doorknob vanished in a flash of light. A second burst of brilliant white appeared above her hand. When it receded, two doorknobs bridged by a complete locking mechanism sat in her palm. The weight of it pulled Mara’s arm downward, so she relaxed her arm and let it drop to her side.

Sam pointed to the round hole in the door and said, “Cool. You popped the whole thing from the door.”

Ping looked impressed. “The element of Space, but you didn’t have to exchange one object for another. When were you aware that you had developed this ability?”

Handing the doorknobs and locking mechanism to her brother, Mara pulled open the door. “That’s the first time I’ve done it intentionally. It happened spontaneously during the battle with the dragon, and I’ve been wondering if I could do it when I’m not freaked out.”

“It appears so,” Ping said. “Why not just pixelate the lock? Make it go away?”

“I’m hoping we can get in and out of here without looking like a felony has been committed. With any luck I can replace the mechanism before we leave. If we simply break in, that might draw more attention, if the feds come snooping around,” she said, stepping into the storage room.

She remembered the light switch was on the far side of the room and slowly walked forward with her arms extended. After several steps, her thigh grazed the gurney, and her hip rubbed against what felt like a hand. She found the switch and flipped it. Her gaze locked on the decapitated body on the gurney. Her phone vibrated in her pocket.

Taking it out, she saw an opened message from Cam, the first she’d received since Friday. She tapped it, and the message displayed
Hurry
.

For a second Mara froze. Blankly she looked at Ping, who remained in the doorway of the concrete-walled storage room next to Sam. Still standing behind the gurney, she extended her arm over the body and held out the phone, so they could see the screen.

“Is that a text message from Cam?” Ping asked.

Mara nodded. “But I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in a hurry. Get him out of here? Repair him? He hasn’t called, and he’s got no head to talk to this time.”

Sam pointed to the body and said, “Hit Reply and ask him.”

“Duh.” Mara rolled her eyes and typed on the screen
What do you need me to do? I will do my best to hurry
. She hit Send.

She stared at the headless body on the gurney and hefted the phone in her hand as if the motion would speed a response. After a moment the phone vibrated again. On the screen the message read
Return to Repository 97210. Hurry
. She read it aloud, then glanced at Ping and asked, “Repository?”

Ping shook his head. “Some manner of storage facility? Since he is asking to be returned to it, he’s not referencing this storage room.” Glancing at the phone, he said, “Ask him.”

Mara typed on her phone
Repository?

After another short wait, the phone vibrated again. Mara read the response.
Cameron Lee, Receptacle 7531-12-7250. Return to Repository 97210. Hurry
. She frowned and said, “That’s not very much help.”

She typed on her phone
What repository are you referring to?
and hit Send.

Ping was about to say something when the phone vibrated again. She looked at the screen and said, “It’s the same message again, repeated verbatim. It looks like it could be some kind of automated error message. Maybe Cam set it up to ping my Wi-Fi signal, and, when I got close enough, my phone received it.”

“Why didn’t he just call again?” Sam asked.

“Maybe he couldn’t. Before his head was taken, he was concerned about the weakness of the signal between his head and torso. He said it would eventually degrade to the point that he would have the personality of a toaster. It looks like he might be there, if all he can do is send the same message over and over. Maybe I can do something to help him, make some repair to his body that will enable him to give us a little more information. Where are my tools?”

Sam held up the book bag. “Your pack mule, at your service.”

As she reached for the bag, her phone rang. Her heart jumped, thinking that Cam might have found a way to communicate, but, when she glanced at the tiny screen, it read
Bohannon
.
She held up a finger, then used it to tap the screen.

“Hello, detective,” she said.

Concern in his voice, Bohannon said, “Where are you right now?”

“We’re in the storage room at the hospital. As soon as I got into the room, Cam sent me a—”

“You’ve got to get out of there. I just found out that Pirelli and his folks are at the hospital right now, meeting with some of the administrators. They will probably show up down there any minute.”

“Hold on,” Mara said. She looked at Ping and Sam and said, “Come in here and close the door.”

In the distance, a muffled
ping
ing sound bounced off the concrete walls in the cavernous parking garage. Sam leaned out the door, looked over his shoulder and said, “Someone is coming in the elevator.”

“Shut the door,” Mara said. She pointed to the locking mechanism in Sam’s hand and said, “Hold that up for a minute.” Mara narrowed her eyes at it, and it disappeared in a flash of light. A moment later, light shot through the hole in the door, and the mechanism appeared, mounted properly where it belonged. Sam pushed the door closed until it clicked.

“Presumably someone with the access code will be escorting Pirelli here,” Ping said.

A look of panic swept over Mara’s face, but it was quickly replaced by determination. She held out her hand, and a bolt of lightning shot from her palm, striking the doorknob next to Sam’s hip.

He jumped and yelled, “Hey! Watch it with that!”

Mara nodded toward the door and said to him, “Check to see if it’s jammed, just to make sure.”

Sam looked at the smoking doorknob and said, “I’m not touching that. It’s melted metal. We’ll just have to take our chances.”

Bohannon shouted through the phone, “What’s going on?”

Mara put the phone to her ear. “We’re not sure. Someone came down in the elevator, and we’re locked in the storage room with Cam’s body. It’s probably just an employee getting to their car in the garage.”

“You guys need to leave. If Pirelli sees one of you near that robot, he’ll probably hold you for questioning or maybe for a whole lot more than that. There won’t be any lenient judges or technicalities to bail you out this time.”

“Okay,” Mara said. “I’ll call you later when we’re not in hiding.”

“Just don’t let him see you with the robot,” Bohannon said, as Mara tapped the End icon on the phone.

She walked around the gurney and toward the door, where Sam and Ping stood with their ears to it. Sidling up to them, she listened as footfalls echoed in the garage. The noise seemed to move from the elevator, past the storage room door and fade away in some distant corner of the garage. All three of them exhaled and straightened. Mara walked back to the gurney.

“Let’s just roll him to my car. Maybe we can take him to Ping’s warehouse. That way, I can work on him, and we can figure out how to better communicate without having to worry about the feds. You guys think that will work?”

Four distinct beeps came through the wall next to the door, followed by a rattle of the doorknob. Sam and Ping jumped, then slinked over to stand next to Mara, who was frozen with a painful grimace on her face as she eyed the doorknob. It didn’t turn. After another rattle, three pounding knocks reverberated from the door and bounced off the concrete walls of the storage room.

Mara held her breath and listened.

Muffled, outside the door, a man’s voice said, “The code she gave me doesn’t work. Let’s go back and get her to come down here with us.”

The footsteps faded away, followed by the
ping
of the elevator doors.

“We need to hurry,” Mara said. She grabbed one end of the gurney and swung it around so the other end faced the door.

Ping raised a hand. “Perhaps there’s another option that would be more efficient and effective in this circumstance.”

“What?” Mara asked.

“I was going to discuss this possibility after we left here, but, given the circumstances, you might want to consider it immediately.”

“What? What?!” Mara said. “We don’t have time for a strategy session.”

Ping pointed to the gurney and said, “I’m thinking this repository that Cam referenced is likely to be in his own realm, perhaps where he needs us to take him in order to save him. Certainly there is no such place in this realm.”

Mara looked suspicious but said, “That makes sense, I guess. Go on.”

“Instead of taking the chance of getting caught pushing a headless body on a gurney through the garage and then deciding we need to take him to his home, why don’t we just return him to his realm now, from here? You said you have the Chronicle in the book bag.”

Sam lifted the bag and unzipped it.

Mara shook her head. “Jeez, Ping. I don’t know. One minute you are telling me to take some time to think things through, and now you are saying
pop into another realm
on a whim.”

“It’s not a whim, Mara. Remember the haiku,
Continuity now travels through other realms. Therefore, so must you
. You wondered the other night to which realm should you book a ticket. Here’s your answer. You said the Aphotis may have used Cam’s head as a guide to his realm. Circumstances and Cam’s body are pointing us in that direction. It seems logical to use the Chronicle and go there.”

“Okay, okay, stop piling on with the facts. The least I can do is take Cam home, considering how much he helped us when we needed it. But that doesn’t mean you and Sam need to go. I can do this alone,” she said.

Four beeps emitted from the wall next to the door again, followed by a shake of the doorknob.

“You’re not just going to jump into your bubble and leave us to deal with the feds,” Sam whispered. “We’re going.”

“Mom would have a cow if she knew I took you into another realm. Remember how mad she was when I crossed over to Prado’s realm?”

From outside the door, a woman’s voice said, “It appears to be jammed. I’ll call maintenance. Wait here. Be right back.”

Sam said, “She would have never known if you hadn’t told her.”

Ping interjected, “Sam is correct. The last time you used the Chronicle, you were only gone for a few minutes, even though, to you, it seemed much longer. It’s possible that only a few minutes will pass while we are gone.”

Mara locked gazes with Ping. “Are you sure you want to do this? I could send you guys to the warehouse instead of taking you with me.”

“I think it would be wise for you to take me. The haiku says you must travel through realms—plural. That means there may be more than one leg on this journey, and I suspect that is not something you will want to do alone.”

A loud scraping sound came from the door. Through the crack between the door and the frame, some tool was wedged in from the opposite side. Three loud pounding noises shook the door and sent dust cascading down the concrete walls.

Mara cringed. “More than one leg on this journey? What does that mean?”

The pounding intensified, and loud metallic groans came from the door frame.