Forbidden (The Seeker Saga, #2) (23 page)

“The more they know, the greater the danger becomes,” Liz began, but I’d heard this before.  I cut her off before she had a chance to go further.

“Look,” I said, “back on the island that type of thinking made sense.  Keep the crystals to ourselves.  Don’t let anybody else know.  Even when we thought Rob would be staying there, and I wanted to tell him about them… it was prudent, in a way, to keep them a secret.  But, not anymore.  Both Rob and John are in danger because they’re involved with us.  That danger doesn’t come from knowing about the crystals.  It comes from
being around us
.”

“They have both proved they can be trusted,” Madison said slowly.  She looked up at me from the couch, and I saw the conflict on her face.  She trusted me. She had told me her greatest secret. But she had grown up with Liz.  I doubted the girl had ever disagreed with Liz on anything before.  Could this be the first?  “Maybe Tracy is right.  Maybe telling them would make things better.  At least, we could speak freely about the crystals then.  Maybe they can even help us figure something out!”

“Like what?” Liz spat.  “It’s not like they can use the crystals!  Neither of them has the experience we have.  I don’t see what good can possibly come out of them knowing.  All I see is an increased risk of danger!” 

“Liz, you’re being stubborn,” Eve said.

“I am not!” Liz exploded.  “I’ve risked everything keeping it like this.  Keeping the crystals to us.  This is how it has to be!”

“Not anymore,” Madison pointed out from the couch.  She pushed herself up and stood beside me.  “Liz, I think they’re right.  These are different circumstances.  We have to adapt.”

“Madison, you’re with them?” Liz looked shocked—betrayed, even.

“It makes sense,” Madison admitted shyly, glancing at her feet.  For a second, she looked very much the young girl she had revealed herself to be.  Then her eyes shot up, and she met Liz’s gaze again.  There was no meekness left.  “Just
why
don’t you think it’s a good idea?” she demanded.

“It’s too dangerous!” Liz threw her hands in the air.

Eve laughed.  “Dangerous?  Danger comes from the people coming after us.  Danger comes from the attacker in the night.  A knife in the dark.  Danger comes from
those people
, not from our friends, not from people we can
trust
.  And the truth is this: the people who are dangerous to us
already know about the crystals
!  John is spending his money on us without a single question.  He left his job for us.  Rob ran away from school for us.  How can you still think we can’t trust people like that?”

Ashley frowned.  For a second, she looked conflicted.  But then she sighed, and stepped away from Liz.  “Sometimes, you have to take a leap of faith,” she muttered, coming to our side.  She glanced back at Liz.  “They’re right, I think.”

Liz glared at me, then at Eve, and, finally, at Madison.  The look she gave us was enough to crack boulders.  She glared at Ashley worst of all.  Her mouth worked silently, and she clenched and unclenched her fists.  Then, just when I thought she would explode, she… sighed.

“You’re probably right,” she grumbled, unhappily.  “I guess… I was just being stubborn.  I was afraid we’d get hurt if more people knew.  That’s why secrecy was so important at first.  But look at us now.”  She barked a laugh.  “This is by far the worst thing we could have expected.  Chased by anonymous attackers.  Threatened for our lives.  And we don’t even know the real reason why.”

She came over to us, and we surrounded her in a hug.  “John and Rob are reliable,” I assured her.  “They’ll be able to help.”

“If they don’t think we’re totally crazy when we tell them,” she mused.

With that settled, all we could do was wait for the guys to return.  We had no phones, no internet, so there was nothing we could look up about the professor we had to meet.  While we waited, I asked Liz for the abstract of the report about the crystals again.  But no matter how many times I read it, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

There was a TV in the room. We had time to kill, but there was little of interest on in the morning hours.  So, we just kind of just lounged in the hotel room, waiting for Rob or John.  They had been gone much longer than I expected.  Hours started to creep by. With each hour, doubt grew in my mind.  What if we were wrong about all this?  What if Arthur Eliot wasn’t the one who knew about the crystals?  And if he was the right man, what if he wouldn’t talk to us?  That was entirely plausible.  We had come here on a whim – a whim necessitated by the people chasing after us, but a whim nonetheless.. When we decided to leave Traven Island, we hadn’t really thought of what we’d do if this turned out to be a dead end.  The Harvard Professor was the only lead we had.

The front door burst open with a bang.  I whipped my head at the sound and found Rob gleaming in the doorway.

“We found him!” he announced triumphantly.  He had a huge grin on his face.  “He’s a professor of philosophy here.  He teaches in Emerson Hall.”

“And he has office hours today at five,” John said, coming in from behind on crutches.  “That’s only a few hours away.  We can go meet him there. Or…” he hesitated, “…you can go without us.  Neither Rob nor I know why you consider him so important.”

“Actually…” I began.  We decided I’d be the one to tell them everything, since I was the one who had wanted to do it from the start.  “Actually, we want you to come.  There’s more to all this than what we’ve told you.”

“What do you mean?” John asked.  His eyes narrowed suspiciously.  Rob looked at me blankly.  Liz was staring out the window, clearly avoiding John’s eye.

“Close the door. We’ll tell you,” Eve said.

“Alright…” Rob said uncertainly.  He closed and locked the door. John hobbled over to the table.  “This sounds pretty serious,” he noted.  “What’s going on?”

“Well… this is going to sound crazy,” I sighed.  “Okay.  There are these… crystals.  We found them on Traven Island.  Actually, the other girls found them way before I got there.  But the crystals are the reason all these people are coming after us.”

John frowned.  “Are they very valuable?” he asked.  “Did you steal them?”

“No!” Liz cried out.  I turned to look at her, and she shyly looked away. “Keep going,” she told me.

“They’re valuable…” I said, “…but not in the way you think.”

“What do you mean?” Rob asked.

I sighed again.  This was harder than anticipated.  “The crystals… they’re not plain rocks.  They give us—” I motioned with my hand around the room, “—special
abilities
.”

“Special abilities?”  Rob snorted.  “What? Like in the movies?  This is a joke, right?”

“No joke,” I said seriously.  I pulled the leather cord from around my neck to show them the crystal that hung from it.  “This is one of them.  This one’s mine.  We all have them.  What they do… well, it’s hard to explain.  They… allow us to open our minds.  We can use them, in a way, and when we do…” I trailed off helplessly.  “Jesus, this sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”

“Your minds become more in tune with your surroundings,” Madison piped in.  She looked at me and smiled.  “When we use the crystals, we can connect ourselves to the world around us.  Everything becomes much clearer.  Imagine you have on somebody else’s glasses.  Everything you see becomes foggy and blurry.  But when you take them off, things come into focus.  It’s like that with the crystals.  Except what we see
without them
– what you think of as clean and clear – is the blurry part.  With the crystals, we can… sense… everything about, well,
everything
.  Everything around us.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like it!” John said.  “You’re not joking, though.  What do you mean,
use
the crystals?”

“When one of us touches her crystal,” Ashley said, “we can form a link to it.  With our minds.  It’s… tricky to explain, I know,” she glanced at me sympathetically, “but it’s something we just
do
. You know?  I can’t describe it any better.  Not to someone who can’t do it.  It’s like a bird trying to teach a fish to fly.”

“What do you mean, someone who
can’t?
” Rob asked.  “If
you
can do it, why can’t
I
?  Why can’t
John
?”

“Only
some
people can do it,” Eve emphasized as if it were the simplest thing in the world.  “And only females.  That’s just the way it is.  None of us knows why.”

“We’re the only ones on Traven Island who can do it,” I said.  “All of us feel a… a
pull
… to the crystals.  A longing.  Like… kind of like if you’re missing home when you’ve been gone for a while.”

“So let me get this straight,” John said.  He looked directly at Liz.  “You guys found these crystals, these
rocks
, and you can link your minds to them?  Just like that?  What happens when you do it?”

“We become hyper-aware of our surroundings,” I explained.  “Acutely so.  It feels like our minds go into overdrive.”

“What do you mean?” Rob asked.

“Like, reality slows down for us.  At least, our
perception
of reality slows down.  Time grinds to a halt.  We think it’s because our brains start working so fast.”

“And then what?” John asked.  “You said they give you…
special abilities
?”  He put particular emphasis on that to show his incredulity.

“Yes,” Eve said.  “I’d call us crazy if I were you, too.  But with the crystals activated, we sense things about the world.  There are these… connections… that exist between everything.  The crystals make them apparent to us.  And we can manipulate those connections, in a way.  Except…” she paused, looking at me, “…except, only Tracy has the strength to actually
do
anything about it.  The rest of us can only
feel
the connections. We can’t shift them or move them or anything.”

“Connections?” Rob asked.  “What? Like energy or something?”

“Yes, exactly!” I exclaimed.  “That’s exactly what it is!  Or, at least, that’s what it feels like.  It’s like the inherent energy that exists within everything in this world.  We – I – can redistribute some of that energy when I’m linked up to the crystal.  Ashley knows some more about the theory behind it.”

“I mean, I’ve puzzled out some things,” she said.  “I think the connections that the crystals open our minds to are linked back to the beginning of time.  Back to the big bang, or the origin, whatever you believe in.  Back when everything in this world and in this universe was created.  All the matter around us came from one initial source, and with the crystals, we’re able to
sense
some of that essence.”  She shrugged.  “But that’s mostly theoretical.”

“And this professor you had us seek out,” John said, “he knows more about it?”

“We hope,” I said.      

“You also notice things when you link your mind to the crystals,” Madison added.  “Tiny things.  Like, if I do it, I can feel every thread of fabric in this chair, every molecule that makes it up.  I know very infinitesimal part of everything around me clearly in my mind.”

“And that’s not overwhelming?” John asked.  We had his rapt attention now, I could tell.  “How do your minds cope with all that information?”

“We don’t think it happens consciously,” Liz said.  She seemed only to speak when John asked something.  “We think what happens is that your mind filters out most of it, except the most relevant things.”

“It’s like at a party,” Madison exclaimed.  “You know, when there’s noise all around you, you filter all of it out.  Things go in one ear and out the other.  But if somebody calls your name, even from across the room, you instantly pick up on it.”

John nodded in agreement.  “I’ve experienced that before.  But who found the crystals in the first place?”

“I did,” Liz said.  “On the island.  In the caves down below.  When I just got to Oliver Academy my first year, I went exploring.  I found these ancient runes inscribed into a cave wall.  They led me to the crystals.  But…” she bit her lip, hesitating.

“Go on,” I urged.

“Alright.”  She nodded.  “We’re in this together.  John, remember the night you talked about, when Tracy and I both came to the clinic?”

John nodded.  “Everybody knew about it.”

“But nobody knew what happened, did they?”

“No,” he said.

“Well, here’s what happened.  Chris – Professor Rosenberg’s son – tricked me into coming down to a part of the caves I haven’t been before.  And when I got down there, he trapped me, demanding that Tracy come.  He threatened me with a knife.  I was useless to him except as bait to lure her down.”

“What did he want with Tracy?” Rob asked.

“We don’t know,” Liz continued.  “But she’s the only one who could manipulate the connections the crystals link our minds to.  Somehow, we think Chris knew that.”