The Shimmers in the Night (10 page)

“That's all you got?” asked Hayley. “We're
supposed
to? That's messed
up
. It makes me feel queasy.”

“Look,” said Jaye, in a grim tone.

She was pointing at the refrigerator door.

At the small window in the door, glass white with steam. It seemed to be
melting
—melting and trailing in grayish lumps down the metal.

Cara watched a stream of it race down the door's inside. It hissed and sizzled like drops of water hitting a hot stove.

“Hold my arms,” she said, and stood.

She was above the open book that had turned into a window. She still had the wet cloth on her hands.

“Grab my arms!' she urged, when her friends didn't move.
“Now.”

She felt them clutching her upper arms (even
that
hurt her hands as they moved against the rough cloth of the towel), but she squeezed her eyes shut and raised one foot and stepped forward into nothingness.

It was like falling. No: it
was
falling. Her stomach flipped, and she wanted to yell in terror: she was stepping off a ledge into thin air—down, down, with no idea how it would end.

Then it did. Her feet made contact with a solid, flat surface: she was hitting the ground. She held her hands up reflexively, held them out and fell onto her elbows instead; that hurt, too. But not anything like as badly as the burns.

They were on an expanse of dried-out, brown grass. Strewn through the grass were the white smudges of cigarette butts, dirty Styrofoam cups, and crushed soda cans in the tangle of weeds. In front of them was a high, chain-link fence with razor wire curling on top; behind it was the massive power plant.

Wherever they were, it wasn't Narnia.

But they were safe from the Burners, anyway. At least for now.

She sat up. Hayley groaned beside her, and Jaye kicked at Cara's shin by mistake, struggling to get upright.

Off to their left there were what looked like low, black hills—piles of powdered coal, Cara realized—along with a big A-frame building made of metal. There were long chutes going up and down between buildings farther off, and a row of freight cars sitting on a railroad track. Off to the right was a row of tall lights, which shone brightly over water that glittered in large, square ponds with banks of cement.

“That was amazing!” squeaked Jaye, breathless. “I can't believe that—that happened to me! Is it—Cara, seriously—is it
magic?
Is that what it is?”

“I don't know,” said Cara honestly. “I don't know how it works.”

“What matters is we're in the middle of nowhere,” said Hayley, brushing dirt off her clothes as she stood up.

“Or at least, at a coal-fired power plant,” amended Jaye. “In the middle of nowhere.”

Cara looked up at the fence with its sharp wire.

“Would have been nice,” she admitted, “if the book had put us
inside
that.”

The
book
, she thought, and looked around in a panic.

And there it was, on the ground behind them. Looking like nothing special—just a big, flat book with a dark cover.

Hopefully they could use it again, thought Cara. To get back.

“This place is huge,” said Hayley. “How are we supposed to find your mom in there? It's the size of, like, a small city.”

“One step at a time. We just have to trust the flow,” said Cara.

“Rad,” said Hayley. “Next you'll be telling me what color my aura is.”

“I mean the flow of events—like we have to take it one step at a time,” said Cara. “First we need to find an opening in the fence. Because even if we
could
make it over the razors, I can't climb with my hands like this. Can one of you guys carry the book again?”

Jaye leaned down to pick it up.

Left or right? Cara didn't know. She touched the nazar again, her hands still shaky though the pain was starting to ebb a little, and tried to ask it for a picture, but all she got was a faint urge to go left instead of right. In fact, she couldn't tell if the urge was something she was making up or something that was real. But nothing more definite occurred to her, so she decided she might as well go with it.

“This way,” she said, trying to sound confident.

They skirted the chain-link fence in the dark. Hayley was right: it was uncomfortable not to know where they were. They could be anywhere—anywhere it was fall right now, anyway, anywhere that had power plants—and that gave Cara an unmoored feeling, as though the place was only half-there. The night world was huge, and somewhere in that darkness, cut loose from everything they knew and everyone who knew them, she and her two best friends crept over the surface as tiny as ants.

If Jax were with them, she thought, he'd use his GPS in a way she could never use hers. (Jax could do things with his phone she didn't hope to understand.) He'd tell her right away how far it was to the nearest bus stop, the nearest gas station or all-night diner. Probably even the nearest bathroom.

And if Max were here, he'd make a joke or two and she wouldn't have to feel like success or failure was all on her. Her friends were here, and they were great, but she'd brought them into this and it would be her fault if anything happened to them.

She realized she was truly relieved it was her hands that had got burned, not anyone else's.

“Look!” said Jaye. “There!”

Sure enough, the fence was ripped; part of it had been pried away from one of the metal posts that connected its sections, and there was a long, thin triangular opening.

“So much for Homeland Security,” said Hayley, whose mother was almost as interested in terrorists as she was in kidnappers and perverts. “Someone could just walk in and plant a bomb or whatever. We could be Al Qaeda. The nation is, like, completely lucky it's just us.”

They bent down, Jaye holding the book sideways, and one by one they ducked through.

“Are there guards?” asked Jaye, and answered her own question. “There have to be guards. And cameras and all that. If they catch us, they'll definitely not let us in.”

They saw the long, bright stripe of a searchlight slowly sweeping the ground around the outside of the main building, originating from somewhere up on the roof. It disappeared at the far end of the complex, to their right, and then rotated around and started up again at the left.

“I don't know if we can stay hidden,” said Cara. “I think that light moves faster than we can.”

“We'll have to try to outrun it,” said Jaye. “What else can we do?”

“Just don't drop that book thing, Jaye,” warned Hayley. “I really don't want to get stuck here.”

Cara watched the beam scope across the lake of cement stretching before them.

“We wait till the leading end of the light passes us, then make a dash for it,” she decided. “And cross our fingers we get to the building before it starts up again. Let's aim for that double door, OK?”

She raised an aching hand and pointed.

As they waited for the searchlight to finish its circuit and begin again, she closed her eyes and touched the ring.
Where is she?
she thought.
Where in the power plant? Where? Where?

And then she saw something: pipes stretching across a floor, with a grid of wooden slats beneath them. Something clouding the air. But Hayley's voice interrupted.

“Go! Now!”

Her friends were already running, and the beam was moving off to her right. The vision had only seemed to last a second, but she must have been standing there for longer without being aware of time passing…. She sprinted after them, arms rigid at her side to keep her hands from flopping around more than they had to. She could feel the blood throbbing in her fingers, making her more conscious of the soreness.
Just get to the doors
, she told herself,
just make it to the doors, and then we'll be out of the searchlight's scope….

She was catching up to Jaye, she realized, who was running a little slower than Hayley since she had the book under one arm; over the hard ground, first on dried grass, then on concrete. She was dimly aware of some machinery off to the left, more chutes or silos or something, silent and angular in one corner of the lot; then the doors loomed.

“It's coming around again!” yelled Jaye, and they picked up their pace and then jerked to a stop to avoid slamming against the wall of the building. A bright white light glared over their heads, then left them in the dark again. Or not quite dark—there were other lights on the building itself—but Cara didn't see anyone around who might notice them.

They stood panting, Cara's hands trembling again and tears standing on the rims of her eyes, whether from the force of the air as she ran or from the pain in her hands she couldn't quite figure out.

“Made it,” breathed Hayley.

“So far so good,” said Jaye, and Cara contented herself with a brief nod as she tried to still the shaking.

They listened, expecting the sound of an alarm to pierce the night, but none came. Cara focused again on what she'd seen: an empty room. Pipes. Water spraying from them onto a wooden lattice below.

“Jaye,” she said when she caught her breath. “Do you know anything about the inside of places like this?”

Jaye shook her head.

“My dad took me to a plant once,” she said. “That old one in Sandwich, right before the bridge. But I was really little. Why?”

“I think my mother's in a room with water,” said Cara.

“There's lots of water in power plants,” said Jaye. “That could be anywhere.”

“Water is spraying down,” said Cara. “All these little nozzles are coming out of pipes, and water is spraying down from them. Then, beneath that, there was a kind of wooden grid….”

“I'm thinking,” frowned Jaye. “But it was so long ago. I'm
trying
to remember….”

“It sounds like a cooling tower,” said Hayley suddenly.

Both of them looked at her, surprised.

“A cooling tower?” asked Cara.

“Yeah, how those things look inside,” said Hayley, and pointed in the direction of the two hourglass-curved giants that hulked over the complex. They had to be hundreds of feet tall, Cara thought. “My mom had this boyfriend last year who was a lineman for NStar—”

“You never told me about that,” said Cara reflexively.

“Yeah, well, it lasted ten seconds. Anyway, he was a lineman and really macho and proud of it. One time he tried to do the bonding-with-the-kid thing, hunkered down at my computer and made me take a virtual tour. It was wicked boring. Not the Canal plant—it was one on the mainland. Those towers are basically empty except for the water that gets sprayed at the bottom. The big white clouds coming out are called plumes.”

Would the Burners keep her mother in a
cool
place? Cara wondered. A place with water, where they apparently couldn't go?

“It's really cool you knew that, Hay,” she said.

“Whatever. The guy like basically
forced
me to do this uber-boring tour.”

But even in the meager half-light cast across her friend's face, Cara could tell Hayley was pleased by the compliment.

“Then let's bounce,” said Jaye.

Hugging the wall of the building, they moved toward the massive towers, which were sometimes visible if they craned their necks and sometimes out of view. Jaye went first, and then Hayley and Cara. There was a hum coming from inside the building—what Cara guessed was the hum of power being generated. But other than that they heard only the soft noises of their footsteps, the brush of their clothes against the wall.

Abruptly, Cara had a sense of discomfort. It seemed to come from nowhere and grow quickly. She kept moving, but as she moved she touched the ring again.
Is there a danger here?
she thought, and blinked her eyes quickly. She couldn't afford to stand still or lose time.

But she saw nothing.

Try again.

What is the danger to us here?

Again she blinked. And this time she did see—for a moment.

It was one of the cooling towers, and outside it there were people standing. Encircling the base in a human chain—a ring of them looking outward, guarding like toy soldiers with their hands clasped in front of them and their feet splayed. They weren't Burners, or if they were, they were nothing like the bland man from the subway train with his army of clones. They looked like regular people, almost relaxed except for the fact that they all stood the same way. Not security guards, though, because as far as she could tell they weren't wearing uniforms. And because…

Because some of them were kids. Some of them were children. Children of different ages.

Just as she realized that the picture vanished.

“Stop.
Stop
,” she hissed to Hayley and Jaye.

They were about to round the corner of the building, and it was possible they would be in view.

Both of them froze.

She leaned a shoulder against the wall to steady herself.

“Wait a minute,” she whispered, and closed her eyes again.

Yes. There were children, along with women and men. Some of the kids looked even younger than Jax, while some were older than she was. They were dressed as any kids might be, and yet there was something abnormal about them.

It was the eyes. The eyes…their pupils were like Jax's. They were large and blacker than black, not convex but so concave that it seemed they had no bottom. They were empty; the eyes seemed to have holes in them, holes of an endless depth.