The Gossamer Crown: Book One of The Gossamer Sphere (9 page)

London

Kevin hadn’t had time to play tourist the last time he’d been here, but he knew about the international cruise port, and when the cabbie had asked where they were going, it was the only destination that popped into his head.  After sitting next to the malodorous Zach for the last twenty minutes, however, he changed his mind.

“Sir?” he asked in his borrowed accent. “Isn’t there a shopping center near the cruise terminal?”

“There is.”

“Would you drop us there instead?”

“Anything you say, mate.  Mind if I turn on the radio?  Last I heard, the Chunnel’s been closed.  Leaks, you know, from all these blasted little earthquakes popping up in strange places, now that the whole world’s gone anti-clockwise.”

“Sure,” Kevin said, wondering what a ‘chunnel’ was.

The cabbie turned on his radio and tuned it to a news station.  Len had mentioned something about volcanoes, and now Kevin and the others were treated to a sobering account of just how bad it really was.

The female announcer said, “Normally, tectonic plate movement over the course of a year is measured in centimeters, but geologists say the latest satellite measurements of the Pacific Plate show that it has moved almost a meter in the last week alone.  Earthquakes have literally been too numerous to count, but there have been more than seventy volcanic eruptions along the ring of fire in the last twenty-four hours, more than would normally occur in a month, with hundreds more volcanoes showing signs of activity.  Now word has come in that even volcanoes considered long extinct are reawakening.  Authorities in the U.S., Canada, the Philippines, Mexico, Indonesia – indeed, most of the affected countries – are calling for mass evacuation in some coastal areas.  Ash clouds are interfering with air travel and causing health hazards.  Damage has been immeasurable, with whole towns lost, and the death toll–”

The cabbie switched the channel then, muttering something about finding local news.  Kevin met Zach’s eyes and then Lizbeth’s.  As Caitlin had warned, the situation was getting worse.  He set his jaw, grimly determined to find a way to help, with or without Caitlin.

Not long after, the cabbie announced that they’d reached the shopping center.  “I’ll drop you here on the pavement.”

The building that housed the mall had a tall, windowed central structure over the front entrance.  As soon as Kevin paid the driver and they exited the cab, Lizbeth asked, “Why did you tell him to come here?”

“Where else are we going to go?” Kevin asked.  “At least we can buy what we need now that our luggage is gone.”

Lizbeth made a beeline for a door on the left, framed with the familiar golden arches of a McDonalds.  Once they’d eaten, they wandered into the indoor mall.  The store names were mostly unfamiliar.  Kevin pointed to what looked like a department store, a place called Marks & Spencer.

As soon as they stepped inside, a saleswoman approached.

“May I help you?”

“Um, pants?” Zach said.

“Blokes or ladies?”

“For me.”

She led the way up the aisle and after a few turns, pointed to the men’s underwear section.  Zach started to correct her, but Kevin interrupted with a quick, “Thanks.”

After the saleswoman was out of earshot, he said, “Things are different here, dude.  ‘Pants’ probably means ‘underpants.’  Besides, I’m guessing you could use a fresh set of drawers.”

They selected socks and underwear for Zach, and after a short discussion, decided each of them needed a new shirt.  The police would have confiscated their luggage; therefore any description of the three fugitives released to the media would include their current attire.  As Kevin was making the purchase with the stolen cash, Lizbeth took off.  She returned moments later to set a stick of deodorant on the counter.  She and Kevin changed into their shirts and waited on a wooden bench while Zach escaped to the men’s room to wash up in the sink and change.

Kevin watched her face as a wet-haired, fresh-smelling Zach emerged in his new blue, long-sleeved shirt, appearing confident and, not that Kevin spent a lot of time evaluating other guys’ looks, handsome.  There was a softness around Lizbeth’s eyes when she looked at Zach that reinforced Kevin’s suspicion that something was developing between his two companions.

Zach said, “I guess we should look for a hotel and hide out until Caitlin finds us.”

“How?” Lizbeth asked.  “Hotels need I.D. and credit cards, right?”

Kevin thought back to the beginning of summer, when he’d first arrived.  He’d spent less than twenty-four hours in England before he’d boarded the drilling vessel.  Dr. Weinstein had checked into the hotel for them, so he had no frame of reference to offer advice.  Then something occurred to him.

“I know where we could stay.  Getting there might be a problem, but I’m sure he’d put us up.”

Lizbeth looked relieved.  “Where?”

“On the drilling vessel.”

Zach and Lizbeth said in unison, “What?”

“Bill Masters is looking for someone to work the iridium, and we need a place to hide out.”

“Great idea.”  Zach’s tone said the opposite.

“I think that’s the last place Caitlin would want us to go,” Lizbeth said.

Kevin snorted.  “Even if we do manage to find a safe place to stay, are we really going to wait for Caitlin to somehow break out of jail and find us before the police do?  And before the gossamer sphere destroys the world?”

“Nice speech,” Zach said.  “I agree with you, though.  We should take some kind of action instead of hiding like cowards, but I’m not going to walk up to Caitlin’s
enemy
and ask him for help.”

“If they worked together looking for the crown, then they weren’t always enemies.”  Kevin looked out at the passing shoppers.  No one seemed to be paying them any attention.  “What do
you
think we should do?”

“We need to find survivors from
The Gossamer
, the ship that salvaged the crown from Titanic.  Time is running out.  We need to find that crown.”

“And do what with it without Caitlin?” Lizbeth asked.  “We don’t even know what it’s for.  No.  Caitlin was looking for the survivors when she got arrested.  Maybe the police set a trap for her.”

“Come
on
.  She dropped us off at Simon’s and he told us to run like an hour later.  How long do you think it took the cops to catch her?  She didn’t have time to find any of the survivors.”  Zach stood and swung his backpack, bulkier now with the addition of his soiled clothes, onto his back.  “If we can’t get a hotel, let’s at least find an Internet café.  I need a connection.”

He said it like he needed a fix, and Kevin smiled.

The mall was huge and the directory confusing, since the first floor to Brits was the second floor to Americans and on up.  Still, it didn’t take them long to find a cybercafé.  There weren’t many patrons, so they had their pick of tables.  Zach chose a secluded spot near the back and sat with his back to a faux brick wall.

Kevin escorted Lizbeth to the counter to order coffee and scones, leaving Zach to boot up his laptop.  When they got back to the table, Zach was hunched intently over his keyboard, rapidly tapping.  Lizbeth sat next to him and scooted her chair close to look at the screen.

“Whatcha doin’?” she asked.

“Not having much luck, that’s for sure.  Can’t find anything else about
The Gossamer
or her crew.”

Kevin said, “If they all died from contact with the crown, maybe you could search for the symptoms.”

Zach glanced up briefly.  “We don’t know what the symptoms are, do we?”

“Fever, agitation, flushed skin, bleeding conjunctiva,” Lizbeth supplied.  When Zach gave her a look, she shrugged and said, “What?  You saw that lady scientist.”

Zach twisted his lips, but began typing again.  “Okay, here.  Looks like we have Ebola or Dengue Fever.”

“Try searching for the symptoms plus the word shapeshifter,” Kevin said.

Zach’s expressive face told him what he thought of that suggestion, but he tapped the keys, waited a second and said, “Hm, that’s weird.”

Lizbeth leaned closer, and Kevin noticed their shoulders were now touching. 

“What?” she asked.

From across the table, Kevin couldn’t see what Zach was pointing at on the screen, so he got up and came around. 

“I just looked at this website this morning,” Zach said, clicking on the link.

When the site loaded, Lizbeth said, “Seamus the Bard, huh?  Oh, look!  What’s this?  Click on ‘The First Shapeshifters.’”

Zach obliged, and a long block of text appeared, with illustrations in the border that looked like woodcut prints from a classic fairy tale storybook.  Lizbeth read aloud in her soft voice:

“Wyn of the Grove was a young queen who ruled a minor clan in the land that would come to be called Ireland.  Just outside the Grove’s border was an abandoned mine, feared by all.  Legend had it that a deadly affliction struck any who extracted the ore.  The old mine had become lair to a vicious wild boar with blood-red eyes and tusks the size of a man’s forearm.  The boar had encroached upon the Grove, so Aedn, the clan’s bravest warrior, requested permission from the queen to subdue it.  Although the beast attacked in an erratic, agitated manner, the fight was long and fierce, and Aedn lost two of his finest hounds.  Just as the monster gored Aedn in the leg, the warrior defeated it with a spear-thrust down through the heart.  That night, the queen’s household feasted on succulent wild boar.

“Tadg the Small convinced his queen if the boar could live in the mine, the danger was only superstition.  She agreed to let him lead a group to scout it for workable veins.  When the party returned with reports of great wealth to be had, elation soon turned to sorrow.  Six of the ten men who’d gone to the mine grew gravely ill.  At first they thought the boar meat had been tainted, but none of the sick men ate at the queen’s table.  The clan shaman concluded from their symptoms that they suffered the same illness as the boar, with feverish skin and bleeding eyes, and the affliction was brought about because they offended the evil spirit haunting the mine.  Tadg was charged with the miners’ deaths and banished to live within the mine one year for each of the dead.  Alone in the mine, it wasn’t long before he unearthed a strange lump of metal, surrounded by iron hematite.  He spent much of his penance carefully experimenting with the metal, deducing that it imbued unique and wondrous powers to whatever living thing survived its touch. 

“At the end of six years, Tadg returned to his clan.  He approached Aedn, whose injury had robbed him of his warrior livelihood and left him an artisan by trade.  Under Tadg’s guidance, Aedn painstakingly formed the silvery stuff into a crown and crafted an iron-lined box to hold it.  The two men presented it to their queen with the warning that there was something very special and very dangerous about the gift…”

Lizbeth trailed off and then said, “Oh, my gosh.”

“He’s talking about the gossamer crown.”  Zach hit his browser’s back button and they all studied the photo of Seamus the Bard.  Other than the long, black hair pulled back to reveal a sharp widow’s peak, he looked perfectly normal.

“I wonder if Caitlin knows him,” Lizbeth said.

Kevin thought about Simon and Len, Caitlin’s highly colorful acquaintances, and figured this Seamus guy, with his flamboyant website and imaginative story-telling, would certainly fit in.  As Zach clicked on another link to further explore Seamus’ site, something niggled at the back of Kevin’s mind.  He looked up and scanned the cybercafé.  It had gotten busy fast.  The café’s computers were all occupied now and many of the tables had sprouted laptops.  He looked out into the mall through the green fronds of a wall of potted plants and saw a security guard who seemed to be looking right back at him.

“I think we better get out of here,” he said.

Zach looked up at the plump security guard and made a face that said he’d taken his measure and found him wanting, but he shut the laptop and popped up out of his chair.  They left and walked quickly towards the mall exit, weaving in and out of the shoppers.  They paused in the bright sunshine by a line of grumbling, exhaust-spewing buses.  By unspoken mutual decision, when the guard stepped outside, too, they got on the nearest bus.  Kevin thought it ironic that when the bus pulled out of the parking lot and got on the highway, it took them back towards London.

Just in case it wasn’t paranoia and the security guard really had pegged them for fugitives, they decided to switch buses.  They did so two more times, meandering all over the outskirts of London, talking little and looking out the windows at the city’s strange little cars and unfamiliar road signs.  Finally, when the sun was getting low in the sky, they alighted in an industrial area near a marina on the Thames River.

The marina was big, with several buildings that were not quite seedy-looking, although it seemed he and Zach and Lizbeth landed far from the nearest upscale yacht club.  At least the three of them could wander into the restaurant off the street without looking out of place.  Kevin did all the talking in his faux English accent and wondered if he was fooling anyone.  It might be called English in both countries, but there were so many differences between the languages he probably gave himself away with every other sentence he spoke.  He doubted American tourists were all that common in this area, though, and it was the best disguise he could come up with.