Broken Dreams (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 5) (19 page)

When Mara followed, she gasped.

The interior of the building was open space, and the back wall was clear—a massive window—that provided a view of the giant green wheel turning, dipping into the river, splashing as water spilled off its right side and spraying as it lifted on the left. A giant drive shaft connected to the center of wheel pierced the transparent wall and bisected the entire building twenty feet above their heads. At the middle of the drive shaft was a large vertical gear with a ten-foot diameter whose teeth fed into a smaller horizontal gear that spun another drive straight up to network with smaller gears and drives woven across the ceiling.
Click
ing and cranking sounds filled the air.

A large dark-haired man in white overalls approached them. “Chief Simmons? I’m Milt Platkin, supervisor of operations. I think we’ve met before, but I’m not sure you would remember me.”

They shook hands, and the chief said, “Yes, I recall. You reported trouble with this so-called swarm? Doesn’t seem like much is happening at the moment.”

“That’s because we shut down the flour mill and sent all the workers home. Just a few overseers remain. We didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t want a bunch of panicky people just standing around. That’s a recipe for disaster in a place like this.”

“How long has it been since someone last saw it?”

“Not more than half an hour. It was floating around the grain bins, chasing after the chute workers,” he said. “One of them fell in a chutes, and the poor man almost got milled to death. The millstones weight tons, you know.”

“Where are these grain bins located?”

“Second floor, up on the catwalk. South side of the south wing, in the middle of the building,” Milt said. “Can’t miss them. They are large clear compartments filled with wheat.”

“There’s no one in there at all?”

He shook his head. “The hourly workers are gone for today.”

Turning to the group, the chief said, “You guys stay here, and I’ll take a look around.”

“Wait a minute. I came along on this call to help,” Mara said. “How can I do that if you’re out there looking for the thing, and I’m standing here?”

“I will take a quick look to make sure we’re not walking into a situation, then I’ll come back and get you. It’s questionable enough that I brought you along. You can’t expect me to take you in there blindly.”

“I don’t like it,” she said.

“Either we do it my way or we don’t do it at all,” the chief said.

She glanced at Ping. He nodded to her.

“All right, I guess I have no choice.”

The chief turned to Milt and said, “Which way do I go?”

The supervisor pointed to the far right corner of the massive room in which they stood and said, “You’ll see a set of doors down there under a sign that reads Grain Operations. Once you go through those, take the stairs on the right to the second floor. Keep looking to your left until you see the wheat containers. That’s where it was last seen.”

The chief gave a curt nod and walked away.

“If he’s not back in fifteen minutes, we’re going after him,” Mara said.

Ping patted her shoulder and turned to the supervisor and said, “Mr. Platkin, I’m a little confused about the design of this place. Do you have a few minutes to answer questions?”

“Sure. I can’t do anything until Chief Simmons returns. What would you like to know?”

Ping pointed toward the ceiling and said, “I don’t understand how the series of gears in this building could serve as a power source for mill works in two other buildings. Aren’t the two components normally more closely situated?”

“In a conventional mill that is true. However, the wheel doesn’t actually provide energy directly to the machinery in the grain mill and the lumber mill. This building is a power plant in which the energy of the water wheel produces highly charged steam, in essence multiplying the output. That’s how a single wheel can support two such large mill operations. Come farther inside. You can’t see most of the operation from here.”

He led them under the giant vertical gear attached to the water-wheel shaft and turned to face the front of the building. He pointed upward.

Again Mara gasped.

The series of gears mounted just below the vaulted ceiling fed a network of wheels and pulleys that stretched to the front wall. There they drove dozens of brass pistons that plunged up and down in cylinders of brilliant blue steam, shunting it through transparent pipes leading to each side of the building.

“How does this work?” Ping asked. “It looks like the pistons are driving the steam, not the other way around.”

Milt nodded at Mara. “As you know, the steam captures the kinetic energy of the pistons and delivers it to the mechanisms in the mill. The steam acts a storage device for the energy—sort of a gaseous battery that is continuously recharged and circulated within the system of pipes. As long as the river keeps turning the wheel, it will continue to charge the steam and drive the mills.”

“Fascinating,” Ping said. “It’s a remarkable feat of engineering.”

“All thanks to the research of our progenitor,” Milt said, smiling at Mara.

She blushed and said, “Thank you.”

In the distance they heard a loud slam, coming from the corner to the right.

“Get everybody out of here right now!” Chief Simmons yelled, running toward them. “It’s coming this way. Everyone outside. Now!”

Milt dashed toward the back of the building, toward the transparent wall and the huge turning wheel. “Ray, sound the evacuation alarm. Tell everyone to leave the buildings.” He turned left and ran from view.

A klaxon reverberated off the distant walls, but the gears and wheels kept
click
ing and turning.

Red-faced, the chief ran up to them and pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “It can’t be too far away. Let’s find a place to hide.”

“Was it chasing you? Did it attack you?” Mara asked.

“Come on. We must get out of the open.” He pointed to a row of desks and storage shelves along the left wall of the building. “Over here. Hurry.”

Mara, Sam and Ping followed him and found the desks were some kind of control consoles, probably used to manage the mill’s power plant but large enough to hide behind. Crouching next to the police chief, Mara whispered, “Did you see it? The swarm?”

“Yeah, it came from one of the chutes where they feed the flour after it has been milled,” he said. “I was sure it was chasing after me, but it turned and went back down the chute. A minute later I looked out a window and saw it floating outside, then it flowed in this direction, toward the power plant building, to the front door.” He gazed across the room to the sliding doors they had come through about one hundred feet away.

The loud alarm went silent. From the back of the building, Milt walked into the middle of the open floor, below the large turning gear. He turned around, stopped with his back to the door, looked at the moving machinery above him and called out, “Is anybody still here?”

He cocked an ear for a response. Getting nothing, he shook his head as if in disgust and turned on his heel to see a black mist streaming through the cracks below the front door, gathering in a roiling cloud just below the plunging pistons and cylinders of blue steam mounted above.

“Oh, jeez,” Mara said.

The mist pounced on the man, spinning a living cocoon around his head. Strands of blackness whipped around him, lashing at his nostrils and eyes with tendrils winding their way into him. Milt staggered backward, swatting at the storm that clung to him, until he fell to the ground, writhing and shaking his head back and forth.

Mara jumped from behind the console and ran to Milt, squirming on the ground. “Let him go! It’s no use, Prado. You can’t take these people.”

The police chief stood to go after her, but Ping grabbed his arm and said, “Let her help him. That’s why you brought her here.”

The chief yanked away his arm but reconsidered and stayed put.

“We can’t just let her go out there by herself,” Sam whispered from Ping’s other side.

“She’s the progenitor,” the chief said.

In the center of the floor, Mara bent down to Milt. She wasn’t sure what to do. She had never dealt with the Aphotis in this state before, as an amorphous cloud of mist. So she couldn’t target him like a solid object. Shooting bolts was off the table because of the whole chasm thing.

From behind her, Sam yelled, “Pixelate it.”

Mara initially rejected his idea, since Sam didn’t know that that didn’t work here. Well, it worked, just differently. Might as well try. She raised her hands and remembered the train she had encountered upon crossing over to this realm.

The edges of the black fog sheared off and dissipated into white wisps of steam. Strands of the thing unwound from Milt’s head, gyrating in the air like a headless snake, dissolving. The black cloud lifted all at once, as if catching a thermal, rising and gathering beneath the massive still-turning gear above them.

It spun and tightened into a funnel, its tail dancing a jig in the air, not seeming to have a course in mind until it swung toward Mara’s head, its tip pointing like an accusing finger. And it pounced. Pouring down on her, into her eyes, ears and mouth.

She closed her eyes, gagged and stumbled backward, falling on her butt, flopping to her back and striking her head on the hard floor. The stars she saw merged into a flash of light, and she remembered the night on the gadget shop rooftop. The night the Aphotis possessed her for a moment. Her niece had prompted her to shine, and a light had burst from her, driving the thing from her.

Mara saw the light, but it was just a memory, a flashback. Her niece’s promptings were only one-shot deals, and that bullet had been fired already.

The light was gone. She strained to open her eyes, and all she could see was hazy blackness, now in her eyes, wanting in her body. She could feel it crawling over her skin. Rolling around on the floor, trying to get away from the cloud, she felt the hard copper rod fastened to her thigh. The Chronicle of Cosms.

Ignoring the filth pouring over her, she reached down and slid the eyepiece from the loops on her pants leg and hugged it to her chest. Gagging and sputtering, she clawed with her left hand at her own right eye to clear it and jammed the eyepiece against it with her right hand.

The crystals alongside the Chronicle luminesced, and the light they emitted spiraled around its copper shaft, growing brighter as it sped up, turning the eyepiece into a brilliant blur. A beam of light shot from it, arcing upward until it struck one the cylinders filled with blue steam and plunging pistons above the entrance to the building.

A burst of brilliance washed over Mara, consuming her and the black mist that swept over her body, and, when the light receded into the Chronicle, she was gone.

Chief Simmons jumped from behind the console, followed by Ping and Sam, and ran to the center of the floor where Mara had been. He spun around as if Mara were hiding. Not finding her, he looked at Milt, still on the floor. “Where did she go?” the chief asked.

Milt shook his head, still dazed from the assault.

Ping turned to look up to the bank of cylinders and piston. “You saw the same thing the rest of us did,” he said. “I believe that she may have used the Chronicle to enter a microcosm within one of those power cylinders.”

“I do not understand what you are talking about,” the chief said.

“The Chronicle transported her into the steam up there,” Sam said, pointing to the cylinder struck by the beam of light emitted by the Chronicle. “She’s in there with the Aphotis—that’s what we call the black cloud.”

“So the three of you
do
know what this thing is?” The chief didn’t look happy.

Somewhere above her, as if she looked through a tunnel, Mara glimpsed blue clouds in the distance. Then something yanked her forward and upward. The tunnel walls glowed and spun as she rushed, falling in the wrong direction, as if gravity had somehow reversed. Though dizziness threated to overcome her, she still fought against the black mist that crawled over her skin, that tried to seep into her mouth and eyes.

And all motion stopped. The spinning, the falling upward, the prickly sensation of the Aphotis clinging to her. All gone. She blinked her eyes and opened them, found herself standing in billowing clouds of a glacier blue fog. Ahead of her, she could see movement. And heard sounds, like footsteps. The steam parted like a shroud, revealing the silhouette of a man.

“Hello, Mara,” Juaquin Prado said in a familiar baritone that sent a shiver up her spine. “We keep running into each other in the strangest of circumstances, wouldn’t you say?” he asked, his odd lisp now back since he wasn’t using Abby’s voice. His eyes swept around, scanning the space around them, but his head didn’t move. It felt like he focused on Mara even as his eyes wandered.

“Why can’t you stay dead like a normal person?” she asked.

“For me, this is normal.” He held up his hands and smiled at the blue steam. “It is my destiny to join the battle wherever it takes us.”

“More of that battle-to-determine-the-nature-of-existence crap? I suspect you don’t even know where you are. You didn’t expect to be floating around as a disembodied cloud of smog again. Did you?” she said.

“This is a unique realm with unusual properties, but I’ve got limitless time to learn them, ample patience to leverage them for the cause to which I am dedicated.”

“You are dedicated to chaos and destruction, not defining a viable Reality. Nothing you have done could lead to a stable Reality. You possessed people and caused their bodies to decompose. You created a race of beings made of light, not to help them but to fight me. What kind of Reality did you create for them? How many of them were lost?”

“As I told you before, casualties of war. Collateral damage,” he said. “You should stop thinking so one-dimensionally. It stymies your ability to grasp the intricacies of existence. For every life lost in this endeavor, thousands of their counterparts live on in other realms.”

“But your goal is to define the one viable realm, the ultimate design of the universe. Who gets to decide who lives and who dies in the one world that ends up mattering the most?” she asked.