Coronation: A Kid Sensation Novel (Kid Sensation #5) (29 page)

I think I went to sleep. At least, that’s what it felt like. No, I take that back. In retrospect, it was more like I hibernated.

It seemed that I snoozed for an excessively long time, my slumber typically filled with blissful dreams that I was never quite able to remember. On rare occasions, my dreams were not so delightful, but I didn’t remember those either. For the most part, it was less like I was dreaming and more like I was a ghost in other people’s dreams – overhearing secrets, quarrels, confessions, etcetera.

I probably would have stayed that way forever – happy, content, and at peace – but then someone woke me up.

It had to have been an accident. If they’d known how wonderful my sleep was, no one would have dared disturb me. And yet they did, giving me a firm tap between the eyes, like a class bully thumping a smaller kid on the forehead. At the same time, I felt a tug on my left hand, as if something was being yanked from my grip. Still half-asleep, my eyes slowly fluttered once or twice.

Odd flakes, like metallic snow, came sifting from my eyelids and eyelashes, causing me to blink a few more times. As my eyes came into focus, I saw that there were two guys wrestling on the floor in front of me. One of them looked incredibly familiar, like maybe we’d grown up together or something. He was holding a glowing gem, one that shined so brightly it almost hurt my still-drowsy eyes. It was too early for this; I decided to go back to sleep.

However, it seemed that I had barely closed my eyes before I heard voices.

“–ead,” someone was saying. “I left him far enough in the past that his bones have been dust for millennia now.”

I opened my eyes again and saw that one of the wrestlers was back. Not the one who looked familiar – who looked like me, now that I thought about it – the other one.

He was standing with his back angled towards me and was flanked by a couple of robots, but it was him.

What was his name?
Victoria? Victor?
Vicra!

With my recollection of the name came a flood of other memories, including where I was and what Vicra had done.

I stretched, lifting my arms out wide and then up into the air. As I did so, more of the metallic flakes fell off me, silently floating to the ground. (I also noticed that I held two items: the Telumem in one hand, and a piece of the Beobona Jewel in the other.) I shook my head from side to side, sending more flakes cascading down from my hair like the world’s worst case of dandruff.

Hair?
I thought.
What happened to my battle helmet?

It wasn’t just the helmet that was gone; all of the body armor had vanished – apparently transmuted (along with the weird metal that had engulfed me) – into the ash that had been covering my body. The only thing I currently wore was a pair of gym shorts that I’d had on under the armor.

I noticed that I seemed to be standing on a pedestal. Without thinking about it, I floated from my position down to the ground. With something akin to shock, I realized that I had my powers back. Not only that, but – aside from an odd (yet familiar) buzzing sensation in my head – I felt healthier and more refreshed than I had in years.

Upon landing, I felt something hard and solid under my foot. I reached down telekinetically and picked the item up; it was the Cantillate nut. I used my power to put it in a pocket, and then turned towards Vicra.

He was still talking, his back partially to me, and a moment later I saw that he was addressing my grandmother and the other people in the force field.

“–n’t last forever,” Vicra was saying. “And I can afford to wait. You don’t have that option.”

I saw Myshtal cut her eyes in my direction momentarily while Vicra was speaking, and then immediately shift her gaze back to him. Indigo never looked at me at all. The royal physician, on the other hand, was practically telegraphing my presence, and pretty soon Vicra would pick up on it. I needed to end this fast.

I looked at the piece of the Beobona gem that was in my hand and intuitively knew what I needed to do. I glanced towards the wall where the original Beobona device was located. As if on cue, its chest cavity cycled open.

“–now you can hear me,” Vicra continued. “I’ve altered the harmonics of the force field so my voice – or weapons-fire, if I choose – can come through. Let’s not make this any more difficult than it has to be.”

I teleported over to the device and held the jewel fragment in my hand over the opening. The larger piece within the device rose up and connected with the portion that I held, and once again the Beobona Jewel was seamlessly whole, uniform, and symmetrical. It also began throbbing again with an intense light.

Vicra may not have known I was in the room prior to that, but he suddenly knew now. He looked at me and turned paler than Queen Dornoccia, who was on her deathbed.

“It’s impossible,” he muttered, clearly stunned by my appearance. “You’re supposed to be dead. A million
times
dead! A million
years
dead! It’s just not possible!”

“I’m part human,” I said. “We specialize in the impossible.”

Vicra pulled out his pulse pistol; he must have retrieved it when he thought he left me stranded.

“Fire!” Vicra shouted. On command, the two robots started shooting arcs of electricity at me while Vicra fired his pulse pistol. I phased and then zipped around the room at high speed. Needless to say, none of their shots came anywhere near me. I sidestepped them all easily, the shots seeming to move in slow motion around me. (And if they had hit me, they’d have just gone through my insubstantial form.) I laughed, reveling in the sensation of having my powers again.

After a few moments, I tired of the game. (Besides, I didn’t need to give Vicra a single extra second to come up with something dastardly to do.) Dashing forward, I quickly performed the same internal dismemberment on Vicra’s two robots as I had done on Sloe, only this time – with my hands full – I telekinetically grabbed chunks of their internal components.

I dumped the robot parts in front of Vicra. He looked at me like he’d never seen me before, and then I realized his issue: even if I had come back to the present somehow from where he’d left me, I wasn’t supposed to have my powers. In essence, I’d given him a double shock.

“It’s over, Vicra,” I said. “You’ve lost.”

My voice seemed to bring Vicra back to himself. He laughed.

“When you control time, it’s never over,” he said, reaching quickly towards his waist.

With my powers back, however, I was faster. At super speed, his hand had barely moved before I telekinetically lifted his jacket and finally got my first real look at his temporal device.

It was about the size of my palm, with numerous dials, buttons, switches, and such all over it. I really didn’t see anything that made it intuitively easy to use or understand. My guess was that Vicra had had lots of practice, such that using the device was second nature to him. My real issue, however, was what to do with it.

I could teleport Vicra’s time machine, of course, but where could I send it? Who could I send it to? What would it do when it got there? Was it already active in some way? Did it have some kind of temporal default setting? If it somehow activated when it wasn’t on an individual’s person, how would that affect the temporal field?

These questions and dozens more popped up in my brain as I wondered what to do with Vicra’s little toy. I didn’t know what the best solution was, but I knew I couldn’t allow an active time machine to remain in his hands.

Hmmm… Is there some way to make sure it’s
de
activated?
There was one surefire method of doing so.

I looked at the temporal device, mentally bisected it, and then teleported half of it to a far corner of the room. I then shifted back to normal speed.

Sparks began to fly from the half of the device that was still attached to Vicra’s waist; where the other half had been, there was now a mass of dangling wires, diodes, and such.

“No! No! No!” Vicra shrieked, grabbing the remainder of the time machine despite the risk of shock and lifting it so that he could get a better look at the damage.

“No!” he yowled again in disbelief, and then began fiddling with the controls.

I’m no expert on temporal displacement, but messing with a broken time machine has to rank among the top ten on the worst-ideas-ever list. I involuntarily took a step backwards.

“Vicra!” I shouted. “Stop! You don’t know what it’ll do!”

Vicra wasn’t listening. Instead, he was now talking to himself and trying to get the remnants of the time machine to work. As I watched, a spectral light began to surround him.

Assuming it was the temporal device (or what was left of it) activating in some way, I reached for Vicra with my teleportation power, intending to transport him somewhere safe – and closed on nothing. I could still see him, but it was if he wasn’t there anymore. And then I understood that he wasn’t; although his image was still visible, Vicra himself had moved somewhere else in time. As I watched, his image slowly began to fade, becoming less and less visible, less and less substantial, until it finally winked out.

I didn’t get a chance to dwell on what had happened to Vicra, because the next second my grandmother was screaming for me, both verbally and telepathically. Assuming the force field was now down, I raced over to where she sat on one side of the queen’s bed; on the other side, Myshtal was crying while the doctor bustled about frantically. And then I noticed what everyone was so distressed about: Queen Dornoccia had been shot.

“It happened when Vicra and his robots were shooting at you,” Indigo said, referring to an ugly wound on the queen’s side that was bleeding profusely.

“Can you save her?” I asked the doctor.

“In the proper medical setting, possibly,” he replied. “Here, though, it’s unlikely. I don’t have any of the specialized equipment I’d need, and she only has minutes.”

“Is there some place I can take her?” I asked no one in particular. “A hospital or something?”

“She’s only treated by her three personal physicians,” Myshtal answered. “At least one of them should be on standby at the queen’s residence, in case she needs medical attention when she returns.”

I frowned, staring at the doctor. “You’re not one of the queen’s physicians?”

“He’s with me,” my grandmother said, and I immediately knew this was someone who would be loyal to her – to the House Nonpareil.

“Her personal physicians will have access to full medical resources,” Myshtal said. “They’ll have whatever’s needed to save her.”

“That fact’s not going to do us much good,” Indigo said. “My grandson could teleport Queen Dornoccia, but only to places he’s seen for the most part. If he doesn’t know where to find her doctors, their knowledge is useless.”

I shook my head in frustration. This conversation was getting us nowhere, and the queen would be dead in minutes. We didn’t have time to debate. And then I realized that we already had the solution to this problem in hand. Literally, it was in
my
hand: the Beobona Jewel.

I handed the Telumem to my grandmother, and then – unsure of exactly what I was supposed to do – laid the Beobona gem on the queen’s abdomen. To my horror, the jewel immediately rose into the air, then flew quickly across the room – back to the construct that it normally resided in. It went into the chest cavity, which then cycled closed.

“No!” I shouted.

I bent down and picked Queen Dornoccia up; she appeared small and frail in my arms.

“Hold on,” I whispered to her. “Don’t die.”

“What are you doing?” Myshtal asked in alarm.

“Saving her life,” I said.

At super speed, I dashed over to the Beobona device.

“Open up!” I screamed at it. “I said open up!”

I kicked it in frustration. “Open, you stupid tin can! Open!”

I kept calling the Beobona device names and screaming at it, but after about a minute it became clear that it was going to stay shut. My grandmother, who at some point had come over and joined me, laid a sympathetic hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t die,” I said to Queen Dornoccia. “Please don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die…”

I stopped speaking as a soft blue glow started to form around the queen. I almost jumped for joy, thinking that the Beobona had finally responded to my pleading. But when I looked, its chest cavity was still closed. Frowning, I looked at Queen Dornoccia again and suddenly realized the truth. The blue light wasn’t coming from the Beobona. It was actually coming from me.

Two days later, I paid a visit to Yelere. I had a ton of questions and the old man was quite likely the only one who could answer them.

As before, he greeted me affably, and we then retreated to his study to talk.

“Well,” Yelere began, “I examined those parts that you sent to me.”

I nodded. I had sent him the half of Vicra’s temporal device that remained after Vicra had vanished, along with a brief overview of what had happened.

“What were you able to find out?” I asked.

“For starters, you mentioned before that occasionally when you and Prince Vicra jumped through time, you’d hear a beeping noise and then he would take you to another era.”

“That’s correct.”

“I’m guessing that was the warning I mentioned to you before. It was a hint that he was about to do something that would cause a notable distortion of the timelines.”

“And thereby bring the Temporal Monitors to his door.”

“Indeed.”

“So what do you think happened to him?”

“Based on the remainder of the equipment, what you saw, and my own experience, I’d say he got sent to the future.”

“Where in the future?” I asked. “Or rather, when?”

“That’s just it. He’s not going to a specific date in time. He’s going to the
end
of time.”

I blinked, incredulous. “What?”

“He has no end destination. He’s on an infinite journey.”

Much to my own surprise, I began to feel bad for Vicra. I can’t say whether he deserved it, but the outcome seemed to be a cruel and unusual form of punishment.

“Don’t blame yourself,” Yelere said. “What happened to him wasn’t your fault. Besides, from what you told me, he was already probably headed towards a bad end.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“If I remember correctly, you said that you could still see Vicra for a short while after he went to the future. To me, that means that he was already in trouble.”

“How so?”

“Too much time travel can sometimes affect you physically – cause some temporal displacement.”

“So you’re saying that even though I could see him towards the end, he was no longer there.”

“Pretty much. And that kind of thing rarely ends well.”

That would certainly explain why I couldn’t seem to grasp him with my teleportation power, but it brought to mind another question.

“In addition to affecting you physically,” I asked, “can time travel affect you mentally, as well?”

“Absolutely.”

I nodded, taking this in. “Maybe that’s why he seemed crazy in some ways.”

“Oh?” Yelere said, keenly interested in this part of the conversation.

“Yes. For instance, he seemed to alternate between wanting to kill me and wanting me alive. It’s like he had a split personality.”

“Well, you’re assuming all of his actions occurred sequentially, and maybe they didn’t from his point of view.”

“You just lost me,” I declared, shaking my head.

“Okay, let’s suppose a temporal rogue wants to eliminate you. He takes a few trips through time and makes arrangements to kill you with – say, explosives – so he plants bombs in places he knows you will be and sets them to go off on Day Two, Day Four, and Day Six.”

“I’m with you.”

“Later, he decides he’d rather just stun you, so he sets stun grenades to go off on Day Three, Day Five, and Day Seven. From his perspective, he’s simply changed his mind about wanting to kill you.”

“But from my point of view he looks like a schizophrenic, changing his mind every other day.”

“Yes, but in truth his sequence of events is simply different than yours. And throughout, he’s trying to avoid doing anything that will cause the Temporal Monitors to take notice of him.”

I rubbed my temples. “This time travel stuff is enough to give you a headache.”

“Which is why, as I first advised, you should just leave it alone. Time will fix itself.”

His words reminded me of another question I’d had. It felt a little weird to talk about it, but I was never going to get a better opportunity to talk to an expert about it (assuming my mentor Mouse wasn’t familiar with time travel).

“Speaking of Time fixing itself,” I began, “what about my ending up with a piece of the Beobona Jewel in my grip?”

“What about it?”

“Setting aside the notion that I may have spent a significant amount of time as a statue, when I was stranded in the past, it was with the complete Beobona Jewel. I then got left with a fragment of it, but when I ‘woke up,’ for lack of a better term, I felt the piece of the Beobona crystal in my grip pulled away, and the jewel held by the other me became whole. Then that other me went back in time, got stranded, and the process repeated, I suppose.”

“Understood,” Yelere said with a nod.

“However, even though I felt the jewel shard taken out of my hand after I ceased being encased in metal, when I looked again it was still there.”

“Ahhh. You want to know why that jewel fragment you held isn’t stuck in an infinite time loop.”

“Yes, but not just that,” I said with a nod. “Why wasn’t the larger piece of the jewel in a time loop as well? After all, the original J’h’dgo seemed to take it, and later on it would get sent back in time with me, where the first J’h’dgo would simply take it again and start everything all over.”

“I told you before, time loops are unnatural, and Time itself abhors them. Like everything else, Time will eventually fix them.”

“And the fix, in this instance, was allowing the same item to be in two places at the same time,” I said, unable to fully hide my skepticism.

“Well, let me ask,” Yelere said in response. “Which is easier to believe: that for eons now you’ve been encased in metal in the Caelesian Empire, while at the same time spending at least the last sixteen years being born and raised on Earth? Or that, for the space of a few heartbeats, two pieces of an ancient relic managed to be in two different places at the same time?”

*****

I spent a little more time talking to Yelere and getting some valuable insights into time travel as well as the things I had experienced since arriving on Caeles. He was really a fascinating character, and I determined that I would make it a point to visit him socially – not just when I needed his expertise.

After leaving Yelere, I teleported to the queen’s residence, appearing at a guardhouse. (In the past two days, I’d made multiple visits, allowing me the opportunity to get more familiar with the place.) I was immediately escorted to Queen Dornoccia’s drawing room, where I was left alone. A few seconds later, the queen joined me, telling her guards to wait outside.

She was dressed simply today, wearing some kind of beige pants suit that put me in mind of a high-powered exec. She walked towards a comfortable-looking divan and flopped down on it.

“Come, J’h’dgo,” she said, patting a spot on the sofa next to her. “Sit with me.”

I didn’t know if it was standard protocol to sit in the presence of the queen, but I did as asked.

Needless to say, she had fully recovered. Neither the poisoning nor getting shot had seemed to have any lingering effects. The blue glow had fully healed her. In fact, it had gone a step beyond healing, as over the last few days a number of age lines had disappeared from her face, and a significant amount of gray had faded from her hair. In short, she seemed to have grown noticeably younger.

“So, are your friends happy with their reward?” the queen asked.

“Oh, yes,” I replied. “You’ve been more than generous.”

As thanks for their part in saving her life, Queen Dornoccia had bestowed a king’s ransom (or rather, a
queen’s
ransom), on Berran, as well as Captain Ventrua and his crew. None would ever have to work again, although Berran had made it clear he would remain in service to the House Nonpareil.

“Excellent,” the queen said, looking satisfied. “They took an incredible risk in helping you save me – they’d have been branded traitors had you failed.”

“It speaks volumes about their character,” I said, “that they helped me without the promise of reward and with only risk to themselves.”

“I think it says more about you,” she replied, “that you were able to gain their trust and confidence, and inspire them to throw caution to the wind.”

I felt my cheeks turning red, somewhat embarrassed by the praise.

“Regardless, please accept my thanks on their behalf,” I said. “And for myself, I want to thank you again, Your Majesty, for the royal pardon.”

“And don’t forget expunging your criminal record,” she added with a smile. “Of course, you never should have even had a record, but that’s beside the point.”

“I’m happy with the final result,” I said.

“As am I, since otherwise I’d likely be dead.”

“I doubt that, Your Majesty. You strike me as being highly resilient. It’ll take more than bombs, poisonings, and exploding ships to do you in.”

“Thanks,” she said with a smile. “But that reminds me – I received the report on what caused my ship to explode the first time you and I met.”

“Yes?” This was something I was definitely interested in.

“Apparently, at the time of its manufacture decades ago, a piece of malicious code was inserted into the cooling system software. It remained latent until my last trip, activating when my ship drew near Caeles and causing a deliberate misread of the temperature of the engines. As a result, the cooling system failed to activate as required. Ultimately, the engines overheated and blew up.”

“And presumably that’s what happened to my ship as well.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” the queen said. “Anyway, I suppose you’re wondering why you’re here.”

I shrugged. “I assume it has to do with my request to return to Earth.”

“Not exactly. And though I’m honor-bound to grant it – you did save my life, after all, three times over – I have to say that I’m disappointed. Having you here has proved to be beneficial, to say the least, for both me personally as well as Caeles. That being the case, I’m reluctant to let you go out of hand.”

I crossed my arms, seeing where this was headed. “So I’m here to strike a bargain.”

“Correct. Normally, I would negotiate this with Prince Norbeo or Princess N’d’go, but it occurred to me that – despite your youth – I should give you a chance to make your voice heard.”

I had to admit to being taken slightly aback. I had not expected Queen Dornoccia to be the type to attempt to squeeze concessions from a situation like this. However, on an emotional level, I could feel something building up in her, and it had a mildly selfish ring to it.

“You want something,” I said matter-of-factly.

“Yes,” she said.

“Let me guess: I agree to do whatever I did before to keep you young and beautiful so that you can rule forever. In exchange, you acquiesce regarding my request for a ship to Earth.”

The queen laughed, taking me by surprise. “Heavens, no! Continue to rule? I can’t wait to get this crown off my head. True, whatever you did has rejuvenated me well beyond what science or medicine could do, but the last thing I plan to do is waste any additional time I’ve been granted trying to stretch out my time on the throne. It’s a thankless job.”

“I–I–I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I thou–”

“It’s fine,” she said, cutting me off, “although my request is a bit selfish in nature.”

“Go on.”

“You know my quint-child, Isteria?”

I blanked for a second, then recovered. “Oh, Myshtal. I mean, Ist–… I mean, yes. I do. I know her.”

Queen Dornoccia gave me a wary look. “Yes, well, I know that you’re aware of her unique abilities, which is how she found me when your mother spirited me away. There aren’t many here who can help her develop her gifts, so I think it would be of immense benefit to her to be among those who can.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, frowning. “You want me to take her to Earth?”

“If you would. I know that Isteria trusts you and cares for you deeply. In fact, one of the reasons Vicra left you alive was to keep her under control. As long as she did what he wanted and stayed in line, he promised her no harm would come to you.”

“I had no idea. When did all this happen?”

“At some juncture around the time I was poisoned. As a show of goodwill, he let you go. Of course, by then, you’d already been tried and convicted.”

“So, in a way, Myshtal saved my life,” I said, pondering what would have happened had she rebuffed Vicra.

“She probably saved mine and your grandmother’s as well. I think the only reason Vicra didn’t just blow up that repository when he found where N’d’go had taken me was because my quint-child was with us.”

“That’s entirely possible,” I said. Vicra’s obsession with Myshtal made the queen’s supposition very likely, in my opinion. “Anyway, I’d be happy to take her to Earth, and not just because she bought me some time with Vicra.”

“Thank you, but I don’t want her to simply accompany you on the journey. She will need a guide once she’s there – someone who can help her understand and integrate with Earth society and culture.”

“So you want someone to show her the ropes. I can do that.”

“Thanks, but please understand something. Isteria is my favorite, with many great things in her future. I won’t entrust her future and well-being to just anyone. And, while I trust you, I’m not inclined, in this instance, to simply rely on a gentleman’s agreement. I prefer an alliance.”

She couldn’t mean what I thought she was implying. There was no way…

“What are you trying to say?” I finally asked.

“You and my quint-child are both considered adolescents by the standards of your respective societies. You are both of the Royal House, and heirs to considerable fortunes. When you alter your ears to the Caelesian norm, you are rather handsome. Needless to say, Isteria is quite beautiful and – what is the Earth term? – a showstopper. Plus–”

“Stop. Stop,” I said, making a short wave with my hand to cut her off. “Please stop. There’s no way I’m agreeing to that. Absolutely no way.”

Queen Dornoccia was silent for a moment, and then said, “You know, the Mectun conducted a special vote last night concerning election of the MiPluri.”