Keystones: Altered Destinies (24 page)

Going Up

The Elevator doors were disarmingly modest. For something that could take you to the Terra Rings, Michael had expected a grander entrance. Instead there were just two sliding doors, much like what could be found in almost any apartment building, even though they were six times as wide. Still, they lacked insignias or anything that made them look other than ordinary. Michael also knew that there were identical doors on the two floors above them that would open into the same Elevator.

That fact didn’t stop him from watching in amazement as the Elevator arrived for boarding. He had flown from New York to Boa Vista for this moment. The doors opened without a sound, and people pushed forward as though their lives depended on it. Elbows were thrown as the crowd surged forward. Michael did his best to create room for himself, Arc, and the Tobins as they joined the rushing mob.

Tricia slowed their progress as she craned her head in all directions looking for Deklan. Michael knew she was convinced that he would arrive at any second and be reunited with them. His absence had dealt her a crushing blow. Each time that Michael saw her look for her son, she became less energetic and less hopeful. He refrained from pointing out to her that if Deklan were anywhere in the room, even if they had somehow failed to notice him, he would have noticed them.

Despite being large enough to carry a thousand people in comfortable seating, their particular Elevator was filled like a multi-story subway car during rush hour. Every seat was filled and all standing spaces occupied.

Michael felt immensely self-conscious. Passengers were staring wall-eyed at his wings, and he kept bumping into them. He couldn’t help but jostle people with his wings, regardless of how he wrapped them around his body. Their dirty looks made him feel small. That coupled with the sheer throng of people did nothing to alleviate his claustrophobia. Michael closed his eyes and thought of being in the sky with the wind in his face.

Someone bumped into him again and ruined his fantasy. When his eyes snapped open again, the Elevator’s walls caved in on him. His knees hit the floor with his arms and wings raised above him like a shield. When he came back to his senses, everyone was staring at him. That only made things worse. His breathing came faster and faster. There was nowhere to escape.

A ring of open space cleared around Michael. The cabin was packed, but people pushed away from him. He felt humiliated by his weakness, and for the first time since The Sweep he wished that he hadn’t been given wings. He kept his face down so that the crowd wouldn’t see his reaction.

He only looked up when Tricia gasped, “Michael, what’s happening to you?”

Closing his eyes in the futile hope that the sensation would go away, he answered, “I just don’t like small spaces. I’ll be fine.”

She ran over to him and brushed his back, her voice still shocked. “Not that. Your wings!”

Michael’s eyes snapped open, and he looked above him where he’d positioned his wings when he’d thought for a second that the ceiling was collapsing. They were gone. Their comforting weight was gone. He reached up to his shoulders, anxious hands running behind his neck, as though the simple act of touch would reveal what he had just seen to be a lie. His shoulders were normal. Not a trace of his wings remained other than the advanced musculature that he’d developed in the brief time he’d been able to fly. Tear burned into his eyes. His wings were all that had ever made him special, and they were gone.

Michael desperately wanted the wings back. He craved them as he had craved nothing else in his life. Warmth rippled through him again, and a sensation of taut stretching pulled at his shoulders, it reminded him of when he’d been shoved from the building. His wings burst forth, pushing their way to the ceiling, a white wall of safety once more.

The unadulterated joy that came over Michael was matched only by the crushing return of his claustrophobia. He collapsed to his knees again and held his arms over his head. His chest was too tight to allow even a single breath. He’d done it before; he could do it again. Michael thought hard about his wings shrinking into his shoulders. The warm sensation came again. This time he recognized it for what it was and welcomed it. He felt his wings pull back into his shoulders and vanish. As the last feathers disappeared into his back, he felt his fear of small spaces disappear like dust in the wind.

Tricia touched his back. Her voice was soft and amazed: “They’re a tattoo now.”

“What?” replied Michael.

Arc and Brice nodded in agreement with Tricia.

She touched his back again. “Your wings are not gone entirely. They’re on you like a tattoo. You didn’t know that you could do that?”

This was even better than just having wings. “I didn’t,” Michael said, “but I like it.”

Tickets

Deklan had run to the security checkpoint of the terminal. “I lost my Uplink,” he said to the guard, “but I’m Deklan Tobin. If you would just scan my biometrics, you’ll see that I have a ticket booked.” After a tiring day it took all of Deklan’s strength to remain composed.

“Sir, I’m sorry, but I have no way of verifying that you have a ticket.” The security guard spoke in a thick monotone that suggested an absence of independent thought.

“My Uplink was destroyed,” said Deklan, frustrated with the triumph of idiocy over reason.

“Yes, sir, but we can’t let anyone through who doesn’t have a ticket.” The man sounded as though he were reciting some internal script that didn’t allow for deviations from what he expected.

Deklan closed his eyes, counted to ten, and tried to get through to the blockhead. “I
do
have a ticket,” he asserted.

“No, sir, you don’t.”

“If you would let me use your Uplink, I can prove it.”

The guard responded with another rote answer. “That’s against company policy, sir, and even if that were true, we are at capacity. You will need to wait for the next Elevator.”

Deklan blew out a breath, the throbbing pain from his mangled finger stumps left him with little patience. “When is that?”

“Services have been temporarily disrupted, but we expect them to resume soon.”

Deklan wondered whether there was any way to break through the wall of stupidity facing him. “Why?”

The guard blinked for a minute. He didn’t have an answer for that one. “What?” he said.

Deklan laid the question out for him in a more complete form. “Why do you expect them to resume soon?”

The guard stared blankly ahead while ponderous wheels turned in his head. “Service will resume soon, sir.”

Deklan stared at the man, comprehending that the nitwit had no idea of what was happening. “Can I speak to your supervisor, please?”

He shook his head and kept shaking it all through the answer, looking like a confused duck. “My supervisor is unavailable.”

“Where is he?” Deklan had a sinking feel that he knew the answer to that question.

“He left to manage things on the Terra Rings once the situation here became more complex.”

“And that doesn’t worry you?”

The guard looked at him with big mournful eyes that suggested his unease with Deklan’s asking hard questions. “I don’t understand your question.”

Suddenly the man collapsed in a convulsion. Taser cables extended from him to a point behind Deklan.

A melodious and cheerful voice with an English accent came from the direction of the cables. “Tasers have long been one of my favorite toys.”

Deklan turned to the man who had just tasered his idiotic tormentor. The stranger had a slight build and dark brown hair. He looked to be in his mid-forties, except for his eyes. In his hand was a taser that he tossed to the floor.

 
“There’s almost no one else here,” he said, “so I’m pretty sure that if you hurry we can get you onto the Elevator before it leaves.”

 
Deklan felt bad for the nitwit on the floor, but not so much that he wasn’t going to accept the offer of help. “Thank you,” he replied.

The man’s grin promised more mischief than Deklan had ever seen in a smile. “My pleasure. I intend to get on it too, but we should probably run.”

“Who are you?” Deklan asked. He would have been curious even without the tasering.

The man flashed Deklan another grin that went all the way up to
 
his eyes. “You can call me Cheshire.”

Deklan nodded, unsure of how to read the man or even how to respond. “Hi. I’m Deklan.”

The man inclined his head. “Nice to meet you, Deklan. Now it’s time to run.”

When Deklan and Cheshire reached the waiting area, it was empty. They’d missed the Elevator.

“Damn it!” exploded Deklan in frustration. “What now? I sent my parents up on that Elevator, and I don’t know where they are.”

Cheshire was unfazed. “Now we override the door.”

“We what?”

Cheshire walked over to a panel next to the closed Elevator-loading doors. “We override the controls, and by ‘we’ I mean that I do.”

After Cheshire manipulated the panel, the doors opened onto empty space and the Elevator cable.

“How is that helpful?” asked Deklan.

“Well, normally it wouldn’t be. There is a three-story drop.” Cheshire leaned out and looked down. “However, the cable can be climbed with this.” He pulled a small device from his pocket.

Deklan had never seen anything quite like it in his life. “What’s that?” he queried.

Cheshire’s grin was back in full force. “It’s a tool used by repair technicians. It’s also a miniature version of the engine that pulls the Elevator up and down the cable. It will lock onto the cable and pull us both up. I call it a hauler.”

This level of preparation made Deklan suspicious. “You haven’t told me why you’re helping me.”

Cheshire replied with a question in the same cheerful tone. “Do you want to get onto the Elevator or not?”

“I do, but I don’t know where my parents are.”

Cheshire nodded and started ticking off his fingers. “Brice and Tricia Tobin are on the Elevator accompanied by your friend, Michael, as well as their new acquaintance named Arc. Slate and Vinicius are also aboard.”

The words hit Deklan like a shotgun blast. He stepped backward in disbelief. “Who
are
you?” he asked again.

“A Keystone, like you.” Cheshire sprang across the empty space to the cable, falling about six or seven meters before snapping the hauler into place. His momentum carried him past it for a few moments before a belt-like attachment between himself and the device swung him back. He then activated the hauler and ascended to eye level with Deklan. “Moment of truth,” he said. “Are you coming?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” Cheshire threw Deklan an identical belt-like loop that would attach him to the hauler as well.

Deklan looked at the loop with skepticism as he fitted it around him. “Now what?”

“Jump. It’ll catch you.”

It was almost like being back at work as a stuntman. Deklan jumped. His momentum carried him much farther than Cheshire’s momentum had carried him, but he too came back around and was held by the slender loop, though he dangled a good ten meters below Cheshire.

“Excellent. Now it’s time to get up there.” Cheshire reactivated the hauler, which pulled the two of them skyward toward the not too distant Elevator.

In Cheshire’s hands the small device moved faster than a full-sized Elevator, such that in perhaps ten minutes they were only meters below the underside of their quarry and hundreds of stories above the Earth. The ground spread out beneath them, resembling the view from a plane or skyscraper. Cold wind tore at Deklan’s thin clothes. It was much like returning to the dark void where he’d come so close to dying, though more scenic.

“What now?” he called up to Cheshire, forced to yell over the wind’s rush.

Cheshire yelled back down to him, “This will take a minute, and the air is getting thin. Here, you’ll need this to breathe.” Cheshire pulled two small masks fitted with canisters from another voluminous pocket. After attaching one to the line down to Deklan and dropping it, Cheshire affixed the other to his face.

Deklan snagged the mask with numb fingers as it hit his waist. “You seem suspiciously well prepared,” he shouted.

Cheshire flashed him a quick thumbs-up. “I’m always that. It’s my gift. I advise you to put the mask on while you can still breathe.”

“Now what?” asked a confused Deklan as he put on the mask.

Cheshire pulled his mask away from his face to yell his answer. “Now we wait for the signal.”

What signal? Deklan wondered as he was overcome by darkness.

The Terra Rings

Susan drifted. She felt as though she were waking from a dream. More than that she felt suffused with life and energy. Errant currents of thought came together for her. Awareness returned as she rose to consciousness. Everything was black with little white points, but at the same time strangely illuminated.

The last thing she remembered was her vanishing into a suffocating darkness. And now this?

She hung suspended in space next to an Elevator terminal. It was a massive sphere with large glass sections. Cutouts in the side faced down to Earth. She could see that the cutouts housed Elevators as they left and arrived. Coming up fast enough that it would be there in seconds was an Elevator. To her left were the Terra Rings. Far below was Earth.

Susan looked down at Earth
through
her body. She knew that this should worry her, but the emotion didn’t come. She didn’t know what was going on or how she got here. Susan searched for memories that might explain where she was. She had been getting colder. Of the time between then and now there was nothing.

Susan watched an Elevator arrive at its destination. Something odd was hanging from its underside. Without conscious thought Susan moved closer, crossing half of the distance before realizing that she could initiate movement.

It was Deklan. He hung from the bottom of the Elevator. Frozen crystals of blood indicated burst veins and capillaries all over his body. He was connected to the Elevator by a long tether line and an assortment of straps that held him in place. A mask covered his mouth and nose.