Raven Rise (14 page)

The moment the lock was thrown, an alarm shrieked. The horn cut through the silence of the big house as loudly as if a fire truck were barreling through the living room. The dog started barking again. A red light on a keypad next to the door started flashing. It was the alarm control.

Courtney looked at Mark with wide eyes and said the only thing that made sense under the circumstances. “Run.”

The three bolted out of the door, ran across the wide porch, and jumped down the stairs to the gravel drive below. Floodlights burst on, lighting up the yard like a football field. Or a prison yard where a break was under way. Courtney and Mark took a sharp right and ran for the cement wall that surrounded the property. They knew there was a tree on the other side they could climb down. The trick was scaling the wall from this side. They'd done it enough times to know how. No words were needed.

The harsh alarm sound was even louder outside. Speakers were hidden in trees. Floodlights followed them as if powered by motion detectors. The once-deserted home of a chicken farmer named Sherwood was now equipped with some serious security.

“We're okay,” Mark panted as they ran. “We'll be long gone before the police show up.”

Bang!

A bullet whistled by. They weren't alone anymore.

“I think they're already here,” Patrick whined.

“No way,” Courtney gasped. “The police don't shoot at you, even if you
are
trespassing.”

“Then who is?”

Two more flat cracks sounded.
Bang! Bang!
Grass and dirt kicked up around them.

“I'm on the bottom!” Mark shouted. They were at the wall. Courtney didn't argue. She knew what he meant. Mark put his shoulder to the wall and cupped his hands for Courtney to step into an “alley-oop” up. Courtney barely broke stride. She leaped into Mark's hands, right foot first. Her momentum kept her going. Mark launched her upward as she pushed off her foot. She was airborne. Like a flying trapeze artist she grabbed the top of the cement wall and hoisted herself up, all in one smooth movement.

“Let's go!” she called down before she was even settled.

Mark cupped his hands again, looking to Patrick. “C'mon!”

Patrick was unsure. “I can't do that.”

Patrick needed inspiration. He got it. The sound of machine-gun fire cut through the alarm. To their right, the cement wall began to explode from rounds being pumped into it. Splinters of cement flew everywhere. The attack was getting closer. It was all the convincing Patrick needed. He jumped into Mark's waiting hands, leaped up, and grabbed Courtney's down-stretched hand. Mark pushed and Courtney pulled. Adrenaline helped. Patrick was up on the wall.

“Climb down the tree,” Courtney barked at Patrick.

Patrick didn't need to be told twice this time. He scrambled for the tree. As the cement wall was torn apart by gunfire, Courtney leaned down and reached for Mark. Mark looked up to see that she was actually smiling.

“Welcome home,” she said with a wink.

Mark bent his legs and leaped straight up, grabbing both Courtney's hands. Courtney leaned back, pulled hard, and a moment later Mark was on top of the wall. Without another word Courtney followed Patrick down the tree.

As Mark waited for her to climb down, he looked back at the Sherwood mansion. The clattering machine-gun fire stopped. Whoever was shooting must have realized that the intruders were gone. Mark allowed himself a few seconds to inspect the old house and wonder what had changed. Who lived there now, and why did they have the gate symbol over their fireplace? Mark couldn't help but feel that whatever change in history had happened on Second Earth, the people in this house were part of it. The coincidence was too much. They lived on top of a flume.

He threw his legs over the side, and was about to slip onto the tree when his eyes caught movement inside the house. He glanced up to the second floor. A large window overlooked the front yard across which they had just made their escape. A lone figure stood in the window. It looked to Mark like a man. An old man. Maybe wearing a bathrobe. The light was on behind him, creating a silhouette. If the guy was upset about his house being broken into, he didn't show it. He stood at the window, looking out at the yard as calmly as if he were looking for deer. In the window next to him, with its front paws up on the window frame, was the black retriever. The old man had one hand on its head, patting the animal as they both gazed outside. To Mark it seemed as if they were looking at him. A cold shiver shot up his spine.

“Stop right there!” came a shouted command.

Mark looked down to the ground to see four people wearing dark clothes that could have been uniforms, sprinting along the front lawn toward him. One of them held the machine gun. Mark didn't need to see any more. He jumped off the wall and climbed down the tree, landing by the other two.

“Let's disappear,” he said, and the three ran into the neighborhood. Mark and Courtney's neighborhood.

They were home.

(CONTINUED)

The suburban street was dark. And cold.
No leaves were on the trees. It felt to Mark like early spring. The dirty, melting snowbanks along the sides of the road completed the picture. The houses were dark. That was good. It was late at night. The town was asleep. There was little chance of anyone spotting three people walking around who looked as if they had just stepped out of a time machine. With any luck, Mark figured they'd get to his house without a problem.

Better, the neighborhood didn't look any different to Mark from when he'd left. For a moment he could almost pretend as if things were normal. He knew he was kidding himself.

“When did you leave home?” Mark asked Courtney as they walked along the sidewalk.

“A couple of days after you did” was her answer. “I don't remember the exact date. Some time in December.”

“This isn't December,” Mark thought out loud. “Not cold enough. No Christmas lights. Feels more like late February or March.”

“How far is your house?” Patrick asked. “The police are sure to show up after all that ruckus.”

“Ruckus?” Courtney said with a grin. “You really are a geek teacher, aren't you?”

“Not a problem,” Mark answered. “We're here.”

Mark's house looked exactly as it did the day he left for First Earth with Nevva Winter. As he stood in front, he had trouble understanding his own conflicting emotions. He was happy to be home, but sad that his parents weren't there. He was encouraged that things looked normal, but knew they really weren't. Most of all, he was nervous about going inside and finding things that would tell him that his familiar life had changed.

Mark decided to stop thinking.

“Let's go around back,” he suggested.

He led them across the front lawn, around the side of the house, and up the stairs of a redwood deck that led to his back door. A heavy plastic container near the door was where the Dimonds kept a garden hose and a spare house key. Mark opened the container and let out a relieved breath when he saw the key was there.

“Lots of things haven't changed at all,” he said, relaxing a little.

They entered the house and quickly closed the door behind them.

“Pull all the shades,” Mark suggested. “It wouldn't be good if somebody saw us walking around. They might think we're prowlers.”

“Yeah, we'd
never
go inside a house where we didn't belong,” Courtney said, joking.

Nobody laughed.

“C'mon people!” she cajoled. “Just trying to lighten things up!”

Mark looked at the kitchen clock. “Three in the morning. Let's get the shades down before the world wakes up.”

“What are shades?” Patrick asked.

“Sit down,” Courtney said, pointing to the kitchen table. “We got it.”

Patrick sat at the table, but he didn't look comfortable. He sat straight up, looking at his hands, afraid to see anything more on Second Earth. He had been jumping from one alien environment to the next, and his nerves were jangled.

“We'll be right back,” Mark said to him kindly as he and Courtney left the kitchen.

“I'm worried about him,” Courtney said to Mark softly, so Patrick wouldn't hear. “He's a mess.”

“He's been through a lot,” Mark offered.

“Like we haven't?”

“Yeah, but we're used to it.”

The two looked at each other and laughed. “It's true,” Courtney said, shaking her head in amazement.

“Patrick will be fine,” Mark assured her.

“He better be. He's the Traveler of this trio.”

They quickly walked through the house to see that most of the shades were already drawn. They only needed to pull down a few on the second floor. Mark thought that was good. If somebody looked at the house the next day there wouldn't be any obvious, suspicious changes. Mark went into his bedroom and stopped short when he saw a few touchstones from his former life. The anime posters, the stacks of books, the pictures of him and Bobby when they were younger. He felt a lump rise in his throat. He missed his old life. He missed being geeky Mark. He didn't want to know about Travelers and Halla, and most of all, he didn't want to know anything about Forge.

One thing caught his eye that was different. It was the computer screen on his desk. Mark had been using an old-fashioned tube monitor for the longest time. Now sitting on his desk, the desk he recognized so well, was a high-tech-looking flat screen like he had never seen before.

Courtney stepped into the room to see Mark staring at the alien computer.

“Strange, huh? When you brought computer technology back to First Earth, it jump-started the whole computer revolution by sixty years. No wonder you're a legend.”

“How is it different?”

Mark had barely gotten the words out of his mouth when the computer screen blinked to life. A 3-D geometric pattern appeared, making Mark and Courtney take a step backward in surprise.

“Hello, Mark,” a pleasant, female voice said from the computer. “It is three fifteen in the morning. How may I help you?”

Mark and Courtney stared at the screen for several seconds. Finally Courtney uttered, “Well, there's that.”

“It recognized my voice,” Mark said with dismay.

“Ask it something,” Courtney suggested.

Mark thought, then said, “Uh, what's today's date?”

The computer answered, “It is March the eleventh.”

“Bobby's birthday,” Courtney said with a smile. “He's eighteen today.”

Mark ran his finger across the top of the computer screen, wiping off a thin layer of dust. “Three months,” he said thoughtfully. “That means a whole lot of things.”

The computer said, “What exactly does that mean?”

Courtney shot a look at the screen and barked, “Hey, mind your own business.”

“Turn off,” Mark said to the computer.

“Good-bye,” the computer responded as the screen winked to black.

Mark looked at Courtney with surprise. “Wow, that was easy.”

Courtney plopped down onto Mark's bed, thinking. “This is bad,” she said. “Being gone for so long, I mean. If the flume sent us back to when we'd left, like it did when we went to Eelong, we could just pick up like nothing happened. But now we're going to have to answer questions. Everybody here still thinks your parents were killed when that plane crashed. You'd have to deal with that.”

“It's true,” Mark said, rubbing his eyes. “My relatives would be all over me. They'd probably make me go live with my aunt in Maryland. I can't go to Maryland.”

“And I can't go home. What would I tell my parents?”

“And how do we explain Patrick?”

“As wrong as this sounds, we can't go back to our regular lives,” Courtney concluded, glum.

“Agreed. It'll prevent us from figuring out how things have changed and what Saint Dane is up to.”

The two fell silent. Then, “Mark?”

“Yeah?”

“How exactly are we going to do that?”

“I have no idea.”

They decided that whatever they were going to do, it wouldn't be that night. They had to get their internal clocks set to local time. They each found a bed and settled in for a few hours of sleep. Mark was in his own bed, Patrick took the Dimonds' room, and Courtney claimed the couch downstairs. All three of them lay awake, staring at the ceiling, unable to nod off.

Finally, at nearly six, Courtney poked her head into Mark's bedroom and announced, “Stop pretending like you're asleep. I'm hungry.”

When they hit the kitchen, they discovered that Patrick was already there, sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the torn book cover he'd brought from Third Earth.

“Hey, you all right?” Courtney asked.

“I don't know what I am anymore,” Patrick answered wearily.

Courtney gave Mark a nervous look.

Mark went for the refrigerator to find it mostly empty. “Cupboard's bare,” he announced.

“Check the freezer,” Courtney suggested.

In the freezer Mark found orange juice and Eggo waffles. He tossed the frozen juice to Courtney and grabbed the box of waffles.

“Better than nothing,” he declared, and walked to the counter. There he stopped and looked around with confusion. “Uh, the toaster's gone.”

“Put 'em in the oven,” Courtney suggested.

Mark opened the oven and put a layer of frozen waffles on the top rack, but when he tried to turn the oven on, he was lost.

“There aren't any buttons,” he said with dismay. “This isn't our oven.”

“Sure it is,” Courtney said patiently. “It's just improved, remember? Try telling it what to do.”

“Yeah, right,” Mark scoffed. He looked at the oven and said, “Cook the waffles.”

Instantly, the oven light went on and the coil began to heat.

“Whoa” was all Mark could gasp.

Patrick asked, “That isn't normal?”

“Uh, no,” Mark answered.

“But it is,” Courtney interjected. “At least the new normal after Mark brought Forge to First Earth. Mostly things look the same, but there are small differences with technology. Just be lucky you don't have any pets. That would really make your head spin.”

Patrick added, “What about that house over the flume?”

Courtney frowned. “That's different. No way somebody moved in and made all those changes so fast.”

“That means even more things have changed since we left,” Mark added. “Which means something else must have happened in the past besides Forge.”

“We've got to figure out what that was,” Courtney said.

Patrick lifted the torn book cover from the table and added, “And find out why people seem to know about this.”

Mark and Courtney looked at the cover.

“Ravinia,” Mark whispered, reading the cracked word on the cover.

“Maybe it's a good thing,” Courtney offered hopefully as she mixed the orange juice in a pitcher.

Patrick winced. “You wouldn't think that if you saw what happened to Third Earth.”

“Oh. Right,” Courtney said, embarrassed. “That.”

“I think our first step is to look around and see what things are different,” Mark declared. “We might find something we can trace back to First Earth.”

“How?” Courtney asked.

Mark pointed to Patrick's Traveler ring. “We've got a hotline to the past. If we find anything suspicious, we can send a message to Dodger.”

“You sure?” Courtney asked.

Mark grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled something. “Put the ring on the table,” he said to Patrick as he folded the note in half.

Patrick took off his ring and placed it next to the pitcher of orange juice.

“Let's give it a shot,” Mark said. He cleared his throat and spoke distinctly to the ring.
“First Earth.”

The ring came alive. The relief in everyone's face was obvious. They may not have been able to communicate with Bobby, but at least the rings still worked. The circle opened up, spewing light and music. When it reached its full size, Mark dropped the note into the hole, after which the ring immediately shrank back, ending the event.

Courtney picked up the ring and examined it. “Do you think we're ever going to figure out how this works?”

“How do we know it worked?” Patrick asked.

“Oh, it worked,” Courtney answered for Mark. “But did it go to Dodger, or Nevva?” Mark shot a surprised look at Courtney. “She has your ring, Mark. And if she's still on First Earth…” She didn't have to complete the thought.

“We'll know in a couple of hours” was Mark's answer. “When the bank opens.”

Patrick frowned and looked to Courtney. Courtney shrugged. Neither knew what Mark was talking about. Then it hit Courtney and she brightened.

“Hey, you asked them to put something in the safe-deposit box!” she declared.

“No,” Mark answered, pouring orange juice. “I want them to open an account and make a deposit at the bank. If we're going to be here awhile, we're going to need money. They've got the KEM money from Forge.”

“Will that work?” Patrick asked. “They can deposit money back on First Earth and it will be in the account today?”

“Should,” Mark answered. “I gave them the number of our safe-deposit box and told them to put the deposit slip inside.”

“Amazing,” Patrick gasped.

“It's ironic,” Mark said thoughtfully. “We're going to try to stop Saint Dane by using money from the company he got me to sell Forge to, and that we tried to stop from giving me that money in the first place, so they wouldn't create the dados and change the future of Halla.”