The Missing Read online

  ++Yes, yes,++ gloated The Evil. ++Come closer and together we will open the way for good.++

  “Blow the man down!”

  The cry came from behind Jaide. She ducked as a pair of royal blue wings flapped overhead, scattering the insects that were attacking her. A curved black beak snapped at the clumps bothering Tara and Ari. With a snap of her wings, Cornelia the macaw swooped to help Jack, who had staggered backward into the earthen wall, struggling against two attacks at once.

  Before Jaide could rally her Gift, a beam of silver light shone down the ramp, issuing from the moonstone ring of a stiff-backed, white-haired woman dressed in jeans, a white linen shirt, and cowboy boots, with Kleo, her Warden Companion, trotting at her feet. The light scattered the insects crawling over Jack, and sent them swirling in a panic.

  “Grandma!” Jaide ran to her side and hastened to explain. “It wasn’t our fault. The Evil came out of nowhere. I don’t know how —”

  Grandma X shook her head. “Let’s deal with it first. We’ll talk after.”

  ++You will never defeat us,++ The Evil intoned. The swarm had taken on the shape in which it had first appeared, and it rose up on three spindly legs and spread its arms wide to face this new challenge.

  “It’s not our job to defeat you,” said a soft voice. “Just to contain you.”

  Jack felt a firm, wooden hand come down on his shoulder. “Rennie?” he said.

  “I’m here,” she said, and some of Jack’s panic evaporated, even though he still couldn’t see. The living parchment absolutely refused to come away from his face. When he tugged at it, it stretched like rubber, then snapped back exactly as it had been.

  Jaide watched the Living Ward of Portland, one of four wards charged with keeping The Evil at bay, do something with her one human hand. A translucent bubble formed around The Evil, turning the whiteness of its eyes to myriad tiny rainbows. The Evil reached out to pop the bubble with one bug-claw but it only bulged slightly, spreading circular ripples out in waves.

  Rennie’s hand moved again, and the bubble began to contract.

  ++We will return,++ The Evil vowed. ++We have found a way. We are coming.++

  The bubble shrank and the bug-thing crouched to avoid touching it. Eyes blinked and rolled as The Evil folded in on itself, becoming a shapeless swarm confined to the size of a basketball, a football, a tennis ball….

  ++We are coming!++

  Soundlessly, the bubble collapsed to nothing, and the eyes went out. Instantly, the swarm was released, unharmed, and the air was full of buzzing insects.

  Jaide grinned in relief and Tara clapped her hands.

  “What’s going on?” asked Tara’s father. He and the workers, released from the gloom Jack had cast over them, swatted at insects and looked at the sudden crowd on the work site with suspicion. “It wasn’t a cave-in, was it?”

  “Termites,” said Grandma X, raising her moonstone ring a second time. “You called Rennie here for a second opinion.”

  Rennie, in her former life, had been the town’s handyperson.

  “Looks bad,” she said. “You’d better go call an exterminator.”

  Martin McAndrew blinked three times and nodded.

  “You’re right,” he said. “That’s a good idea.”

  He reached in his pocket for his mobile phone.

  “You’ll want to do that somewhere else,” said Grandma X, with an unbending gleam in her eye. “Reception is bad down here.”

  Tara’s father and the workers headed obediently up the ramp.

  “A little help here?” said Jack, his voice muffled by the parchment.

  Jaide hurried to him, horrified that she hadn’t noticed that he was still under attack. She had simply assumed that all of The Evil had been expelled by Rennie and Grandma X.

  “What is it?” asked Tara, as together Grandma X and Rennie helped Jack peel the living parchment from his face. Cornelia circled above, offering encouraging squawks.

  “I think … yes.” Grandma X held up the parchment by it its top corners while Jack and Rennie held the bottom two. “Okay, easy,” she told it in a reassuring voice. “We have you now.”

  The paper became still.

  “It’s a message,” she said, “of a kind that Wardens send one another sometimes. Living mail, if you like, only I’ve never seen one as determined as this. It must have been sent a very long time ago, and held up somehow, desperately trying to get through.”

  “What does it say?” asked Jack, eyeing the paper resentfully. It had better be something really important, given it had almost smothered him in its quest to make sure it was noticed.

  The paper seemed blank at first. Then ink swirled around the edges and sent fine filaments across the page. Letters formed, then words, written in an unsteady hand.

  We’re here and we are trapped. Please help us!

  It wasn’t signed.

  “What does it mean?” asked Jaide. “Who’s it from?”

  “Where are they?” asked Tara.

  “How do we help them?” asked Jack. Cornelia landed on his shoulder and cocked her yellow head.

  Grandma X’s face had gone very pale. She folded the parchment into four and clutched it tightly in her hand.

  “Tell me how you came by this,” she said.

  They explained about the brassy tube buried in the bedrock under the house and the mysterious way their Gifts had woken as they came near it.

  “It’s a cross-continuum conduit constructor, isn’t it?” said Jaide.

  Grandma X nodded.

  “And these aren’t really termites,” said Tara, pulling one of the wriggling bugs from her hair. It had four wings, five body segments, and no less than ten legs.

  “Did they come from the same place as the message?” asked Jack.

  Grandma X nodded.

  “How?” asked Tara.

  “The cross-continuum conduit constructor opened a small hole inside the wards,” said Rennie. “That’s how it got into Portland. The Evil followed the message through.”

  “So it was our fault,” said Jaide, feeling a pang of guilt.

  There were many places in the world where The Evil tried to break in, places where the fabric of reality was weak. Each was protected by four wards, and each ward had a different nature, as depicted in a simple rhyme that every troubletwister learned by rote:

  SOMETHING GROWING

  SOMETHING READ

  SOMETHING LIVING

  SOMEONE DEAD

  The Something Read Ward was a piece of romantic graffiti scribbled on the town lighthouse by Jack and Jaide’s parents. Rennie was Something Living. What the other two wards were, the troubletwisters didn’t know. The Evil was always trying to get around the wards and the Wardens who maintained them. Jaide hated the fact she had helped it find a new way in.

  Grandma X stirred from her deep thoughts.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she told Jaide in a firm voice. “Don’t ever believe what The Evil tells you. It only means to frighten you or put doubts in your head. It saw an opportunity, that’s all … an opportunity the message provided.”

  “Does that mean the message came from the same place as The Evil?” asked Jack.

  “From the Evil Dimension?” asked Jaide.

  Instead of answering, Grandma X crossed the room to study the cross-continuum conduit constructor. The parchment went into her pocket, but she kept one hand pressed against the pocket as though keeping its contents safe.

  “Tara,” she said, turning away from her examination, “thank you for bringing this to our attention. Please tell your father that I would like to buy it from him for a price we’ll settle later. I would also like his expertise in freeing it from the earth. I need to get this home as soon as possible, so I can examine it.”

  Tara nodded and headed up the ramp.

  Grandma X turned to the twins.

  “Whatever you have planned for the rest of the day,” she said, “I’m afraid it’s canceled.”

  “
Why?” asked Jack, exchanging a worried glance with his sister.

  “What does this mean?” asked Jaide. She had never heard their grandmother sound so serious.

  “I don’t know what it means. That’s why I’m going to do something that’s only happened once before in my lifetime. I’m going to call a Grand Gathering and ask them the question that for the life of me I cannot answer on my own: Why do I recognize the handwriting on that note?”

  Two hours later, in an opulent palace far away, a hall full of glass came to gleaming life. Hundreds of candles flickered in massive crystal chandeliers that hung suspended on long cables from a painted ceiling far above. Down one wall hung a bank of well-polished mirrors that were famous around the world. Down the other wall, tall windows reflected the light dim yellow back inside. Outside it was the dead of night. No one near the Palace of Versailles noticed the unusual light flickering inside, or the people it illuminated.

  Meanwhile, in Portland, Jack and Jaide were in the blue room, peering into a much less elaborate mirror. This mirror was lying on its side and resting on two chairs, whose backs supported its heavy weight without complaint. The mirror, which normally reflected images in a perfectly ordinary fashion, now acted as a window to the famous Hall of Mirrors, where they could see Wardens from all over the world assembling for the historic Grand Gathering of the Glass.

  Grandma X was pacing on the other side of the blue room, out of the mirror’s sight, one hand pressing on the pocket where the note still sat. She had revealed nothing more since the discovery of the cross-continuum conduit constructor, but she was muttering silently to herself, which was in itself more worrying than anything she could have said. Jaide and Jack waited with impatience for the Gathering to begin in the hope that they would learn what on earth was going on.

  Perched silently in her cage, Cornelia watched closely with one black eye, taking in everything and saying nothing.

  “Were you at the last Grand Gathering?” Jack asked Custer, a local Warden who was watching with them in the blue room. He was a middle-aged but somehow ageless man with high cheekbones and long blond hair. His most striking feature was the ability to turn into a saber-toothed tiger at will. He had tried to teach the twins to shape-shift, but neither seemed to possess Gifts that worked that way. Everyone assured them that they would have other Gifts, possibly soon, but there was no way to tell what they would be. It was just a matter of waiting to see.

  “I was present at the last Grand Gathering,” Custer replied with a formal inclination of his head. “It is good that such terrible times are long behind us.”

  Grandma X shot him a look that Jack couldn’t interpret. Perhaps she was warning Custer not to give away too much. There were supposed to be no secrets between her and the troubletwisters anymore, not after the last time The Evil had attacked, exploiting knowledge that had been kept from them, supposedly for their own good. That the twins were present for the Grand Gathering suggested that this compact was being honored, but they knew there were limits nonetheless. They were troubletwisters and they were kids. It didn’t come easily to grown-up Wardens to treat them like equals.

  “Look, there’s Dad!”

  Jaide had spotted Hector Shield in a reflection of a reflection. He was peering out of another mirror, just as floppy-haired and crumpled as he usually looked. His glasses sat on a slight angle, and she wished Susan, her mother, was there to straighten them for him. Susan wasn’t a Warden, but like Tara and Kyle she was aware of the twins’ training. It was her job, she said, to make sure everyone remembered there was an ordinary world out there, too, full of things like homework and chores. She was an aero-ambulance paramedic who worked three-day shifts outside of Portland, and although the twins missed her, it also meant she was usually away when they were exercising their Gifts. It worked better that way.

  Hector waved, waggling all ten fingers of both hands and beaming in welcome, but it was impossible to talk to him. A loud buzz of voices issued from the mirror as Wardens from all over the world joined the vast assembly through mirrors of every shape and size. Faces peered out of bedrooms, closed shopping malls, dressing rooms, and airports. Every age, race, and culture was represented. Some of the Wardens had clearly been woken from deep sleeps to attend and were still in their pajamas. One appeared to be underwater, peering into the reflection of her goggles. All of them were adults. Look though he might, Jack saw no other troubletwisters.

  Sometimes Jaide could make out fragments of what they were saying to one another. It seemed to be variations on a single question: What’s going on?

  An imposing figure stepped into the Hall of Mirrors, a man wearing a dark gray suit, with broad shoulders and a full, bearded face. His hair was yellow and thick, and stood out like a mane. The twins had never seen him change shape, but nothing would have surprised them less than learning that he could turn into a lion.

  His name, they knew, was Aleksandr, and the few times they had met him he had seemed to be in charge, as he appeared to be now. With ringing footsteps, he walked down the gallery to its center and stood there alone, staring at the mirrors surrounding him.

  When silence didn’t fall immediately, Aleksandr raised his left hand and snapped his fingers.

  Jack and Jaide held their breaths. There was suddenly no sound at all. It was as though the air in the blue room had vanished, replaced by a feeling of great significance — of history, even.

  “The Warden of Last Resort calls us,” Aleksandr said, “and we have come, the Grand Gathering of the Wardens of Earth, only summoned in times of direst need. We await the reason for our summoning.”

  He paused, and his deep voice echoed off marble and glass, rolling and rumbling for a full second.

  “It had better be good,” Aleksandr added before the last of the echoes had faded away.

  Before Jack could ask Custer who the Warden of Last Resort was, a clear strong voice spoke out in reply.

  “She’s alive,” said Grandma X.

  Jaide jumped several inches in the air. She hadn’t noticed her grandmother coming up behind her. Grandma X put her right hand on Jaide’s shoulder, pressing her back into her seat. In her other hand she held up the note.

  “Who is alive?” asked Aleksandr.

  “My sister.”

  “Impossible.”

  “I have proof!” said Grandma X over a rising hubbub. She tried to explain about what the twins had found, but too many voices shouted her down. Aleksandr raised his hands for calm, but even he couldn’t bring order. All he could do was wait until everyone’s surprise and shock — and no little outrage, it seemed — had been vented.

  “The message was from Lottie?” Jack asked Grandma X in a whisper, while he had the chance. He and Jaide had been hunting for information about their missing great-aunt, Grandma X’s twin, for months now, and had turned up nothing except that she’d disappeared long before they were born. They had assumed her dead at the hand of The Evil, but they had never been able to prove it. It was incredible that news of her had turned up like this.

  If the note had been written by Lottie, and had come from the same place as The Evil, that meant Lottie was in the Evil Dimension. They had received the merest glimpse of that place the day their Gifts had woken, and it had been horrible. To be trapped there … Jaide shuddered at the thought, and Jack hugged himself.

  Grandma X glanced down at the troubletwisters. She had heard Jack’s question, but for a moment she didn’t seem to see her grandchildren. Her gray eyes were full of grief and anger. This wasn’t a secret that had been kept from them, Jack understood. No one had known, not even Lottie’s own twin sister.

  Grandma X sighed, nodded, and seemed to grow suddenly impatient with the racket. When she spoke again, her voice was like thunder, and it drowned out anyone who tried to speak over her, even Aleksandr.

  “My sister is alive,” she said, “and you know what that means.”

  The twins didn’t know. They waited breathlessly for silence to fall, in
hope and dread of finding out.

  “We abandoned her,” Grandma X said in her ordinary voice. Custer reached up to take her hand but she shook him off. “We left her to die, all of us, even me — but she didn’t die. She has endured horrors we cannot imagine. Yet she lived in hope all these years. She sent us a message, and she waited and waited for rescue, and we didn’t come. She is still waiting for us, even now, after all we have not done for her.”

  “She might be dead —” said Aleksandr.

  “She is not. The living-mail charm dies with the user.”

  “Then it is a trap, set by The Evil to sow dissent among us.”

  “She would never fall.”

  “How can you say that? No one is entirely immune here, let alone there, where The Evil’s power is strongest.”

  “Lottie would die first,” said Grandma X. “I was the weak one, not her.”

  Jack was horrified to hear his own fears coming from his powerful, confident grandmother’s mouth. The Evil often claimed that of every set of troubletwister twins one would turn to its side. Their father’s twin brother, Harold, had done exactly that, and there had been moments when The Evil’s power had been almost too strong for either Jack or Jaide to resist. Each time, they had been saved, but maybe it was a matter of time, and when their time ran out, the weaker would fall.

  If Grandma X was the weak one, thought Jaide, how strong must Lottie have been?

  “We must rescue her,” said an elderly Warden from the far end of the Grand Gathering. “Lottie and any others who remain with her.”

  “We cannot,” said Aleksandr.

  “It must be possible,” said a Warden peering through a shaving mirror. “By what means was the message received?”

  Grandma X briefly explained about the discovery in the grounds next door.

  “The artifact lay dormant until exposed by happenstance,” she concluded. “The presence of the troubletwisters activated it, and a Bridge briefly formed.”

  Jack and Jaide felt the combined attention of the Grand Gathering fall upon them, but not for long. Their role in the events of that day was a crucial but small one.