“No,” Rose said. “She’s in her room.”
“We were wondering if we could take her out for ice cream later?” Cindy asked.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea.” Rose didn’t elaborate.
“Does her mother play with her in the evenings?” Cindy asked.
Rose returned with the Coke and coffee. Steve sipped his drink—a bit weak, too much cream, but smooth.
“Ms. Smith is not the playful sort,” Rose said. “She spends time with Nira each evening, and they will read together and watch TV. But Ms. Smith usually brings home a lot of work.”
“Does Nira understand what she reads? What she watches?” Steve asked.
“She has favorite books and TV programs. But it’s impossible to say how much she grasps.”
“How did she get that weird scar on her forehead?” Cindy asked.
Rose shook her head. “She had it when we met.”
Lunch was Indian: tandoori chicken, vegetable samosas, basmati rice, pappadums. Steve was in seventh heaven. Breakwater, naturally, given its size, did not have an Indian restaurant, and neither of his parents liked Indian food. The only time he got close to such delicacies was when Cindy’s mom made it, or Ali tried her hand at it, which was usually a disaster. Her fairy powers aside, Ali was a dreadful cook. She knew how to keep her dad happy, but all he ate was meat and potatoes.
For a time Steve blotted out the many town mysteries and just ate.
He was on his third helping of chicken when Cindy brought up the electric plant explosion. Rose’s face brightened. “I’ve read about that, and talked to Ms. Smith about it. She was there, you know, that night. She saw the whole thing.”
“I didn’t know Ms. Smith was from here?” Steve said.
“She was born and raised in Toule. That’s why she put Omega here. She wanted to give something back to the community. She employs a hundred locals.” Rose paused. “I’m surprised you didn’t know?”
Rose had not mentioned any of those facts yesterday.
She had acted like she had no idea why Sheri Smith had built Omega in Toule.
Steve mumbled, his mouth full. “We don’t know that much about your local history.”
Rose offered him another samosa. “Finish it, or I’ll have to eat it later.”
Steve accepted the samosa, cut it up, and mixed it in with his rice. “Was Ms. Smith injured that night?” he asked.
“No. It was something of a miracle she wasn’t, at least the way she told it. To celebrate the basketball team’s big victory, they had a short parade down the main street, then a party with food and speeches and drinking in front of the power plant. Ms. Smith was alone with her boyfriend in the plant when it exploded. I don’t know what they were doing, I didn’t ask. But when it blew, a wave of fire roared over her head. But she was not harmed.”
“What about her boyfriend? Was he hurt?” Cindy asked.
Rose hesitated. “No.”
“Amazing,” Steve said, surprised to get so much information out of Rose, who did not seem like the type to gossip. “I thought everyone in the immediate area was burned to death.”
Rose shook her head. “That woman doesn’t have a mark on her.” She added, “You can meet her if you’d like, ask her about that night. I told her about you two, how you took care of Nira while I was with Freddy’s mother. She said she would like to thank you in person. She told me to ask if you would like to have lunch with her tomorrow. Like I said, she is a very busy woman, and almost never home. She must really want to meet you.” Rose paused. “Would you like that?”
Steve glanced at Cindy, who ever so slightly nodded her head.
“That would be wonderful,” he said.
When they were through eating, Rose told them to go say hi to Nira in her room. It seemed the girl spent a lot of time there, alone. Steve and Cindy were surprised when they entered the place; it was painfully sparse. There was a bed, a tiny desk, a chest of drawers, a closet of neatly hung clothes—that was it. There was not one book, no TV, not a single decoration on the walls. The room did not even have a decent view. Its sole window stared at a thick pine trunk. It could have been a nun’s cell.
Nira glanced up as they peeked inside her room, but if she smiled it was too faint to detect. Yet she stopped what she was doing—playing with her fingers on the center of her bed—and stepped over and took Cindy’s hand and led her into the room. The slight gesture of affection warmed Cindy’s face. Maybe she was just happy the girl remembered her. Yet Nira’s eyes kept straying to the door in anticipation, and there was no doubt that she was looking for Ali. Who wasn’t, Steve thought.
Nira and Cindy sat on the bed together, and the little girl took Cindy’s palm and began to draw circles on it, around and around, in the center. Cindy told Steve she had very warm hands.
“They feel like they just came out of the oven,” she said.
“Repetitive behavior is common among the autistic,” he said.
He might have spoken too soon, or maybe he shouldn’t have spoken at all. Nira suddenly reached out and took his hand, and stared at his palm a long time, almost as if she were trying to divine his fortune. Then she looked up at him without blinking, and her strange eyes seemed to darken, and she slowly closed his hand and shook her head. He did not know why, but her fingers were the opposite of what Cindy had described. They were like ice, and he felt a chill run through the length of his body, and it did not go away, even when she let go of him.
CHAPTER
12
There was no Emerald City for her to see, not yet, but the soft green sun in the sparkling clear verdant sky was a treasure. Not because of its beauty, which was great, but because of the centuries of forgotten memories it invoked inside. Ali did feel at home the instant she exited the mountain cave and beheld the sun, yet she also felt fear. Home would not be exactly as she remembered, she knew. It was the reason she had left home in the first place, to be born as a human being. These days, there was much to fear in the elemental kingdom.
Still, coming out of the dark cave and into the light, she was happy.
The green sun was almost straight up, as the yellow sun would have been above Breakwater. She had entered another dimension but it did not look as if she had to reset her watch. She was pleased to see that the green light did not bother Farble.
The light of the sun surprised her in another way. Because of its soft radiance, it did not color everything green. The sand that surrounded their mountain was still yellow. The slopes of the bare peak were brown. Indeed, there wasn’t single tree, not even a bush or a blade of grass, on the entire mountain. She asked Paddy if it had always been that way.
“Aye. As long as Paddy can remember.” He added, worried, “But Paddy does not remember desert so close to the river, and so close to Tutor.” He pointed to a two-mile stretch of sand that lay between the base of the mountain and a vast river. “The sand has spread,” he said.
Tutor must be the name of the mountain, she thought, and she asked the name of the river, which Paddy called Elnar—not the Elnar. The “the” seemed unnecessary with such pretty names. As far as she could tell, the river flowed east to west, into the sea, which stretched forever to their left, and started not far from the western base of the mountain. Yet looking east, in the distance, she saw that Elnar was really made up of two rivers, one that came straight from the north, and one that flowed out of the east. They joined about ten miles inland. She pointed to the rushing water coming out of the north, and Paddy told her it was called, Lestre, after the Lustra.
“What are the Lustra?” she asked, although she believed she already knew.
“It is what the high fairies call themselves,” Paddy said.
“Lestre runs through the fairy kingdom?” she asked.
“Through the heart of it, and all around Uleestar.” Paddy added, “It is Lestre that makes Uleestar difficult to attack.”
Ali nodded, having vague memories of a magical green island surround
ed on all sides by a vast flowing river. “I hope it’s still safe,” she said.
“It was fine when I left, Missy,” Paddy said.
The green ocean was enchanting. Never before had Ali seen such crystal-clear water. They were a mile up on Tutor—not nearly as high as they had been on Pete’s Peak—and still she could see the floor of the sea as far out as two miles. With her fairy eyesight she could see different-colored fish and gigantic blue and gray shapes moving in the depths. Clearly the elemental sea was brimming with far more life than Earth’s.
Far out at sea she saw an island.
“What about in the west? What’s there?”
“The Isle of Greesh.”
“Who controls the Isle of Greesh?”
“It fell . . . It . . . We do not speak of it.”
“It fell to the Shaktra? Is that what happened?”
“It just came . . . No one knows where it came from.”
Ali asked Paddy what they called their ocean.
“The ocean,” he said.
She gave him a look “Why do you guys all speak English, anyway?”
Paddy shrugged. “Why do you speak it?”
He had a point there, she thought. Who was mirroring whom? Paddy had told her before that much of what was in the human kingdom was also in the elemental kingdom, only in a changed form. The relationship was not direct—there were differences—but he had once said that a large toxic spill on Earth could damage their realm. That was another reason the elementals were angry at mankind, because of all the pollution people were making.
South of Tutor was all sand, and the desert appeared to stretch far into the east, along the edge of Elnar. But on the north side of the great river was normal brown earth, and not too far north she saw a low stretch of hills that was cut in half with the southward plunge of Lestre. The softly sculpted hills, along with the river Elnar, appeared as natural barriers between the desert and the lands of the leprechauns and the elves. Paddy agreed with her observation.
“None of us come this far south unless we have to,” he told Ali.
“When Lord Vak was assembling his forces to invade Earth, did he drive his army up here?” she asked.
“Aye. We came over the bridge you see crossing Elnar, then hiked up here, along a path.”
The stone bridge he referred to was an imposing feat of engineering, for Elnar was three hundred yards across—three football fields set length to length. It was when Elnar joined with Lestre that the river swelled dramatically. But the sight of the bridge caused her to reflect on what type of tools the elementals possessed. For all she knew, the bridge had been built by magic alone. She questioned Paddy but he had no idea who had made it, only that it was very old.
“It was there when Paddy was a boy, and his pa was a boy,” he said.
The path Paddy had spoken of wound back and forth up the mountain, without actually circling it. It was broad, made up of well-worn marble stones, and Ali could easily see an army marching up it to the top of Tutor. She assumed that was where Lord Vak had positioned his force, just before he had opened the Yanti and materialized on Earth. It scared her to think how bitter their retreat from Tutor must have been, after she had sent them back. The last thing Lord Vak had promised her was that the next time they met, he was going to show no mercy. She had to either join him or die. . . .
Yet Ali did not feel that was the choice that had to be made.
The Shaktra was their common enemy.
She did not see any road between the base of Tutor and the bridge.
“It was there a month ago,” Paddy said when she questioned him. “The sand must have covered it. I told you, the desert has grown.”
“How could it have grown so quickly?” she asked.
Paddy shuddered. “The scabs.”
“What exactly are the scabs?”
“Best not to talk about them.”
“What if we ran into them? I need to know if they’re dangerous.”
“Very dangerous, Missy,” Paddy said in his most unhelpful manner.
“Not good enough. I need to know ahead of time how to handle them.”
“Use your fairy powers.”
“To do what?” she asked.
Paddy shrugged. “Kill them.”
“Is there any way to detect them before they attack?”
“We won’t see them until they come out of the ground.”
“Can they fly? Do they have weapons? Is their bite poisonous? Are there lots of them?”
“Yes,” Paddy said, nodding. “All those things.”
“Oh brother,” she groaned.
Ali turned to Ra, who stood in silent awe. She understood the glow in his eyes. Since exiting the cave, she had almost forgotten about the pain in her hand. Farble, for his part, also seemed happy to be back. But he kept clawing at his backpack, trying to sneak steaks when he thought she was not looking. She suspected that he had already finished off half his food. It did not matter, the meat would have spoiled anyway. She had to assume there was food to be had, at least when they got beyond the hills.
“I bet when you woke up this morning, you didn’t think you’d end up in a place like this,” she said to Ra.
He turned to her. “I have you to thank.”
“Don’t be silly. You have earned your keep already. But now that you’ve seen this place, you might want to head back. There’s no predicting what we’re going to run into on the road.”
“Do you know where you’re going?”
“North, into a land called Karolee, where the fairies live. There’s an island there called Uleestar, where I think I can get some answers.”
“What kind of answers are you looking for?” Ra asked.
Ali shook her head. “It’s a long story, I don’t have time to tell it all now. Just know that my mother has been kidnapped, and that I’m pretty sure she’s being held hostage in this dimension.”
“Did the fairies kidnap her?”
“It’s complicated,” she said, thinking of Karl Tanner, Drugle, who used to serve on her high court, before joining forces with the dark fairies and the Shaktra.
Ra was sympathetic. “I would be honored to help you find your mother.”
His comment touched her. She pointed to the two miles of sand that separated Tutor from Elnar and the stone bridge. “Paddy says creatures called scabs live in that sand, and that we need to avoid them at all costs. We’ll climb down and cross as fast as we can. But I think you had better be ready with your bow and arrow at all times.”
“Understood,” Ra said.
She grinned. “I think you’re getting used to taking orders from a girl.”
“As you like to say in America, don’t push it.”
Ali patted Farble on the back. “You all right?”
He nodded. “Hungry.”
“Hungry? I just saw you eating!”
The troll bowed his head, embarrassed. “Not hungry.”
They climbed onto the stony road, started down the mountain. Although the path wound vigorously—in an obvious attempt to take the sting out of the decline—Ali still found the way steep. It reminded her how tough elementals were compared to humans, and how badly it might go for humanity if they ever invaded Earth. Despite mankind’s high-tech weapons, the elves, the dwarves, and their partners were a determined foe. When she had spoken to Lord Vak, he had acted like they had no choice but to take over the Earth.
The climate was warm and humid; there were odors in the air that reminded her of candy stores and flower shops rolled together. The air was richer in oxygen—each breath seemed to satisfy the lungs more. The descent was jarring to the bottom of her feet, but she felt herself carried along by the dual forces of gravity and a wonderful sense of adventure. What Ra had said in Africa was true. This journey was the chance of a lifetime. She just hoped that at the end of it she would find her mother.
Halfway down the road, she felt the ground move, a minor tremor. Indeed, it was identical to the quake she had
felt in the cave in Pete’s Peak. It made her wonder if Tutor had the potential of transforming itself into an active volcano.
They took three miles to descend one mile, to reach the flat sandy plain. The latter started suddenly, the road just disappeared. Ali asked Paddy about wind and sandstorms. The leprechaun looked worried and shook his head.
“The scabs spread the desert,” he repeated.
“So they’ve always been here?”
His answered surprised her. “They came a few years ago.”
“Where did they come from?”
“Some say the sea, Missy.”
“That makes no sense. They come out of the sea and they spread desert?”
Paddy eyed the sand nervously. He made Ali feel as if the three miles to the water and bridge was a hundred miles. “Some say they were made, Missy,” he said.
Ali paused. “On the Isle of Greesh?”
Paddy nodded. “Must keep them off our heads. Important.”
“What do they do if they get on your head?”
The leprechaun shuddered. “Eat your brains.”
Ali turned to Ra. “What do you think?” she asked.
Holding his bow ready, Ra peered in the direction of the bridge. “This sand might not be deep. If we stay on the road, it’s possible we might avoid these creatures.”
“What road? I can’t see any road,” she said.
“It must be there, buried beneath the sand. It should run straight across, between here and the bridge.”
Ali took out the fire stones, balanced them in her left palm. If she could’ve erected a force field around them, they wouldn’t have had to face such danger. Radrine’s shot had cost them dearly. As it was, she was not sure how much power she could generate in the stones. Her initial excitement was cooling, she felt exhausted. It had been ages since she had slept.
Yet Ali drew herself up, tried to look confident in front of her friends.
“We’ll run across the sand,” she said. “We’ll stay close together, keep our eyes open. Anyone see anything, they shout out. Ready?”
Paddy and Farble hemmed and hawed at the edge of the sand. Farble must have known about the scabs, too. The troll kept trying to grab her hand. She had to explain that she had to keep her hands free to use the fire stones. In the end, she decided to put them between her and Ra. The move pacified the elementals only slightly.