whatsoever to criminal gangs, or was in any way knowledgeable about their activities, Cali's patience was wearing thin.
'Who else did you both – or she – socialize with?' the slightly less obnoxious-looking policeman asked.
'Elra... wasn't really one to have a big group of friends. A few close mates was all she needed. Me... well, we grew up together on the estate. Over the years we formed little cliques with other girls and a few guys, but most of them moved away, in time. I guess that's the way these things work.'
'Did she ever suggest to you that she might run away?'
'Are you kidding?' she gave the officer a disapproving look. 'Wouldn't you want to? We'd talk about getting out together. Fantasy stuff, mainly, like moving to London or packing everything up and going abroad. She was always concocting a 'bug-out' plan, as she called it. Modern life didn't really seem to suit her. We always joked she was born either before her time, or after it.'
The officers looked at her strangely. 'Did she ever have any suicidal thoughts that she shared with you?'
The expression on Cali's face was priceless. 'What makes you say that?'
'Well,' the other officer explained, 'you've been talking about her in the past tense, which tells us you may have had indication that she's... gone for good, as it were.'
She looked at both of them, one to the other. 'Elra would never do something like that,' she stated firmly.
They looked at her for a long while, seemingly weighing something up between them, without talking. 'Thank you very much, Califindra. You've been a great help. Under the circumstances we'd ask you to stay put in the hospital for a while, if that's okay with you. Your family are, of course, welcome to visit, but we think that...' he trailed off.
The other one picked up. 'We think that under the circumstances you'd best be kept under police protection, until we've clarified the situation.'
'How long - ?' Cali began, indignant.
'A few days, probably. We'll know more by then.'
Great. Things really weren't going well. Seriously, where the hell was Elra?
Twenty-five
'Stand about... there. Perfect. You're doing great. Right, when you're ready - '
'Really? You want me to just go for it?'
Kai rolled his eyes. ‘Yes, just “go for it”.’
For the first few days after she'd arrived, Elra had spent her time coming to terms with two things: the bizarre but exciting new direction her life had taken and, with more difficulty, her loss. Time, the great healer, hadn't quite worked its magic, and she'd spent most of her hours in her room, away from the others, remembering her mother. The memories weren't all fantastic, and in fact most of them were pretty forgettable, but out of the screed a few gems emerged. Days on the beach when she was younger, trips out, nights in... the odd moment of motherly love that had been so lacking in recent years.
Nevertheless, it felt like a hollow had formed in her stomach. But Elra used it. From within that hollow, she rebuilt herself. All her sorrow of loss, mainly for what could have been and now never would be, all those misplaced days, all that lost potential, she used to make herself stronger. From the pain came experience and resolve, firmness and foundations on which the future could be built.
Kai came to the door a few times, mainly with food, but all they exchanged were a few brief pleasantries. At night she would lie in bed and hear the muffled conversations going on downstairs: she couldn't make out the words, but the tone was unmistakable. Mostly it'd be Kai's mother – Zhen – talking (by process of elimination: she had the only female voice), and by the sounds of it she wasn't too happy.
There was nothing more ugly in the world than bigotry, Elra thought, regardless of whether it was against people with different skin tone, different religion, or people who weren't born into the Knowledge tradition.
Now here she was, about a week after she'd arrived, standing about ten meters away from Kai in the large bare room with the elevator, trying to create a rift.
'You've got to remember, you have actually done this before.'
'But back then I was really stressed!'
'But you can do it! And now you've consciously used Knowledge without marks, down in the tunnels, you can remember how it felt and translate that to this.'
'Easier said than done,'
Kai rolled his eyes again. Elra gazed at the antique elevator set in the far wall, and remembered how she felt in the depths of the city. Power? Kind of, but that didn't really do it justice. A better word would be potential. That feeling of being able to achieve anything, even things she couldn't conceive of. She just needed to recapture it.
She had an idea. Start small and work your way up. Excitedly, she raised her hands, palms facing each other. Elra wasn't certain about rifts, but this she could do. She didn't know why she hadn't done it earlier, really. She closed her eyes and focused. For a moment, things seemed clear.
Across the room, Kai yelped with joy. 'That's awesome!' he cried. 'Not a rift, but - '
She opened her eyes and met his excited gaze. She viewed him through the space between her aligned palms, and the arcs of electricity passing between them. 'Shhh, don't say anything.’
See, you can do it. It wasn't even that hard. Now, USE it.
Across the room. Me, the room, and the space within are all the same. Me and the destination are the same. There was Kai, about ten meters away, looking strangely nervous. Me and Kai are the same. I can do this.
The electricity was still passing between her palms. The air was beginning to smell slightly acrid, presumably from where the sparks' energy was burning dust, or creating ozone.
That smell.
That was it. That's how the rifts smelled – like fierce metallic burning. The details flooded back to her: the shimmering surface, the ambiguous edges, that faint crackle... And the shock of seeing somewhere else on the other side.
The power between her hands was growing. It wasn't just electromagnetic anymore. It seemed to be moving, becoming independent, coalescing into something more physical.
There. Elra stepped back, and the nascent rift remained. It hung in the air, amorphous and one-sided, about the size of a beach ball, except flat. It had no destination end: its event horizon was a translucent metallic sheen.
Kai walked around the periphery of the room, never taking his eyes off it, his face a perfect picture.
'Now we're getting somewhere.’
Twenty-six
Hiero walked down Oxford Street, mingling with the throngs of unmarked, weighing the situation. This Elra girl was fascinating: it was clear that she’d be the cause of great change. And with great change comes great opportunity.
It was about time something happened. And it wasn't like he was getting any younger.
He'd heard what happened to Elra. Attacked by red warriors from a desert beyond imagination. He knew Harland and Zhen didn't buy it, but then again they had never been great thinkers. The prospect of a different world felt incredibly compelling to him: it was like an affirmation of what he'd believed all his life. Each person makes their own reality. All realities are equally real.
So how could this new-found reality make his better?
Twenty-seven
It took a few more tries before Elra was able to form a fully-functioning rift. A few days later, after constant, exhausting practicing, where her and Kai had pretty much holed themselves up in the empty elevator room and tried again and again until Elra got the feel for her supreme command of Knowledge, it finally happened.
It was the evening, and Elra had a headache. They were close to stopping for the night: outside the bank of windows the lights of London shone in their constellations, casting a huge orange glow on the clouds above. So far, Elra had learned to create a rift with no destination fairly easily at will, but connecting it to somewhere (or some-when) else was proving problematic.
'Perhaps we should pack it in,' Kai mused, staring at yet another two-dimensional metallic disk hanging in the air.
&n
bsp; 'Let me try something different,' Elra countered. Her mind felt muddled, but her resolve was firm.
'What?'
'Well, I've been focusing on the smell, the texture... the sense of these rifts so far. It makes it easier for me to create them, but maybe I've been thinking too much about them rather than the destination.'
'Well, the destination we should aim for first should be the other end of this room,' he replied dejectedly.
'Well, maybe that's just it. Maybe we should try something else. Watch.'
'Elra - ' Kai began. 'El - '
But she was already at it. The blank rift suspended in the air faded out of existence as Elra began forming the new one. By this stage she didn't need to take the electric palms shortcut: the thing would manifest in front of her without any contact needed.
Elra thought of that moment with the mask in the British Museum.
Goosebumps shivered across the back of her neck when she remembered the woman's cruel metal muzzle, the shoulder spikes, the unknowable horror of that reality. One of many, many realities, an infinite number... All just a few states away from her own.
What had she been aware of? The huge booms of bombs exploding high above – if they had been bombs – the darkness and artificial light, the smell of damp concrete... Feelings of oppression, desperation, control...
In front of her the rift took form. Me, the universe, all and every universe, we are one and the same. I am the multiverse thinking of itself.
Almost majestically, the rift opened up to