1.12 – Atlantis

“What do you mean, you warned them?”

Rayn crashed into the wall and slid to the floor, stunned. Dimetrius loomed above, fury enveloping him in a dark haze. Two points of red glimmered through the stygian veil—eyes which now lacked any humanity.

“I owed them a favor—” Rayn began.

Dimetrius swung at him. His hand did not come within a foot of Rayn’s head, yet Rayn flew across the room as if he had been clubbed. He crashed into a table, knocking it over.

The office door was flung open. Octavius stood there staring into the room. “What in the world is going on?”

Dimetrius had ceased to appear human at all. He was now a swirling mass of blackness, laced with red lightning. “He told the Strider of Chronos about the storm,” his voice thundered from the cloud. “This cuts our window of opportunity by nine days.”

“You’re not killing Rayn over that!” exclaimed Octavius, striding across the room and grabbing his pupil by one arm. He hauled the half-conscious Rayn to his feet. “There are other punishments more suitable,” Octavius told the black cloud that was Dimetrius. “Rayn has come too far to be disposed of.”

“He is a fool,” hissed Dimetrius, “A fool with too much weakness in his soul.”

“He is one of us,” replied Octavius. Boldly, he turned his back on Dimetrius and carried Rayn away.

Dimetrius dispersed like smoke, leaving the room empty and in shambles.

“So nobody will care about the car?” Carda asked.

“Naw, bring it,” said Lucas. “We’re going to a near-future Atlantis, and these sorts of vehicles are common in the present. If anything, they’ll think you’re one of those folks who collect cars and refurbish them.”

“Like somebody else we know,” said Xironi, snickering.

It was the next morning. Again, the sun was just rising, and Carda, Xironi, Sera, and Lucas were standing on the driveway around the Roadster. Esca sat on its roof, new tail twitching as she ran the computations for their dimensional jump. Ben was nowhere to be found—Carda felt certain that the little elemental was off stashing some shiny thing in whatever hidey-hole he had found in Xironi’s vast house. Lucas loaded up a large case containing all of his alchemy equipment, and a small duffel bag containing the clothes they had bought for him during his stay. He was pumped about finally getting to go home.

“I’m finished with the calculations, Miss Xironi,” Esca announced.

“We’re ready to jump, so go ahead,” said Xironi, taking Carda’s hand.

Esca shone her beam in a circle around the group and the car, and the world faded to gray. As it darkened to black, Carda’s heart leaped into his mouth. He was facing a different direction this time, and out beyond the circle, in the nothingness between worlds, he saw Michelle.

She floated in a standing position, leaning backwards as if still recoiling from Rayn’s fateful shove. Her hair streamed around her face, and her open eyes gazed at nothing. She was suspended in time and space, beyond the reach of both.

Light and color slammed into being around them, concealing Michelle behind its three solid dimensions. “Michelle!” Carda gasped. “Did you see her? She was outside of the circle!”

“You saw Michelle?” gaped Xironi.

Sera and Lucas stared at him. “How did she look?” asked Sera.

“Who’s Michelle?” asked Lucas.

“She’s frozen in time,” said Carda. “Or outside of it. Michelle’s my sister, and Rayn put her there somehow.”

“This Rayn guy needs a good pummeling,” said Lucas.

“He’s got it coming to him, believe me,” Xironi agreed. “We can’t help her now, Carda. But we will.”

“Right…” said Carda, looking around distractedly. “Where are we?”

They stood beside the car in a huge paved space full of strange-looking vehicles. They resembled beetles more than cars, with no visible windows or wheels. From time to time one would leave its spot and streak off toward a road that curved away in the distance.

“A car park, looks like,” said Lucas. He turned in a circle. “Oh, I see. We’re on the south side of the island. This used to be the marina. I wonder why they paved it?”

To the north the bulk of the island towered into the sky. It had once been a mountain, but it had been tiered and developed for so many thousands of years that it now resembled a pyramid hundreds of stories tall. At its pinnacle a blue shimmer glinted against the dawn sky. “That’s the World-gate up there,” said Lucas, pointing at it. “It’s the source of Atlantis’s wealth. We have a huge inter-world commerce system.”

The rising sun gleamed across the burnished roofs of the houses on the mountain, so that the whole island appeared golden. The group collectively shaded their eyes. Lucas grinned. “Well, that much is the same, anyway! Let’s drive up into the city, see what else has changed.”

“Yes, you acted foolishly, but we both know that you’re not a liar.”

Rayn was sitting in Octavius’s office, hunched forward with his elbows on his knees, head hanging between them. His injuries were only bruises, but a shadow of fear sat on him. He’d learned what happened to those who displeased Dimetrius.

“No,” Rayn mumbled, “and if I were, I’d have saved myself a beating.”

“You can’t lie even to yourself about your feelings,” said Octavius. “You still have an attachment for Xironi Heartlight, don’t you?”

Rayn nodded without looking up.

Octavius smiled. “You can do something to atone for your mistake.”

Rayn looked up.

Octavius stooped and spoke softly into Rayn’s face. “Find the Strider of Chronos. Keep him from stopping the storm.”

The streets of Atlantis were a vast grid, and Xironi quickly grew confused and lost. Carda had a good head for directions, however, and soon picked up on the pattern of the roads. Lucas pointed at landmarks as they drove, remarking about how they had changed.

The Roadster’s interior space had been adjusted so four people could sit inside, instead of only two; Xironi had “copy/pasted” the front seats, as she put it. The Felician sat next to Carda, while Sera and Lucas took the back seat.

“This place is so gorgeous, it doesn’t seem real,” said Xironi. “Don’t they have dirt anymore?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” said Lucas.

Every window was clean, the streets swept. Any people they saw had perfect teeth and hair, like movie stars. The roof of nearly every building was polished gold—or “orichalcum,” as Lucas informed them: a particular metal which Atlantean metalworkers had perfected. Beyond that, everything was built of white marble, and all the buildings were adorned with relief carvings of people and animals. Xironi wished she had brought a camera.

“There’s a library right up there,” directed Lucas, pointing up the street at a conspicuous dome made of glass. “Let’s stop by and see if they have the journal there.”

They parked outside and trooped into the library. It was full of bookshelves, but its collection seemed miniscule after the Library of Alexandria. They asked a librarian whether any journals graced the collection, but were informed that, no, this library held only nonfiction literature. For journals, she referred them to another library on the northern side of the island.

They piled back into the car, and Carda charged back into the maze of Atlantis. The higher they ascended on the island-pyramid, the more traffic they encountered. Their pace slowed to a crawl. Eventually they crossed a wide highway that descended from the World-gate; it, too, was choked with trucks loaded with goods, crawling slowly into the city to make their deliveries.

The sun was approaching its mid-day zenith by the time they reached the top of the island and began to descend the northern side. They stopped for lunch in a small outdoor market. Lucas paid for a plate of meat, bread, and cheese, worked some brief alchemy on it, and produced some fine deli sandwiches. They leaned on the car and ate, reluctant to use the car’s hidden den when the day outside was so pleasant.

Having finished his meal before the others, Carda wandered off into the market and returned with a pack of playing cards. They were similar to the cards of Earth, but consisted of three suits of eighteen cards each. He shuffled them and dealt them out on the hood of the car.

Xironi watched as Carda picked up the cards, re-shuffled, and dealt them again. Frowning, he repeated the process a third time. “That’s weird,” he murmured.

“What’s up?” she asked him, coming over to see.

“Well, look. I’ve shuffled these cards about a dozen times now. They should be mixed up.” He waved a hand at the cards, which were clearly ordered just as they had been when the deck had been opened.

“That’s a neat trick,” Xironi commented.

“It’s not a trick deck, and I don’t know how to trick shuffle,” Carda replied, a slightly ominous tone in his voice.

“I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I, and that worries me.” Carda waved a hand at their surroundings. “I mean, everything around here’s just… TOO perfect, you know what I mean?”

“Well, it’s not our present day, maybe…?”

“No technology, no matter how advanced, could possibly reverse entropy; it’s a fundamental law of nature.”

Xironi shrugged. “Well, so is gravity, yet airplanes fly.”

Carda scooped up the cards again and shuffled them. “That’s different. Airplanes use Bernoulli’s principle to counter gravity; that’s just using one law against another. This isn’t the same thing. It’s like…” He dealt the cards out. Again they emerged in perfect house order.

Xironi looked at them. “Like nature’s going haywire?”

“Yeah. What could possibly do something like that?”

Carda and Xironi stared at each other for a moment.

“Oh heck,” they said in unison.

Indal and Alatha sat on the floor in one of the living rooms in Xironi’s house. Alatha had brought over an armload of chronomancy equipment, so the room was full of spinning rings that flickered with violet sparks. She had also brought along an archaic instrument chronomancers had used throughout history for scrying: a crystal ball.

“This is an antique,” Indal commented, looking at it. “Mine is made of chrome.”

“This one has been in my family for generations,” said Alatha, “and it’s always worked for us.”

“You do know that the ball itself has no special properties, right?” said Indal.

Alatha scowled at him. “What do you think I am, five years old? Yes, I know that the ball only concentrates and reflects a chronomancer’s power. That’s why we USE it. It’s a good tool.”

Indal shrugged. “Just checking.” He clasped the temporal shackles around his wrists and placed both hands on the ball. They began to glow magenta, as did the sphere between them.

Alatha picked up the broken wand-pendant by its chain and touched it to the ball’s surface, then placed her other hand on top of Indal’s.

The timestream appeared around them, a million fine threads floating in the air, some crossing or intertwining. Indal peered around at the threads. “Look.” The pendant was lit with the violet light, and a single short strand hung from it, waving in an unfelt breeze. Alatha cupped her hand under it and touched it with one finger.

The strands disappeared and Alatha stood before them—or a ghost of her. There was something strange about her face, as if it were slightly distorted. Alatha gasped.

“About time,” said the ghost Alatha. “I’ve been trying to tell Carda how to fix this time fragment, but he was always interrupted.”

“How did you end up in a time shard?” asked Indal.

“And are you me?” asked Alatha.

“Sort of,” said Alatha. “I’m more of an echo. Look at the end of the string.”

Both chronomancers turned and looked along the timeline, toward its beginning. They saw a gaping rent in the timeline, with other times visible through it. They glimpsed an explosion of temporal energy, and a sword, and dust—

Suddenly the light was snuffed out. Swirling blackness shot up the timeline toward them. The chronomancers threw up protective wards, which slowed down the darkness for a split second.

It was enough. They yanked their hands off the crystal ball, and the visions of time vanished. But the instruments all around them were sparking frantically, as if the time-lightning itself was on supercharge. Then they all fell still at the same instant.

Indal and Alatha looked at each other.

“You know that subspace storm?” he queried.

“It’s here,” she replied.

“We’ve got to get out of here!” Xironi said, panicking. The four of them had jumped into the Roadster as soon as Carda and Xironi had voiced their suspicions.

“We need to find that journal!” Carda said at the same time, weaving through traffic.

“We need to evacuate everyone!” Sera and Lucas exclaimed simultaneously with them both.

“Okay, the librarian told us that journals are kept in the Oceanloft branch. Where is that?” Carda asked Lucas.

Lucas took a quick survey of their surroundings. “It’s down at the foot of the island. We’re still at the top.”

Carda slammed on his brakes as traffic ground to a halt ahead of them. He noticed a wide building built into the mountainside with a train sign in front of it. Light dawned. “Are there subway tunnels here?”

“Of course. Why?”

Carda grinned madly. Everyone else just stared at him.

“NO,” Sera exclaimed, grabbing the seat in front of her. “Absolutely NOT.”

“Too late,” Carda replied, barreling into the nearest subway entrance. He gave the car a quick spatial nudge past the ticket booths and security gates, and then they were booking down a dark tunnel. The subway rails were recessed in a deep channel in the concrete, and the Roadster’s tires sped along on either side of them. There was no third rail, Carda was glad to see. Catching the wheels in the rail ditch might tear up his car, but it wouldn’t electrocute them to death.

“Have you completely lost your marbles?” Xironi yelped, fingernails digging into the seat and ears pinned back.

“Only mostly,” Carda grinned. “It looks like there’s another station up ahead…”

“That can’t be right,” Lucas countered. “The subway stations are at least ten miles apart.”

Silence enveloped the car; no one wanted to say what all of them were thinking. The oncoming light was getting brighter as they rounded a gradual right curve in the tunnel.

“Are the walls down here straight or curved?” Carda asked through gritted teeth.

“Why should that make a diff—” Lucas said.

“More talky, less quizzy!” Carda snapped.

“Curved!”

“GOOD!” Carda yanked the steering wheel to the left and floored the accelerator. At the same time, he gave the ground beneath them a push with his spatial powers, helping the car jump over the rail ditch. The Roadster leaped forward and rolled to the right as it climbed the wall on their left, held there by centripetal force, just as the train screamed past in a blur of colored lights, shaking the tunnel and rattling the car. As soon as the train was clear, Carda allowed the car to slowly drift back into a horizontal position on the tunnel floor.

“Well, that’s something you don’t usually see on your daily commute,” Lucas admitted, looking pale.

“WHERE did you learn to pull off a stunt like that?” Xironi gasped.

“Video games,” Carda quipped, eyes searching ahead for any more trouble.

“And people wonder why he needs an Angelus,” Sera muttered.

Dimetrius sat in a dark room, toying with a black plastic stand. A broken chunk of dried glue in the center showed that it had once supported a large, heavy object.

“So,” he said aloud to it.

He turned it over and looked at its back. “Well,” he said.

He set it on the nearby desk and smiled at it. “Yes,” he said. “This concludes our contract, Octavius.”

The subway tunnel emerged far down the northern side of the island. Carda had to teleport the car three times to get clear of the subway station. The first hop landed him in the station terminal, and people screamed as a red car appeared out of nowhere in their midst. He jumped into the street outside, planting them in the path of an oncoming truck. So he jumped them to a rooftop where the car sat idling, and the Roadster’s passengers sat panting in stunned silence.

“Well, we made it,” said Carda. He looked around at everyone, and noticed that their eyes were fixed on something outside. He turned and looked.

The building they sat on was two stories tall, affording them a clear view of the ocean at the foot of the island, now a few miles distant. In the sky above the ocean hung a green sphere, like a giant bubble. Its inside blossomed with violet lightning. People on the street below were pointing and gesturing, and street traffic had ground to a complete standstill.

“It’s happening again,” murmured Xironi.

“Is that the subspace storm?” asked Carda, watching the lightning arc inside the sphere.

“Yes,” said Xironi. “We don’t have much time left. I remember from when I was little… The storm destroys everything slowly, so you have time to see it coming and feel reality being ripped apart. First to go are time and space. Then the elements. Then finally the atoms themselves are dissected and the world passes into a wave of pure energy.”

Everyone goggled at her in a moment of stark terror. Then Carda spoke. “I’ve got to find that journal!”

“We’ve got to evacuate everyone!” cried Lucas at the same time. He opened the car door and bounded out onto the rooftop. Sera followed him, and Carda and Xironi climbed out as well.

“I know the symbols for the Library of World’s Ages,” muttered Lucas to himself with a feverish look in his eyes. He gazed up the island-pyramid and found the World-gate. “I have to get everyone up there, quick. But how?”

Sera turned to Carda and Xironi. “Can you spare Esca?”

“Um, sure,” said Xironi, fumbling in the car and pulling out the biomech, who was folded up in a tidy little rectangle. “Wake up, Esca!”

The robot cat unfolded and looked around, her eyes lighting up yellow. “What’s the matter, Miss Xironi?”

“That’s the matter,” said Xironi, pointing at the storm. “You need to go with Lucas and Sera and help them evacuate Atlantis. Okay?”

“Okay, Miss Xironi,” said Esca, staring at the storm in wonder. “Where are you going?”

“To find the last journal,” said Xironi grimly. “We’ll meet you at the World-gate.” She and Carda climbed back into the car, and it teleported to a relatively clear street a block away in a flash of green light.

Sera turned to Esca. “Can you amplify my voice?”

“Sure,” said Esca. “How loud?”

“So everyone can hear me,” said Sera.

Esca’s eyes turned green, then orange. “All right, Miss Sera. Talk into my back—there’s a microphone there.” She scampered up on the edge of the building, looked down at the crowded street, and opened her mouth. Sera spoke into the mechanical cat’s back, and her voice blasted through the street. “”May I have your attention please! A subspace storm has broken into this dimension. Time and space powers have been disabled. Please make your way to the World-gate as quickly as possible.”

People looked up, and hopeful murmurs replaced the shouting of a moment before.

Sera turned to Lucas. “While Esca and I keep broadcasting, you’ve got to get to the World-gate so you can open it.”

“Don’t worry about me,” said Lucas. “This is my hometown. I’ll use the trolley system; it’ll get me there in ten minutes.”

Sera nodded.

Lucas climbed down the building’s fire escape and ran up the sidewalk, looking for a trolley station.

Carda and Xironi drove north as fast as the Roadster would go, taking back streets whenever they could. The roads were cluttered with unmoving traffic, honking horns, and people fleeing on foot.

In the sky, the lightning arced outward, striking the city with fingers of destruction, followed by puffs of green flame as if the air itself were on fire. The northern edge of the city fell prey to the storm as space was shuffled like Carda’s card deck. Buildings were torn apart and reassembled inside out and upside down, fragments embedded inside of walls, trees, and anyone who was unfortunate enough to hang around.

And Carda drove grimly right into the thick of it.

Xironi threw a spatial curve around the car, so that incoming debris would deflect around them. She held it with her right hand ablaze with green fire. Suddenly it went out and she doubled over, gasping, as if she had been punched in the stomach. “It took my power!”

“What? Are you okay?” asked Carda, swerving as half a wall appeared in the middle of the street and caved under its own weight.

“I’m okay, but it’s eating space,” said Xironi. “Be careful—”

Carda slammed on his brakes. The street ahead had been sliced cleanly away by the storm. There was nothing in front of them but a thousand-foot drop to the ocean. Fifty feet beyond this chasm, the street continued on into the city.

Carda and Xironi stared at the gap in silence. Then Carda held out his left hand to Xironi. “Hold my hand.”

Xironi obediently took his hand, and Carda’s green flames ignited. She lent him her own power, hoping the storm wouldn’t snuff it out this time.

Carda tilted his head back, and the pavement at the edge of the chasm peeled away from the ground and curved upward into a ramp. Carda stuffed a couple of abandoned cars under it to hold it up, then released Xironi’s hand. He threw the Roadster into reverse.

“Oh no,” said Xironi, staring at the ramp. “You’re not going to—”

“Yes!” said Carda, arriving at the beginning of the street, which was about two hundred yards long. He threw the car into drive, stomped on the brake, and pressed the accelerator. The car’s wheels spun under them, but remained in one spot, held there by the brakes. The rubber screeched and smoke began to billow from them. Carda’s speedometer edged up to one hundred. Then he released the brakes.

“You’re insane!” cried Xironi as the force of their acceleration pinned her to the seat.

Carda said nothing. He was concentrating on that jump, and one hand edged toward That Button. He had one charge left over from the race… Now was a great time to use it.

They flashed toward the ramp, and just before they reached it, Carda hit The Button. Their speed skyrocketed past three hundred miles an hour. The car shot up the makeshift ramp, and they were airborne. All they could see out of the windshield was the darkening sky. The engine screamed. So did Xironi.

Rick’s Juice system did its job, though. The car was once again enveloped by a wedge of air, which sliced through the maelstrom around the Roadster and kept it aloft long enough to clear the gap.

Then with an almighty crash and crunch of suspension, they landed on the far side and shot up the road, propelled by the afterburner. Carda whooped. Xironi only clung to the armrests, unable to make a sound.

Lucas ran up a street along with hundreds of other people, headed for one of the trolleys that travelled up to the center of the island. Panting, he arrived at the station, only to see a trolley depart, stuffed full of people. “Darn it,” he groaned. He was still miles from the World-gate. There was no telling where it opened to now, but only the Library of World’s Ages was safe, for it existed outside of both time and space.

Lucas pushed through the crowd and trotted up a street that led south, toward the island’s center. He had to keep moving or he would never get there.

Carda and Xironi drove right under the hovering bubble of destruction, and there they found the library.

Part of it protruded from a temple wall, complete with shelves and books. Parts of the floor were embedded in the street, with books sticking out of the pavement as if they had been set there when it was laid. The rest of the library looked as though it had been chopped up and shuffled together, with slash-lines through the shelves and books, and other shelves and books spliced up against them.

To make things worse, this close to the storm the air vibrated with a subsonic hum that rumbled in their stomachs and rattled their teeth. It made Xironi feel like she was losing her mind, and it was all she could do to keep from screaming.

Carda found it increasingly hard to focus on anything. He parked the car and struggled out of it, but found it hard to move. The air felt like cold molasses, and pushing through it was a strain. He tried to summon green flames, but couldn’t. Then he tried the lightning with his right hand. All he got was one violet spark, but that jumped to a certain book on the shelf. “That one,” Carda said.

Xironi jumped up and grabbed it off the shelf, then stared in horror.

The journal had been severed by the storm. The back half, with the spine, was in her hands, but the other half had been cut cleanly away. She peered onto the shelf and saw that it had been sliced all the way down its length. She could smell the freshly-cut paper.

Xironi wordlessly handed the cut journal to Carda, who stared at it.

Carda looked up at the sky. “Did I really deserve this?”

Xironi pointed at the street and yelled, “We have to find the other half!”

“Let’s just go!” Carda yelled back.

“No!” Xironi yelled. “It’s no good without the rest! It has to be here!” She spun and looked at the fractured bookcase where the journal had come from. It had been sliced into a triangle ten feet tall. She looked at the other shapes of the slices: trapezoids, rectangles, squares… no triangles. She traced the triangle with a motion of her arm, trying to show Carda what to look for, then dashed out of the roofless building and along the street, looking for more dislocated fragments.

Carda followed her, thinking she had lost her mind. She had grabbed his arm, waved vaguely in the air, then run off. The storm must be affecting her even worse than it was him. He followed her along the shattered street, trying not to trip over the volumes sticking out of the pavement.

Xironi looked at the ground, backed up, ran forward, holding her head sideways, studying the shape. Then she knelt and tugged. As Carda reached her, she stood up with the other half of the journal in her hand, unbound pages sliding between the disconnected cover.

They dove back into the car, and Carda threw it into reverse, hoping beyond hope that they might still make it out.

With a bird’s eye view of the doomed Atlantis, one would have seen that the subspace storm had splintered the northern side, scoring miles down into the planet’s surface, rupturing the crust and piercing the mantle. The ocean drained into the fractures and erupted back into the atmosphere as scorching-hot steam, forming a great dark cloud that mushroomed over the continent, full of lightning and thunder as it collided with cold air in the upper atmosphere.

This in turn fed the subspace storm, which began to send greedy ripples into the lightning element. The violet chrono-lightning stopped working completely. Carda and Xironi drove backward through the debris-choked street, aiming for the chasm they had jumped before.

Sera and Esca flew back and forth across the island, repeating the call to run for the World-gate.

And Lucas was only halfway there. The streets were packed with people, all running uphill. There was screaming, shoving, trampling, and looting everywhere. Why is it that a disaster brings out the worst in people? Lucas wondered grimly.

A trolley chugged by, loaded down with more passengers than it was meant to carry. Lucas ran after it, grabbed the railing and hung on. He had to get there somehow.

Unfortunately, the trolley had taken all it could stand. It shuddered, rasped to a halt, and expired. Its passengers swarmed off, leaving Lucas still clinging to the rail. “This is turning into a really bad day,” he said to nobody in particular.

“I just realized something,” Carda observed calmly as he drove full tilt toward the gorge.

“What’s that?” Xironi asked.

“The other side of that jump is higher than this side, and I don’t have any Juice left in the system.”

“What does that mean for us?”

“It means we can’t jump back over.”

“Then why are we still moving TOWARDS it?!?”

“Because I see a way for us to make it back that isn’t quite the way we came,” Carda replied, flooring the accelerator with only a quarter mile left until the drop-off.

The engine howled, Xironi followed suit, and Carda laughed. He was clearly under the influence of adrenaline by this point.

The car sailed off the precipice and hurtled toward the rock wall on the other side. Through her panic Xironi saw what Carda was doing. When the island had been sliced through, the subway tunnels had been exposed, like holes in swiss cheese. Carda was aiming for one such hole.

The gap didn’t appear much larger than a ping-pong ball from here, yet Carda was laughing almost confidently.

Almost.

The car didn’t quite make it into the tunnel cleanly. The convertible roof was torn free of the roadster and plunged into the abyss behind them. The car landed in the tunnel with no other damage.

Damage that wasn’t cosmetic, at any rate. The paint job alone was going to be pretty expensive after this little excursion.

“That… was close,” Carda commented, sobered by the near miss.

“You THINK?” Xironi yelled at him. “Don’t you EVER put us in that sort of danger again, mister!”

“At least we’re over the gap. Now to meet up with Lucas and Sera…”

“Lucas!” shouted a voice.

He looked up from the midst of a crowd that was rushing toward the top of Atlantis. They were still two miles from their destination.

Sera hovered overhead with Esca in her arms. Lucas’s mouth dropped open.

Sera plummeted to the pavement. “What are you doing here? I thought you’d be at the gate by now!”

“Traffic is horrible,” said Lucas, gesturing at the panicked crowd.

Sera rolled her eyes. “I guess I’d better take a hand in things. Here.” She thrust Esca at Lucas, who caught her in both arms. Then Sera grabbed Lucas under his armpits, flapped her wings, and took off, hoisting him above the street and flying uphill as fast as she could go.

Just as a person could not see an Angelus’s wings until they knew about them, so the average bystander could not see an Angelus in flight. Lucas could only see Sera because Sera wanted him to see her. Her wings beat powerfully on either side, yet they created no wind, and Lucas could see through them.

In five minutes they covered the last two miles, and just as Lucas’s shoulders were beginning to really ache, they crested the hill and arrived at the World-gate.

The pinnacle of Atlantis was a stone-paved square about an acre in diameter. In the center stood a twenty-foot tall ring of stone. Usually its interior displayed a picturesque view of some other world, but today there was nothing. The World-gate was turned off. Its operators were nowhere in sight, except for one man sitting outside a guard booth, staring at the oncoming storm and guzzling the contents of a bottle.

Lucas set Esca down, and ran up to the guard. “Excuse me,” he prodded, “could you help me activate the World-gate?”

“No point,” drawled the guard, gesturing at the storm with his bottle. “That’s the end of the world, that is.” There were three empty bottles on the ground beside him. Obviously, he planned to feel no pain when the storm took him.

“I have to open the gate to the Library of World’s Ages,” snapped Lucas, temper flaring. “And I need help!”

The guard looked at him sideways, and grinned. “The Library, eh? How do you plan to do that? The code’s been lost for a hundred years.”

“But I know it,” said Lucas. He grabbed the guard’s shoulder and shook him. “Snap out of it and come help me!”

“The code’s lost, see,” explained the guard with drunken deliberation. “It imprints on people so it can’t be lost. But whoever knew the code never came forward, so it’s been a hundred years since the gate opened to the Library. See? You can’t open it.”

“I’m from a hundred years in the past!” Lucas shouted. “I know the code, all right? I just need help to enter it!”

Sera tapped his shoulder. “I can help you. We can do it together.”

“Good,” said Lucas, “because this sot’s not doing us any favors.” He stomped toward the gate, already running the sequence through his mind.

The World-gate’s code entry system consisted of two ring-shaped pedestals on either side of the gate. Each sported twenty dials, and each dial chose between twenty symbols. In the center of either pedestal was embedded a circle of smooth black glass which displayed the symbols that the operator chose.

“Stand over there,” ordered Lucas, stepping into the right-hand code center and gesturing to the one on the left. Sera obeyed. “The code is twenty symbols long. I’m going to call them out to you,” Lucas said. “We have to enter them at the same time.”

“Oh boy,” said Sera, fingers hovering over the first dial.

Lucas spun his dial. “The one that looks like a cross.”

Sera found it. The symbol lit up on each pedestal, and a blue light ignited on the World-gate’s arch.

“Now one like a backwards capital E,” said Lucas.

Sera found it. A second symbol lit up.

They entered each symbol this way, carefully clocking each one in at the same time. Lucas concentrated fiercely, teeth clenched, the full code hovering behind his eyelids every time he blinked.

The last symbol lit up, and the World-gate opened, showing the endless aisles of books inside the Library of World’s Ages. Lucas turned to grin at Sera, and gasped.

The area in front of the gate was jammed with a silent, waiting crowd.

As soon as the gate was open, they charged through in a mob, pushing, shoving, shouting. Lucas crouched for cover behind the pedestal.

Slowly the mob thinned as the first crush of people vanished into the portal. Traffic diminished to a steady stream of people who arrived at the mountaintop gasping with relief to see the gate open. Sera directed traffic, and after a while, so did Lucas. He made sure the drunk guard was helped through the gate. The guard seemed disappointed that he wouldn’t get to see the world end.

“Where’s Carda?” Lucas called to Sera. “Shouldn’t he be back by now?”

“I was just thinking that,” said Sera, looking worriedly at the sky. It was black with ash-laden clouds, and almost nothing was visible past their blanket. Swooping down upon Atlantis was the green and violet heart of the storm, a malicious body of corrosive energy bent on devouring the elements.

In the distance a car honked. A moment later, a dented, mud-splattered Roadster screeched onto the mountaintop. Carda hollered and waved, but Xironi was almost invisible, she was crouched so far down in her seat. Lucas gestured to them. “Get through the gate already! The storm’s almost here!”

Carda drove up to the gate and stopped. People were still running past them. “Not until everyone is out of here,” he said, climbing out of the car and brushing off Sera, who rushed over to make sure he was all right. “Sera,” he said, “fly up and see how many people are left.”

She sighed irritably, but did as he said, taking off straight up. She rose a hundred feet in the air and floated on her glowing wings. “Not many,” she called down. “I only see a couple hundred, and they’re all nearly here. The rest of the city is empty.”

“We’ll wait for them,” said Carda, gazing at the storm as though he could stop it merely by staring at it.

So they waited, watching the lightning arc across the sky, watching the earth split open and buildings collapse, feeling the ground tremble beneath their feet. The clouds began to spill a hot, sulfurous-smelling rain.

Sera came drifting down. “That’s the last of them now,” she said as a family with several small children hurried by into the gate. “Atlantis is clear.”

“Good,” said Carda. “Lucas, do you have to close the gate from this side?”

“No, I can close it from the other side,” said Lucas. “But if the gate here is destroyed, we won’t be able to come back.”

Carda dropped a hand onto his shoulder. “Atlantis is a legend on all worlds, Lucas. This storm is the reason why.”

Lucas did not look happy at this news.

As they all glanced up at the sky, suddenly the green-and-violet heart of the subspace storm was shot through with beams of golden light, which pulled the storm back to collapse inward on itself. The clouds overhead, the city underneath, were sucked into the storm’s center as it imploded and vanished into subspace. A few seconds later a crashing boom struck them, shaking the island to its core and shattering buildings near the storm’s center.

The noise faded and they pulled their hands away from their ears.

Xironi was the first to speak. “What just happened?”

“I don’t know,” Carda replied. “I should re-read all the journals again when we get home. I must have missed something.”

“Who’s going to help the evacuees?” Lucas asked.

Carda considered this. “Most of them have lost everything in the storm. And I don’t think the island is stable enough to allow anyone to move back in…”

“The Librarians will help the survivors relocate to other worlds,” Xironi added solemnly. “It’s what they did with us.”

“Then that’s taken care of,” Carda nodded.

“I should help,” Lucas added. “They’re still my people, even if they’re a hundred years distant.”

“All right. If you want, I can drop you off in your own time before we go home—”

“No,” Lucas shook his head. “There’s no reason for me to return now. I’m a second-rate alchemist who has just seen how the world ends. Who’s going to believe me if I do warn them?”

“I’ll stay with Lucas for a while,” Sera offered.

“Sounds like a plan,” assented Carda.

He looked at the friends around him. They were exhausted, worn down, haunted by the sight of something that transcended all of their ability and power.

“Let’s go home and get some rest,” he said finally. “I believe we’ve earned at least that much today.”