Lying on her stomach, sprawled sideways across the bed in a pair of dark blue drawstring pants and a gray tanktop, Sandoval Lucas (née Mason) snored lightly. Her outstretched hand, hanging off the edge of the bed, held a purple field-engraver loosely between several fingers, while her construction mace rested with the handle lying across her back. A soft drizzling rain sound from a prepared white noise sleep assistance spell drowned out most of those light snores, as the brunette girl continued to slumber. The blinds across the room’s windows were half-raised, with somewhat dim light from simulated stars within the simulated nighttime visible through the gap.
At once and with no apparent warning, Sands jerked upward and very nearly fell off the side of the bed. Her hand clutched the field-engraver so tight she bent it nearly in half, while the mace fell off her back and onto the floor with a loud thump (which itself would be inaudible outside of the room, thanks to magically reinforced sound-proofing). Said soundproofing would also prevent anyone else from hearing the young woman’s abruptly blurted shout of, “Erin!”
Eyes wide, Sands shoved herself off the bed. She nearly tripped over the fallen mace, before stooping to grab and set it up on the nearby chair. From there, she jerked a drawer open and began to hurriedly grab clothes almost haphazardly. In a bare handful of seconds, she had changed out of her sleeping attire and into jean shorts and a red tee-shirt, all in near darkness without bothering to flip on a light. Grabbing her phone and the mace, she shoved both into their containers on her belt before bolting for the door. The whole way, she muttered a mixture of curses and apologies under her breath, even as she jerked the door open to leave her room.
In the corridor beyond her room, Sands almost ran into her twin sister. Sarah was just coming out of her own room. Both girls’ eyes were wide as they almost stumbled into one another.
“Erin!” Sands blurted as soon as she’d recovered from the near-collision, staring wildly at her sister through the dim light coming from the open windows in the corridor. “Did you–”
“Yes,” came the simple, flat response. Sarah gave a short nod, glancing over her shoulder back through her open door. “Erin came to my dream. Sort of. She didn’t… talk. But I saw her.”
Sands’ head bobbed up and down quickly. “Yeah! Yeah, I saw her too. And she didn’t talk, but I got like… ideas. Impressions. She’s not at Crossroads anymore. She ran away or… or something. They’re looking for her. And she’s trying to talk to her dad but she can’t get through.”
“But she found someone to help her, another girl.” Those words came not from either twin, but from Vanessa, who had just climbed the stairs and stood on the top step, hand on the railing. “Someone who has… some kind of connection to my family. And they need us to find them.”
Sands glanced that way, biting her lip as she stared at the blonde girl. “You got the dream message too… All three of us got it. You were roommates with her and we spent a lot of time with her when we were kids. That’s gotta be it, right? Whatever spell she’s using to communicate, it must need some kind of connection like that. So she sent the message to all of us just to make sure we wouldn’t blow it off or anything.” Even as she said that, a guilty flinch crossed the girl’s face. They’d left Erin behind back at Crossroads. After lying to her for a whole year and leaving her out of things. No wonder the other girl was afraid of being ignored now.
From the look on Vanessa’s face through the dim light, she felt about the same guilt. Her voice was quiet. “I don’t know who this girl is that she found, or how she’s connected to my family. She couldn’t get that part across in the dream. But it doesn’t matter. Even if she didn’t have someone else, we still have to go help her. We can’t… we can’t just…” She trailed off, her voice pained.
“We can’t fail with her like we failed with Flick.” Sands finished for the other girl. It had only been a couple days since the assault on Fossor’s compound. The Necromancer himself had escaped, of course, even if they’d managed to destroy a lot of his resources at what was apparently his primary residence.
They’d destroyed many of his ghosts, had wrecked over a dozen ongoing horrible spells he’d had in various levels of readiness, had claimed a whole vault full of various magical artifacts, gold, and other useful tidbits. They’d driven him to retreat.
They had hurt him. That much was indisputable. Fossor had been hurt and forced to abandon a large amount of his personal resources. But it wasn’t enough. He still got away, and they hadn’t accomplished the primary goal. They hadn’t saved Flick or her mother.
There had been no sign of Joselyn at all. Wherever she was, the woman wasn’t in the palace when Sands and the rest of the quickly-gathered army had descended into Fossor’s secret underground chamber.
But worse than Joselyn not being anywhere in sight, Flick had been right there, clutched in Fossor’s grip. And they’d still failed to save her. Fossor had used a time travel spell again. A much stronger one than before, according to the adults. From what Wyatt, Sariel, and Dries had been able to put together, Fossor had sent Flick several years into the future. Years.
What the hell were Sands and the others supposed to do about that? For all they knew, that was where Joselyn was too. Either way, Flick was gone. The only way she could come back was if she on that end managed to get someone to send her back to some time after she was sent forward.
Not that that was stopping Wyatt and the other spell-focused people. They were apparently working on a way of attempting to grab hold of Flick and yank her back through time from this end. But from everything Sands had heard, it was… pretty unlikely to work. Still, they were trying, and she couldn’t fault them for that. She couldn’t blame anyone for needing to try.
“They’ll find Flick,” Sarah insisted. “Or she’ll find a way to come back. We can’t do anything about that now.” She turned to look pointedly at her sister, adding in a firm voice, “We can do something about this.”
Vanessa was already nodding in agreement. “Right. We can get Erin and this girl she found, figure out what she has to do with my family, help Erin contact her dad… We can do that.” After a brief pause, she added, “We’ll need help to do that.”
Sands folded her arms, suddenly feeling uncertain. “I didn’t get an address or anything, but I got umm… images? It’s like the spell couldn’t give real words, just impressions and sort-of thoughts. Feelings, that kind of thing.”
“There was a submarine,” Sarah put in. “A black submarine, in the water near a building. And a bunch of like… science places. There was a planetarium, a place where little kids were playing with science experiments.”
Sands added, “And there was that red shuttle thing. Except not a shuttle. It was like… it didn’t go anywhere, but it went up and down and stuff and made you feel like you were moving when you were inside it? Except without any magic. That’s a Bystander toy thing, right? But where–”
“OMSI,” Vanessa abruptly interrupted. When the other two looked at her, she elaborated. “Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. I’ve been there a couple times. I told Erin about it. She said we should see it sometime. That’s… that’s what she was showing us.”
“Are you positive that’s the same place?” Sands asked before making a face. “Why am I asking you if you’re remembering something right?”
“I’m positive,” Vanessa confirmed. “The submarine. That’s the big thing. The other parts could maybe be other museums, but OMSI has a big submarine right next to their building. You can go on it and look through the periscope and everything. That’s–” She cut herself off, swallowing hard. “That’s the place.”
“What’s the place?” That particular question came from Dakota Coalbright. The dark-haired girl, much younger than the others, had been staying in Vanessa’s room for these past weeks because it happened to be where she felt the most safe. She attended her own classes for those her age, but lived in this house. Vanessa didn’t mind. The two had been getting to know each other more. Plus, Dakota was apparently trying to help Avalon and Miranda fix the Eden’s Garden vines so they could grow properly.
Now, the older blonde girl winced as she glanced toward her roommate, lowering her voice. “Sorry, Dakota,” she murmured. “Did we wake you up?”
Head shaking, Dakota insisted, “I had to get a drink and you weren’t in the room. Then I heard you guys talking. What’s…” She looked back and forth between them, suddenly pensive. “What’s wrong?”
The other three exchanged brief glances before Vanessa explained the dreamcall that they had all experienced, and what it meant. Given everything Dakota had been through, being forced to kill her own family members, spending years in a mental institution, all because she had been the unwitting pawn of an evil, potentially world-ending plant monster, Vanessa wasn’t about to try to keep the girl out of what was going on, even if Principal Fellows thought she should. Dakota deserved to know the truth, despite the fact that she was young and had been through so much. Vanessa herself knew as well as anyone what it was like to be in that situation. And even she couldn’t fully comprehend what it was like to have actually killed people you loved at all, let alone when you were just a little kid. Trying to avoid telling her what was actually going on now wouldn’t be fair. To say the least.
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Hearing that, Dakota hesitantly started, “So, um, your old roommate needs help getting here, and she has a friend that’s like… connected to your family. And now she sent you a message about where to meet her. But it’s not like, word messages, it’s just images of a place you know.” Once those words were met by nods, the younger girl bluntly asked, “Are you sure it’s not a trap?”
“A trap,” Sands echoed thoughtfully, with a glance toward her sister, who grimaced.
“Sure,” Dakota confirmed with a vague gesture. “You know, from those Crossroads people. Come on, your old roommate happens to run into someone connected to your family and they send you a magic dream message showing you where to meet them? That smells like a trap to me. What’re the odds of your friend finding some long-lost family member or something?”
“You uhh, might be surprised,” Sands offered with a weak cough. “But yeah, you’ve got a point. On the other hand, we can’t just ignore it or abandon them.” Her voice was more firm then. “Erin was our friend for a long time. Even if we had to leave her out of stuff last year, even if we didn’t… couldn’t… get her involved, she’s still our friend. If she needs help, we have to be there.”
Vanessa agreed hurriedly. “Yeah, she was nice to me. She helped me not umm, not stay in the library all the time. She was a really good roommate and I just… I just left her there. If she really does need help to get here and to contact her dad, then I’m going to help.”
“But you’ll be careful, right?” Dakota insisted pensively. Her wide, perpetually sad eyes were focused on Vanessa as she continued, “You have to be careful. I mean–” Flushing belatedly, she waved both hands to indicate the twins as well. “Everyone, you all have to be careful.”
“Don’t worry,” Sarah reminded the girl gently, “we can’t go anywhere without telling the adults what we’re doing.” Under her breath she muttered, “Even though we all technically are adults. I mean we’re eighteen, what–” Coughing to cut herself off, she finished with a shrug. “And they’ll insist that we all have a plan.”
Vanessa agreed, “Yeah, believe me, Dakota, we’re not just going to run off right now. We need a plan, and we’ll have plenty of help.” After a second of thought, she looked to the other two. “You didn’t get a time or a day or anything, right?”
“They’ll probably just be waiting there all day,” Sarah pointed out with a shrug. “You know, waiting for us to show up."
“That was dreamjaunt they were using to communicate, right?” Sands put in as the memory of an old lesson from their mother came back to her. “Maybe we could find someone like Wyatt to mix some together and send a message back. You know, to let them know that we got it and show them like a clock or something.”
“No!” That was Dakota, who hurriedly insisted, “If it’s a trap, you don’t want to give them any idea of when exactly you’ll be there. If they’re just waiting around there all day, it’ll be easier to check to make sure it’s not a trap. They have to wait around. But if you give them an exact time, they can plan a trap around that really easily, see?”
“I get the feeling you and Wyatt are gonna get along really well,” Sands informed the kid before acknowledging, “But yeah, right, good point. Okay, so we just go tell our Moms what’s going on, right?”
“We might want to wait a little bit on that,” Vanessa pointed out.
“What?” Sands shook her head. “Why’re we waiting?”
“Because,” Sarah reminded her sister while pointing to the nearby dark window.
“It’s two-thirty in the morning.”
********
Thirty-eight hours later
Sands had wanted to go the very second the museum opened, of course. But Sariel, Larissa, Haiden, Principal Fellows, Professor Dare, and Professor Kohaku all insisted they wait until late in the day, to give the group time to plan a quick approach and extraction. As Kohaku put it, even if Erin and whoever she was with were on the up-and-up and weren’t trying to trap them, it was possible that someone from Crossroads or Eden’s Garden might have caught on anyway. They couldn’t be sure that Erin didn’t have secret minders following her around in case she might lead them somewhere important.
Even without Wyatt (who was busy focusing on his attempt to work on a targeted time-travel spell to pull Flick back out of the future), the rest of the adults were definitely providing enough paranoia. Not that Sands could blame them, really. She knew all the dangers and everything, she just… she just wanted to get Erin out of there so she could say they accomplished something. With Flick banished years into the future, and no total guarantee that they’d be able to pull her back here… It was bad. It felt bad. But with Erin and whoever she had with her, that was something that had an immediate fix, something Sands and the others could do right then. They couldn’t help Flick right at the moment. But they could help another friend, the other one they had abandoned.
As part of preparing to meet Erin and her friend, Dare and Kohaku, who had taken charge of the mission, such as it was, had sent several groups through the museum all day long. They were a mix of Natural Heretics whom Erin (and hopefully any Bosch Heretics following her) wouldn’t recognize and Alters who didn’t set off the Heretic sense for various reasons.
They’d spotted Erin with some pale, dark-haired girl around the same age fairly quickly, apparently. From the description, Sands didn’t recognize her. Neither did Sarah or Vanessa. Or Tristan, for that matter. He’d insisted on coming too, and was currently sitting next to Sarah in the van they were all waiting in, the two of them whispering about some movie they’d watched or something.
Sands knew those two had a thing. It had become progressively more clear over the past few weeks, even if they were obviously taking things slow. The pair read books together, went for walks together, watched movies, had food. They did all the dating things aside from actively calling it a date or kissing or anything. At least, Sands was pretty sure they weren’t kissing.
Part of her felt like warning Tristan about hurting her sister. But she pushed that thought aside. Sarah didn’t need her to fight her battles or play protective sister for her. She was fine. Tristan was obviously going slow through all that stuff, and neither of them needed Sands butting in.
Still, she couldn’t help but squint at the boy every time he wasn’t looking at her, before quickly looking away when he glanced in that direction.
“Okay.” That was Larissa, sitting in the driver’s seat. “The four of you can make your approach. Tanner says they’re out by the submarine, sitting on a bench. We’ll be all around you. Kohaku’s nearby, just out of sight. Dare is on the submarine itself. We’ve got people on the roof, and I’ll be a few steps back in disguise, just in case.” As she said that, the woman took a masker and pulled it on, turning her appearance to an elderly, gray-haired woman. “Everything looks clear. But be careful.”
Sands, Sarah, Vanessa, and Tristan all slipped out of the van and headed that way. They bought their tickets, were informed that the place would be closing in forty-five minutes, and headed around toward the submarine. On the way, Tristan remarked, “You know, it’s too bad we have to rush in and out of here. This place looks pretty cool.”
Vanessa shot her brother a quick look, eyes wide. “It’s science stuff. You want–”
“Yeah, yeah, I said it’s cool.” Tristan nudged her. “Don’t have a coronary. Seriously though, we should come back here sometime.” His face and voice darkened then. “With Flick, if we can get her back sometime before we’re all over legal American drinking age.”
Sands started to insist that they would get Flick back before then. But she was interrupted by the sudden sight of Erin. The girl’s hair had been bright pink the last time Sands saw her, but it was back to being blue. She was also, as promised, sitting next to a pale, anorexically thin girl with dark hair, who was staring intently at a very old-looking leather book in her hands.
With a shrug, Sands walked that way with the others. Both seated girls looked up, before Erin quickly stood with a murmured word to her companion.
“Hey, Erin.” Quickly, Sands stepped over to embrace her old friend. “You guys wanna get out of here?” She tried not to sound as nervous as she suddenly felt.
Erin’s head bobbed, even as she took the time to embrace Sarah and then Vanessa. “Yes. Fuck yes, let’s go. There’s more than just you guys, right? Y-you’re sure there’s no Crossroads people here?”
“Definitely sure,” Sands confirmed.
“Why?” That was Larissa, who had removed the masker and took Erin into her arms for a tight hug. “Do you think you might’ve been followed? And who’s your friend here?”
“This is Dylan Averty,” Erin quickly introduced them all before adding, “And we have to get out of here. I have to tell you about Baron Dallant.”
“Jeremiah?” Larissa frowned. “What about him? He’s undercover, but he’s on our side.”
“He may be undercover,” Erin agreed, “but I’m pretty damn sure he’s not on our si–”
“Pardon me.”
The interruption came from a new figure, one who simply appeared a short distance away, prompting everyone there to jerk that way, drawing weapons and readying powers. Dylan had one hand raised with a small, strange, clearly magical bag clutched in it. Larissa and Dare were both right there in an instant. All of them faced the figure who had spoken.
He was tall, purple, with red eyes and a long beard. Not to mention partially translucent.
“Ghost,” Dare immediately snapped, her sword snapping upward. “One of Fossor’s.”
“No.” That emphatic, sharp denial stopped the woman from lashing out. The purple ghost gave one shake of his head. “I am not his. Not anymore. That, in fact, is entirely why I have spent all this time searching for someone connected to the Chambers.”
“What are you talking about?” Dare demanded, making certain to keep herself between the ghost and the teens, her sword already prepped with a ghost-harming spell.
“I am no longer bound to the orders of that creature,” the spirit informed them. “Thanks entirely to the efforts of your… Felicity. And I am here to repay that incredible favor.
“By leading you to where Fossor is, so you may stop him before it’s too late.”