Rachel Golden and the Retriever of Sin (17 page)

After the rabbit had left she reluctantly got out of the bath (she could have stayed in there for hours, but her stomach was starting to grumble) and toweled off. She dressed in her newly washed clothes and went to knock on the boys’ door.

Kel opened it and met her with a grin, but as much as she felt like smiling hugely at him, she remembered their conversation in the cell and gave him a curt little nod instead. Which she immediately felt bad about.

They were all likewise bathed and dressed in clean clothes, even AC, though he complained of being itchy and kept fidgeting. Ros was sitting on the floor and reading a pamphlet called ‘Out and About in the Burrow: A Guide to City Nightlife’. ‘Well,’ he said, looking up and nodding hi to Rachel, ‘it seems they
do
have a few restaurant choices. But I don’t know…’

‘What’s the problem?’ Kel asked. Rachel was fixing her hair in a mirror opposite the bed and caught him staring at her. They both immediately looked away and Rachel felt herself blush. Awkward.

‘Well, rabbits only eat salad,’ he said, pretending not to have noticed the little scene, ‘and do you know what moles eat?’ Rachel and Kel considered it for a moment. Oh. Right. ‘Yeah. Worms and beetles and things.’ Rachel’s stomach growled again. She wasn’t really in the mood for carrots, but given the alternative she guessed they’d have to do.

‘So… what
is
the problem?’ AC asked, scratching himself.

As it happened, they were all pleasantly surprised. Just a short walk from the hotel they had found an Indian restaurant that served a variety of breads, rice and curry. Admittedly it was a little strange that there would be an Indian restaurant in a rabbit warren, and Rachel wondered if they even
had
an India in this Altworld, but compared to everything else she’d seen, she supposed it wasn’t so crazy after all.

Though there was a ‘meat’ option available for the curry, Rachel had played it safe and gone with a prawn Madras. She knew they were close to the ocean, and the lobster Crabs had given them had been delicious. She couldn’t help but wonder if the ‘meat’ would be diced chunks of python-sized earthworm.

After the meal Assorted Colors was mopping his plate with a piece of chapatti. ‘Well,’ he said, pausing to burp, ‘it wasn’t earthworm. I’ve had earthworm before.’ He had gone for the ‘meat’ option, and sounded a little disappointed.

Rachel unfastened the top button of her jeans and leaned back in her chair, feeling full and relaxed. As she stared at the ceiling of the restaurant she noticed for the first time how the rabbits and moles got the butterfires to stay where they wanted them. Above their table a clear glass globe hung, where a lamp might hang elsewhere. It was half filled with a clear liquid, probably nectar, and reminded her of a hummingbird feeder. The butterfires, though free to fly where they pleased, were attracted to and clustered around the feeders. They used bigger globes where they wanted more light, and smaller ones for a more relaxed ambience, like in this restaurant. It was really quite ingenious.

Kel appeared to be brooding and had barely said two words throughout the entire meal. Ros was surreptitiously looking between him and Rachel. ‘So,’ he said at last. ‘What’s the plan now? I mean tomorrow, obviously. I know we’re all pretty tuckered.’

Kel shrugged and looked away. Yep. Definitely sulking. Rachel stifled a yawn. ‘I dunno,’ she said, sleepily. ‘I guess we wait and hear what Pepper has to say in the morning. What was he gonna do? Speak to the king or something?’

‘Yes, we should wait and see what
Judge Benjamin
has to say,’ Ros said in a slightly admonishing tone, and Rachel rolled her eyes. She hadn’t forgotten that Judge Benjamin had been about to feed them to the seals a few hours ago. ‘And he said he was going to consult the Crown about possibly helping us in some way. I’m not sure what that would involve. Hey, maybe they could give us some weapons?’

Rachel thought back to their previous fights and agreed that weapons would be a good idea. Then she remembered Rain and Caroline, the other Hero party they had met, and got mad again. Stupid Caroline. She glared at Kel. But they
had
been carrying weapons; Rain had a bow (ha! a ‘rainbow’) and Caroline had a Taser.

‘Sure Ros,’ she said, yawning again. ‘We’ll ask them in the morning.’ Right then all she could think about was the extremely comfortable bed back in her hotel room.

That night Rachel dreamed. She was back in the courtroom, but instead of Justice Pepper Benjamin, the judge was Mr. Lemming, her math teacher. He was furiously banging his gavel and telling Rachel that she had failed her Hero test, and would be sentenced to the butterfires. The courtroom vanished and she was suddenly being pursued across a wild Altworld plain by fire-breathing butterflies. Huge worms broke out of the ground as she ran, twisting their way out of tangled tree roots in the gray nightmare world.

Stumbling, breathless, she dived for cover behind a fallen tree. Safe for the moment from the killer butterflies, her only thought was
Where is Kel?
Then she remembered. He had turned his back on her for the sake of his Safeguarder license. She was on her own.

As she lay there, shivering and afraid, the ground began to shake with the rhythmic drumming of massive hoof beats. Splinters of bark showered over her as black hooves smashed the top of the fallen tree, clipping it as their owners hurdled the mighty trunk. Two Dark Ones thundered past and began to make a wide turn. Any second they would be on her, and she just knew that they would kill her. Screwing her eyes shut tight, she waited for the flames from the monstrous black unicorns. Flames which never came.

After maybe a minute, but impossible to tell in dream time, the sounds of galloping died away and she opened her eyes. The plain was gone and she found herself sitting on a lonely beach. Waves crashed against rocks beneath a leaden sky, and a cold wind whipped at her clothes.

‘Come, lass,’ a familiar voice said, ‘I’ll show you what you’re looking for.’ She turned, expecting to see Crabs the old seaman, but instead found herself staring into the giant eye of Mr. Ross, the wandering albatross. He snapped his beak and lifted effortlessly on the wind, massive wings carrying him over the long grass of the dunes. Not sure what else to do, Rachel followed.

She was breathless by the time she reached the cliff top, her cheeks stinging from the frigid wind. As she clambered to her feet she looked around for the bird, but found him gone. In his place was the old man Crabs, who was watching her sternly from the top of the bluff.

Rachel’s hands were cut from the sharp marram grass, and she rubbed them on her jeans. Surely this was a dream? But she couldn’t recall ever having one so vivid before; where she could taste the salt wind on her chapped lips and feel sand in her shoes. Slowly she caught her breath. When she straightened up, Crabs was staring at her.

‘Here,’ he said, stepping aside and gesturing to a figure on the cliff’s edge. Behind him, standing on one foot and frozen in time was the figure of a man. He looked to be about 40, and was as insubstantial as a ghost. He reminded Rachel of the temporal echoes she had seen when she first entered the Altworld—the transparent playground rides that were just memories of her own world. But there was something… familiar about the man.

She stepped closer. Whoever he was he had been caught in time just before he fell over the cliff. He was standing on one leg, and leaning back at an angle that he couldn’t possibly recover from. Had he not frozen when he did he would certainly have fallen to his death. Rachel peered over the edge of the cliff and swallowed as she saw the massive rocks below doing battle with the crashing surf.

She looked back at the man’s face. Yes, there was definitely
something
, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She turned to Crabs, looking askance at the old man. ‘I think the eyes have it, eh girl?’ he growled, an amused glint in his eyes.

‘They’re… they’re
my
eyes,’ she breathed, mesmerized. The color was washed out and she could see through them, but the eyes in this man’s head were hers. It was like looking in a mirror. And then it dawned on her. ‘Is this,’ she swallowed again, the words catching in her throat, ‘is this my dad?’ She looked at Crabs, who closed his eyes and nodded solemnly.

‘I told you I’d show you what you were looking for,’ he said, lighting his pipe and puffing on it, ‘though not necessarily what you wanted to see.’

Rachel turned back to the echo of her dad, blinking tears from her eyes as she tried to bring him into focus, to absorb every detail of his face. She reached out a hand, tentatively, but her fingers passed straight through him as if he were smoke. ‘Is he dead?’ she asked Crabs, not turning around.

‘Well, that’s hard to say, lass,’ the old man said after a pause. ‘Sure looks like he’s going to be, doesn’t it?’

Rachel just stood and stared, dumbfounded. So this was what had become of her dad. This was how his last mission had ended. He was frozen in time just before falling to his death on this cold and unforgiving beach. And all of a sudden she hated the Altworld. She hated
all
Altworlds. She hated that he had died because he was Hero. She hated the Council for robbing her of a father. She hated the Guides and Safeguarders and Heroes who all played along with this bullshit and never said Stop! This is wrong. They never stood up for themselves or anything else but just blindly did what they were told.

And then as quickly as it had flared the anger was gone out of her; replaced with an empty sadness, a sense of defeat and loneliness. ‘I have to do something,’ she said, reaching out to touch her father’s cheek and again feeling her fingers slip through the ghost.

‘And what might that be?’ Crabs asked; maybe rhetorically, maybe trying to lead her to an answer. But what could she do? She wasn’t even a qualified Hero yet. (And very possibly never would be one.) And besides, whatever this image was that she was seeing, it was 13 years in the past. It wasn’t like she had a time machine.

‘You don’t need one,’ Crabs said. He was standing next to her now, looking sadly into the face of a man frozen in time. ‘This is the present,’ he said, gesturing with his pipe, ‘just in another Altworld. You know there are places where the walls are thin. You ain’t seeing into the past, lassie.’

Rachel frowned. Something was gnawing at the back of her mind, like a dream half remembered that was just out of reach. Something someone had said about what happens when a mission fails… Was it Ros? He’d said that the reality splits, and two worlds are created out of one moment in time; one decision or event. He said that there was one world where the mission failed, and another where it succeeded. But what had he been talking about at the time…?

‘Wait,’ she said, turning to Crabs, ‘if this is just another Altworld, and in the
present
, can’t the Council just open up a portal? I could go and save him!’

Crabs shook his head sadly. ‘Even if the Council
could
do that, they wouldn’t. Your father failed, lass. They closed the book on that one 13 years ago.’

Rachel bit her lip, deep in thought. She wasn’t taking no for an answer this time. Her dad was out there somewhere NOT DEAD. She didn’t give a damn about the stupid rules or multiple universes or whatever other crappy-ass excuses anyone came up with. She was going to save her dad.

‘You sure about that, girl?’ Crabs asked, looking at her slyly out of the corner of his eye. Rachel blinked. She hated when people read her mind, whether she was dreaming or not. ‘If so then I guess you could use the Retriever of Sin.’ He left the words hanging in the air, and Rachel’s pulse quickened. The Retriever of Sin… That sounded so familiar, but she couldn’t think why. She stamped her foot in frustration. Why did everything have to be so damn confusing and cryptic?? Would it kill someone to give her a straight answer just ONCE?

‘Yes, the Retriever of Sin might be just the thing you need,’ Crabs said, turning and walking back down the dunes toward the beach. His voice was getting hard to hear over the wind and the crashing surf. ‘Shame you lost it…’

‘What?!’ Rachel shouted at the old man’s back.
Lost
the Retriever of Sin? She’d never even
had
the Retriever of—oh wait. Did he mean the pocket watch? That was the only thing she’d lost recently. ‘Crabs!’ she called at his receding back. ‘Wait! Tell me what you mean!’ But it was too late. The old man waved without turning back, and she felt herself being pulled out of the dream and into consciousness. The last thing she heard before waking was that she wasn’t the only one looking for it, but it was so faint that it was hard to tell. She might even have heard the name El…

RACHEL WAS SITTING ON THE EDGE OF A FALLEN TREE IN THE FOREST, cleaning something in her lap. Ros and Kel were huddled together a little way away, shooting her nervous glances and talking in hushed tones. Assorted Colors was attending a fire, on which sat a roughly convex flat stone. He was poking at a dark gray powder on it that looked like ashes, and steam was gently rising from it.

‘I don’t like this at all,’ Kel whispered to the Labrador.

Ros nodded, chewing on his lip, his eyebrows knotted with concern. ‘I know Sinbad definitely wouldn’t like it,’ he said, then looked up at the trees. There were scant patches of gray sky visible in the canopy of leaves. ‘And I’m not a hundred percent sure we’re completely hidden, either,’ he said.

Kel’s stomach felt like it was full of butterfires. Things had suddenly seemed to have gotten serious for the Hero party, since leaving the safety of the warren. He risked a glance at Rachel again, studying her red hand as she worked.

An oiled leather cloth was spread across her lap, as well as numerous rusted metal machine parts. She picked up a piece of fine sandpaper and scrubbed at a short metal tube. There was a small bottle of oil among her tools, and a thin wire cylinder-brush. As one, he and Ros turned their heads to watch AC as he worked at the fire. Now
there
was a combination to steer clear of: Assorted Colors, fire, and black powder. Ros gave an involuntary little whine of anxiety, and Kel rubbed his friend’s head. And the morning had started out so
well
…