The Golden Spiral (2 page)

“I already feel it.” V frowns. “And I think you’re feeling it too much. Stop that, Tony. You’re making me nervous.”

He agrees. There is a wrongness emanating from Tony. The edges of his body seem softer, thinner than before. He thinks of the word
suffused.
Of the word
bloated.
Of the word
decomposing.

He can feel the pressure building inside Tony. After spending all those years controlling the pressure from the river, he is surprised that Tony has missed identifying something so important to his survival. He hadn’t realized Tony was so weak.

He wonders if he should intervene. Warn him. But he’s curious to see what they will do. How capable they are without him. He wants to know how much they need him.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry!” Tony grabs V’s arm and pulls him forward. “We’re late, we’re late, for a very important date.”

“Quit it,” V barks, yanking his arm away. “Stop acting so crazy.”

There is a strange note in V’s voice but there is no time to identify it. The gold-flecked shadows overhead have ended suddenly in a hard edge. A solid wall rears up before them, tall as a tower, narrow, foreboding.

It is the black door.

He can see a glimmer of brass and knows that the hinges on this door only swing
in.
There are no elaborate designs on this slab of black. There is no need. No one ever expected anyone would lay eyes on this side of the machine.

He grins. He loves shattering expectations. It’s important to be the first. The best.

This is the door that will lead him into a new life. He can feel the thrumming hum of energy trapped just on the other side of the door. So close. Close enough to touch. Almost. Almost.

The promise of power is screaming like a high wind through his ears. It will take only a touch to tame it, claim it for his own. The pull is insistent. Immediate. He lowers a hand he hadn’t realized he’d raised.

He hears chimes ringing, a melody that is at once familiar and alien.

It is time—in more ways than one.

“We should wait for Zo,” V says. “He’ll want to go first.”

“Who died and made him king?” Tony’s words slur together in a lump of sound. They knock against the shivery chimes, a discordant clash. “I’m going to do what
I
want for a change.” His laugh sounds like a seam ripping apart. “My way this time.”

Tony lifts a hand, reaches for the door.

The music swells like a rising tide. The pressure gathers, thick as a storm cloud, focused as a tornado’s funnel.

He thinks of the word
crescendo.
Of
corrupted.

V takes a step back. “No, don’t—”

Tony touches the door.

Cataclysmic.

A supernova of white reverses the world from dark to light in an instant. Heat floods the narrow space—a fire that doesn’t burn, but one that is deadly all the same.

The golden stars over Tony’s head begin to wink out one by one. The delicate web strung between them begins to sag and droop, falling, fading. In the harsh white light of destruction, Tony himself grows thinner, fainter, torn apart like a cloud in the wind.

He hears Tony scream. The laughter is ripped from his voice, and all that is left is pain. He watches Tony writhe, caught by forces he can’t see, much less stop. His body begins to disappear, an emptiness that eats away at his chest before spreading out through his arms, up his neck, down his legs. He struggles, fighting against the impossible.

His mouth vanishes, and his scream is nothing more than a fading echo. The golden chains on his wrists shimmer like mirages. He is a faint outline against the burning white. For a moment, he holds his shape, and then the outline disperses like ashes.

Tony is gone, unraveled. Erased from existence.

There is no sound. Even the chimes are silent. He is alone with V. He looks at the stunned expression on V’s face, follows his gaze.

There is a hole where the door used to be. A portal that empties out onto a familiar room, a familiar sight. The courtroom is empty tonight. He smiles. This time there will be no judge, no guards to watch them travel through the door. This time no one will ask him any questions.

He is glad now that he didn’t intervene. If he had stopped Tony, then he would have been the one to trigger the trap. He would have been the one blasted into oblivion instead of the one to cross through the portal and step onto his homeland after more years than he cares to count.

He walks forward. He can feel the weight of V’s gaze on his shoulders, equal parts surprise and fear. That is good. It’s good to keep people on their toes. Prepared.

He feels he should miss Tony more than he does. Ah, well. Perhaps later. For now, V is enough. He will have to be.

“Come, Vincenzio,” he says. “Let’s go home.”

V hesitates for a bare moment, then falls in behind him, following in his footsteps across the threshold.

A warm ripple passes over him, into him. And then he is through. He is home.

He draws in a deep breath, feeling free and whole. Turning, he looks back into the dark heart of the machine. The walls, the ceiling, the floor—everything glows with a white-hot light. As he watches, the light begins to spread deeper into the machine, moving with the speed of a wildfire and leaving behind only ash in its wake.

Though he left a warning not to follow, he secretly hopes Dante disobeyed. And if he did follow, he hopes he survives the coming onslaught.

Things are about to get interesting.

Chapter

1

Is this a joke?” Jason sat down next to me on the patio steps in my backyard, a sheaf of papers in his hand. He shuffled through them, one after another, sometimes flipping a sheet upright, sometimes turning one over.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, looking up and squinting against the early June afternoon sunshine. My purple Popsicle dripped a splash of grape onto my hand.

“According to these directions, this”—he pointed to a series of rectangles and squares drawn in overlapping layers—“connects to this”—he shuffled to another page, this one covered with tiny circles and ovals—“but without any apparent bolts or hinges or . . . or anything.” He dropped the papers on the ground between our feet and ran his hands through his blond curls. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Um, sorry?” I offered.

“It might help if I knew what we were building. I mean, sometimes it looks like it’s some kind of a house. But not like a real house—it’s too narrow and long. And there seem to be too many doors. And no windows at all. It’s like we just have plans for a hallway and not the rest of the house. You’re not keeping something from me, are you?”

I stuck the Popsicle in my mouth, grateful for the excuse it gave me not to respond immediately. I looked at the dozen or so small flags stuck into the ground along one edge of my backyard that outlined the parameters of the project. Jason was right; it didn’t seem to make any sense. What could possibly fit into a space twenty-four feet long, two feet wide, and eight feet tall?

“And if I’m reading this right, then once we’re done building it, we have to burn it down. What’s that all about?”

I shrugged, though I had wondered about that part of the plans myself. “It’s the final step. You know—like making ceramics or forging a sword. There’s always a finishing process you have to go through.”

“The refiner’s fire,” Jason said with a nod. “That’s cool. Dan-gerous, but cool. Maybe we’ll call the fire department when we get to that part.” He wrote himself a note in the margin.

I felt bad for Jason. Dante’s instructions were complicated and sometimes confusing. I knew exactly what we were building, but even I couldn’t see how those finely drawn lines would result in a time machine.

“And what are all these symbols?” Jason grabbed a sheet from the ground and waved it at me. “At first I thought they were just decorative, but now I think they might mean something.”

I took the paper from Jason, handling it carefully with my slightly sticky fingers. “Well, this one is a spiral shell. It’s called a nautilus.” I traced the curved lines with my eyes, imagining Dante’s long fingers wrapped around a pen, his strong hand stroking the lines confidently onto the blank sheet. “It’s an example of a natural logarithmic spiral. See, you can trace along the spiral, circling the center an infinite number of times without ever actually reaching the middle.” My memory suddenly caught a fragment from the past: the feel of the night wind, the heat of Dante’s eyes on me, the weight of his words on my heart. Those long-ago words slipped into my mind:
“Can you imagine it? To be forever denied the one thing you long for most of all?”

I handed the paper back to Jason with a steady voice but a trembling hand. “The logarithmic spiral also appears in sunflowers, the nerves of the cornea, hurricane patterns, and the arms of the Milky Way. It’s based on the Fibonacci sequence.”

“Since when do you know so much about math?” Jason asked, bumping my shoulder so I’d know he was teasing. “I thought you were strictly a word person.”

“I am.” I bumped him back. “I’ve been studying. Is that so hard to believe? And as a word person, I know that a nautilus is also called an
argonaut.
As in ‘Jason and the.’ And
argonaut
is another name for an adventurer or a traveler.”

“Seriously? That’s cool.” He leaned back on the steps and stretched his legs out on the grass, studying the nautilus sketch. The sun lined his body with golden light. “I still don’t get why we have to carve it on what appears to be the front door of this crazy house.”

I bit my lip. I wanted to tell him the truth—
because it’s a mathematically perfect representation for traveling through time
—but I knew I couldn’t.

I had shown the complete blueprints of Dante’s design only to Jason. He was my muscle on the project and needed to know as much as I could tell him, which admittedly wasn’t much. I had told my parents about the project, but in very
general terms—I couldn’t very well build something in the backyard without their permission. Hannah knew the basics too, but that was more because she was a nosy little sister and I figured it was safer to tell her
something,
if only to prevent her from snooping around, looking for answers on her own.

All of them believed it was a rather offbeat school project for a rather offbeat school.

“It’s just something I have to do for my scholarship application for Emery,” I said, hating that I could hear the lie in my voice. I hated even more knowing that I didn’t have a choice. It was too dangerous to tell Jason the truth. “They wanted to see how I would approach a seemingly impossible project.”

“And your approach is to rope me into doing your homework for you?” Jason grinned.

“No, my approach is to delegate the task to a qualified, talented individual and then supervise his work. That shows serious leadership ability, which is a very important and desirable quality, you know.”

“So is honesty,” Jason retorted.

I flinched inwardly. “I’m also being resourceful and creative. Besides, it’s not like anyone from Emery is going to come check up on my work. I’m just supposed to send them pictures of the finished piece along with a written report of what
I learned from the process. It’s an exercise in creative,
out-of-the-box thinking. A kind of organic experiment. You know—the journey is more important than the destination and all that.”

That was less of a lie than the rest. I knew that the journey to finish the time machine would be as important as the destination, if not more so. I tried not to think about what it would mean if I actually succeeded in following Dante’s plans. “I’m glad that Mom and Dad will let us use the backyard,” I finished.

Jason sighed. “
I’m
glad all I had to do for my scholarship was fill out an application. That took me a half hour; building this will take us weeks. Literally.” He tapped a page that detailed the step-by-step assembly instructions, annotated with specific dates and times. Start to finish, it would take eight weeks exactly. As if that weren’t bad enough, the plans specified that we had to start on the first day of a season, and since we had missed the first day of spring, I had to cool my heels, waiting for the first day of summer. I was trying to be productive with my time—studying, reading, researching, anything to help the time pass faster—but every day seemed to be traveling at a slow crawl.

“Yeah, well, Emery is a very exclusive college. They don’t let just anyone in.”

“They let
you
in.” Jason bumped me again. His grin was all teeth and teasing.

“Then that must mean I’m not just anyone.” I tossed my hair back over my shoulder and gave him my most haughty supermodel smile. “I’m Abigail Edmunds and I’m going to change the world.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Jason said softly. A wistful look crossed his face, flashing through his eyes so quickly I almost missed it.

My heart stuttered. I thought we’d been over this. We’d tried the boyfriend-girlfriend thing and it hadn’t worked. At least, it hadn’t worked for me. And besides, I knew Jason and Natalie were still together because Nat had told me he’d already planned to take her out to dinner after graduation tomorrow.