The Lost Gate (42 page)

As far as Danny could tell, though, only one person connected him with the Tripping Place. “You did this,” said Pat, touching her cheek.

“Did what?” asked Danny.

“I had the worst acne in the school,” said Pat. “Now it's gone.”

“So you grew out of it. What does that have to do with me?”

“You did it,” she said. “The Tripping Place in the lunchroom—I was the first person to trip there. You did it, and it healed me.”

“Just like that?” asked Danny. “Wow, I must be, like, really magic.”

“You show up at Parry McCluer and strange things start happening.”

“So I'm in control of, like, the spacetime continuum.”

“Why did you decide to cure my acne and heal over Sin's piercings?” demanded Pat.

“You and Sin seem to think I care about you way more than I actually do.”

“Then why do you keep sitting down at the same table as us during lunch? And bringing those dweebs Hal and Wheeler with you? Are you trying to destroy our reputation?”

“Just studying Laurette's cleavage,” said Danny. “She's still averaging two, but I keep hoping for changes.”

Pat called him a name and walked away. But she couldn't fool Danny. He had seen the smile playing around the corners of her mouth. She liked her new face. She liked
him.
And pretty soon she'd work up the courage to admit it to Laurette and Sin and Xena.

Danny enjoyed doing things for people. Especially for his friends.

Unfortunately, Danny also enjoyed toying with people who weren't his friends. Especially jerks who were begging to get pranked.

But Danny didn't want to be the typical gatemage, playing nasty tricks on people and laughing at them without compassion. If there was anything he had learned from the Silvermans, it was that you should use your magery to make the world a better place. And he already learned for himself that you don't walk away from somebody else's need, not if there's something you can do about it. Even Coach Lieder didn't deserve to be abused; whenever he left Danny and Hal alone, Danny left
him
alone.

One night, when Danny was having dinner with Veevee at her favorite little Italian spot in Naples, he asked her, “If this whole theory about gatemages serving spacetime is true, then if I
don't
play vicious pranks on people, does that make my power to influence spacetime weaken or go away?”

“I have no idea,” said Veevee.

“Okay,” said Danny. “Just wondering.”

“Danny, you're a natural smart aleck. You can't help it. It just doesn't stop. And the worst thing is, when you want to, you get away with it.
That's
how you prank spacetime itself—you don't ever have to suffer the consequences of your pranks.”

Danny didn't really set out to prove her wrong about consequences. It just happened.

On Danny's sixteenth birthday, he went to school as usual. It was a Tuesday. Over the P.A. system in the morning, Danny's birthday was read out by somebody from student government. It was cool how many people commented on his birthday as they passed him in the hall between classes. And at lunch, Laurette and Sin and their friends got him outside at lunch to sing him a deliberately off-key version of “Happy Birthday” that replaced the word “to” with another word that started with
F
.

“Is that, like, my present?” asked Danny.

“Somebody had to say it to you,” said Sin, “or it wouldn't really be your birthday.” She had gotten two new piercings on one ear, and one of them was already infected. A slow learner, Danny figured. Not his job.

“Well, thanks,” said Danny.

Coach Lieder had also noticed the announcement. “Sixteen years old, right, Stone?”

“Yes sir,” said Danny.

“Well, I have a present for you.” He pointed to the thick rope dangling from the ceiling near one wall of the gym, with a bunch of mats under it. It hadn't been hanging there yesterday.

“We're having a hanging,” said Danny. “Cool.”

“Climb it,” said Lieder.

“I don't know how to climb a rope,” said Danny.

“Your other teachers tell me you're a quick learner.”

“But, see,
they
make an effort to teach me,” said Danny.

“Put your hands on the rope and pull yourself up,” said Lieder. “Then grip the rope with your legs so you don't slide down, while you reach up to raise yourself to the next level. There, I've taught you. You have a new skill. It's my present to you, Birthday Boy.”

It took three tries, but Danny made it to the top without using a single gate. His legs and hands were raw. And getting down without rope burns was nearly impossible. But Danny made it a point not to show any reaction to the pain—though he also refrained from using a gate to heal himself. He wanted the other kids to see that even though his skin was red and raw, he showed no sign of minding the pain.

It clearly rattled Lieder that Danny made it up the rope and didn't complain about the discomfort. So he started in on his favorite victim. Hal was tall, but he was skinny. There wasn't an ounce of muscle on his body. His arms looked like Amish buggy whips. His leg muscles looked like he went home to a concentration camp every night.

Hal couldn't lift himself up by his arms. Period. Not even a chin-up. Certainly not the first upward surge of a rope climb. And even when a couple of guys lifted him up off the ground as a “boost,” he just slid down, yelling in pain the whole time.

“Get him up the rope,” Lieder ordered Danny.

“What do you want me to do?” asked Danny. “Push him up?”

“I want to see him at the top of the rope,” said Lieder.

“Sorry, dude,” said Hal to Danny.

“Not your fault,” said Danny. Of course, Danny
could
get Hal to the top of the rope whenever he wanted. But it might be a little too spectacular. As in, make-the-newspapers.

Danny remembered what he used to do for himself, before he even knew he was a gatemage. Short little gates that he didn't even realize
were
gates.

Danny had vowed never to use gates to help himself win a contest. But to help a friend silence a tormentor? That was different.

Danny tried to figure out how to do it so it wasn't obvious, even if someone was watching. Maybe a spiral set of gates, so you couldn't see as easily that Hal's hand movements had nothing much to do with his rise up the rope.

Lieder was busy yelling at some other poor sap, and everybody was watching him. Danny grabbed onto the rope and then set it—and himself—to spinning. While he spun, he made a series of gates rising up the rope. He figured that if Hal was twisting on the rope while he climbed, it wouldn't be so obvious that what was happening was unnatural.

Then, as the rope started unwinding, Danny made another bunch of little gates spiraling back down from the ceiling.

Danny beckoned to Hal, who really was in pain from rope burns on his thighs and hands. “Try it again,” he said softly. “Keep your hands moving so it looks like you're really doing it.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Hal.

“Just grab onto the bottom of the rope and start spinning clockwise. You'll see.”

Nobody was watching at the moment, which was a good thing. Because it didn't work at all the way Danny expected. Hal grabbed on, started spinning, and
shot
upward in a spiral. Only he didn't stop at the top. He just disappeared.

About half a minute later, though, he reappeared spiraling down the rope. He fell on his butt and then flipped over and crawled along the mats to get away from the rope. All his rope burns were gone.

“What happened?” Hal demanded hoarsely.

“I don't know,” said Danny. “What do you
think
happened?”

“I start spinning, and suddenly it's like I'm a mile up, looking out over the whole Maury River Valley, I mean I can see the cars going into and out of the McDonald's drive-through in Lexington, I'm up so high. And I feel great. But I'm still spinning, see, and then all of a sudden I start to fall, only whatever it is catches me and sucks me down, still spinning. To here. I think I'm going to puke. Motion sickness. Fear of heights. You're a dangerous friend to have, man. What is it, some kind of drug? Cause if that was a hallucination, it seemed pretty damn real.”

Danny had made gates that all led to points on the rope. None of them could have taken Hal past the ceiling. Danny hadn't made anything like the gate Hal was describing.

Hal reached for the bottom of the rope and handed it to Danny. “You try,” he said. “Show me how to do it right, if that was wrong.”

Danny grabbed on and started spinning.

He really did spiral upward. But it didn't stop at the roof. Just as Hal said, the gate took Danny to a spot about a mile over the school—and held him there.

Before the gate began to let him slip downward, another kid from gym class joined him in the middle of the air at the south end of Buena Vista. “This is freakin' awesome,” he shouted. “How'd you get it to do this? You some kind of freakin' magician or something? I want to learn how to do this trick!”

Danny spun down. All the guys in the class were lined up to “ride the rope.”

Coach Lieder was sitting down, watching his students grab onto the rope and flat-out disappear. He looked at Danny with hatred and fear. “They're riding it like at a carnival,” said Lieder. “You did this.”

Danny had no answer. This was the worst thing imaginable. Word would get out. It would attract media attention. Especially once somebody set up a telephoto lens outside to see the kids hanging in midair before they spun back down. And Danny had no idea how to shut it down.

“Where are you really from?” asked Coach Lieder. “What damn planet, New Kid?”

“I don't know how this works,” said Danny truthfully. “Hal must have done it.” Please, please, let Hal get all the credit in the media. Not that the story wouldn't still bring all the Families to Parry McCluer. And that would be the end of Danny's high school career.

A couple of weeks and it would be over. All because Danny
had
to use gates to impress his friends. No, oh no, it was to
help
his friends.
Except
Danny knew better. He really was a show-off. He had been so careful not to use gatemagery to cheat at athletics, and here he was using it to cheat and win at high school life. What had he been
thinking
? He had fallen into the same trap as the typical nerd hero in young adult novels, who gets himself in serious trouble by trying too hard to make a good impression on the other kids.

I learned nothing, thought Danny. And now I'm going to lose it all. I have to get away from here. Preferably now.

He might have gated away on the spot, gone home to Yellow Springs, and confessed all to the Silvermans, except that one of the guys at the rope shouted, “Hey! What's going on?”

Danny looked. The kid was spinning and spinning on the end of the rope, but nothing was happening.

The kids who had already gone up the rope kept coming down, so it was obvious that the gates were still working. Except the bottom one.

Danny looked at the gates. Or rather,
felt
the gates with that inner sense that had nothing to do with his eyes. They had been changed. They looked like his old gates. Only this was the first moment that he actually registered the fact that his old gates and the gates he made now were different. When had they changed? And why had
this
gate changed back?

As he watched, other gates in the spiraling sequence also changed. It was as if they were getting pinched. Closed. Someone or something was closing his gates
right now.

Has the Gate Thief found me?

The last kid was back down the rope, and now the downward gates pinched off, one by one, until all the gates were locked.

All my old gates looked just like this. They must have been locked when I created them, so I was the only one who could go through them. But when Veevee found them, she unlocked them. She's a Keyfriend, that's what she does. Only once I saw what my gates looked like
open,
I started creating them that way. I imitated what she did with my gates without even realizing it.

Had Veevee figured out how to lock gates as well as open them? Was she checking up on him and saving him from his own mess? If so, he would
not
be angry. The kids could say what they wanted, Coach Lieder could tell all to the media, and nobody would believe them as long as the spiral gates no longer worked. Unless a camera saw it happening and showed it on the news, it never happened at all, and the only story that would reach the papers was if Lieder was stupid enough to insist on the story until he got fired or committed.

Veevee had probably saved Danny's butt. She had to be just outside the gym somewhere—her range wasn't anywhere near as long as Danny's, she could only affect gates that were within a few blocks of her unless she actually saw them get made.

Danny was glad to see that the disappointed boys were pestering Hal about the fact that the gates no longer worked. It would give him a moment to slip out and apologize to Veevee for his stupidity and promise that he would never, never do it again, and as long as she was closing gates, could she please do something about the Tripping Place in the lunch room?

Danny stepped through the outside door and scanned for Veevee. Not there. She must be around the other side of the building.

So he ran in search of her, rounding the first corner in only a few steps. Rounding the second corner.

It wasn't Veevee.

It was the Greek girl.

A Family had found him. Even without the story hitting the papers. There had to be a whole bunch of the most powerful Greek mages poised to zap him with whatever powers they had. Filled with immediate terror, Danny did the only thing he could do. He gated away.