During the journey, Courtney and I floated next to each other on the magical cushion of air that sped us through the flume. We both wore jeans, low hikers, and T-shirts. You know, your basic Second Earth uniform. I had to admit, Courtney never looked better. She’d grown up since I saw her last. I guess we all have. Her incredibly long brown hair was tied back in a practical braid. Her big gray eyes sparkled, reflecting the light from the stars beyond the crystal walls of the flume. I remembered the very first time I saw her. It was at recess the first day of kindergarten. I decided to pick up the dodgeball she had been playing with. She decided to punch me in the head.
“Don’t touch my stuff,” she scolded, and grabbed the ball back.
I should have been ticked, but something about her playful smile told me she wasn’t your typical playground bully. I held back my tears, smiled, and said, “Don’t start a fight you can’t win.” I grabbed the ball and ran away. She took off after me and chased me through the busy playground for the next ten minutes. By the time we stopped, exhausted, we were laughing. That began a love-hate relationship that has lasted to this day. We were always friendly rivals, trying to outdo each other in sports. Sometimes she’d win, other times it would be me. Neither of us really felt superior, but that didn’t stop us from trying. The strange thing was that over those years our rivalry turned into serious affection. The night I left home with Uncle Press to become a Traveler, Courtney and I kissed for the first time.
So much had happened since that night. We were different people. As we floated through the flume, I saw it in her eyes- she was older. But “older” didn’t really cover it. We’d both seen things that no kid should have to. No adult, either. The fourteen-year-old kids who kissed that night were long gone. We were the keepers of Halla now.
Courtney explained to me what happened when she followed Mark’s instructions and went to the flume in the basement of the Sherwood house. Mark had left his Traveler ring for her. When she saw it, she realized the frightening truth. Mark had jumped into the flume. But where had he gone? And why? Mark no longer wanted to be an acolyte, that much was clear, because he left his ring. The flume wasn’t damaged, which meant he’d left with a Traveler. But who? Could it have been Saint Dane? Not knowing what else to do, Courtney put on the ring. The flume sprang to life. Seconds later Saint Dane himself blasted out of the tunnel between territories and added yet another twist to the mystery by revealing a disturbing truth.
He had been with us on Second Earth our entire lives.
“It’s so strange,” Courtney said as we flew along. “Can you believe Saint Dane was Andy Mitchell from the beginning?”
“Yes,” I replied flatly.
“Well, it surprised the hell out of me. He’s been watching us our whole lives, Bobby. How creepy is that? He’s been setting us up.”
“No,” I corrected. “He’s been setting Mark up.”
The cruel truth of what Saint Dane had been doing on Second Earth was finally revealed. Sort of. He became a person named Andy Mitchell, a low-life bully who harassed Mark for years. After I left home to become a Traveler, Andy Mitchell showed Mark another side of his personality. He turned out to be smart. Incredibly smart. He joined Mark’s science club, which at first freaked Mark out. Courtney told me how it seemed impossible that a nimrod like Andy could suddenly become brilliant. But Mark believed. Soon the victim was drawn to the tormentor.
“That’s how he works,” I reminded Courtney. “He pretends to be a friend and lures you into doing things you think are right, but lead to disaster. He takes pride in that. He says that whatever happens isn’t his doing. He believes the people of the territories make their own decisions.”
“That’s so bogus,” Courtney snapped. “How can people make their own decisions when he’s pushing them the wrong way?”
“Exactly. On Second Earth, he pushed Mark.” Andy Mitchell and Mark worked on a science project they named “Forge.” It was a small, plastic ball with a computer driven skeleton that would change shapes when given verbal commands. They were about to fly to Florida to enter a national science contest when Andy asked Mark to stay behind to help him clean out his uncle’s florist shop that had been wrecked in a flood. Mark’s parents flew to Florida without them.
Mr. and Mrs. Dimond never made it. Their plane disappeared over the Atlantic. Everyone on board was lost. Saint Dane had a hand in that tragedy. No doubt. He killed Mark’s parents.
Courtney continued, “Saving First Earth didn’t change things, Bobby. Saint Dane is coming after Second Earth. And Third Earth.”
“I figured that.”
“Whatever he’s planning has to do with Mark,” Courtney added. “He said their relationship had entered a whole new phase. What was that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “But I think there’s a pretty good clue in what happened next.”
Second Earth changed. That’s the simple way of putting it. It changed. Saint Dane jumped into the flume and Courtney got pulled in after him. Rather than being swept to another territory, Courtney was dumped right back in the cellar of the Sherwood house, where she’d started. But it wasn’t the same place she had left only moments before. Second Earth had changed. Courtney quickly recognized strange differences, mostly to do with technology. She returned home to find a computer that was way more elaborate than anything she’d ever seen, and a robotic talking cat that nearly sent her off the deep end. Kinda freaked me out when I saw it too. We discovered it was manufactured by a company called the Dimond Alpha Digital Organization. DADO. It may have been a coincidence, but the robots on Quillan were called dados. That, along with the fact that the company that made the mechanical cat shared the same name as Mark, meant the coincidences were piling up a little too high to be coincidences anymore.
“I think when you did a boomerang through the flume, the history of Second Earth was changed,” I concluded. “And since you were in the flume, you weren’t changed along with it. You still remembered what the old Second Earth was like.”
“Probably because Saint Dane wanted me to remember.”
“Probably,” I agreed. “I think Saint Dane used Mark to help create a new technology that is somehow going to lead to the turning point of Second Earth. Killing the Dimonds made Mark emotionally vulnerable. Who knows what Saint Dane told him to get him to leave Second Earth?”
“Still,” Courtney countered. “I can’t believe Mark would leave Second Earth with that monster, no matter how badly he felt about his parents.”
“I know,” I said softly.
“We’ve got to find him,” Courtney concluded soberly.
The jumble of sweet musical notes that always accompanied a trip through the flume grew louder and more frequent. We were nearing our destination-Third Earth. It was where we would start our investigation. Patrick, the Traveler there, would be able to research the incredible computer databases of Earth in the year 5010 to trace how the Dimond Alpha Digital Organization came to be, and what may have happened to Mark. We were about to step into the future to try and piece together the past. But when we hit Third Earth…
Third Earth hit back.
No sooner had my feet touched ground when I got slammed and knocked backward. The next few seconds tumbled together wildly. At first I had no idea what was happening. That is until I felt the hot breath on my face and a searing pain tear through my left forearm. I was being attacked. It only took a few seconds to realize why. It was a quig-dog. The yellow-eyed beastie was on my chest. Its razor teeth gnashed to get at my neck, while its slobber dripped into my eyes.
“Kick it! Kick it!” I shouted, hoping that Courtney wasn’t dealing with her own quig.
The beast was strong and had the benefit of surprise. I saw from the corner of my eye that it had slashed open my arm. I wasn’t strong enough to stop it. In seconds its teeth would tear into my neck.
Fummm! I heard a familiar, sharp sound. The quig yelped and lurched away. I quickly jumped to my feet, braced for another attack. It didn’t come. The vicious devil lay unconscious at the mouth of the flume. I quickly looked around to see Courtney holding a small silver cylinder about the size of a roll of quarters. She held it up like a weapon because, well, it was a weapon. When she had gone to the Sherwood house to meet Mark, she’d brought two canisters of pepper spray with her in case she ran into any quigs. After her roundtrip through the flume, they had transformed into silver canisters that shot out an energy burst like the weapons of Quillan. It was another example of how Second Earth technology had been changed.
