“He better be. He’s the Traveler of this trio.”
They quickly walked through the house to see that most of the shades were already drawn. They only needed to pull down a few on the second floor. Mark thought that was good. If somebody looked at the house the next day there wouldn’t be any obvious, suspicious changes. Mark went into his bedroom and stopped short when he saw a few touchstones from his former life. The anime posters, the stacks of books, the pictures of him and Bobby when they were younger. He felt a lump rise in his throat. He missed his old life. He missed being geeky Mark. He didn’t want to know about Travelers and Halla, and most of all, he didn’t want to know anything about Forge.
One thing caught his eye that was different. It was the computer screen on his desk. Mark had been using an old-fashioned tube monitor for the longest time. Now sitting on his desk, the desk he recognized so well, was a high-tech-looking flat screen like he had never seen before.
Courtney stepped into the room to see Mark staring at the alien computer.
“Strange, huh? When you brought computer technology back to First Earth, it jump-started the whole computer revolution by sixty years. No wonder you’re a legend.”
“How is it different?”
Mark had barely gotten the words out of his mouth when the computer screen blinked to life. A 3-D geometric pattern appeared, making Mark and Courtney take a step backward in surprise.
D. J. MacHale
Raven Rise
“Hello, Mark,” a pleasant, female voice said from the computer. “It is three fifteen in the morning. How may I help you?”
Mark and Courtney stared at the screen for several seconds. Finally Courtney uttered, “Well, there’s that.”
“It recognized my voice,” Mark said with dismay.
“Ask it something,” Courtney suggested.
Mark thought, then said, “Uh, what’s today’s date?”
The computer answered, “It is March the eleventh.”
“Bobby’s birthday,” Courtney said with a smile. “He’s eighteen today.”
Mark ran his finger across the top of the computer screen, wiping off a thin layer of dust. “Three months,” he said thoughtfully. “That means a whole lot of things.”
The computer said, “What exactly does that mean?”
Courtney shot a look at the screen and barked, “Hey, mind your own business.”
“Turn off,” Mark said to the computer.
“Good-bye,” the computer responded as the screen winked to black.
Mark looked at Courtney with surprise. “Wow, that was easy.”
Courtney plopped down onto Mark’s bed, thinking. “This is bad,” she said. “Being gone for so long, I mean. If the flume sent us back to when we’d left, like it did when we went to Eelong, we could just pick up like nothing happened. But now we’re going to have to answer questions. Everybody here still thinks your parents were killed when that plane crashed. You’d have to deal with that.”
“It’s true,” Mark said, rubbing his eyes. “My relatives would be all over me. They’d probably make me go live with my aunt in Maryland. I can’t go to Maryland.”
“And I can’t go home. What would I tell my parents?”
“And how do we explain Patrick?”
“As wrong as this sounds, we can’t go back to our regular lives,” Courtney concluded, glum.
“Agreed. It’ll prevent us from figuring out how things have changed and what Saint Dane is up to.”
The two fell silent. Then, “Mark?”
“Yeah?”
“How exactly are we going to do that?”
“I have no idea.”
They decided that whatever they were going to do, it wouldn’t be that night. They had to get their internal clocks set to local time. They each found a bed and settled in for a few hours of sleep. Mark was in his own bed, Patrick took the Dimonds’ room, and Courtney claimed the couch downstairs. All three of them lay awake, staring at the ceiling, unable to nod off.
Finally, at nearly six, Courtney poked her head into Mark’s bedroom and announced, “Stop pretending like you’re asleep. I’m hungry.”
When they hit the kitchen, they discovered that Patrick was already there, sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the torn book cover he’d brought from Third Earth.
“Hey, you all right?” Courtney asked.
“I don’t know what I am anymore,” Patrick answered wearily.
Courtney gave Mark a nervous look.
Mark went for the refrigerator to find it mostly empty. “Cupboard’s bare,” he announced.
“Check the freezer,” Courtney suggested.
In the freezer Mark found orange juice and Eggo waffles. He tossed the frozen juice to Courtney and grabbed the box of waffles.
“Better than nothing,” he declared, and walked to the counter. There he stopped and looked around with confusion. “Uh, the toaster’s gone.”
“Put ‘em in the oven,” Courtney suggested.
Mark opened the oven and put a layer of frozen waffles on the top rack, but when he tried to turn the oven on, he was lost.
“There aren’t any buttons,” he said with dismay. “This isn’t our oven.”
“Sure it is,” Courtney said patiently. “It’s just improved, remember? Try telling it what to do.”
“Yeah, right,” Mark scoffed. He looked at the oven and said, “Cook the waffles.”
Instantly, the oven light went on and the coil began to heat.
“Whoa” was all Mark could gasp.
Patrick asked, “That isn’t normal?”
“Uh, no,” Mark answered.
“But it is,” Courtney interjected. “At least the new normal after Mark brought Forge to First Earth. Mostly things look the same, but there are small differences with technology. Just be lucky you don’t have any pets. That would really make your head spin.”
Patrick added, “What about that house over the flume?”
Courtney frowned. “That’s different. No way somebody moved in and made all those changes so fast.”
“That means even more things have changed since we left,” Mark added. “Which means something else must have happened in the past besides Forge.”
“We’ve got to figure out what that was,” Courtney said.
Patrick lifted the torn book cover from the table and added, “And find out why people seem to know about this.”
Mark and Courtney looked at the cover.
“Ravinia,” Mark whispered, reading the cracked word on the cover.
“Maybe it’s a good thing,” Courtney offered hopefully as she mixed the orange juice in a pitcher.
Patrick winced. “You wouldn’t think that if you saw what happened to Third Earth.”
“Oh. Right,” Courtney said, embarrassed. “That.”
“I think our first step is to look around and see what things are different,” Mark declared. “We might find something we can trace back to First Earth.”
“How?” Courtney asked.
Mark pointed to Patrick’s Traveler ring. “We’ve got a hotline to the past. If we find anything suspicious, we can send a message to Dodger.”
“You sure?” Courtney asked.
Mark grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled something. “Put the ring on the table,” he said to Patrick as he folded the note in half.
Patrick took off his ring and placed it next to the pitcher of orange juice.
