Excantation Read online

  “I don’t think anyone can. It hurts, yes. Being rejected by my own parents was bound to hurt. But I’ve also seen this coming for years. I’ve been in denial about it, but we’ve all seen it coming. The older I got, the less invested they became. I’m six months from turning eighteen. In their minds, I’m basically an adult and can manage on my own, I guess.”

  “No child completely outgrows needing a parent.” Klaus got his murder face on. He definitely had torture racks and thumb screws dancing in his brain. “That’s what they seem incapable of understanding.”

  “Yeah.” I had no argument for him. But as I looked at him, this amazing little man that moved heaven and earth for me, that treated me so preciously, I felt that crippling pain fade a little.

  He reached up, stroking hair from my face, and looked me dead in the eye as he promised, “You have me until the grave.”

  “I know.” I smiled at him, eyes burning a little from unshed tears. I believed that promise with every fiber of my being. And that was why I didn’t fall apart in a big, emotional mess right then. The rejection of my parents stung, but Klaus’s love and support soothed the pain.

  Klaus gave me an encouraging smile. “You can stay back tomorrow if you don’t feel up to it.”

  “No, I want to go. And I’ll be okay. My parents suck, but we all knew that. And my family of choice rocks. I’ve got an amazing master, a Ciarán, and you. Really, Fate did great compensating for crappy parents. I just needed a minute to process it, y’know? That realization.”

  “Then why don’t I make us some hot cocoa, and we can sit here and let you process it.”

  It was one of the best offers and precisely what I needed. I’d need to get him the most amazing birthday present to thank him. For just being him. “Yes, please.”

  I watched him go into the kitchen, staying curled up in my chair. I was a little sad tonight, still a little depressed over everything. But I’d be okay. I was determined to be okay. I wasn’t going to chase after people who didn’t want me anymore. I wasn’t signing up for more of that heartbreak. It was time to let that go and focus on the people who did love me.

  They were the ones who deserved my time and attention, after all.

  We woke early. Why? I had no idea. It seemed like a bad idea to me, but people kept saying things like, “We’ll need all the time we can get,” and “Better to get an early start,” and weird things of that nature. What happened to being—I don’t know—awake to work? Little hard to focus when my eyelids were still glued with sleep.

  Ciarán and Klaus took turns chivvying me into getting ready, and Klaus actually braided my hair while I ate breakfast. I found it unfair that even after our late-night talk, Klaus was still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning. I wanted the ability to survive on four hours of sleep, please and thank you.

  By the time I walked to the platform I was mostly awake, at least. The brisk walk in the morning air did something to get the blood pumping.

  Klaus had taken all of our equipment last night and put it in one of those special rooms of his. So, we had basically nothing to carry except a few essentials, what we thought we’d need right out of the starting gate. Jackson did the honors of starting the platform up and connecting it to the Hub, touching each symbol lightly. On this international platform, it meant touching all three usual symbols and the fourth, top one. It started up without even a blip, proof we’d rebuilt it correctly.

  With the connection strong and steady, we filed into the lit tunnel, walking toward the bent door and the Hub. I wasn’t quite sure how we’d get past the door, unless someone wanted to try banishing it. Not me. My banishing skills were still a mite iffy.

  Aisling walked alongside me. She wore more practical pants and a white shirt with a vest today, looking a little Renaissancy but with Celtic flair. Her hair was braided in a fat French braid over one shoulder, and she twirled the end of it around her finger as she walked. “What do you think happened here, Reagan? I’ve not heard you offer a theory.”

  “I don’t really have much of one, to be honest. But I do wonder if we’ve had too many cooks in the kitchen.”

  She cocked her head at me, curious. “Aye? How’s that?”

  “Well, think about it. The original plans to the Hub didn’t seem to get passed down to anyone. And no building lasts forever, no matter what plane it’s on. Repairs have to happen sooner or later. So, every time something needed repairs done, that meant an Imagineer would need to go in and look it over, decide how to go about it, and just do it. Without really understanding all the structure it tied into. Multiple Imagineers from all ages, all cultures, who just walk in willy-nilly and patch stuff. Doesn’t that sound like a recipe for disaster to you?”

  Aisling rolled her eyes. “Oh, aye. That sounds right terrible. And it might cause us more than a few headaches. But truly, you don’t have a theory on why they shut it down?”

  “I don’t have enough information to form one, really.”

  “Fair enough.”

  This line of inquiry made me ask, “Are you here to satisfy your curiosity, or help solve the problem?”

  “Healthy mix of both. That, and when James asked, I couldn’t bring myself to say no. He’s a dear man, that one.”

  “That’s fair.” Everyone seemed to have their own motivations for coming in and working on this.

  Like in all things, when you’re actively anticipating something, it seemed to take forever before it happened. But according to my watch, we only had to walk for about twenty minutes before we reached the door. James and Jackson both gave it a good once-over before shrugging, taking it by the sides, and pulling it free of the frame. It came with a wrench and a screech of tortured metal, but not as much effort as I would have guessed. That badly warped, eh?

  Klaus was the first one through, and while I couldn’t see him over everyone else, I could hear him.

  “Just a minute. Give me one moment to see if there’s anything here…hm. Oh dear, this is quite a bit of damage. Nothing living, at least. Alright, come through.”

  We filed in, some of us quite eagerly, but people stopped a few feet inside and then just stood there. I had to squeeze through with Aisling and around them to finally get my own eyes on the room.

  “Oh dear” just about covered it.

  I knew what this room should have looked like, but only because I had a painting to compare it to. Lighting strips along the base of the walls provided ambient light, similar to the tunnel. It looked much like emergency lighting, as if they were on a backup generator or something. The arched dome ceiling overhead was half-caved in, and every wall in line of sight leaned at a significant angle, as if someone had taken the Hub by one side and shook it hard to the right. The chairs and such were all jumbled together, almost stacked against one side of the wall, and the floor itself slanted significantly. I had to stand cockeyed to brace myself. This didn’t bear any resemblance to the waiting room in the painting. It was just a wrecked room, thick with dust. I didn’t see any other gates here, but we were probably in a gate waiting room just for London visitors. We’d likely see the other gates tied to the international platforms as we walked. Maybe. The scale of this single room made it clear the Hub was ginormous. We’d be here a while, that was for sure.

  “What happened?” Jackson asked in bewilderment, basically voicing what we all thought. “It’s almost as if this place experienced an earthquake!”

  “Perhaps it did,” Richard stated slowly, turning in place to look around him. “I’ve seen this kind of damage before. Either something happened to the foundations of this place and sent a strong kinetic energy ripping through it, or something is structurally wrong here to make it warped like this.”

  “A building flaw can do this?” Zoya asked him incredulously.

  “Remember, dear lady, we’re not dealing with the average building. It’s rare, I grant you, but I’ve seen buildings cave and warp due to a lack of connecting framing, which didn’t give the roof and walls enough
support.”

  I was reminded of a few Holmes on Homes episodes where Mike was honestly not sure how a building still stood because of that very issue. “So, you think the framework either wasn’t sufficient to the weight load, or it wasn’t tied together properly?”

  Richard turned to me, his expression that of a proud professor speaking to a student. “Precisely. It could be they tried to do so, but failed to consider the foundational challenge. If this isn’t braced on something solid, like earth, then it would need to be self-supporting. That’s an engineering nightmare with something this large.”

  “Based on ancient building techniques, no less,” someone muttered sarcastically. “Oh, I can see how things went wrong, alright.”

  “Let’s go further in, see what we see,” Richard encouraged everyone. “If we see more evidence to support that something impacted it, then this might be repairable.”

  I loved how he didn’t voice the obvious. If this was a structural flaw, then it might not be fixable. And y’know, my money was on the structural fault. It would explain why no one had tried to fix it and just shut the Hub down instead. They probably just had no idea how to handle the problem.

  We came to an end terminal, so we only had one direction to go, which was straight and down a hallway. The walls were warped here, too, but not as badly. We still didn’t get too close to them, or even brush up against them, for fear it was just gravity holding things in check right now. We all had our guards up, ready to throw up personal wards just in case. I was starting to wish for something like a hard hat or some safety gear, too.

  The whole thing looked eerie. You know how schools at night look and feel creepy, as if there’s something right past your shoulder, or dead ahead in a dark hallway you can’t quite make out? Multiply that feeling by ten and that was the Hub. There was only emergency lighting in here, little glowing channels along the base of the floors to give illumination, and everything else was cast in shadow. It smelled really musty too. There was no air circulation whatsoever.

  Nothing about this place gave me an orientation of where I was. I had no sense of direction here and that freaked me out on an internal level.

  Ciarán put a hand on my shoulder and leaned in to ask in a low tone, “Are you cold? You keep shivering.”

  “Goosebumps,” I admitted to him. “I’m not cold, just a little freaked out. There’s something fundamentally wrong here.”

  Klaus appeared at my other elbow and looked me over in concern. “Yes, the area here is warped. That’s what you’re sensing. I forget sometimes how sensitive you Imagineers are.”

  “Where are we?” Zoya demanded of the group. “I keep waiting for some sign, but I can’t figure this out. And the gravity is off here. I feel much lighter. I will swear we’re not on Earth.”

  “Oh, we’re not on Earth,” Aisling assured us flatly. She kept looking around her as if ready for something spooky to leap out. “We’re not on the planes, either. We’re somewhere else, in between. I’m not sure entirely where. I can just sense the oddity of it.”

  “Well, that doesn’t sound promising.” Jackson lifted eyes to the weird, pitch-black sky overhead and squinted as if trying to discern something. “You can’t sense where?”

  “No. Not a plane I normally walk, that I know for sure. Oisin?”

  Oisin shook his head, looking just as disturbed as the other druids. “No, we’re not connected to an actual plane. But I think we’re tethered to one. I sense the tethers, at least. But it’s not something I’ve been able to put eyes on yet.”

  “So, we need to find a way to dig into the Hub,” James summed up, looking grim. “We’re not getting concrete answers until we do. Klaus, I’d truly like to get hands on our tools.”

  Klaus grunted, expression peeved as he turned in place, panning the area. “I keep searching for a suitable place to open a Door and bring your equipment through, but so far nothing is strong enough. Or stable enough.”

  “Wow. That’s really not good news.” I felt my stress levels ratchet up another few notches. I’d need a good book and a hot tub of water after this to unwind.

  “No,” Klaus agreed grimly. He turned his head to look around us. You could barely see hints of the stores that used to line this area, their wares still in the windows, but no longer neatly displayed, instead jumbled up in a pile. “I used to question the decision of closing the Hub. It’s hard to envision anything an Imagineer can’t fix. But seeing this place, I realize now the scope of the problem. This might be beyond any team of Imagineers to restore.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed faintly, “no kidding. Speaking as one of the Imagineers in question.”

  “AH!” Richard cried out ahead of us in a happy tone. “Yes, precisely what we need!”

  Good news? Oh, yes, please! We could really use some good news. I was feeling all sorts of overwhelmed just then.

  I caught up to him and realized what he meant. He’d found a sign, now half off its hinges, with a map on it, written in six different languages. Thankfully, one of them was English—old school, we were talking Victorian Era—but still perfectly readable English. We all took our phones and immediately snapped a picture. A map was super useful to have at this juncture.

  “Alright, I feel better suggesting this now.” Richard turned and faced the group as a whole. “I would like to split up at this point. I want a team to go towards the outer rim, poke around there and see if you can figure out where we are. I want another team to start taking things carefully apart—mostly the floor—and see if we can figure out what the foundation and supports are doing. I want another team to find the main control tower in this place. I assume it’s the tall tower we saw in the pictures. If there are blueprints in existence, they are surely there.”

  Klaus lifted a hand, “Why don’t Reagan, Ciarán, and I go hunt for the main control room? I still haven’t found a place I can set up a Door. If we head for the center of the building, I might have better luck.”

  Richard gave him a nod. “Fine by me. Zoya?”

  “Da, it’s fine,” Zoya assured him. “Jackson, Liam, and I can try for the outer rim, da? I think a glamour is overhead, but it’s not working right. I want to see if I can undo it. It might tell us where we are.”

  “Be careful on that, please, but certainly. The rest of you, with me. Let’s carefully take a few things apart and see if we can’t figure out some of the structure, possibly what happened here. Everyone is on channel 1?”

  We all waved walkie-talkies at him in confirmation.

  “Alright, disperse. And talk to each other, keep us all updated.”

  I personally found the silence in this place oppressive, so I was happy to chatter. I kept the map up on my phone and used it to navigate by. So far, we seemed to be following a very uncomplicated route of dead ahead, Captain.

  The streets were oddly empty at moments, full of debris at others. I skirted by some of it. Ciarán gave me a hand over the piles too big to easily hop, and Klaus had to clamber over some as well, but we all managed. The central tower loomed ahead of us like a dark shape against an even inkier sky. It was a strange inside-outside feeling, like I was walking through an outdoor mall. Still in a building complex, but outside at the same time. The trip also felt like it took forever because no matter how much we walked, it didn’t feel like we made a lot of progress. Just how big was the Hub, anyway?

  After eons and eons—fine, it was like an hour and a half—we finally made it to the base of the tower. What I could see of it looked pretty, or it had been at one time. The tower spiraled upward with white grooves in it, an elegant, twisting shape. Some of it was broken and warped, but the remains told the story of its beauty in former years.

  “It has a Fae sort of look to it,” Klaus noted, touching the side of the building with light fingertips. “They favor this sort of elegant twist, like an ice sculpture.”

  “Yeah, that’s what it reminds me of.” I’d take his word on the Fae part, not having been in their territory to see fo
r myself. I put the walkie-talkie to my mouth and said, “Finally reached the tower. Looking for a door now.”

  Zoya’s voice came over the tiny speaker, “Does it look safe, devushka?”

  I looked to Klaus for this, as he had a better sense of the structure than I did. He gestured for the walkie-talkie, so I handed it to him.

  “Seems solid enough, only semi-tilted,” he answered. “We’ll go in by stages.”

  “Keep us posted,” she requested.

  It meant walking to the side a few feet, but we finally found the door, still on its hinges but thankfully unlocked. Ciarán opened it for us, and I panned my flashlight around. The inside of the tower had such little lighting that I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face without the flashlight. I walked with Klaus as my point, Ciarán guarding my rear. There was nothing at the base of the building except a foyer and stairs leading up.

  And up.

  Did I mention up?

  At least it wasn’t a spiral staircase, there was that. But still. UP.

  Somewhere around floor 1,368, I panted out, “I should have worn a Fitbit today. I would have so gotten my steps in.”

  Klaus also panted a bit for breath and waved us to a stop at the next landing, just to catch our breath. Ciarán didn’t seem all that winded, but he routinely ran around as either a horse or a cat, which I guess was sort of an aerobics exercise? Enough that he didn’t think anything of climbing multiple flights of stairs.

  “I think we took the wrong door,” Ciarán stated, looking around. “I think this was the back service entrance. It’ll go straight to the top, or the mechanics room, whichever floor that is on.”

  I stared at him in absolute dismay. “Uh. Seriously?”

  “Common thing back in the day,” Klaus agreed and groaned as he said it, as if only just realizing it himself. “That should have been a Door downstairs, to connect directly to the mechanics room or the service quarters, either one. The stairs here were a backup measure in case the Door ever had an issue, nothing more.”

  Well, that would make more sense than forcing poor working employees to lug toolboxes up and down multiple flights of steps. I mean, that was just cruel and unusual punishment, right there. “Yeah, so…where does that leave us? Do we continue to go up? Go back down, try a different door, see where that leads us?”