D. MacHale - Raven Rise

“Welcome home,” she said with a wink.

Mark bent his legs and leaped straight up, grabbing both Courtney’s hands. Courtney leaned back, pulled hard, and a moment later Mark was on top of the wall. Without another word Courtney followed Patrick down the tree.

As Mark waited for her to climb down, he looked back at the Sherwood mansion. The clattering machine-gun fire stopped. Whoever was shooting must have realized that the intruders were gone. Mark allowed himself a few seconds to inspect the old house and wonder what had changed. Who lived there now, and why did they have the gate symbol over their fireplace? Mark couldn’t help but feel that whatever change in history had happened on Second Earth, the people in this house were part of it. The coincidence was too much. They lived on top of a flume.

He threw his legs over the side, and was about to slip onto the tree when his eyes caught movement inside the house. He glanced up to the second floor. A large window overlooked the front yard across which they had just made their escape. A lone figure stood in the window. It looked to Mark like a man. An old man. Maybe wearing a bathrobe. The light was on behind him, creating a silhouette. If the guy was upset about his house being broken into, he didn’t show it.

He stood at the window, looking out at the yard as calmly as if he were looking for deer. In the window next to him, with its front paws up on the window frame, was the black retriever. The old man had one hand on its head, patting the animal as they both gazed outside. To Mark it seemed as if they were looking at him. A cold shiver shot up his spine.

“Stop right there!” came a shouted command.

Mark looked down to the ground to see four people wearing dark clothes that could have been uniforms, sprinting along the front lawn toward him. One of them held the machine gun. Mark didn’t need to see any more. He jumped off the wall and climbed down the tree, landing by the other two.

“Let’s disappear,” he said, and the three ran into the neighborhood. Mark and Courtney’s neighborhood.

They were home.

(CONTINUED)

The suburban street was dark. And cold. No leaves were on the trees. It felt to Mark like early spring. The dirty, melting snowbanks along the sides of the road completed the picture. The houses were dark. That was good. It was late at night. The town was asleep. There was little chance of anyone spotting three people walking around who looked as if they had just stepped out of a time machine. With any luck, Mark figured they’d get to his house without a problem.

Better, the neighborhood didn’t look any different to Mark from when he’d left. For a moment he could almost pretend as if things were normal. He knew he was kidding himself.

“When did you leave home?” Mark asked Courtney as they walked along the sidewalk.

“A couple of days after you did” was her answer. “I don’t remember the exact date. Some time in December.”

“This isn’t December,” Mark thought out loud. “Not cold enough. No Christmas lights. Feels more like late February or March.”

“How far is your house?” Patrick asked. “The police are sure to show up after all that ruckus.”

“Ruckus?” Courtney said with a grin. “You really are a geek teacher, aren’t you?”

“Not a problem,” Mark answered. “We’re here.”

Mark’s house looked exactly as it did the day he left for First Earth with Nevva Winter. As he stood in front, he had trouble understanding his own conflicting emotions. He was happy to be home, but sad that his parents weren’t there. He was encouraged that things looked normal, but knew they really weren’t. Most of all, he was nervous about going inside and finding things that would tell him that his familiar life had changed.

Mark decided to stop thinking.

“Let’s go around back,” he suggested.

He led them across the front lawn, around the side of the house, and up the stairs of a redwood deck that led to his back door. A heavy plastic container near the door was where the Dimonds kept a garden hose and a spare house key. Mark opened the container and let out a relieved breath when he saw the key was there.

“Lots of things haven’t changed at all,” he said, relaxing a little.

They entered the house and quickly closed the door behind them.

“Pull all the shades,” Mark suggested. “It wouldn’t be good if somebody saw us walking around. They might think we’re prowlers.”

“Yeah, we’d never go inside a house where we didn’t belong,” Courtney said, joking. Nobody laughed.

“C’mon people!” she cajoled. “Just trying to lighten things up!” Mark looked at the kitchen clock. “Three in the morning. Let’s get the shades down before the world wakes up.”

“What are shades?” Patrick asked.

“Sit down,” Courtney said, pointing to the kitchen table. “We got it.”

Patrick sat at the table, but he didn’t look comfortable. He sat straight up, looking at his hands, afraid to see anything more on Second Earth. He had been jumping from one alien environment to the next, and his nerves were jangled.

“We’ll be right back,” Mark said to him kindly as he and Courtney left the kitchen.

“I’m worried about him,” Courtney said to Mark softly, so Patrick wouldn’t hear. “He’s a mess.”

“He’s been through a lot,” Mark offered.

“Like we haven’t?”

“Yeah, but we’re used to it.”

The two looked at each other and laughed. “It’s true,” Courtney said, shaking her head in amazement.

“Patrick will be fine,” Mark assured her.

“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.”