D. MacHale - The Merchant of Death

I thought back to the other two times I had seen Rellin. The first was at the Transfer ceremony. Though I was far away, I felt his hatred for the Bedoowan. The other time was in the mines after the explosion. After he was rescued, he had that strange laugh that felt so out of place. Loor was right. Something odd was happening.

“He trusted your mother, didn’t he?” I asked.

“Of course,” came her quick reply.

“Then he would have told her if things had changed and she would have told you, right?” I asked.

“Are you saying that I am wrong?” she asked.

“No,” I answered quickly. “I’m saying that if you’re right, then something strange is going on and the fact that he didn’t tell your mother about it makes me kind of nervous.”

We all let this hang in the air for a while. Finally Alder said, “So what do we do?”

I knew the answer to that. So did Loor, but I wanted to say it first.

“We rescue Uncle Press,” I announced. “We gotta get him back here.”

I shot a look at Loor. She didn’t have to say a word. I knew what she was thinking. Rescuing Uncle Press was exactly what we needed to do and she had decided to help me. She then looked to Alder and said, “This will be a difficult fight, Alder. You will have to reveal to them that you are a Traveler.”

Alder stood up proudly and said, “I knew this day would come. I am ready.”

“Whoa, whoa!” I said while stepping between them. “Who said anything about a fight?”

Loor scoffed and said, “If you think we can get into the Bedoowan fortress, find Press, release him, and get out without a fight, you are not only a coward, you are a fool!”

Loor’s macho act was starting to get old, but I didn’t want to make her angry by telling her so. I had to stand up to her or she’d walk all over me.

“Yeah?” I said trying to match her bravura. “The goal here is to get Uncle Press out, and if you think the three of us have any chance of doing that by fighting Kagan’s knights, then maybeyou’re the fool!”

Loor didn’t have a comeback. Alder put the icing on the cake for me by saying, “He is right, Loor. If we charge in fighting, we will be killed before we find Press.”

This bothered Loor. It was obvious that her first reaction to problem solving was to come out swinging. But she wasn’t an idiot, and she was beginning to realize that her way might not have been the best way in this case.

“Then what do we do?” she asked. “Ask Kagan politely to release Press? Maybe if we saidplease it would happen.”

Whoa, the muscle head was capable of sarcasm. Maybe she had more going on than I gave her credit for.

“The only chance we have is to sneak in there without them knowing,” I said. “The longer we can stay invisible, the better chance we have of getting Uncle Press out.”

Alder was getting excited. He said, “Yes! I know a way to get in. And I know every corridor of that fortress. There are passageways and tunnels that are rarely used.”

Loor didn’t like being told she was wrong, especially by someone she didn’t respect, which was me. But I think she was smart enough to know that my way made more sense.

She said, “And do you have a plan for what to do after Alder gets us into the palace?”

The fact is, I did. Sort of. It wasn’t really a plan as much as it was a bunch of ideas. Unfortunately all my ideas needed things that didn’t exist here on Denduron. I needed a bunch of stuff from back home.

“If I got a message to my friends back home,” I asked, “is there a way for them to send me something from there?”

Loor stepped away from me. She knew the answer, but I think she was reluctant to tell me. I was still pretty new to this whole Traveler thing. Maybe she wasn’t sure she could trust me with all the secrets yet.

But Alder didn’t have the same concerns. “Of course there is,” he said innocently. “You can flume back to your territory and get whatever you want.”

I was beginning to like this guy. Could it be as simple as that? All I had to do was go back to the flume and I could get home? Cool. But there was still the tricky issue of having to climb back to the top of that mountain to get to the gate. There’s no way I could do that in time to get home, then get back here to rescue Uncle Press before he was executed. Besides, I’d probably get eaten by those quigs anyway.

“That’s no good,” I said. “Is there another way?”

“You do not need to go to the mountain,” said Loor. “There is another gate in the mines that is not guarded by quigs.”

Oh, yeah! This was getting better by the second. And maybe best of all, by Loor giving me that piece of information, she was allowing herself to trust me. Maybe we could work together after all. Now that I was certain I could get home, my mind started to calculate all of the things I could get that would help us sneak into the fortress. The thing that was so cool is that the people of Denduron knew nothing about life at home. They would be blown away by something as simple as a flashlight. Man, talk about power! I wasn’t exactly sure how it was going to work, but I was beginning to think that we might really have a chance of getting Uncle Press out of there.

Loor took me back down to the mine. It was an uneasy truce that we had going. We both knew we needed each other, but neither of us was too happy about it. The first thing I did was go back to the small cell-like room where Loor made me wait before, and finish my journal. I also wrote out the list of items and the instructions that I sent to you. Once they were ready, I rolled them up and did exactly what Osa had done when she sent you my first journal. I took off the ring, put it on the ground, touched the gray stone, and said, “Earth!”

But nothing happened. I tried again. Nothing. I was suddenly hit with a terrible thought. Osa told me that the power only worked for Travelers. What if I wasn’t really a Traveler? I was doing exactly what she did, but the ring didn’t work. Maybe I wasn’t a Traveler after all!

Loor had been watching from the doorway. Before my panic got any worse she said, “You are not from Earth. You are from Second Earth.”

Oh. Right. That’s what Osa said. Second Earth. Did that mean there was a First Earth? I made a mental note to ask that question later. There were more important duties at hand. I touched the stone and said, “Second Earth!” Sure enough, that was the ticket. The stone began to glow, the ring grew, the musical notes played, and I dropped the journal with my list into its center. It disappeared and all returned to normal. Cool. But then I was hit with another thought.

“Loor,” I asked. “How will I know when to flume back to Earth…uh…Second Earth? It could take a long time for my friends to get the stuff together.”

Loor gave me the straightest answer I’d had since my arrival. And she seemed unsure of herself, like it didn’t make sense to her, either.

“I do not fully understand how,” she began. “But when Travelers fly through the flumes, they will always arrive when they need to arrive.”

It was then that I realized that Loor didn’t know much more about being a Traveler than I did. Sure, she put on this tough front, but I think she was still trying to get her mind around the concept.

“My mother began to explain it to me,” she added. “She said the flumes travel through time as well as through space. But why a Traveler always arrives at the time they need to arrive was not made clear to me.”

“So you’re telling me that when I flume to Earth-”

“Second Earth,” she corrected.

“Yeah, whatever. When I flume to Second Earth I’ll arrive at the same time that my friends arrive at the other end?”