Catherine Fisher - The Slanted Worlds

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Copyright © 2014 by Catherine Fisher

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fisher, Catherine, date.

Obsidian mirror : the slanted worlds / Catherine Fisher.

pages cm

Summary: While Jake continues searching for his father and is sent by the obsidian mirror to multiple times in the past, Sarah and Venn battle with Summer for control of a powerful coin.

ISBN 978-1-101-60314-7

[1. Time travel—Fiction. 2. Fathers—Fiction. 3. Missing persons—Fiction. 4. Coins—Fiction.]

I. Title. II. Title: Slanted worlds.

PZ7.F4995Oc 2014 [Fic]—dc23 2013018259

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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Contents

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Part 2

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part 3

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Part 4

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Part 5

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

About the author

When shall we three meet again?

1

If the past becomes a land to voyage unto, how carefulle the journeyman must be. Will he not tread in a nightmare of uncertaynties? Be enmeshed in histories of which he knows nothing?

Like a man coming suddenly to a foreign land, and speking not the language . . .

From The Scrutiny of Secrets by Mortimer Dee

THE BOMB FELL in a split second of silence.

Racing down the street, Jake felt the unbearable pressure in his teeth and nerves; he grabbed at the unlit lamppost and threw himself to the ground.

The explosion was terrifying, a white starburst on his retina. It blew out every window. Bricks and dust roared down, glass shattered on his back and head and arms. Lumps of rubble thudded on him.

For a moment he was blind and deaf in a fog of ash and pulverized brick, afraid of broken legs and arms. Then he coughed, dragged himself up onto hands and knees, and turned his head.

The street was gone.

What had just been a square of Georgian houses was now a vast crater spouting flames, lurid in clouds of smoke. Fires erupted like volcanoes; as he staggered to his feet he felt sudden heat scorch his face.

It was hard to breathe. His eyes were gritty with dust, his hands black with soot that fell like rain.

A hand grabbed him. Noise buzzed in his ear.

“What?” he mumbled.

The blur became a man in a dark uniform, the letters ARP painted in white on his helmet.

With a crack Jake’s hearing came back.

“. . . said get to the shelter! Bloody bloody stupid kid!”

He shoved Jake fiercely away from the twisted lamppost.

Searchlights stabbed the sky. Jake glimpsed his own hand, bleeding.

Dazed, he said, “Where is it?”

“The Underground! God in heaven, where did you come from? I had this street cleared!”

Jake managed a short bitter laugh. “This isn’t the 1960s, is it.”

The air-raid warden stared at him, taking in his carefully anonymous dark clothes, the narrow band of worked silver clasped around his wrist. Suspicion came down on his face like a shutter.

“What’s your name? Where are your papers?”

“Jake Wilde.” He stared at the ruined houses in sudden despair. The black mirror must have been in one of those houses, the glass Chronoptika that had transported him here from his own time. It had to be nearby, and it couldn’t be destroyed by any German bomb, so was it there, under all that rubble? Before the dread of not getting back could grip him he said, “What’s that noise?”

A faint, screeching sound. For a moment of sheer terror he thought it was another bomb, then the warden turned quickly. “Someone’s trapped.”

He ran into the smoke.

Jake wiped dirt from his face. Quickly he took out a small elegant square box from his pocket and touched its tiny screen.

“Piers? Piers! Can you hear me? Listen! It’s all gone wrong. I’m in the Second World War, Piers! ”

Nothing.

He had left them just seconds ago, gathered around the control desk. Now Piers would be fiddling and muttering over the controls, Venn—Jake’s godfather—probably storming up and down the lab and lashing over furniture in his frustration. And Gideon, the changeling, would be watching with his sharp green eyes.

What a team. The blind leading the blind.

“Piers! It’s Jake! Get me back. NOW!”

Already he knew they couldn’t even hear him. Of course they couldn’t. They were eighty years in the future, because this had to be the London Blitz of what? . . . 1939? 1940? His knowledge of World War II was sketchy, but obviously the mirror was at least twenty years out. The cell phone, even fitted with Piers’s hopeful refinements, was useless.

“Hey you! Boy! Come and help! There’s a woman still alive down here. Quickly!”

Jake thrust the phone in his pocket and scrambled over the debris. Roving searchlights made triple shadows of himself flit and stretch and vanish over the stacks of rubble. The ruined house slid and clattered under him, a mess of tiles and curtains and furniture and ragged bedding and the fluttering pages of books, hundreds of white fragments, a snowstorm of paper.

How could anyone be alive under this?

The man was crouched by a slab of roof tilted at a crazy angle. He was saying: “I can’t dig you out . . . I’ll have to get help. The second wave will be over any minute.”

“Don’t worry, dear. I’ll be fine.” The whisper was muffled through layers of debris.

The warden stood, blew three sharp blasts on a whistle, but no one came, so he threw himself on the bricks, hurling them away, feverishly working. Jake scrambled up next to him. They toiled together under the eerie lights, tearing at the stacked layers of the collapsed house, but it was useless, Jake already knew—there was too much rubble, the buildings smashed to chaotic twists of metal.

And he could smell gas.

The ARP man glanced at the sky, his eyes white in a face black with dust. “They’re coming back. We have to go.”

“And leave her?” Jake stared, appalled.

“No choice.”

Far in the distance, a wave of planes droned.

“It’s very dark down here,” the woman whispered. “Can we go now?”

Jake grabbed a floorboard, hauled it away. “Here,” he said.

A small hole. The stench of gas rose from it, choking in his throat. He stopped. Fear was a slippery sweat in his chest. The whole thing could explode.