and feet after
telling Thomas to remain quiet, I peered out through the corner of
one window.
A boy I recognized ran from house to house,
knocking on the door of each.
Frowning, I darted over and threw open our
front door. "What's going on?"
The boy saw me and ran up to me, shouting his
fearful message. "They're in trouble!"
"Run with me," I ordered quickly, dashing
toward the old Dodson lot, and the paths beyond. The exhausted boy
followed suit as best he could, and Thomas was not far behind.
"What's the situation?"
The panting, red-faced boy let out his story
between ragged breaths. "Danny tried to take the book through the
portal on his own."
"I don't have the book with me?" I asked,
furious at the eighteen-year-old's misguided bravado.
"No, he stole it from you…" he explained,
starting to lag behind. "But the portal suddenly got bigger, and
they all fell through…" Falling to his knees, he shouted his last
information. "And they were all on the other side screaming and
running from something!"
My heart seized. Why wouldn't they just go
back through the portal? Something had clearly gone wrong with the
main egress in a fundamental way. Thomas kept pace with me a few
feet behind as I ran. "Go to Suzie's portal and tell them to start
unburying it," I ordered, giving no time for debate.
Thomas nodded and sprinted off in another
direction.
I soon crested the final hill, curving up
above the Virginia forest and back down beneath the canopy in
seconds… only to tumble to a painful and wrist-spraining halt.
The portal had ruptured even further.
Space hung like a sheet flapping in the wind
on an invisible clothesline. No semblance of the original ten-foot
portal remained, nor the thirty-foot gash I'd last seen. Instead,
the path and brush on both sides had been consumed by unstable
rifts… a clearing of deadly anomalies nearly three hundred feet in
length, by my best guess. Ten feet… thirty… roughly two-seventy…
the portal energy wasn't expanding geometrically. It was growing exponentially. By that same comparison, tomorrow the
corrupted space would be…
A mile and a half wide.
The day after that - I clutched the gritty
dirt beneath my hands tightly for a moment - a hundred and eleven
miles. As far as I'd seen, the portals had clung to the surface. I
had no way of knowing if the rifts were underground in a spherical
area, too, but this area of spatial disturbance seemed largely
rebuffed by the density of the ground beneath.
But a hundred and eleven miles … and
the day after that… the numbers began escaping me, but at least… twenty-five thousand miles…
Which happened to be almost exactly the
circumference of the Earth. The numbers might have escaped me, but
the neatness of that value did not. This was a darkly ironic
challenge from forces beyond comprehension: save the world in two
days, or lose it on the third.
In this exact moment, all I could worry about
were the thirty-odd children stranded in another reality. The
portal had been stable for weeks before I'd interfered. Was all
this somehow my fault? A dark grip caught my chest. How many
children had to die because of me?
Eyeing the maelstrom of spacial contortions,
I waited, waited, waited… and leaped.
I slid through a small oval barely big enough
to fit me, and the blinking rift took one of my shoes at the last,
barely sparing me my foot.
Already tired from the run, I pushed myself
wearily up, and then observed the world that the children had
thought safe enough to visit briefly.
A ruddy sky swirled high over an endless
plain of cracked obsidian. The sun hung huge and red in the sky,
seemingly much older than the star I knew. My shoed foot crunched
as I moved, and my bare foot fought for purchase among smooth flat
stones that were dully jagged along the sides.
Glassy black spread out to the horizon. What
had the children been running from?
I turned to look behind me.
The main portal was a mess of little blinking
rifts, and
telling Thomas to remain quiet, I peered out through the corner of
one window.
A boy I recognized ran from house to house,
knocking on the door of each.
Frowning, I darted over and threw open our
front door. "What's going on?"
The boy saw me and ran up to me, shouting his
fearful message. "They're in trouble!"
"Run with me," I ordered quickly, dashing
toward the old Dodson lot, and the paths beyond. The exhausted boy
followed suit as best he could, and Thomas was not far behind.
"What's the situation?"
The panting, red-faced boy let out his story
between ragged breaths. "Danny tried to take the book through the
portal on his own."
"I don't have the book with me?" I asked,
furious at the eighteen-year-old's misguided bravado.
"No, he stole it from you…" he explained,
starting to lag behind. "But the portal suddenly got bigger, and
they all fell through…" Falling to his knees, he shouted his last
information. "And they were all on the other side screaming and
running from something!"
My heart seized. Why wouldn't they just go
back through the portal? Something had clearly gone wrong with the
main egress in a fundamental way. Thomas kept pace with me a few
feet behind as I ran. "Go to Suzie's portal and tell them to start
unburying it," I ordered, giving no time for debate.
Thomas nodded and sprinted off in another
direction.
I soon crested the final hill, curving up
above the Virginia forest and back down beneath the canopy in
seconds… only to tumble to a painful and wrist-spraining halt.
The portal had ruptured even further.
Space hung like a sheet flapping in the wind
on an invisible clothesline. No semblance of the original ten-foot
portal remained, nor the thirty-foot gash I'd last seen. Instead,
the path and brush on both sides had been consumed by unstable
rifts… a clearing of deadly anomalies nearly three hundred feet in
length, by my best guess. Ten feet… thirty… roughly two-seventy…
the portal energy wasn't expanding geometrically. It was growing exponentially. By that same comparison, tomorrow the
corrupted space would be…
A mile and a half wide.
The day after that - I clutched the gritty
dirt beneath my hands tightly for a moment - a hundred and eleven
miles. As far as I'd seen, the portals had clung to the surface. I
had no way of knowing if the rifts were underground in a spherical
area, too, but this area of spatial disturbance seemed largely
rebuffed by the density of the ground beneath.
But a hundred and eleven miles … and
the day after that… the numbers began escaping me, but at least… twenty-five thousand miles…
Which happened to be almost exactly the
circumference of the Earth. The numbers might have escaped me, but
the neatness of that value did not. This was a darkly ironic
challenge from forces beyond comprehension: save the world in two
days, or lose it on the third.
In this exact moment, all I could worry about
were the thirty-odd children stranded in another reality. The
portal had been stable for weeks before I'd interfered. Was all
this somehow my fault? A dark grip caught my chest. How many
children had to die because of me?
Eyeing the maelstrom of spacial contortions,
I waited, waited, waited… and leaped.
I slid through a small oval barely big enough
to fit me, and the blinking rift took one of my shoes at the last,
barely sparing me my foot.
Already tired from the run, I pushed myself
wearily up, and then observed the world that the children had
thought safe enough to visit briefly.
A ruddy sky swirled high over an endless
plain of cracked obsidian. The sun hung huge and red in the sky,
seemingly much older than the star I knew. My shoed foot crunched
as I moved, and my bare foot fought for purchase among smooth flat
stones that were dully jagged along the sides.
Glassy black spread out to the horizon. What
had the children been running from?
I turned to look behind me.
The main portal was a mess of little blinking
rifts, and
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