Timescape by Robert Liparulo Page B

he kept his lids closed. He remembered a song Dad liked: “Doctor, My Eyes,” he thought it was called. It was about a guy who suddenly couldn’t see, and the singer wondered if it was because of all the sad things he’d seen.
    I could write that song, he thought. But I better not be blind. Yeah, that’s just what I need now.
    He snapped his eyes open. The bulb on the ceiling, inside a wire basket to keep it from breaking, shot white spears into his head. He clamped his eyes closed again.
    Okay, easy does it.
    He cracked his lids just enough to see through his eyelashes. Dad sat on the floor to his right, leaning his head back against the wall. His chest rose and fell with almost cartoon exaggeration.
    David shifted his gaze. Xander’s head was pushed up against him. His legs stretched up to the bench, where his feet rested. His teeth chattered like Morse code.
    Xander spoke, the cold clinging to his words. “Are . . . are we al-al-alive?”
    â€œI’m t-t-too cold to be d-d-dead,” David said.
    Xander tried to laugh, but it quickly turned into a series of coughs.
    Wind blew in from under the portal door. It swirled around the room, buffeting their clothes and hair. Drops of water filled the air. Then the wind and the water whooshed under the crack beneath the door and were gone.
    David felt warmer. Still bone-cold, but not nearly as icicley as a few seconds ago. He touched his hair. It was cold, but perfectly dry. Except . . . a sore spot on his forehead was wet. He looked at his fingers: blood, not enough to scare him. He lifted his head and said, “Xander, what did you hit me with?”
    â€œOh.” His brother held up the shiny object David had seen from the water. A sextant, which once helped sailors use the stars to navigate. “This old-fashioned GPS. It was one of the items I picked up to unlock the door. Sorry.”
    David thunk ed his head down. His brain was numb, as though the cold had penetrated and frozen it. He knew, however, that it wasn’t the cold that had flipped the off switch in his mind—it was the craziness of what he’d just gone through.
    â€œThat wind thing,” he said. “It took all the ocean water back where it belonged. Right out of my hair and clothes.
    How freaky is that?”
    â€œWe just survived the sinking of the Titanic , and you think the wind is freaky?” Xander nudged his cast.
    â€œAmong other things,” David said. “There’s just too many things happening to get my head around them all.”
    He felt Xander at his side, nodding.
    David held up his fist and straightened a finger for each point he made: “We went from Phemus coming after us . . . to Keal fighting him in the clearing . . . to finding out the world gets destroyed sometime in the near future . . . to running from, then running into , those future-world humanlike things . . . to nearly freezing to death in the Atlantic— because we jumped off the Titanic!” He pushed out a heavy breath. “Did I miss anything?”
    Dad patted his leg. He said, “We found Nana. We rescued her.”
    â€œTwice,” Xander said.
    David looked at Dad. “It worked?” he said. “Throwing the creature into the portal instead of Nana worked?”
    Dad smiled and nodded. “Next time we have to do something like that, try not to let them pull you in, okay?”
    David thought about it, where they had gone. He said, “We killed that guy, that creature.”
    â€œBetter him than Nana,” Xander said.
    Dad didn’t comment for a while, then: “We didn’t know where the portal would take him, Dae. Besides, maybe somebody rescued him.”
    David tried to imagine that thing jumping into one of the lifeboats, screeching and flying around, scratching and biting people. They’d think he’d gone insane. Probably throw him overboard. He saw Dad watching him and realized Dad didn’t think