Insight Kindling (The Call to Search Everywhen, #2)

Chapter 1 The Arrivals

VALCAS and I landed as swiftly as we’d flown away from the White Tower, where we’d left his past behind.  I blinked, willing my eyes to adjust.  As the white light faded, I loosened my grip on Valcas and let go. 

I swung myself off the back of his Estrel-Flyer and readjusted the straps of my backpack.  I held my breath.  A cross between a motorcycle and a hovercraft, the black and gold flying vehicle shone in the moonlight.  It hadn’t changed into anything else—a car, a motorboat, a horse, or any other type of vehicle built for traveling by land, sea or sky.  The Estrel-Flyer would have changed into something else had we landed in a real place or a made-up place.  I immediately grew suspicious. 

I slid the travel glasses from my face up to the top of my head and looked around, squinting for signs of still waters.    

“I didn’t expect TSTA Headquarters to be a Nowhere,” I said, “especially when everyone there seems so worried about people getting lost.”  From what I’d learned about traveling so far, Nowheres were either un-places or made-up places that were no longer real.  Places of the lost.

Valcas stepped off the side of the Estrel-Flyer and turned to look at me.  At least I assumed he was looking at me.  His sunglasses were still on his face, reflecting the moonlight, hiding his creepy eyes.

“What?  Say something,” I said.

Dark eyebrows arched beneath the dark strands of hair spilling over his forehead down toward the darkness of his glasses.  “You’ve learned a lot more about traveling, but you still don’t have much of a sense of direction.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”  The blood drained from my face as I remembered just how little I trusted him.  But Mom had said—

I straightened my shoulders.  “Where are we?” 

“We’re just outside of TSTA Headquarters.  Did you think we could walk right in?”

I rolled my eyes.  “It’s called the Time and Space Travel Agency, isn’t it?”

“Yes.  It’s an agency, a very secure one.  Don’t stray far from me.”

I squinted as we walked.  There weren’t any buildings, just lots of dirt and the occasional tuft of grass, all shrouded in a hazy midnight blue, illuminated by the silver glow of the moon.

“You know where we’re going, right?” I asked.

Valcas sniffed.

“Are we going to jump off a cliff somewhere like we did at the meadow…to get to your palace?” 

Not that I was afraid.  I’d traveled several times with the glasses by jumping from high places in order to generate plenty of momentum to get to different places and times.  The first time this happened had been a surprise.  Not long after Valcas and I had first met, he’d literally grabbed my arm while we were standing near the edge of a cliff. And jumped.  I’d woken up in a palace in a kingdom Valcas said he’d usurped.

“This is where I got the idea,” he said.  “You’d better put your glasses back on.”

“Why?”

“You don’t want to lose them.  We’re not taking the conventional way in.  Licensed TSTA vehicles have their own entrance.”

I covered my eyes with the travel glasses and kept walking, wondering how Valcas could see anything in the inky blackness.  I couldn’t see beyond an inch or two in front of me. 

Minutes passed—empty minutes filled with nothing but the sounds of our footsteps.  Valcas stopped abruptly in front of me.  I felt his fingertips graze my elbow. 

“It’s not my palace anymore,” he said.

Then he grabbed me by the waist and jumped.

I HADN’T seen the cliff coming.  We fell, shrouded in darkness as thick and black as the open area where we’d been walking.  Had I not felt the pull of gravity and the rush of wind sweep upward along my skin and clothing, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between falling and walking. 

I waited as the blackness succumbed to the bright white glow. Squinting, I held on to Valcas, just like I’d done on the Estrel-Flyer on the way out of the White Tower. I didn’t want to tell my pair of travel glasses to go somewhere else. I wanted to get the TSTA hearing behind me.

Valcas and I landed with me still in his arms. 

I looked up at him and caught my breath.  “You could have told me when we needed to jump.  I’m not going to run.”

“Good.  Between the Uproar that is after you and now the TSTA, I’m the least of your worries.”  He let go of me and looked up at the sky.  “Stay close by.”

I followed Valcas’ gaze.  The sky was a dirty slate of charcoal smeared with a scribbling of chalky clouds.  Everything underneath it was thick with fog.

“What’s an Uproar?” I asked.

“The being that knocked you flat to the ground at Winston Lake?  Suffice it to say that the being is deadly.  It was playing with you back then, testing you out.”

“Okay, but what is it?”  All I remembered seeing at the dock near the lake where Valcas and I had first met was a flash of bright white light.  It attacked me multiple times, once just before Valcas arrived, and then again the next day, right before Valcas and I escaped using his travel glasses. 

“The Uproar is a disturbance.  Chaos.  A being that feeds on the blood of travelers and the lost.”  Valcas waved his arms in front of him, as if he were trying to part the fog, to clear a path.  “This is not good.”

“What’s wrong?”

“The visibility here is worse than I’ve ever seen it.”

I tried to read the expression on his face, but I couldn’t.  It was bad enough that the glasses covered his eyes.  The fog covered everything else.   

“Take my hand,” he said.  “We have to run inside.”

As I stared at his outstretched hand, my stomach twisted into a knot.  “But I’m not lost.”

“I know.”

Hand in hand, our feet pressed forward to the same beat.  The gravel beneath us grated with each step.  A bright white glow, thicker and more pervasive than the gritty fog, once again surrounded us.  Without our travel glasses the light would have been painful.  It would have forced both of us to close our eyes.

I kept my eyes open as the light faded.  Smooth polished stones replaced the rough gravel below us.  We stopped running.  I let go of Valcas’ hand and stepped forward.

A steel blue building stood at the end of the stone pathway.  Its façade of smooth brick-shaped rectangles reflected the sky like glossy mirrors.  The door to the building was closed, barred shut with long mirrored posts.  The stenciling on the sign above the door read: 

TIME AND SPACE TRAVEL AGENCY.

I wiped sweat from my palms across my jeans.  All I had to do was run, to use the travel glasses to transport me somewhere else.  Anywhere else but here.