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

Chapter 2 The Wait

I KEPT my promise to Mom.  I didn’t run. 

As Valcas and I approached the door, a beam of light from a tiny camera below the sign stretched out across both of us, starting with our feet.  When it reached the tops of our heads, the light flickered off and the camera receded back into the wall underneath the sign.  A ringing clang of metal releasing metal stung my eardrums.  The bars on the doors sprang open.  So did the door.

Valcas turned to me and smiled.  “I’ve never seen the door open that freely.”

“Why not?”

“The bars are intended to keep people out.  No one at the TSTA cares to see me.  You must be in a whole lot of trouble.”

Valcas’ laughter echoed off the walls as he walked ahead of me into the building. 

I gritted my teeth and muttered under my breath.  “Is this some kind of sick payback for you?”

I followed Valcas through the open doorway.  The air inside the building smelled like vinyl and rubber cement.  He looked back at me before turning a corner at the end of the hallway, and then looked back again before stepping through another open doorway on the right.  The plaque on the wall beside it was also labeled. 

“Waiting Room,” I read.  I stepped inside, set my backpack on the ground and sat in a chair across from Valcas, shrugging low in my seat.  Both of us still wore our dark glasses, which was fine with me.  I didn’t want to meet his eyes anyway. 

Instead, I busied myself by searching through my glasses, catching glimpses of Valcas’ memory of me as a baby—the way he held me with his hands, the adoration he felt when he called me beautiful, the resolve in his voice when he’d said he was looking for my father.  The travel glasses did more than transport me through time and space; they allowed me to search and replay the recordings Valcas and I had burned inside them. 

From across the room, Valcas cleared his throat.  “We could still be on our honeymoon, you know…”

I lifted my head and looked at him—really looked at him—sitting there in a tan vinyl office chair.  Black glasses, black slacks, black leather jacket.  Each article of clothing contrasted with the tan chair and plain white walls, the same way his dark hair framed his tan face.  He grinned at me, evidently amused by his poor attempt at humor about our feigned engagement; well, the first one anyway.  After escaping the bright white light—the Uproar—Valcas had offered me his protection if I agreed to pretend to be his intended bride.  That hadn’t worked out so well.  I’d stolen his travel glasses and fled back home after he’d locked me in a room for four days.  Let’s just say he’d developed a pretty warped sense of protection.

Our second fake engagement was more my fault than his, according to the TSTA.  After escaping the palace, I’d searched for and met the elderly inventor of the travel glasses, Edgar Hall, and then traveled into Valcas’ past to find out why he’d searched for me in the first place.  What I’d found was a disturbed past version of Valcas—not quite as disturbed as he is now, but an intelligent and lonely teen caught in a made-up world where it was often difficult to figure out what was real and what was not real.  That version of Valcas had grown fond of me and convinced himself that we were engaged.  How that happened still boggles my mind, but I had the evidence of his state of mind with me: a poem about me he’d written on a photograph of us, which I planned to present at the TSTA hearing as part of my defense.

What I hadn’t expected to learn while traveling in Valcas’ past was that his order to protect me had come from my father, whom I’d never met.

I swallowed a lump in my throat.  “You knew my father,” I said.

“Plaka was the only true friend I ever had.”