A Quill Ladder Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cast of Characters

  What Has Gone Before

  Prologue

  1. Berets and Not Bitter Orange

  2. The Good Side, Of Course

  3. Stranger Lessons

  4. Finding the Center

  5. A Flood of Dots

  6. Zero Declination

  7. Universe Jumpers’ Phi

  8. Deeks and Dogs

  9. Very Bad Men

  10. The Rat in the Room

  11. Always Together

  12. Burning Questions

  13. Keys and Coordinates

  14. Apothecaries and Backhoes

  15. Swamps and Ladders

  16. Agrippa’s Cross

  17. Pythagoras in the Dark

  18. Momentum

  Author’s Note

  Other Books in the Series

  Also by Jennifer Ellis

  A Grave Tree Excerpt

  About Jennifer Ellis

  Acknowledgements

  A Quill Ladder

  THE DERIVATIVES OF DISPLACEMENT BOOK Two

  Jennifer Ellis

  Moonbird Press

  A Quill Ladder

  Copyright © 2014 Jennifer Ellis

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, events, locales or organizations are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are imaginary, and any resemblance to actual places, events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Design by: Design for Writers

  Editing by: David Gatewood

  ISBN-13: (print) 978-0-9921538-6-1

  ISBN-13: (ebook) 978-0-9921538-4-7

  Moonbird Press

  Book Layout © 2015 BookDesignTemplates.com

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  Cast of Characters

  The Sinclairs

  ABBEY – Fourteen-year-old science genius

  CALEB – Abbey’s twin

  SIMON – Abbey and Caleb’s older brother

  PETER – Abbey, Caleb, and Simon’s father

  MARIAN BECKHAM – Abbey, Caleb, and Simon’s mother

  Potential Friends

  MARK FORRESTER – The Sinclairs’ twenty-six-year-old map-obsessed neighbor with Asperger’s

  FRANCIS FORRESTER – Mark’s mother

  SYLVAIN SALVADOR/MANTIS – Apparent friend of the family

  JAKE HAMMOND – High school student from Greenhill; helped Sylvain by using the docks

  IAN – “Witch” rescued from Nowhere living in Forrester house

  FRANK AND FRANCIS – Ian’s hairy and tattooed associates

  DR. PAUL FORD – Francis Forrester’s ex-husband/Sandy’s father

  SANDY FORD – Francis and Paul’s daughter rescued from Nowhere

  KASEY – Map librarian in the future

  MAX – Spaceship pilot in the future

  Likely Enemies

  RUSSELL ANDREWS – Working with Sylvain

  SELENA DARBY – Seems to be leading the “bad” faction; old friend of Peter Sinclair’s

  NATHANIEL – One of Selena’s lackeys

  DAMIAN – One of Selena’s lackeys

  QUENTIN STEINAM – Unknown investor who seems to be pulling the strings of the “bad” faction

  For those who love treasure maps…

  A note about the maps… If you are interested in looking at the maps provided in A Quill Ladder at higher resolution, please go to the reader bonuses section of my website and check them out. But don’t spoil the surprise and go too soon….

  What Has Gone Before

  In A Pair of Docks – Derivatives of Displacement Book One

  Abbey, Caleb, and Simon Sinclair discover a set of stones that lead them to what appears to be the future—except that there seem to be not one, but three futures: one in which space travel is possible, one in which people live in a plant cell bubble in the desert, and one in which forest has overtaken the landscape and people live in tents. More troubling is the fact that someone named “Mantis” appears to have hired someone to kill one of their future selves.

  Abbey, Caleb, and Simon work to unravel the secrets of the stones and track down “Mantis,” which proves to be an alias for a computer company owner named Sylvain Salvador. They discover that the future they go to seems to be determined by who steps on the stones first, and that all three of them seem to inhabit different futures. Abbey meets an older Caleb in the forested future—Caleb’s future—and he warns her to be careful, as there are many dangers associated with the stones.

  When their neighbor Mrs. Forrester has a mysterious stroke, Abbey, Caleb, and Simon take her son, Mark, who has Asperger’s and is obsessed with maps, under their wing. When they travel to Mark’s future, they discover that he will end up in a time purgatory known as Nowhere, inhabited by other similarly trapped “witches” because he will, apparently, try to change the future and create paradox. Drawings that Mrs. Forrester has given them lead them to a professor named Dr. Ford, who claims to know the secrets of the stones. Dr. Ford agrees to help them, but has unclear motives of his own.

  When Dr. Ford tricks Mark into going with him to the future, hoping to rescue his daughter Sandy, who’s trapped in Nowhere, Abbey and Simon follow and end up in Caleb’s future. Mantis and a boy named Jake are there, and are in the process of helping older Caleb—now a leader known as “the Light”—to move his people to Simon’s future via a set of docks that transport people laterally between futures. Only Jake, as a “camel,” can use the docks, because he is dying and therefore has no future. Mantis claims that he has no plans to kill any of them, but rather is helping Caleb’s people escape the forested future because the soil is too acidic to grow food. However, future Caleb must repay Mantis by betraying future Simon, who owns a software company that is competing with Salvador Systems.

  During the transfer of his people, future Caleb tells Abbey that she must stop the event—“the bomb that was not a bomb”—that splits the futures; he tells her where to find a list of clues, left by her future self, in order to do so. Dissidents among Caleb’s people attack everyone during the transfer between futures, and Mark creates paradox by killing one of them and goes with Dr. Ford to Nowhere. Abbey’s mother comes to retrieve them all using the docks, and she rescues all of the witches from Nowhere, including Sandy. In doing so, reveals that she too is a camel, and she forbids Abbey, Caleb, and Simon from ever using the stones again.

  Prologue

  The filtered light pried beneath the heavy curtains, pulling Abbey from slumber. She had grown accustomed to the mute blue sky of the new world, and the bubble was necessary to block out the harmful rays of the sun, but sometimes she longed for the bold azure of the skies she had shared with her brothers, that unconstrained world of movement, green forests and sharp and stunning winds. Other than Simon and Caleb, and her parents of course, it was the wind that she missed most. There were no variations in pressure in the bubble. The small breezes that managed to penetrate the porous cells of the protective skin did not satisfy Abbey the way that the wild crack of a storm once did.

  Sam stirred against her, his warm hand slipping from beneath the covers to cradle her pregnant belly. She ne
stled into him for a minute but then eased away. It was time to rise and prepare for work at the lab. She had an early morning meeting, and judging from the size of her stomach, it was getting close to the day when she might have to help her younger self—if the timeline hadn’t changed.

  Had she changed fate by giving her younger self the list? And if she had, would everything be changed? Or just some things?

  She had taken to haunting the lab, moving her desk so it was pressed up against the glass of the atrium, going in earlier and remaining later so as not to miss the moment. Being there would be a risk to her pregnancy, she knew, but whom else could she ask to keep watch? She thought of Sylvain and his belief that the time periods moved along like side-by-side rivers, their velocity and acceleration the same. But there were moments of jerk and jounce where the change in acceleration, and the change in the change in acceleration, would shift in one river, and the time periods would briefly disentangle. Those were the exceptions.

  What if this moment was one of the exceptions?

  Sam attributed her new longer work hours to pregnancy nerves amplifying her usual work ethic and obsessive focus on finding the right answers. She should tell him what she had done, what she was doing. But he would be upset. The stones had always spooked him a bit.

  Abbey padded to the bathroom of the small adobe shelter she and Sam shared and splashed a small amount of water on her face. Even with their careful efforts to recycle and purify grey water, showers were only permitted every few days. A time-saving policy, for sure. The gallons of water once dumped onto lawns seemed an utter pomposity now. She suspected most of the water in the world sat in Caleb’s uninhabitable future, a future heavy with cloud and the acidic, infertile soil of a boreal forest.

  Her hair, normally dry, tolerated the lack of washing. Abbey prepared to pull it off her face and bind it into a plaited bun, her yet-unborn child thundering around in her stomach like a cyclone. She placed her hands on her belly. Whatever happens, my little fighting man, I can’t lose you, she murmured. She sent another plea to the universe that she had not risked altering the course of time too much.

  But if younger Abbey succeeded in stopping the rupture, as people had now taken to calling it, it could change everything. What if she ended up choosing Jake, or Russell? This little babe in her body would cease to exist in a puff of paradox. But Abbey wouldn’t do that. Would she?

  She regarded her pale skin impassively in the mirror. As she drew her hair back from her face, she saw them: five new, large freckles forming a path across her forehead. The “mask of pregnancy,” or melasma, a pigmentation that results from the hormones of pregnancy.

  Seasoned time travelers became used to observing the minutest details of the people and things around them, so that they could use these details to place themselves precisely in time. She had been wearing her hair up that day, and a brown woven dress of a linen-like rough fiber with a circle of pink flowers at the neckline, and the freckles she was now looking at had decorated her forehead like a constellation.

  So the day was approaching then. In fact, it could be today. The day in the former timeline, or was it still the current timeline—she wasn’t sure—when younger Abbey would show up with a bleeding Jake, and she, the older Abbey, would have to make some choices. It was strange. It seemed like she had already made the choices, since she, the younger her, had technically been there the first time she’d made the choices. But the older her hadn’t actually made the choices yet. And theoretically, she could make different choices this time, even though it was still really the first time.

  She would, of course, save Jake. Paradoxically, for both the first and the last time.

  Time travel, especially when two versions of you are present in the same scene, was pretty much endlessly confusing, even for someone with an IQ of one hundred and sixty-five. Her doctor had dismissed the notion of pregnancy brain, but it was possible she had lost a few IQ points in the past few months.

  Perhaps by giving her younger self the list—if she hadn’t always done so—she had negated all of it. Perhaps the younger Abbey would never show up with Jake. Perhaps this relatively comfortable life in the bubble with Sam and a baby on the way would evaporate at any second. But perhaps she would have her brothers and her mother again. That was another thing about time travel—you learned not to become too attached to any single timeline.

  What a tall order she had given to her younger self.

  Fix everything, but don’t change too much.

  Abbey finished tying her braided hair into a loose knot. She would wear her brown dress today.

  1. Berets and Not Bitter Orange

  ~ Velocity is the 1st derivative of displacement.

  Velocity is the rate of change of position or the rate of displacement. ~

  The man waited on the curb outside of Mrs. Forrester’s most afternoons. He waited for the two beefy men with long wild hair and tattoos who had come down the hill and walked into town the night her mother had freed all of the witches from Nowhere. Of course it was really Nowhen, as Abbey was now calling it in her own mind; she preferred more factual descriptions. The man wore a faded tan beret and wide-legged jeans. He had replaced the striking brown leather jacket he had worn on the first few days with a more subtle corduroy blazer and had shifted through a surprising number of broad-collared shirts in a variety of paisleys, stripes, and solid colors. His style was definitely retro, but with his flippy light-brown hair and crinkly blue eyes, he didn’t seem out of place in 2012 at all. She wondered how old he was, how long he had been in Nowhen, and what that meant for his biological age. Was he in his twenties, as he looked, or sixty? And where was he getting all of those shirts?

  He smoked while he waited, and occasionally he would glance up at the window from which Abbey stared and offer a faint smile through a ring of smoke. The rings were actually vortices, to use the technical name, and had similar physics to tornados. But smoking was very bad for you, so Abbey tried not to think they were neat.

  Then the two other men would arrive, and the three of them would proceed back down into town. The first few days the other men had arrived on foot, but now they showed up consistently in an old burgundy Toyota Camry. When the car had first made an appearance, Abbey had spent several days scanning the news for stolen vehicles.

  The man in the tan beret crushed his cigarette beneath his boot, then slowly and deliberately turned his eyes to the living room window where Abbey sat crouched low on the couch, and pointed at the ground by his feet.

  Abbey’s heart began to flutter. He wasn’t trying to communicate with her, was he? He inclined his head slightly in a nod, extended his finger toward the ground again, then gave another faint nod.

  Abbey had watched the witches come and go from Mrs. Forrester’s for several weeks now. The other comings and goings from the house had been more pedestrian. A pair of younger women had strolled down to the local grocery store on several occasions, returning with bags stuffed with food. So apparently witches still needed to shop like regular people. Her mother, despite her promises three weeks ago, appeared to have reassessed and had been remarkably circumspect regarding the abilities of witches. Strangers—relatives perhaps, or long lost friends—came in twos and threes to collect some of the other witches. Joyous reunions occurred on Mrs. Forrester’s porch, and then cars eased down Coventry Hill, never to return.

  Mrs. Forrester remained in the hospital in rehab, recovering from her stroke. Sandy was staying with Dr. Ford, and Mark had taken up residence in the spare bedroom in the crypt, plastering the walls with maps of all shapes and sizes collected from the shelves in his bedroom across the street. He had decided he would be expanding his previous focus on shorelines to include topographic maps and mountain ranges. Two days ago, he launched into a long description regarding types of contour lines, while Ocean wove in and out of Farley’s legs, causing the Chesapeake Bay Retriever to agitate in despair because he couldn’t chase her and lick her. Mar
k indicated he would be focusing on elevation contour lines, which, according to Mark, could tell you a lot regarding the steepness and shape of a mountain, and in particular where valleys were located, although he was also interested in isotachs, which were wind contours, and he felt isogons, which were lines of constant magnetic declination, were also worthy of consideration.

  Abbey had tried to pay attention. But mostly she’d watched the comings and goings across the street.

  She, Caleb, and Simon had been in virtual lockdown since the night they’d used the stones, and then gone to the docks, and had endangered themselves, and, evidently, everybody. Their parents now drove them to school every morning, and the school was on strict orders to report any absences. Their father had even taken a partial leave of absence so he could be home when they got home every afternoon.

  Their mother had been guarded about her illness. It, apparently, was not for Abbey, Caleb, and Simon to worry about. Her mother would find a cure, and therefore any time they spent worrying would be a waste. Their house practically quivered with determination. Marian Beckham, the new mayor of Coventry City, strode through her days with certainty and crispness, attending meetings, lecturing Abbey, Caleb, and Simon about unnecessary risks, and dispensing competent mothering to all of them, including Mark. Only their father’s eyes seemed heavy with stress.

  Find a cure. How was that possible? From what Abbey understood, in order to be a camel, one must be dying for sure.

  Caleb had regarded her strangely when she had brought this up. “Don’t you get it?” he said. “It’s curable in the future, you ding dong. Mom is using the stones to try to find treatment.”

  “How do you know?” Abbey had breathed.