A Pair of Docks Read online

  Abbey nodded. Her normally reliable brain, fully entrenched in fight-or-flight mode, was not generating any better suggestions.

  Simon still sat on the bench four hundred meters away.

  Abbey clenched Caleb’s hand tightly in her own and braced herself on the causeway. Caleb leaned forward and edged one foot onto one of the stones, jutting his head out. Immediately, Abbey felt the pull from his body and then the acceleration. She tried to yank back on Caleb but her feet lost all traction, and then they were back in the forest, their forest, their eyes trying to adjust to the diminished light.

  “See, it’s fine,” Caleb said. “We can just go back and forth.”

  “We don’t know that,” Abbey said, but she grasped this small shred of relief and held onto it tightly. “Let’s just go get Simon.”

  Despite the unsettling but now familiar plummet through nothingness, the stones returned them to the causeway without incident. Simon had risen from the bench and his black toque bobbed slowly down the commercial causeway. They walked quickly after him, but he stopped every few meters to stare at something in his hands, making it easy to gain on him. What could he be doing? Despite her stress level, Abbey had to gape at the vessels that floated silently past, picking up speed as they moved farther away from the causeway, veering and rolling effortlessly. She looked for exhaust, for any sign of combustion, any hint of the type of fuel they used, but there was none.

  Caleb’s face shone with a barely suppressed look of rapture. He’d unbuttoned his shirt, revealing his beaded peace necklace.

  “Don’t start enjoying this, Cale. We’re getting Simon and then we’re leaving,” Abbey said, tying her sweater around her waist.

  Simon whirled and jumped as they approached, and then stopped walking. His lips twisted into a smirky half-smile, but something almost like relief flitted across his pale face. He thrust his iPhone back into his jeans pocket. “Ah, the Squeaksters.” He laughed almost manically at his personal joke regarding their supposed squeaky-clean status. He’d become more and more secretive and prickly toward them in the last few months. Their mother had said to leave him alone when Abbey wept hot tears about it. That he was just going through teenage stuff. That he should be left to his programming, his increasingly all-encompassing obsession. But Abbey missed the patient and reserved older brother who used to play board games with her, who would hang back with her in social situations while Caleb always plunged ahead. She supposed that chumming with your geeky younger sister, who’d been afflicted with an exceedingly uncool IQ of over one sixty-five, wasn’t high on the list of favorite activities for an almost sixteen-year-old boy. She was sure Simon was just as smart as she was. He was just better at hiding it.

  “All done with your homework?” Simon had intended this to be sarcastic, Abbey was sure. But his voice broke a bit, and ended up sounding more scared than mean. He’d grown impossibly tall over the summer, and if he stopped wearing that toque and frowning all the time, might even be vaguely good-looking. Abbey couldn’t believe none of the girls at Coventry High had noticed. But his averted eyes, eternal awkwardness, and preference for wearing all black likely screamed a warning to most females.

  “Simon, where are we?” Caleb asked.

  Simon pressed his lips together. “I’m not sure exactly.”

  “You better spill, or we’ll tell Mom and Dad. How did you find this place?” Caleb said.

  “Like they’d believe you.”

  “They might, and besides, look around—we’re your best and only allies right now and you might need us. So spill. How did you know about this place?”

  Simon scowled and removed a crinkled piece of paper from his pocket and thrust it at Abbey. She smoothed it out and read:

  Envelope-to: [email protected]

  Date: Thu, 15 October 2012 07:17:03 -0700

  From: mantis

  Subject: Re: Sinclair

  To: [email protected]

  You’ll find Sinclair on the other side of the Coventry Hill path at around 1:00 this Sunday. You can get there in the manner I outlined. Deal with him and return with the proof we discussed. Then I’ll meet my end of the contract. M.

  Abbey reread the message. It didn’t make sense. The Coventry Hill path started right outside their house. Their last name was Sinclair. “What does it mean? ‘Deal with him?’ Were you meeting someone? Is someone after you? Or one of us? Where did you get this?” Abbey asked. The message’s deliberate vagueness gave it a sinister tone, like someone was being careful to ensure no details were in writing.

  Simon shook his head. “I wasn’t meeting anyone, and I didn’t figure you were either, and Dad’s away until tonight. I watched the path all morning. Just before one, I saw this kid head up the path. So, I followed him for a few minutes. Then he stopped by that creepy rosebush and just vanished. I thought maybe there was a cave, or he was in the bushes. I sat down and waited for a bit. But he never came back.”

  The glare that had forced Abbey to squint slackened. She looked up past the delta wing of a ship that cast a shadow over their heads. Black storm clouds had blown over the sun.

  “So, I went looking where I last saw him, and my foot must have scuffed one of those weird stones because I was pulled through the air and I ended up here. Then I must have kind of freaked out or something and stepped backward onto the stones again and I ended up back on Coventry Hill. So, I went home, packed some food, clothes and other supplies and came back.”

  “Why did you pack a bag? You’re not actually planning to stay here, are you?” Caleb asked.

  “I’m not sure about you,” Simon said slowly, shifting his eyes to look pointedly from their feet to their heads, “but when I go to unknown new worlds, I like to be prepared, whether I’m staying or not.”

  Abbey’s foot tapped the causeway in a near stomp. “Why did you even come back? You have no idea what this place is. It might be our imaginations or a trick of physics. There could be danger around every corner. You can’t possibly be planning on staying.”

  With the sun behind the cloud, Simon’s dusky eyes were a mosaic of indigo and cobalt. “Are you suggesting that if you found a portal to a different world, you wouldn’t go back and check it out?”

  “Not by myself,” Abbey said.

  “All right, Boy Scout, how did you get the email anyway?” Caleb asked.

  “I hacked into the school district server. Don’t ask why, and do not tell Mom and Dad.”

  “You have to show this email to Mom and Dad,” Abbey started to say, when the door of the blimp-like ship they were standing next to opened with a creak. A man with a dark, pointed beard in a khaki jumpsuit, black boots, and a sunhat, walked down the gangplank. His outfit was eerily similar to those of the people they’d seen a few minutes before. He smiled, revealing straight, brilliant white teeth with prominent canines. Abbey sucked in her breath.

  “Are you with Sinclair?” he asked. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  ****

  Mark lay on his bed in the fetal position as the dizzy numbness of the Ativan washed over him. Ocean had tucked herself into the curve of his chest and her fluffy fur tickled his nose. The fur in his nose bothered him, but he was trying to tolerate it because she was the only friend he had and her purring was calming (according to his mother). His mother didn’t often resort to Ativan because she knew he hated it, but he supposed he deserved it. She’d locked him in the house earlier that morning after he’d ripped up all the books in the living room looking for another letter or photograph. Told him he couldn’t go out when he was in one of his moods. But Abbey wore the pink and orange sweater for the first time today. The sweater he’d been watching for. The date, today’s date, had already been circled on the calendar for years: 10-18-12, disguised—cleverly, he thought—as part of a sketch of the Aleutian Island chain. He always drew on his calendars, so his mother hadn’t noticed a thing. It wasn’t the date of course, but it was close, and a luckier combination of numbers bec
ause both eighteen and twelve were divisible by three. Kind of like setting his clock radio for an hour or two early. (He’d also circled 09-27-12, which was his favorite combination of numbers of all time, to give himself a three-week advance warning. This had proven to be useless, as he’d come up with no viable strategy and so he’d basically just spent the last three weeks alternately moping and agitating in despair.)

  But the appearance of Abbey’s sweater had made it real, and Mark got panicky. He’d tried to get Abbey and Caleb’s attention when he saw the sweater today by waving and hitting the window. They had ignored him (as usual) and headed up the Coventry Hill path, which suggested maybe today was the first day. He hadn’t known that before. After they left, he yelled some more and ripped up the living room, which led to the Ativan shot and his current situation.

  In retrospect, he hadn’t had a clear game plan. He could have held a note up to the window. But what would he have written? Don’t go? They wouldn’t know what he was talking about, and it was possible that he needed them to go. Don’t let my mother see you? There again he wasn’t entirely sure. But he hadn’t known exactly how it would all start, either, so it had been hard for him to prepare. (Also, the Ativan made everything a bit fuzzy.)

  He still had four days to figure out what to do.

  Before something really bad happened.

  Chapter 2

  Newellay

  Abbey, Caleb, and Simon stared at the man. Abbey’s legs felt like an undulating sine curve, not the slightest bit useful if they had to run. Years of scratches, dirt, and dents covered the silver metal hull of the ship. A pile of pewter crates leaned against the guardrail.

  “Um, yeah,” Simon said finally. “What do you want with us?”

  The man cocked his head and arched a black eyebrow. “Didn’t your office tell you? I’m having problems with my space coordinate calculations. Something to do with the latest upgrade. I was hoping you could fix it. You’re a little young, aren’t you?”

  Abbey tensed her legs for the expected run.

  Simon lifted his body out of his customary slouch to his full height. “I’m Simon, and this is Abbey and Caleb. They’re interns. It’s a school training thing,” he said with a vaguely flinty glance in her direction.

  Abbey pressed out her chest and sucked in her cheeks, hoping it might make her look older than fourteen, while trying to jab her elbow into Simon. Why was he even engaging the man? But as she glanced from one of her brothers to the other, she saw the same animated expressions. Testosterone and boy-ness. This was so not good.

  The man flashed those disturbing white canines again, shook his head and said, “Computer experts…you make me feel old. I’m Max.” Max stepped forward, hand proffered.

  Simon shook Max’s hand. Abbey wanted to kick Simon.

  Max continued, “We’re going to take a quick Earth-to-Earth to Newellay while you work on the system. I have to drop off some freight. It’ll take an hour, tops. Glad you still service the old one point two version.” He gestured toward the gangway. “I have to load some stuff. Server room’s the first compartment on the left. The computer’s name is Sarah. Didn’t bother changing it.” He paused and surveyed them again, his eyes roving over Simon’s backpack and toque. “I see you get to dress in civvies for work. Is it retro day or something?” He paused, and Abbey waited for the sound of alarms and the arrival of police, or bad guys, or aliens, to clap them in irons. “I heard things are different at Sinclair. Must be nice. You can head on in.”

  “You won’t even know we’re here,” Simon said.

  Max’s face relaxed and he barked a laugh. “I love it. Way to work the company slogan in there.” He flipped them a wave and sauntered off toward the crates. A large door in the side of the ship opened as Max approached, and the spindly arm of a crane, like the clawed hook of a praying mantis, rotated out and attached itself to one of the crates.

  Simon stepped cautiously onto the gangplank and looked back at his siblings.

  “Wait! Are you crazy?” Abbey said. “What are you doing? We should run now, while we still have the chance.”

  “I’m with Simon,” Caleb said, crowding around the bottom of the gangplank.

  “Have you two lost your minds? There are so many things wrong with this.” Abbey ticked them off on her fingers. “We’re impersonating someone. We don’t know how to fix his computer. We don’t even know where we are. And why was he looking for someone named Sinclair? We have no idea what’s going on. What if he’s mixed up with whoever wrote that crazy email? We should go back to the stones right now and tell Mom and Dad everything.”

  Simon raised his eyebrows into the depths of his toque and emitted a faint sigh of exasperation. “Abs, we have the chance to go on a real spaceship. We’re in a different world. This may never happen to us again. We have to play it out. Max said the trip would take an hour. We can go right back to the stones when we get back. We won’t even be late for dinner. Besides, if we take off, Max will think there’s something up. And if he’s involved in the email, then we should investigate it.”

  Abbey wanted to shake him. She expected this from Caleb, but not from Simon. “Oh yeah, let’s get on board the ship of someone who might be trying to deal with Sinclair.” She slashed quotation marks in the air around ‘deal with’. “Did you miss the lecture from Mom about not accepting rides from strangers? This is like the ultimate stranger danger. Has your adrenaline replaced your brains? You’ve spent too much time playing World of Warcraft. What about the fact that we have no idea how to fix his computer?” Even while she said all of this, a small part of her was feeling like she would hate herself forever if she bolted back to the stones and forced her brothers to come with her. A small part of her wanted to go on board. It was actually a rather large part of her, she decided, but her rational mind had it in a firm and unassailable stranglehold. Of course they’d all watched and read The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings, although she rather suspected that Caleb hadn’t made it through The Return of the King. Of course they’d all imagined being in one of those books, or at least she expected her brothers had, and judging from the twitchy animation of their faces, she was correct. But actually committing to the absolute, and likely unsafe, unknown—which she suspected wasn’t populated with elves as handsome as Orlando Bloom—when they had a clear and easy path to their safe, and not unpleasant, home was another thing altogether.

  “Computer techies can take forever to fix things,” Caleb put in. “We can just say we got started and need to come back tomorrow. He seems like an okay dude. He’ll never know ‘til we’re gone.”

  Abbey stared back toward the building and the stones. She searched again for the rift, the fracture point at which this alternate reality would rend itself apart and be revealed to be a façade—someone’s joke or experiment gone too far. But the building and hillside looked as solid and real as they had before.

  Max returned to the gangplank. “You better get on board. I’ll be heading out any second. Where are your ID tags?” Max flashed a card that hung by his waist.

  Abbey’s limbs went all quivery again.

  “We don’t do ID tags anymore. We’ve gone all retinal,” Simon said.

  Max paused for a beat, but then nodded. “Of course.” He stood beside the gangplank waiting for them to board. Simon continued up the gangway and Caleb followed, but there was a faltering quality to their footsteps. Abbey’s throat constricted. She could think of no reasonable way out of this now. Claim to have forgotten something? Say they weren’t allowed to fly? Simon and Caleb were almost inside the ship and she stood alone on the causeway. She swallowed and skittered up the metal ramp, her heart a thundering, palpitating mass.

  Dim lights bathed the passageway in an eerie green glow. The walls and floors bore scratches and marks, but the ship seemed to be pulsing with life. It wasn’t a vibration exactly, or if it was, it was one with a long period, making it seem more like a rocking motion. And yet it
was ever so faint. They came to the first door on their left. It was closed and had no door handle, but a console with two buttons was at door-handle height on the right-hand side of the door.

  “What now?” Caleb asked.

  “Push one of the buttons,” Simon ordered.

  “Which one?”

  “Here—let me do it.” Simon impatiently pushed in front of Caleb and pressed the top button firmly. Nothing happened. He tried the second button. The door remained closed.

  “Maybe try both of them at once,” Caleb ventured.

  Simon pressed both buttons at the same time. Still nothing occurred. They could hear the clatter of someone coming up the gangplank behind them. Abbey shrank against the wall as Max walked up the passageway.

  “We are so dead,” Abbey whispered.

  “Oh, whoops!” he said. “Forgot to tell you about the door. The auto-opener’s broken. Gotta use manual.” He pulled open a small compartment to the left of the door and pulled a long lever. The door slid open, revealing a room full of blinking computer lights, control panels, and screens. “There ya go. We’ll be taking off in five minutes. I’ll let you know over the comm system so you can strap yourselves in.” He turned and walked up the passageway, leaving Abbey, Caleb, and Simon to stare into the small room before them.

  “This is so cool,” Simon whispered, walking into the room. “There isn’t even a keyboard. I bet it’s voice-command operated.”

  Abbey and Caleb followed. Three seats with harness seatbelts sat along the back wall, which housed a bunch of closed compartments. One seat sat in a set of tracks on the floor in front of the computer. Simon started running his hands over the control panels. The initials SS twined themselves around the panels like snakes.

  “For god’s sake, Simon, don’t touch anything,” Abbey said. “You don’t even know what any of those buttons will do.”

  “Communications, Environmental Controls, Engines, Visuals, Navigation, Weapons,” Simon read off.