“But, the car is disintegrating.”
He was apparently disappointed in my answer because, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him shaking his head. “The truck is not disintegrating. Tell you what, if this is too hard,” he used his hand and gestured to the rapidly vanishing hood. “Then tell me how you think I managed to pull Dempsey out of his heavily guarded home without raising an alarm.”
“How did you get into the house in the first place?”
“That’s another good question, boy.” But he simply turned his head and fixed me with a new stare. This one didn’t carry the disgust or hatred that had been so constant earlier, instead it held a teacher’s quality to it. He was hoping I would make the connections. As such, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when he added. “You tell me.”
I tried to imitate his calmness but my confusion was keeping me from concentrating. “It doesn’t make sense. You have to be touching something in order to forge it.”
“And…?”
“So how to do you manage to forge something that isn’t within your grasp?” I asked as I pushed my back into the seat, desperately trying to keep the oncoming nothingness from getting to me.
“I had the same question back when my master started my training.” I could sense the smirk on his face as he spoke.
I immediately latched onto one thing he had said, “Master?”
“Yes, my master. And if that word doesn’t work for you substitute ‘teacher’ in its place and you’re mostly there.”
Though that certainly got my attention, I stopped struggling and stared at the side of his head and dumbly asked, “You’re going to be my teacher?” I was a little slow, but I soon caught up with the meaning behind his words. “Wait a second. Teacher implies that you’re going to keep me alive.”
Through a smirk he calmly answered my statement, “No, I haven’t decided your fate one way or the other. But the chance of your surviving the night certainly is growing.”
Grumbling under my breath I turned my attention back to the disappearing vehicle, and with a start, realized that my legs had already crossed the plane. Unable to fully keep control of my nerves I looked back over to Alexis and pleaded, “Seriously what’s happening to me, Alexis?”
All that he was willing to say was, “Wait a few seconds and you’ll find out.”
So sitting there, as scared as I was, there was nothing I could do to avoid Alexis’ twisted humor. As I was being driven through the plane I kept trying to inch back to delay the inevitable. Just before my face went through the invisible barrier, I cursed my inability to push myself through the back of the cab, and then I was being swallowed into the maw of the unknown.
Chapter 21
As my limbs had disappeared, apparently nothing disastrous happened as I hadn’t felt anything to accompany the disappearance. When my eyes finally crossed the plane I had to do a double take. While Alexis looked at me, I was too busy looking from side to side trying to figure out what had happened. I had been expecting to find a vast void of nothingness, but instead I found myself, well the front half of the truck actually, no longer on the street where we had been. Now we were in a cavern. This made no sense. “Where are we? What was that? Was that teleportation?”
With a chuckle Alexis replied. “We are in a safe house of mine. And only by the strictest of definitions was that teleportation. We are almost fourteen hundred miles away from Dempsey’s home.” Alexis used his thumb to gesture at the still missing back of his truck.
“But how… how did you do that?” I asked unable to hide my curiosity and astonishment.
“All in good time.” He replied but, after a half moment he added, “Provided you get the chance.”
His attempt at a jibe pulled me out of my awe. Annoyed, I looked over, stared into his eyes, and calmly retorted. “You can make all the jokes you want to Alexis. I already know that you’re going to spare my life, and I’m fairly sure that you’re going to take me on as your student…” I paused just long enough to flash him a smile before adding a little jab of my own. “Well you’ll probably call me your apprentice.”
“A little cocky aren’t you?” Annoyance laced his voice.
“Not really.” I replied confidently. “If you hadn’t already made up your mind you would have laughed off my request to release me. But instead, you decided to trust me.” As I said that the old saying, ‘trust, but verify’ popped into my head, as did another possibility. “I suppose you could have just lengthened my bonds, enough to give me the illusion of freedom, but…”
With a clinical eye focused upon me Alexis asked, “So if I trust you, why wouldn’t I have just given you the answers to your questions?”
“Because,” I replied with an ever growing smile as I lifted one of my two brand new marbles of air. When he saw what I was holding he started to smile,, “Students learn better when they’re forced to figure out a problem on their own, or at least that’s what teachers or, as you call them, ‘masters’ claim.”
With a smile on his face he added, “Say that’s true, why did I give you a straight answer concerning how we got here.”
“You did, and you didn’t.” He was trying to trip me up, but that wasn’t going to happen. “You gave me a straight answer about the end effect, not about how you managed it. And I’d guess that’s simply because this is too complicated to experiment with.” I shook the marble for emphasis, “It’s not like it’s a marble of air.”
With a smile of his own, he pulled the now fully visible truck to a stop. “Good for you boy. You’ve got quite the head for reasoning on your shoulders. It’ll be a pleasure to teach you the craft.”