Daniel didn’t look happy about having to start over again, but he nodded just the same.
“And Kaitlyn,” Sam finished, “Go back to the part of the circle where Mackenzie is standing and trace over the runes again, moving in the same direction she does. I’ll point to you when it’s time to move to the next rune.”
“Okie dokie,” Kaitlyn agreed.
Sam took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Rush raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Ammu, however, began to watch her with a new intensity.
“OK, everybody,” she said. “Here goes nothing. One… two… one, two, three, four.”
Daniel began to hum again, but this time he followed the beat that Sam had introduced, while Mackenzie moved to the same rhythm, punching and kicking at the air in slow motion. Sam pointed occasionally to Kaitlyn, who would trace the next rune while Mackenzie bowed in front of it.
As they came back around toward the beginning of the circle, Rush began to frown. He felt a strange sort of hum in the air, and he found himself wondering whether this was what it felt like right before you were struck by lightning.
It was not a comforting thought.
Suddenly, Sam threw her arms up over her head, and a dark void began to open between her hands. It started as a pinprick, so small that Rush couldn’t be sure he was seeing anything at all, but he felt it with absolute certainty. It was as though a hole had opened up between himself and something waiting just on the other side, in the same way that a narrow tunnel might suddenly allow you to hear someone’s voice through a wall of solid rock, or allow you to catch the scent of winter lingering on the other side.
As the hole grew, becoming as wide as a marble, and then a golf ball, and then a baseball, and then a softball, Rush could feel the thing on the other side struggling to shove its way into the tunnel, which was still too narrow for it. He felt it yearning toward him, and at the same time tugging at him, like two powerful magnets drawn inexorably toward one another.
“What the hell?” Rush exclaimed. He took a huge step backward and stumbled into Ammu, who barely managed to keep them both from falling.
“What?” Sam cried out, seeing Rush’s reaction. She yanked her hands back into her lap, her wide eyes meeting Rush’s across the span of the room between them, and the void snapped closed without a sound.
30
Instructor Report
“So, what went wrong?”
“I thought it was an excellent first attempt, all things considered. With time—”
“We don’t have time, dammit! What… went… wrong?”
“Why, nothing, really. The boy just—”
“Nothing? You’re trying to tell me that nothing went wrong? Then where are my results?”
“As I have been saying, it is a bit early, in my opinion, to expect the project to come to its full fruition.”
“It’s full fruition? Nothing happened!”
“I admit the process did not reach completion, but—”
“Completion? It didn’t even start, man!”
“I apologize, Colonel, but why do you keep repeating everything I say as a question? I find it very disconcerting as a method of communication.”
“Well, I’m sorry to be disconcerting you with my inconvenient questions about your failure today.”
“I would hardly characterize today as a failure.”
“Don’t play coy with me, dammit! We had instruments set up all around the outside perimeter of that room! Everything from microphones to Geiger counters! So when I say nothing happened, I mean I know for a fact that nothing happened!”
“Interesting…”
“‘Interesting’ is not the word I would use in this situation if I were you, Professor. Not with me. Not today.”
“If you want better results, I believe we need to do a better job of preparing the unconscious mind for success. If they know exactly what they are attempting—”
“For the last damn time, we are not telling them anything! I want results, and I want them now. So you had better figure out how to provide them, or I swear to God I will go down there and motivate those kids myself. And I promise you, you are not going to like the way I choose to do that. You are not going to like it at all.”
31
Conference
“OK, what the hell was that this morning?” Sam stopped pacing behind the couch and put her hands on her hips, glaring at everyone else as though daring them not to answer.
Rush and Sketch were playing HRT Alpha: Year One with something less than their usual enthusiasm. Daniel and Kaitlyn sat next to them, holding hands in silence, looking as though the world were about to end at any moment, which might be the truth of it, as far as Sam knew.
“We don’t know any more than you do,” Mackenzie finally answered when no one else did. She was running through a series of stretching exercises, but it wasn’t doing much to calm her nerves.
“Oh, I beg to differ,” Sam snapped. “We’ve all had individual sessions with Ammu that nobody else got to see. Maybe if we put it all together, things will make some kind of sense. So, spill. What did he say or do with each of you?”
Mackenzie just shrugged. “Mine wasn’t anything weird like this morning,” she said. “Really, it was a lot like Rush’s—which was yours, too, for that matter—and we were all there for that. I just fought this guy named Miller, and I dodged a lot of punches. That’s it. No crazy runes or chanting or holes in space.”
“You saw that?” Sketch blurted out, turning to look at Mackenzie over his shoulder.
“We all saw it,” Mackenzie said. “We might not all be talking about it, but we all saw it.” She glanced meaningfully at the back of Rush’s head, but Sketch wasn’t worried about who was talking and who wasn’t. The fact that he wasn’t the only one to see the weird thing between Sam’s hands was exciting in and of itself, and he turned back around, chewing the inside of his cheek thoughtfully.
“What about you, Gears?” Sam asked. “What did Ammu do with you?” They had been playing HRT Alpha ever since dinner—long enough to start using each other’s gamer tags out of habit—but they had chosen not to play downstairs by silent agreement, all of them feeling safer in the suite than they would have in the open space of the conference room.
“I don’t know. Mine was kind of weird,” Kaitlyn admitted. “Ammu was showing me things like blenders and stuff, and I was starting to see blueprints for them in my head. Then he threw in a picture of the gryphon thing, and I saw these symbols glowing in the air, like the stuff I drew on the floor.”
“OK,” Sam said. “So maybe the runes are some kind of blueprint for the gryphon.”
“You can’t build a gryphon like a blender,” Rush interjected, his voice thick with condescension.
“I’m not saying you can build it,” Sam snapped back. “I’m saying you can, I don’t know, call it or something.”