The light grew brighter. She could hear the faint sweet musical notes that always accompanied the Travelers on their journeys through the flumes. The tunnel itself seemed to twist, ever so subtly, as if stretching out and preparing itself to welcome the visitor-whoever it might be.
“Please be Mark,” Courtney said to nobody. “Or Bobby.”
She didn’t have to say who she didn’t want it to be.
As the light grew brighter, the gray stone walls of the tunnel melted into crystal. Courtney knew it wouldn’t be long now. Whoever was coming was almost there. Brilliant light blasted out of the tunnel and threw dancing, sparkling beams all around the root cellar. Courtney squinted and shielded her eyes, but wanted to see it all. Moments later she saw the shadow of a Traveler landing in the mouth of the tunnel.
“Mark?” she shouted over the now-loud music. “Bobby?”
The light didn’t disappear after the Traveler arrived. It continued to shine brightly. That was unusual. Courtney had only seen that happen once before. It wasn’t a happy memory. If Courtney could have backed herself through the stone wall, she would have.
“Hi, Courtney,” came a friendly guy’s voice. “Long time no see!”
Courtney nearly fainted. She knew that voice. In her mind she was suddenly transported back to a lonely road in the Berkshire mountains. She was lying in a heap, bruised and broken. The headlights of the car that hit her cut through the darkness. The driver of the car stepped in front of the headlights so she could see him. It was the guy who nearly killed her. The guy who tried to kill her. The guy she was riding to meet because she had such a mad crush on him. Courtney’s head was spinning. This wasn’t making sense. That was a memory. A horrible, life-changing memory. Why was she seeing it happen again?
The Traveler stepped out of the flume. He was a cute guy of around seventeen with curly blond hair and a devilish smile. He wore sweats that said: stansfield academy, and carried a soccer ball. It was a nightmare. It was Whitney Wilcox.
It was Saint Dane.
“Miss me?” he asked brightly as he kneed the soccer ball into the air and caught it. “I’m glad you’re feeling better. For a while there I didn’t think you’d make it.”
Courtney could barely breathe. She stared in wide-eyed shock.
“I–I don’t understand,” she stammered.
Whitney laughed heartily. “Now there’s an understatement! What’s even funnier is you don’t understand how much you don’t understand.”
Courtney shook her head. It was all she could do.
‘I’m sure you and Mark have been fretting over what I’ve planned for Second Earth. Haven’t you?”
Courtney didn’t answer. She couldn’t.
“I’ll bet you were wondering if Pendragon’s success on First Earth spared your territory. Be honest, that’s what you were hoping for, right?”
Whitney kicked the soccer ball expertly from foot to knee and back to foot, then caught it.
Courtney stood frozen.
“Well, I’m sorry to say you’d be wrong. I’ve been having fun here on your self-absorbed little territory for quite some time now‹Want to see what I’ve been up to?”
She didn’t, but she had to.
Whitney threw the soccer ball into the air, turned, and kicked it back into the light that blasted from the flume. When he turned back to Courtney, he had transformed. He wasn’t Whitney Wilcox anymore. He was…
“Mitchell!” Courtney screamed.
Standing in the mouth of the flume was Andy Mitchell. He snorted, pushed his greasy hair back, and said cockily, “Yo, Chetwynde, how they hangin’?”
“No…” Courtney said, stunned. “No!”
“Oh yeah,” Mitchell said. “Right from the start. We grew up together, Chetwynde!”
He spit out a lougie and laughed. He may have been Saint Dane, but he had all the mannerisms of Andy Mitchell that Courtney knew so well-because he was Andy Mitchell!
“My favorite part was when I stole Pendragon’s journals,” he cackled. “Man, I had you guys squirming. Pretty good how you got out of that one, I’ll give you that.”
It was too much for Courtney to comprehend. Her whole sense of reality had been turned inside out. “So…there never was an Andy Mitchell?” she asked numbly.
“Of course there was,” the kid answered. “You’re looking at him. Except he wasn’t exactly what you thought he was.” Mitchell cackled out another laugh and brushed his hair back. “Surprise!”
“Where’s Mark?” Courtney asked with a touch of desperation.
“Oh, no,” Mitchell said, wagging his finger. “That would be telling. Let’s just say our friendship has entered a whole new phase.”
As the truth sank in, Courtney was hit with a realization that was so stunning, it rocked her back into complete focus. She was no longer frightened. She was mad.
“You killed the Dimonds, didn’t you?” she seethed. “That plane disappeared because of you, Saint Dane.”
Andy Mitchell took a deep bow and said, “Just another piece in a very complicated puzzle.”
Courtney snapped to attention. That was the single most horrifying thing she had ever heard. Everything that had ever happened with Andy Mitchell, from the moment they met him in kindergarten until the death of Mark’s parents, was all a plot. Saint Dane had been working his way into their lives long before they knew about Travelers and flumes and Halla. Whatever his plan for Second Earth was, it had been in the works for years.
“Enjoy your life, Chetwynde,” Mitchell said as he turned back toward the flume. “What is it that your Traveler friend says? Oh yeah. Hobey-ho. Let’s go!”
He leaped into the flume.
“No!” Courtney shouted.
Courtney didn’t think, she acted. She ran at Mitchell, ready to tackle him and keep him from leaving. It was an insane move, but Courtney wasn’t in her right mind. She jumped into the flume, but it was too late. Mitchell was gone. Courtney hit the crystal floor, empty handed.
“Saint Dane!” she screamed at nobody. He was gone.
Courtney was on her hands and knees, still bathed in the light of the flume. That’s when she felt it. The slight tug. Courtney snapped a look deeper into the tunnel. She saw that the light wasn’t disappearing. What was going on? The tug became stronger. Courtney realized with horror that she was being pulled farther in! She got her wits together and crawled backward. At least, she tried to crawl. It was like pulling against a tornado. She spun around, sat on her bottom, and dug her heels into the crystal floor. It didn’t help. She was being pulled, inch by agonizing inch, deep into the flume. The harder she fought, the more difficult it became. She made one last-ditch attempt to stop herself by flipping over and trying to grab the edge of the tunnel with her fingers. It was too late. Her hands scraped across the coarse crystal, and she was yanked into infinity.
When Courtney spun back to look past her toes, she saw that she was on her way. She was traveling. But to where? She had been through a flume before, so she wasn’t terrified. At least she wasn’t terrified of the experience. The fact that she was there at all was a different concern. She forced herself to take a few deep breaths and calm down. She had to be prepared for whatever she would find on the far side.
There was one small consolation. Unlike every other time she’d traveled through the flume, the rocky tunnel hadn’t cracked. That was what ultimately destroyed the flume on Eelong. Every time she and Mark had traveled, the flume physically cracked a little bit more, until that last fateful trip when it collapsed and Kasha was killed. But when she was sucked into the flume this time, there was no damage. She couldn’t begin to guess why, but she was grateful.
As she sped through the crystal tunnel, she gazed out onto the starfield beyond. As Bobby had described, she saw many of the ghostly images from the territories, as if they were being projected in space. She recognized some galloping zenzens from Eelong, along with the miniature helicopter that Bobby and Kasha flew to Black Water. She saw what looked like a vast tribe of primitive people, chanting and singing. She also saw something that she recognized from history books as the LZ-129- the airship Hindenburg from First Earth. All the images jumbled into one another, making Courtney feel as if she were traveling through an ocean of time and space, where all the territories existed together.