Weavers (The Frost Chronicles) (11 page)

I jerked back with a yelp and the person recoiled. I couldn’t see the face, only the hands. They were large, meaty, with hair on the backs. A voice rumbled across my consciousness.

“Calm down, calm down—you don’t want anyone to hear you, now.” He made a sound in his throat. “Ah, you were sick on the floor. Well, don’t move too much yet—you don’t want to do it again.”

I tried to stand and fell back. He muttered something and then said louder, “Here, here. Let me help you.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m called Juniper,” he said softly. “I manage to catch most of the fugitives coming across the divide, so you might say I’m the welcoming committee.”

“Welcoming committee?” I mumbled. My head still spun, and the sound in my ears crackled. He tugged the sack from my limp hands, and I let him. I remembered the PLD hidden inside and I tried to protest. It came out as a weak mew, the sound a strangling kitten might make.

“Shhh.” Strong hands hooked under my arms and hoisted me to my feet. My knees buckled, and I sagged against a warm chest that smelled like spice and forest. The round, cold shape of a button pressed into my hair.

I stumbled as I tried to take a step.

“Careful now,” the man murmured. “You’ll be fine. You’re travelsick, but you’re over the worst of it now.”

Something hard touched my lips. The rim of a cup of some kind.

“Drink,” he said.

I opened my mouth. Cold water trickled inside. It tasted so good against my parched tongue, and I guzzled greedily.

“That’s it,” Juniper said.

I squinted against the white light again, and this time the blurry shapes around me gained distinction. Walls stretched up far above me. Light lanced my eyeballs from an unknown, square-shaped source. I saw yellow barrels...a tangle of what looked like gray ropes...a strange, metallic fence. Faintly, I heard the sound of something chugging rhythmically. I smelled dust and the scent of old, secret things, like a cave.

“Where are we?” My throat rasped as I spoke.

“Let’s just get you out of here,” he said. “Then we’ll talk.”

Then, we were moving—he was half-dragging me as I stumbled forward on unsteady legs. We moved toward the blinding light, and I shut my eyes again and let him lead me. Cold air hissed through my hair, and we climbed a pair of steps. Warmth spilled over my head and across my arms. Sunshine. The wind hit my face.

It was hot.

“Quickly,” Juniper urged. My feet hit packed earth, and I bumped against him. I cracked my eyelids open and tried to take stock of the landscape around me, but the light was too bright, too painful. I shut them again with a moan.

“It’s the travelsick,” he said soothingly. “You’ll be fine in a minute or two.”

His words spilled over me like little pebbles, bouncing off my awareness and tumbling away. I tried to listen, but the buzzing in my ears was fading in and out. Dimly, I heard the shrill cries of birds. Sweat broke across my back and between my shoulder blades. It was so hot here. Where were we?

Sudden shade enveloped us, and Juniper eased me down onto the ground. “Here,” he said. “Lean back.” My shoulders touched something hard and scratchy. Bark. A tree. I sighed.

He crouched in front of me. “Now,” he said. “Try opening your eyes again.”

I lifted my lids a fraction, then all the way. This time, the light didn’t blind me. I gazed at the man. He was thick and burly, with a short brown beard and bushy eyebrows that hovered like caterpillars above his blue eyes.

“Better?” he asked.

I gulped and nodded. My head wasn’t spinning anymore, and the roaring in my ears had faded. I looked around and saw that a sea of green enveloped us. Thick fir trees arched overhead, their branches waving in a faint breeze.

We were in a forest.

A dirt road led past us and around a bend. The way we’d come. I didn’t see the place where I’d originally appeared, the cave-smelling place with the barrels and walls and fences. It was hidden by the trees.

“Where are we?” I asked. My voice was scratchy, as if long unused.

“The Compound,” Jupiter said. “Along the southern side, near the workers’ quarters.”

“The Compound?” The name was meaningless to me. But it was so warm...we must be far south, or near the sea.

Adam’s face filled my mind as I thought of the sea, because he’d lived at the coast once. My chest ached with hurt at the thought of him.

“What are you called, girl?” Juniper asked.

“Lia.” I said it slowly, my gaze still on the surrounding landscape. My tongue tasted bitter and my mouth was chalky. I licked my lips and tried to swallow. “It’s...it’s so hot here.”

“It’s mid-spring,” he said. “And we’re going through a bit of a hot spell, too.”

His voice faded in and out of my awareness as I gazed at something peeking from the edge of the trees. A long, white rail made of gleaming metal snaked past and disappeared around a corner, like a ribbon frozen in mid-flutter. It was beautiful and strange. Sunlight glittered along the edge and hurt my eyes.

“I’ll let you rest a bit,” Juniper said. “But we need to get inside. You can’t stay here. They might see you.”

“They?”

He didn’t answer that.

A low rumble shook the ground. The air shivered. Pebbles skittered away from my feet and the leaves around us danced. I grabbed Juniper’s hand. “What—?”

“It’s just the transport,” he said. “It won’t hurt you.”

Transport?

Something long and thin and large enough to be a string of wagons flashed from the trees, balanced atop that ribbon of gleaming metal. A flash of light and a blur of white and it was gone again. I drew in a fast breath. This was technology that I’d never seen the likes of before.

“It carries the workers through the Compound,” he explained.

“So fast,” I muttered.

“The Compound spans thousands of acres, all the way to the mountains.” He waved a hand at the horizon, but the trees blocked my view.

“How does it move so fast?”

“It’s powered by the sun,” he explained.

When I was strong enough to stand, we made the laborious trip along the path through the forest. The trees didn’t look so different from the ones in the Frost, except no snow coated these branches. A wind-swept sky the color of a robin’s egg flashed in and out of sight through the waving tops of the trees. Birds shrieked overhead. Sunlight danced along the ground in dappled flashes. I felt sick, weary, and disoriented.

“I’ll process you as soon as we get inside,” Juniper was saying.

“Process,” I repeated. My mind felt thick, my thoughts sticky. I was having difficulty thinking. “What do you mean?”

“We’ll get you assigned a name, a job. We do it with all the travelers,” he said. “The young ones are the hardest, but we find a place for them. We’ve been doing it for years.”

“Are you a traveler, too?”

“One of the earliest,” he said. His gruff tone signaled that he didn’t want to talk about it.

“Is there someone here called Gabe?” I asked, and my voice came out strangled. My heart beat too fast with hope. I was lightheaded, dizzy. “He’s a young man, thin, with light brown hair.”

Juniper shook his head. “We got a couple young ones that fit that description, but I don’t know that name. Everyone gets new names once they come.” He paused. “Friend of yours?”

I jerked my head in an unsteady nod. My foot turned on a piece of gravel, and I almost fell. Juniper caught my elbow and hauled me back to my feet.

“You’ll see everyone soon enough,” he said. “We assemble weekly, and tonight’s the night. You’ll find your friend.”

My stomach twisted with anxious anticipation.

We reached the edge of the forest and began to descend a hill. Unease prickled along my arms. Why did I feel so strange all of a sudden?

“There it is,” Juniper grunted, pointing with his left hand.

I lifted my eyes, and my heart stuttered. I stared.

Ahead of me, utterly alien but at the same time recognizable even in its altered state, was a sight I’d see my entire life. The place I’d taken quota every week for years.

Iceliss
. My village. The village where I grew up.

All the snow and ice was gone. The stones were fresh, unweathered by the elements. The Farther-built walls of metal and cages of steel were absent, and dozens of glittering buildings of a shimmering pale material clustered between the bones of the village that I knew, and yet...I could not deny what I saw. The shape of the hills cupped the town like two hands, cradling it. Overhead, a blue sky soared wide as a sail. The mountains reared up like sentries in the distance, topped with white. There was the path I’d walked my entire life, leading straight into the town. There were the streets, laid out in neat rows like lines drawn for a giant child’s game of marbles. There was the hill that rose in the center of the village, and atop it, instead of the Mayor’s house, a tall gray building with a curving roof stretched up like a questioning finger.

I turned to Juniper and found him watching my expression, his own bemused. “Some realize it faster than others,” he said. “You’re one of the fastest.”

“I grew up here,” I choked out. “This looks exactly like my village. The likeness is striking. Where are we?”

He barked a short laugh. “The better question, my girl, is
when
?”

“WHAT DO YOU mean, when?” I managed to stutter.

“The portal jumps back in time,” he said. He spoke calmly, succinctly, as if he knew I wouldn’t believe him and he wasn’t particularly interested in convincing me. “You’re at the same place you were before, just...about five hundred years in the past.”

I wanted to vomit again. “How is such a thing possible?”

Juniper shrugged. “The portal allows it. The one from your time is special...different. It can bring travelers back, but the portals here cannot carry them the opposite way. Once here, they are stuck.”

Unless they had the PLD, I realized.

My mind spun as I struggled to process this. I hadn’t changed locations. I’d changed times. It was unimaginable. But...more unimaginable than a magic gate that transported its passengers? And I couldn’t deny what I saw right in front of me. Iceliss. The village was the same, but completely different, too. The landscape was the Frost, but there was no snow. No ice. No searing, brutal wind. Everything was bright and green and flowering. Everything was warm.

“Come on,” Juniper said, handing me my bag back and gesturing for me to follow him. “I’ve got to get you to the others before anyone sees your odd clothes and asks too many questions.”

We descended the path on the hill to the village. The streets appeared empty. Stone walls and houses I’d seen my entire life looked fresh and new, with none of the crumbling corners or weathered stains from centuries of snow and ice. Sunlight glittered on the surfaces of the strange buildings and sparkled on windowpanes. Everything was beautiful, graceful, like a garden of houses that had sprouted over the decay of the village I knew, and made it lovely. Vines crawled over walls and gates and waved in a faint breeze. Everything was beautiful, sparkling, and...empty.

“Where is everyone? Where are all the villagers?”

“The people who live here in the workers’ quarters are mostly at the Labs during the day,” Jupiter explained. “The scientists and other important people live on the other side of the Compound.”

“Oh.” Somewhere, I heard the chatter of voices speaking briskly, and the crunch of footsteps.

“This way,” he said, tugging at my arm. We rounded a corner and plunged into a shaded alley. Relief seeped into me at the cessation of the sunlight.

“Why is it so hot here?”

Juniper spared me a glance. “This isn’t so bad. Wait until summer.”

Wait until summer
. I wouldn’t be here that long. He didn’t know, of course. The PLD was heavy in my bag and the secret of it was heavy on my tongue, but I didn’t mention it or my mission. I had to make sure I could trust him before I imparted that vital knowledge.

We reached a side street and turned the corner. Juniper escorted me past a row of bright yellow barrels and a stack of boxes. He stopped before a gray door set deep in the wall and produced a curious-looking sliver of metal from his pocket. He slid the piece into a slot, and I heard a low musical tone. He pushed it open and looked at me.

“Hurry,” he said. “Let’s get inside. Right now most of the workers are away at the Labs, like I said before, but they’ll be back around dinnertime. I want you changed out of those clothes and out of sight before they return in case anyone sees you and asks questions. We’ll work on your backstory while we wait for the others. There’s a meeting tonight.”

I wanted to demand immediate information about him, but my sense of self-preservation spurred me forward and made me shove the thought away for later. I stepped into the darkness of the doorway and he followed, shutting the door behind us. I clutched at my bag with both hands, feeling the comforting weight of the PLD inside. My heart thumped against my ribs. I heard another click, and light flooded the room, glowing from the ceiling as though it were made of moon dust. I scanned the space, taking stock of my surroundings, checking for danger. The room was small and plain. A desk and chair sat in one corner beside a curved window, and pale light slanted through the glass. On the opposite wall, shelves covered a wall from floor to ceiling.

“You can sit there,” Juniper said, nodding at the chair. “Just stay quiet, and I’ll bring you something new to wear. Are you hungry? Thirsty?”

“Thirsty,” I said, my mouth aching for a drink as I sank into the chair and set my bag on my lap.

He jerked his chin in acknowledgement and disappeared through another door on the opposite wall. I heard another musical tone, and a strange whoosh. A breeze fanned my cheeks even though we were inside. The room was cold. I waited, shivering.

Juniper returned with a cup filled with an orange liquid. I sniffed it and then drank, too thirsty to care what it might be. It was ice-cold and tasted like sunshine. I drank it all.

“Feel better?” he grunted, studying my face carefully as he took the empty cup from my hand.