Chapter 10
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S teele shrugged. “It’s not that I don’t like it,” he clarified, “but obviously something is going on here that I don’t know about, with skills that I don’t understand. Those two things together are… unnerving.”
She nodded. “I don’t know about your particular skills. I just know that you were following the Beacon, so something attracted you.” She turned to inspect the woods. “What I don’t know is who else it may have attracted, and I wonder if Terk considered that.”
“Even if he didn’t, I’m not sure that would rank among the highest priority issues on his mind at this point in time,” Steele noted. “What’s through the gate?”
“I don’t know. I sent out probes but turned to the gate because you didn’t follow. I thought, at the time, it would be an easy walk to the castle. Yet I can’t be sure there aren’t more gates here.”
“In this dimension?”
She slowly nodded. “Most people wouldn’t say that. Not to mention that dimension sounds and feels wrong.”
“No, but here is neither physical nor is it nonphysical,” he explained. “So let’s just call it a dimension , and you and I at least will understand we’re in the same ballpark. I was wondering if it’s a hologram, but it’s too real for that.”
“And yet other people can see us here,” she pointed out. “So I’m not sure it’s another dimension, as much as—” She frowned.
He spoke up. “An alternate reality? A simulation?” When she glared at him, he chuckled. “It’s as if we’re sliding into his world here but can return to the main world, if that makes sense.”
Cyan nodded. “Believe me that I do understand. But what are the chances that the Beacon, Terk’s creation, is brilliant and creates this visual world, separating us from the real one, without the nonenergy folk knowing?”
“I thought I was the conspiracy nut.”
“Not at all, but I do understand that something,… likely the Beacon,… has changed things here. Changed or created something.”
Steele raised his eyebrows at that but shrugged and added, “All we can be sure of is that filters are in place to allow whoever is okay to cross, and that could change what we see here.”
She blinked and sighed.
“You’re right. That wasn’t very clear either.”
She shook her head. “No, I think I get it.”
Steele suggested, “What if the person who saw me wasn’t going to get through that gate, and he took his temper out on me?”
She looked at him. “Sucks to be you.” Yet she flashed him a bright grin.
Steele snorted. “I’m not trying to nullify what you’re saying, but you’re also not taking me seriously,” he pointed out.
“It’s not that,” she corrected, “but you are giving an awful lot of intelligence to the Beacon. I don’t want to consider that level of intelligence out there making decisions based on,… on what? Our energy?”
“That would be the most logical way for the Beacon to react,” he replied. “And, if you think about it, that’s very much a possibility. I mean, how else is energy going to make a decision if not based on energy?”
She winced. “You’re giving the Beacon some pretty discerning qualities and a whole lot of skills.”
“No, I think it’s been preprogrammed to allow maybe a certain frequency or a certain… Can it see what we’re feeling and thinking?”
She stared at him in horror. “I don’t know, and that’s a concept I’m not comfortable with.”
He nodded. “I’m not sure I am either. But our frequencies are a visual of how we think and how we feel. So, even if it’s determining what frequency we’re operating at, that’s pretty high-level discernment. And, if it can do that, what else can it do?”
She stared at him and added, “And that just comes back to the person who took you out.”
“Yes. Plus brings us back to the fact that, although we would normally be in contact with Terk, we aren’t.”
She stared at him for a long moment and then nodded. “True. Do you want to try again?”
“Not really.” He glanced around the woods. “I certainly don’t want to be the one who tells him something’s gone rogue out here, yet someone needs to.”
“I don’t know that the Beacon’s gone rogue, as much as a rogue person is out here,” she pointed out.
“We can’t blame one particular thing right now.
I think it’ll be a whole lot more complex than that.
” She studied the area around him and pointed.
“I suggest we go through the gate and see if anything stops us on the other side.”
“Okay,” he agreed immediately. Then he waved a hand before them and added playfully, “After you.”
She gave him a smirk. “The problem with that theory is, if only those who can are supposed to go through that gate, then my even showing you where the gate is means you could already be part of what the Beacon is supposed to filter out.”
He stopped and stared. “Distrustful much?” he muttered, as he turned and headed toward the gate himself.
“Careful,” she muttered. “Be very careful.”
“Granted,” he replied, “but, at some point in time, that caution could end up being a little beyond normal.”
“There’s nothing normal about any of this,” she stated, with a roll of her eyes.
“About all of this,” he clarified. “Including nothing is normal about you or me,” he stated. He took several more steps, then turned back to her and asked, “Are you coming?”
She shrugged. “I’m just watching.”
“No, you’re testing me,” he said in exasperation. “Look. I didn’t get here on a fluke, so you can ditch that idea.”
“I don’t know how you got here,” she declared. “All I know is that, when I got here, you were here.”
“Still, you offered to hold the gate for me,” he pointed out. “And now, all of a sudden, you seem to think that I might be dangerous.”
“Not dangerous so much,” she noted, “but maybe I was being a little impulsive when I shouldn’t have been.”
He rolled his eyes, turned, and walked directly up to the gate and called out, “Shall we?”
She nodded and said, “Go ahead and open it.”
He turned to the gate, looked at the energy, recognized the pattern, and opened it.
He glanced back at her with a mocking expression, not sure why he allowed her to get his goat so much.
He owed her a lot, and yet it was weird that, ever since he woke up, it seemed like he was having to prove himself.
And maybe that was fair. She was a woman, alone. Maybe that was standard treatment. He didn’t know, but it was starting to get on his nerves.
On the other side, the space looked to be a carbon copy of where he’d been before.
He studied the area, looking around to see if anything was different but saw nothing triggering.
That was the thing about realities, dimensions,…
even holograms. They shifted and changed almost at will, certainly by thought.
Just one energetic change could result in a visual change.
He turned to look behind him, but she didn’t follow.
He frowned at that, wondering if he needed to go back and get her.
He hated to leave her alone, but, considering she’d been the one to push the testing on him, he didn’t really feel he should go back.
But then came that irritating little niggle, reminding him that she hadn’t left him, and, if he were to leave her, that would change their dynamic completely.
He groaned and stepped back to the other side, to see her standing there, studying the surroundings. “Are you coming?”
She shifted toward him, eyeing him for a long moment, and then nodded. She followed him back through.
As they got to the other side, he asked her, “What were you looking at?”
“I wasn’t sure,” she admitted, “just trying to confirm we weren’t being followed.”
“If they can follow us here,” he pointed out, “it’s somebody with a lot of abilities, likely ones ahead of ours.”
“Maybe, but that doesn’t mean their abilities are used for the good,” she stated, her tone brisk.
Startled, he frowned at her. “Have you met a lot of people like us?”
“People like us?” she repeated. “Yes, and I’ve had quite a few arguments with them. A distant cousin has abilities,” she shared, “and, when he and I talked about abilities, we’re not talking about… nice abilities.”
“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “You would like to think that everybody in this world, whether an energy worker or not, would be of the nicer varieties.”
“Yeah, well, that’s like living in some Pollyanna land,” she stated, “which I gather is the way you function, but I don’t.” She glanced around this side and nodded.
“And what does that nod mean?” he asked.
“It’s the same as I left it.”
“Okay, but that just means, in theory, we are in the same place.”
She laughed. “It’s a real mind-bender, isn’t it?”
“It absolutely is,” he agreed, “but we came through it together, so chances are everything that we see here is also what we would expect to see.”
She nodded and strode quickly ahead.
He was hard-pressed to keep up with her. She seemed to be on some mission now. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“I think there’s another gate,” she replied. “If we can get through the next one, then, chances are, we’ll be fine.”
He didn’t know what to say to that and quickly followed her as they moved toward some destination only she seemed to be aware of.
When they finally got to a spot where she stopped, he glanced around, nodded.
It looked like any other gate. Just a common blank piece of wood with a handle,…
except that it was self-supporting and just foliage appeared to be where walls would normally be.
Which also made it almost the same as the previous one.
“Interesting look. Same as the other one but anyone who didn’t see energy would stare at this like it’s magic. ”
“Right? It could look like anything, but it’s designed to look like something haunted.” She rubbed her chin as she studied the gate.
“We can still go through it,” he said, not sure what was unnerving her about it, but something was.
“And yet…”
“What do you want to do?”
She turned, stared at him, and sighed. “A big part of me wants to go through, like right now.”
He reached out a hand. “And the other part of you?”
She took a deep breath and shared, “Something is wrong here. I think we need to leave, and we need to leave now. But I don’t know where that’s coming from.”
He hesitated, then nodded. “It doesn’t matter. Instincts alone are good enough for me. Yet don’t you want to go through the gate and see what happens first? It could be our way out.”
She shot him a look and shook her head. “Hell no. I don’t know where that’ll take us.
I’m not going through there. I’m heading back.
” And she spun and quickly moved, but, when they reached the spot where the previous gate had been, it was no longer there.
She sucked in her breath, and her voice caught in an odd cry.
“Easy now,” he muttered. “Just let’s take it easy.” When she turned and glared at him, he raised his hands in mock surrender. “I know. It’s gone. There is another way out. There has to be.”
She took several deep breaths as she processed the point he was trying to make.
Steele repeated, “No way there wouldn’t be another gate.”
She closed her eyes, took several deep, slow, calming breaths, and then nodded. “That makes sense,” she replied, with a nod. “I think maybe you need to lead from this point.”
“I can do that,” he said. “We can go back forward or backward, whatever you want to do.”
“I don’t particularly want to either,” she snapped. “I just want to know that we are in the clear.”
“Ah, then I suggest we move forward because it took a lot to even get us here.”
“It feels like a maze, and I don’t even know the rules of this game,” she muttered, some of the snappiness returning to her tone. “And when people do stuff like this, it makes me extremely uneasy.”
“Yes, that is worrisome. I think the issue isn’t that Terk set this up…”
“What is it then?”
“I’m afraid…” He hesitated.
“What?” she asked warily.
“I’m afraid the Beacon morphed on its own… into this. Terk may not even know that this is happening or that we’re even in here. He may be deliberately kept in the dark.”
“You’re saying that we could be trapped in here?” She stared at him for a long moment. “How is that even possible?” She shook her head.
“The only way it would potentially be possible was if some mechanism had changed or,… or it had taken energy from another source.”
“But you mean that somebody else may have altered the energy of the Beacon?”
“That would make sense. Yes,” he agreed.
“No, that doesn’t make sense,” she declared, staring at him. “That’s a rather horrific kind of a statement, and I don’t like it at all.”
He smiled. “I’m not saying that is what happened, but considering that this energy has a mind of its own…”
She interrupted. “Wait.… When I felt like I was being watched—”
“Was that in here or out there?” he asked sharply.
“It was in here,” she muttered, “ and out there.”
“Right. So, it’s possible that this energy is monitoring us.”
“I would expect that too,” she noted, thinking out loud.
“I would absolutely expect for somebody on the other side of this to be watching us, to be monitoring what we’re doing, to see how we’re doing it,” she stated.
“Though I wouldn’t particularly like that.
” She glanced around and called out, “Just in case any of you are listening, it’s really not cool. ”
Steele shared, “I can’t say any of this feels very welcoming.”
Then she turned back to him and added, “But I’m not sure about what I felt earlier, at the hotel. It was outside of this forest. I was not in here.”
“No, you weren’t, but, because you did cross a gate, you also took that energy with you.”
Her eyes widened as she stared at him. “Meaning?” she asked cautiously.
“Meaning that it’s possible the energy you took with you also had a mind of its own. And, maybe in the process, it could access your energy. Unbeknownst to you, you may have given it a boost.”
She just shook her head and frowned. “We’re going so far afield here. This is ridiculous.”
“Maybe,” he acknowledged cheerfully, “but the thing to focus on is that, like it or not, we’re here, and we need to make a decision on our next move.”
Just then came an odd sound, almost like clapping.
Then came… laughter?
She froze, her eyes widening. Then she spun around to look. She went to open her mouth, but he immediately clapped his hand over her mouth and whispered, “ Shhh , we’re not alone.”