Chapter 52
Amaya hardly breathed as the windskiffs landed inside the Skyvault. Will dismounted ahead of her and held out his hand, which she accepted as she stepped down to survey the cavernous space.
It was dark, lit only by the glow of the storm outside.
That, and a tall, rectangular apparatus framing a shimmering image of a gilded palace towering above an enchanting hillside.
No—a seascape. A desert. A tundra. A wasteland.
Amaya blinked, confused by the shifting images.
They melted into one another like a wayward daydream.
The image glowed as if lit from within, its surface rippling with iridescence. Her fingers itched to touch it.
“Can’t see a damn thing,” Serena said. “Malcolm, care to find the light?”
“At your service,” the automaton hummed. He scanned the room, his blue sensors highlighting a lever a short distance away. He hopped over to it, metallic joints creaking.
Amaya remained transfixed by the mysterious image. She stepped forward, her hand slipping out of Will’s.
“It’s the doorway,” she said, enchanted. Was nobody else seeing this?
“Hey.” Will reached for her wrist, pulling her back. “We don’t know that yet. We shouldn’t touch it.”
“Will, look at it,” Amaya said. “Do you have another explanation?”
Will looked, but his expression remained vacant.
“It’s just an empty archway. We probably need to turn it on,” he said.
Amaya stood in disbelief; no one else was seeing it. Baffled, she turned back to the arch. The images inside pulsed faintly, a hypnotic beat that spoke to something hidden within her soul.
Malcolm reached the lever and pulled it down, scraping through the dry, tarnished metal with an ear-splitting screech.
Amaya winced at the sound as, one by one, golden lamps ignited along the walls, chasing the shadows from every corner.
A massive wooden chandelier affixed to the high ceiling flickered to life last, drenching the space in bright, effervescent light.
Amaya squinted and brought her hand to her forehead to block the stinging light, her eyes having adjusted to the dark storm outside.
Serena spoke for all of them when she said, “Holy shit.”
The Skyvault was filled with a multitude of work benches scattered with scientific instruments and alchemic flasks.
Tattered old notebooks lined the shelves, and derelict automatons sat frozen in the corners.
Amaya spotted a sextant, an abacus, hammers and screws, and jars of Aether swirling with every shade of blue imaginable.
Provisions—undoubtedly inedible now—lined one wall from floor to ceiling.
Complex arrangements of gears and wires adorned the walls, snaking up to the pinnacle of the pointed ceiling and draping across the space. Each wire attached to a small nodule on the steel frame encasing the glimmering rift. There were dozens of them—perhaps a hundred.
“Maker,” Grace breathed. She twitched with nervous, excited energy. “This is . . . this is . . .” She let out a squeak, hand clamping over her mouth. “Where do we begin?”
“With that,” Will said, pointing at the arch.
“Is that it?” Edmund asked in wonderment. “There are other worlds inside?”
“I can see them.” Amaya’s soft statement earned everyone’s attention. “The other worlds. They’re sort of . . . fading into each other, like a moving watercolor.”
Will’s brow furrowed as he looked back to the arch. “I don’t see anything.”
“It must be the Aether—like the pathway,” Amaya said. “Maybe that’s why I’m the key.”
“So can we just . . . throw a hand grenade through it and call it a day?” Sebastian asked.
“Of course not. Do you have any idea how dangerous that could be?” Grace snapped, shooting Sebastian a judgemental glance. “We don’t know anything about the interdimensional physics at play here.”
Amaya knew they had to destroy it. But now that she saw the doorway, destroying something so extraordinary seemed like a crime.
It felt dangerous, too, like Grace said.
The numerous wires fixed to the silver nodules hung in disorganized masses, disappearing into the walls.
Reaching a new world didn’t seem as simple as walking through the rift.
Amaya crossed over to one of the workbenches and found a sheet of paper. After skimming it to make sure there wasn’t anything on it that looked important, she approached the rift and fed the paper through it.
She wasn’t sure what she expected—maybe for the paper to disappear on the other side of the arch.
But that wasn’t what happened. Where the images split and shifted, they ripped the paper in half.
In thirds. In fourths. The entire sheet was shredded before their eyes, and Amaya jerked her fingers away as the rift ate up the last few inches. Scraps floated ominously to the floor.
If it did that to a piece of paper, what would it do to a human being? Or to a bomb, like Sebastian suggested?
Amaya swallowed hard as Will grabbed her wrist from behind, bringing her safely away from the arch.
“Right. No one goes through,” he said, stating the obvious. “Look around. If we can find schematics on how Pearce assembled it, maybe we can disassemble it safely. Keep an eye out for anything about dispersing the storm while you’re at it.”
Edmund pounced on the table nearest to him, examining the tools under a critical eye and flipping through the notebooks.
“There are designs in here!” he marveled. “Designs for relics, new machines . . .”
Grace chose a second table while Serena and Malcolm joined forces at a third. But no trinkets, tools, or old sketches held any interest for Amaya. Not when she was utterly convinced she was staring through space and time, infinite worlds just a few feet away.
“Bas,” Will said, keeping his grip on Amaya’s wrist. “Will you get the Skystone out of the door?”
“Aye.” Heavy footsteps signaled Sebastian’s departure, and Amaya finally tore her gaze from the arch to look back at Will.
He was staring at it, as if looking long enough would make the many worlds appear to his eyes. When they didn’t, he shook his head.
“Let’s get to work.”
While Will sorted through various tools and sketches, Amaya sought what had worked last time: journals.
She brought a stack over from a shelf and began flipping through them, looking for drawings of the Skystone locket, the conductor, or the arch.
When Sebastian joined them a moment later, the recovered conductor in hand, he received the same assignment.
More time than Amaya would have liked passed before anyone found anything noteworthy in Pearce’s writings.
They were stuffed with math, graphs, charts, and observations that flew over Amaya’s head.
On top of that, the information was disorganized beyond belief—a true testament to Pearce’s obsessive, chaotic genius.
Amaya developed a headache imagining what it must have been like inside his head.
But at last, luck smiled upon them.
“I found something,” Will said. He set an open notebook before her, pointing to an entry written in Pearce’s messy scrawl. Amaya devoured the words greedily.
“He was trapped,” Amaya said, skimming the rest of the page.
Her mind whirled, adding Pearce’s three short sentences to the puzzle forming in her head and rotating the pieces until they clicked into place.
“He was trapped here by the storm, and he didn’t know if it was safe to pass through the rift, but he had to. And we know he made it back, so . . .”
“There’s gotta be a way through without getting shredded,” Sebastian said, joining them. He took the notebook and flung it over to Edmund, who caught it with clumsy hands.
“Be careful with that!” he cried. “It’s priceless!”
“Read the rest. Use your speed glasses.”
Edmund huffed but did as he was told, hunching over the table and turning through the pages at a nauseating speed. Amaya watched as his brown eyes grew bigger and bigger; they were on the verge of a breakthrough. She could feel it.
“I’ve found something, too!” Grace waved a notepad and darted across the room. She stopped before the arch to compare the papers she held and shuddered. “They look like sketches of . . . that.”
Amaya accepted the sketches, noticing how the drawing style matched the Skystone locket design they’d studied so long ago. These sketches depicted the arch, but a deconstructed version.
There were notes scribbled around the design, naming the different components, asking questions, and outlining objectives.
“It must have been terribly difficult to build alone,” Grace said in awe.
“But this says nothing about actually building it,” Amaya grumbled. “How do we take it apart?”
She flipped the sketch over to find another rough drawing of a pedestal connected to numerous wires and an airship helm. A familiar orb rested in its center. Amaya ran her thumb over the faded ink and looked up.
“Does anyone see a console?”
When a quick search of the vault returned void, Malcolm scanned the room for energy signatures and successfully revealed the console’s location: beneath a circular tile in the floor, directly in front of the arch.
But this one didn’t require a special key to access.
Will and Sebastian worked together to pry the tile up with their swords and shove it aside.
As soon as it was uncovered, the console rose in a spiral and fixed into place.
It was simple, wrought of unpolished iron and fixed with a wooden wheel Amaya guessed came courtesy of Pearce’s airship. On the top, there was a cavity shaped like a figure eight.
The conductor, but open this time.
“Bas?” Amaya asked.
“Yeah. Here.”
Sebastian tossed her the orb, and Amaya clicked it open, watching the arch intently as she placed it on the console.
Nothing happened.