CHAPTER TWO #3
“Sentiment is rarely about the object itself,” I argue.
My mother’s words echo beneath my own. She’d always find meaning in scrap; one summer, she stitched me a quilt from my favorite childhood clothes, and a charm bracelet from old toys.
I inherited none of her craftiness but all her appreciation for things that people discard.
“How do you know this button didn’t belong to someone’s lucky sweater? ”
Fine, Quill says, as a copper bowl flies down to land in front of her. It’s already filled with water, which sloshes slightly over its thin metal edges. Drop it in here.
I obey, plopping the button and watching it sink into the depths of the bowl.
“Do the others know about the issue with the carousel yet?” I ask in an effort to disrupt the uncomfortable quiet. The ghosts’ concerns ring fresh in my mind, and while I’ve been curious about Everest’s family, this isn’t how I’d like to meet them.
I’m not speaking with them right now, Quill sniffs.
“Again?” I ask.
Each of Everest’s eleven siblings has a Quill of their own – when the gods were young, Mother Time put a kernel of her magic into twelve books, hoping they’d serve as nannies to her twelve slightly out-of-control children.
They developed unique consciences, which have proved to bring much of both good and ill.
While the siblings may not converse on a regular basis (in some cases millennia with no contact), the Quills keep each other appraised of happenings in their corresponding realms.
That is, when they’re not fighting.
They’re impertinent fools, just like their gods.
I roll my eyes. No point getting involved in the business of quibbling books, but it does mean that my window into what’s happening with the other gods is temporarily closed. The water in the bowl remains unnervingly still.
It’s not working, Quill says.
“Yes, I can see that,” I snap, plucking the button back out of the bowl and tossing it into the box, which a mysterious force (read: the carousel) yanks to the right, sending the button tumbling to the ground.
“That’s just petty,” I say.
The fair responds with a wave of disapproval as I march over to pick up the button and put it in storage.
If you want to go back to your old life, you have to figure out a way to bring me something stronger. Quill bristles when I return to her. It’s not my problem that you showed up here with nothing from back home, or it would have saved us a lot of trouble.
I want to yank my hand away, but I know I’ll be taking my anger out on the wrong entity.
It’s not that I never had anything from back home, I just happened to be in the thrall of a fiery rage a few months into my servitude and threw it all into a bonfire.
That was before I accidentally brought something back from a trip: a small bronze key that slipped into my pocket.
Naturally, I thought the entire space-time continuum would collapse due to my carelessness, that I would single-handedly take down the carousel, but then…
nothing happened. Not for days, years, decades, centuries.
Escalation is a core part of human nature; we like to see how far we can push boundaries.
Like just how few hours of sleep I really needed between caseloads, or how much text I could cram into a cheat-sheet.
I started taking things intentionally; it was my rebellion, a small act of control exerted over my present.
It seemed that as long as I rectified the source of slippage, anything else I touched or changed did not affect the carousel.
Eventually, Quill caught me when I examined my loot here in the archives.
We struck a deal. She’s always working on a new spell, and aside from the prospect of using her work to go back to my timeline, I’m captivated by the research.
It anchors me, peeling back the mechanisms of the carousel.
I’ve got journals filled with notes on time-mending procedures, as well as hypotheses around the proximity of dimensions and the possibility of hopping between them without the carousel.
Of course, I can never jot down notes on my thefts in case a nosy ghost discovers my work, so Quill handles our clandestine records for us. It’s thrilling in its own way, looking for a path to accomplish something never done before.
“What exactly is supposed to happen?” Ender asks, peering over the bowl. “Should we be able to see the room we took the button from?”
Theoretically, all that and more, Quill says.
The first step to opening a portal through the carousel is to establish a connection to the dimension.
This is a scrying spell, and it should harness the power of the object to show us connected events.
But I can’t tell you what it would look like, since it hasn’t happened yet.
Something rouses in my chest. “We’ll just have to try again next trip,” I say.
The fair’s displeasure ripples around us. Noted.
Ender shifts uncomfortably. “Are you sure? What with the carousel and…”
He doesn’t need to finish his thought. Ender is the only ghost who knows of this side project, and he’s never approved.
It hasn’t mattered, though. Ender misses home nearly as much as I do, and I know the thought of this working is as exciting to him as it is to me.
So he stays quiet, and I give Quill everything I bring back in the hopes that she’ll find a way to my old life.
Of course, only one of us has benefitted from this arrangement so far.
The tome snaps shut on my hand. You enjoy this work as much as I do, Quill says into my mind as I cradle my pinched fingers.
“Don’t eavesdrop; it’s rude,” I tell her.
“In my defense, I have been standing here in plain sight for some time,” Everest says casually, standing cross-armed by the entrance.
“But don’t let me get in the way of all your secrets, doc.”