A Quill Ladder: Derivatives of Displacement, #2

A Quill Ladder

Copyright © 2014 Jennifer Ellis

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, events, locales or organizations are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are imaginary, and any resemblance to actual places, events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover Design by: Design for Writers

Editing by: David Gatewood

ISBN-13: (print) 978-0-9921538-6-1

ISBN-13: (ebook) 978-0-9921538-4-7

Moonbird Press

Book Layout  © 2015 BookDesignTemplates.com

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Cast of Characters

The Sinclairs

ABBEY – Fourteen-year-old science genius

CALEB – Abbey’s twin

SIMON – Abbey and Caleb’s older brother

PETER – Abbey, Caleb, and Simon’s father

MARIAN BECKHAM – Abbey, Caleb, and Simon’s mother

Potential Friends

MARK FORRESTER – The Sinclairs’ twenty-six-year-old map-obsessed neighbor with Asperger’s

FRANCIS FORRESTER – Mark’s mother

SYLVAIN SALVADOR/MANTIS – Apparent friend of the family

JAKE HAMMOND – High school student from Greenhill; helped Sylvain by using the docks

IAN – Witch rescued from Nowhere living in Forrester house

FRANK AND FRANCIS – Ian’s hairy and tattooed associates

DR. PAUL FORD – Francis Forrester’s ex-husband/Sandy’s father

SANDY FORD – Francis and Paul’s daughter rescued from Nowhere

KASEY – Map librarian in the future

MAX – Spaceship pilot in the future

Likely Enemies

RUSSELL ANDREWS – Working with Sylvain

SELENA DARBY – Seems to be leading the bad faction; old friend of Peter Sinclair’s

NATHANIEL – One of Selena’s lackeys

DAMIAN – One of Selena’s lackeys

QUENTIN STEINAM – Unknown investor who seems to be pulling the strings of the bad faction

For those who love treasure maps...

What Has Gone Before

In A Pair of Docks – Derivatives of Displacement Book One

Abbey, Caleb, and Simon Sinclair discover a set of stones that lead them to what appears to be the future—except that there seem to be not one, but three futures: one in which space travel is possible, one in which people live in a plant cell bubble in the desert, and one in which forest has overtaken the landscape and people live in tents. More troubling is the fact that someone named Mantis appears to have hired someone to kill one of their future selves.

Abbey, Caleb, and Simon work to unravel the secrets of the stones and track down Mantis, which proves to be an alias for a computer company owner named Sylvain Salvador. They discover that the future they go to seems to be determined by who steps on the stones first, and that all three of them seem to inhabit different futures. Abbey meets an older Caleb in the forested future—Caleb’s future—and he warns her to be careful, as there are many dangers associated with the stones.

When their neighbor Mrs. Forrester has a mysterious stroke, Abbey, Caleb, and Simon take her son, Mark, who has Asperger’s and is obsessed with maps, under their wing. When they travel to Mark’s future, they discover that he will end up in a time purgatory known as Nowhere, inhabited by other similarly trapped witches because he will, apparently, try to change the future and create paradox. Drawings that Mrs. Forrester has given them lead them to a professor named Dr. Ford, who claims to know the secrets of the stones. Dr. Ford agrees to help them, but has unclear motives of his own.

When Dr. Ford tricks Mark into going with him to the future, hoping to rescue his daughter Sandy, who’s trapped in Nowhere, Abbey and Simon follow and end up in Caleb’s future. Mantis and a boy named Jake are there, and are in the process of helping older Caleb—now a leader known as the Light—to move his people to Simon’s future via a set of docks that transport people laterally between futures. Only Jake, as a camel, can use the docks, because he is dying and therefore has no future. Mantis claims that he has no plans to kill any of them, but rather is helping Caleb’s people escape the forested future because the soil is too acidic to grow food. However, future Caleb must repay Mantis by betraying future Simon, who owns a software company that is competing with Salvador Systems.

During the transfer of his people, future Caleb tells Abbey that she must stop the event—the bomb that was not a bomb—that splits the futures; he tells her where to find a list of clues, left by her future self, in order to do so. Dissidents among Caleb’s people attack everyone during the transfer between futures, and Mark creates paradox by killing one of them and goes with Dr. Ford to Nowhere. Abbey’s mother comes to retrieve them all using the docks, and she rescues all of the witches from Nowhere, including Sandy. In doing so, reveals that she too is a camel, and she forbids Abbey, Caleb, and Simon from ever using the stones again.

Prologue

The filtered light pried beneath the heavy curtains, pulling Abbey from slumber. She had grown accustomed to the mute blue sky of the new world, and the bubble was necessary to block out the harmful rays of the sun, but sometimes she longed for the bold azure of the skies she had shared with her brothers, that unconstrained world of movement, green forests and sharp and stunning winds. Other than Simon and Caleb, and her parents of course, it was the wind that she missed most. There were no variations in pressure in the bubble. The small breezes that managed to penetrate the porous cells of the protective skin did not satisfy Abbey the way that the wild crack of a storm once did.

Sam stirred against her, his warm hand slipping from beneath the covers to cradle her pregnant belly. She nestled into him for a minute but then eased away. It was time to rise and prepare for work at the lab. She had an early morning meeting, and judging from the size of her stomach, it was getting close to the day when she might have to help her younger self—if the timeline hadn’t changed.

Had she changed fate by giving her younger self the list? And if she had, would everything be changed? Or just some things?

She had taken to haunting the lab, moving her desk so it was pressed up against the glass of the atrium, going in earlier and remaining later so as not to miss the moment. Being there would be a risk to her pregnancy, she knew, but whom else could she ask to keep watch? She thought of Sylvain and his belief that the time periods moved along like side-by-side rivers, their velocity and acceleration the same. But there were moments of jerk and jounce where the change in acceleration, and the change in the change in acceleration, would shift in one river, and the time periods would briefly disentangle. Those were the exceptions.

What if this moment was one of the exceptions?

Sam attributed her new longer work hours to pregnancy nerves amplifying her usual work ethic and obsessive focus on finding the right answers. She should tell him what she had done, what she was doing. But he would be upset. The stones had always spooked him a bit.

Abbey padded to the bathroom of the small adobe shelter she and Sam shared and splashed a small amount of water on her face. Even with their careful efforts to recycle and purify grey water, showers were only permitted every few days. A time-saving policy, for sure. The gallons of water once dumped onto lawns seemed an utter pomposity now. She suspected most of the water in the world sat in Caleb’s uninhabitable future, a future heavy with cloud and the acidic, infertile soil of a boreal forest.

Her hair, normally dry, tolerated the lack of washing. Abbey prepared to pull it off her face and bind it into a plaited bun, her yet-unborn child thundering around in her stomach like a cyclone. She placed her hands on her belly. Whatever happens, my little fighting man, I can’t lose you, she murmured. She sent another plea to the universe that she had not risked altering the course of time too much.

But if younger Abbey succeeded in stopping the rupture, as people had now taken to calling it, it could change everything. What if she ended up choosing Jake, or Russell? This little babe in her body would cease to exist in a puff of paradox. But Abbey wouldn’t do that. Would she?

She regarded her pale skin impassively in the mirror. As she drew her hair back from her face, she saw them: five new, large freckles forming a path across her forehead. The mask of pregnancy, or melasma, a pigmentation that results from the hormones of pregnancy.

Seasoned time travelers became used to observing the minutest details of the people and things around them, so that they could use these details to place themselves precisely in time. She had been wearing her hair up that day, and a brown woven dress of a linen-like rough fiber with a circle of pink flowers at the neckline, and the freckles she was now looking at had decorated her forehead like a constellation.

So the day was approaching then. In fact, it could be today. The day in the former timeline, or was it still the current timeline—she wasn’t sure—when younger Abbey would show up with a bleeding Jake, and she, the older Abbey, would have to make some choices. It was strange. It seemed like she had already made the choices, since she, the younger her, had technically been there the first time she’d made the choices. But the older her hadn’t actually made the choices yet. And theoretically, she could make different choices this time, even though it was still really the first time.

She would, of course, save Jake. Paradoxically, for both the first and the last time.

Time travel, especially when two versions of you are present in the same scene, was pretty much endlessly confusing, even for someone with an IQ of one hundred and sixty-five. Her doctor had dismissed the notion of pregnancy brain, but it was possible she had lost a few IQ points in the past few months.

Perhaps by giving her younger self the list—if she hadn’t always done so—she had negated all of it. Perhaps the younger Abbey would never show up with Jake. Perhaps this relatively comfortable life in the bubble with Sam and a baby on the way would evaporate at any second. But perhaps she would have her brothers and her mother again. That was another thing about time travel—you learned not to become too attached to any single timeline.

What a tall order she had given to her younger self.

Fix everything, but don’t change too much.

Abbey finished tying her braided hair into a loose knot. She would wear her brown dress today.

1. Berets and Not Bitter Orange

~ Velocity is the 1st derivative of displacement.

Velocity is the rate of change of position or the rate of displacement. ~

The man waited on the curb outside of Mrs. Forrester’s most afternoons. He waited for the two beefy men with long wild hair and tattoos who had come down the hill and walked into town the night her mother had freed all of the witches from Nowhere. Of course it was really Nowhen, as Abbey was now calling it in her own mind; she preferred more factual descriptions. The man wore a faded tan beret and wide-legged jeans. He had replaced the striking brown leather jacket he had worn on the first few days with a more subtle corduroy blazer and had shifted through a surprising number of broad-collared shirts in a variety of paisleys, stripes, and solid colors. His style was definitely retro, but with his flippy light-brown hair and crinkly blue eyes, he didn’t seem out of place in 2012 at all. She wondered how old he was, how long he had been in Nowhen, and what that meant for his biological age. Was he in his twenties, as he looked, or sixty? And where was he getting all of those shirts?

He smoked while he waited, and occasionally he would glance up at the window from which Abbey stared and offer a faint smile through a ring of smoke. The rings were actually vortices, to use the technical name, and had similar physics to tornados. But smoking was very bad for you, so Abbey tried not to think they were neat.

Then the two other men would arrive, and the three of them would proceed back down into town. The first few days the other men had arrived on foot, but now they showed up consistently in an old burgundy Toyota Camry. When the car had first made an appearance, Abbey had spent several days scanning the news for stolen vehicles.

The man in the tan beret crushed his cigarette beneath his boot, then slowly and deliberately turned his eyes to the living room window where Abbey sat crouched low on the couch, and pointed at the ground by his feet.

Abbey’s heart began to flutter. He wasn’t trying to communicate with her, was he? He inclined his head slightly in a nod, extended his finger toward the ground again, then gave another faint nod.

––––––––

Abbey had watched the witches come and go from Mrs. Forrester’s for several weeks now. The other comings and goings from the house had been more pedestrian. A pair of younger women had strolled down to the local grocery store on several occasions, returning with bags stuffed with food. So apparently witches still needed to shop like regular people. Her mother, despite her promises three weeks ago, appeared to have reassessed and had been remarkably circumspect regarding the abilities of witches. Strangers—relatives perhaps, or long lost friends—came in twos and threes to collect some of the other witches. Joyous reunions occurred on Mrs. Forrester’s porch, and then cars eased down Coventry Hill, never to return.

Mrs. Forrester remained in the hospital in rehab, recovering from her stroke. Sandy was staying with Dr. Ford, and Mark had taken up residence in the spare bedroom in the crypt, plastering the walls with maps of all shapes and sizes collected from the shelves in his bedroom across the street. He had decided he would be expanding his previous focus on shorelines to include topographic maps and mountain ranges. Two days ago, he launched into a long description regarding types of contour lines, while Ocean wove in and out of Farley’s legs, causing the Chesapeake Bay Retriever to agitate in despair because he couldn’t chase her and lick her. Mark indicated he would be focusing on elevation contour lines, which, according to Mark, could tell you a lot regarding the steepness and shape of a mountain, and in particular where valleys were located, although he was also interested in isotachs, which were wind contours, and he felt isogons, which were lines of constant magnetic declination, were also worthy of consideration.

Abbey had tried to pay attention. But mostly she’d watched the comings and goings across the street.

She, Caleb, and Simon had been in virtual lockdown since the night they’d used the stones, and then gone to the docks, and had endangered themselves, and, evidently, everybody. Their parents now drove them to school every morning, and the school was on strict orders to report any absences. Their father had even taken a partial leave of absence so he could be home when they got home every afternoon.

Their mother had been guarded about her illness. It, apparently, was not for Abbey, Caleb, and Simon to worry about. Her mother would find a cure, and therefore any time they spent worrying would be a waste. Their house practically quivered with determination. Marian Beckham, the new mayor of Coventry City, strode through her days with certainty and crispness, attending meetings, lecturing Abbey, Caleb, and Simon about unnecessary risks, and dispensing competent mothering to all of them, including Mark. Only their father’s eyes seemed heavy with stress.

Find a cure. How was that possible? From what Abbey understood, in order to be a camel, one must be dying for sure.

Caleb had regarded her strangely when she had brought this up. Don’t you get it? he said. It’s curable in the future, you ding dong. Mom is using the stones to try to find treatment.

How do you know? Abbey had breathed.

She sneaks out every morning at five o’clock, while your precious head is still nestled in your pink pillow. Of course that’s what she’s doing, Caleb replied, his green eyes snapping. He had been cool toward her since the night she and Simon had gone to Caleb’s future and refused to tell Caleb what had happened. Abbey shrank away from his tone.

Or maybe she’s going to look for your older self’s body, Abbey thought miserably.

She wanted to tell him everything, to have him as her ally again. She and Simon had shared several whispered conversations regarding what to do about Caleb, but had come up with no answers. And now, since the election, Simon had withdrawn back into his room, brooding about something that was unclear to Abbey.

She still had the list on her iPhone. The list that it seemed she had sent herself. She waffled between, one the one hand, a burning curiosity and determination to resolve the clues, and on the other, a commitment to following her mother’s orders to forget it all and never use the stones again. She hadn’t told either Simon or Caleb about the list, because doing so would result in a definite plan to use the stones again, as soon as their parents stopped watching them every second of every day. And yet here was her mother using the stones herself.

The first date on the list had been in March. The date she was supposed to save Jake. It was only mid-November. She had plenty of time.

Or maybe she didn’t.

It seemed from older Caleb’s words that she hadn’t had access to the list in the previous past. It seemed odd to call it that, since it was actually the current present. So her older self had just potentially changed the course of history, and therefore the dates on the list, by giving Abbey the list in the first place. Perhaps her older self had always left the list on her iPhone under the Madrona. But this time, older Caleb had told her where to find it. Or was older Caleb’s telling her that he had changed his mind about fixing things the trigger that had caused older Abbey to leave the list?

Abbey had read about the multiple paradoxes that could arise when a person traveled back in time. But what about if knowledge or information traveled back in time, as was the case here?

It all seemed too circular and Abbey could not straighten it out in her mind. There were too many hypotheses to explain time travel—the multiple universes hypothesis, the branching universe hypothesis, the timeline corruption hypothesis, the self-healing hypothesis, the destruction resolution and so on—all inherently unfalsifiable. This was the fundamental problem with time travel. And most of the existing hypotheses concerned time travel to the past, not to the future. At least the stones didn’t allow one to travel to the past.

But there was still the problem of the list. Would Abbey change the timeline by acting on the list, and in doing so, what butterfly effects would she cause? Or had Abbey always received the list, and never told Caleb, and by not acting on it this time, she would change the timeline? Perhaps she had always acted on it, but simply failed to change things. Perhaps the course of history was predestined and unalterable and it didn’t matter what she did. She had no idea.

––––––––

The man in the beret pointed at the ground again. Abbey rose carefully from the couch. Her father sat in the office on the main floor, trying to complete his work for the day. She, Caleb, and Simon were not allowed to leave the yard, and if they were outside, their father rose to check on them every fifteen minutes or so. Caleb was still at track, and Mark and Simon were each in their rooms. In half an hour, they would be heading down the hill together to collect Caleb, as they were no longer allowed to be home alone. She didn’t have long.

She poked her head into the office. Peter Sinclair swung around at the noise, his tie hanging loosely around his neck. Faint red capillaries streaked his eyes, and his cheeks seemed more drawn than they had been a few weeks before. The Granton Dam expansion project was underway, and there had been some issues regarding a few contractors subbing in less qualified workers.

I’m going outside to shoot a few baskets, Abbey said.

Her father nodded, a clear sign that things had gone totally awry. If he had paused to give any thought to her statement, he would question her, as everyone knew that Abbey didn’t play sports. His acquiescence alarmed her more than his appearance. Was it the stress of his job, Abbey’s mother’s health, their recent use of the stones, or something else?

Abbey laced up her sneakers—surely one could play basketball in sneakers—exited the house, and grabbed the basketball from the wire bin by the front door. She gave a few halfhearted experimental bounces. The ball rose progressively lower with each bounce. Kinetic energy dissipating to thermal energy from friction. It didn’t take long before the ball was lurching from side to side in an uneven bounce, rising only a foot above the ground. Her hand hurt from the impact of the ball and her face felt hot with embarrassment and exertion. Had the man in the tan beret seen? She had been excused from P.E. for three years now in favor of time in the physics lab. She was supposed to be doing track with Caleb, but had twisted her knee early in the season and had been dismissed, rather enthusiastically she thought, by the coach. She ran like a geek anyway, or so she had been told. Too much up and down, with a slight pigeon toe, both of which lowered her cadence and efficiency, while Caleb could outrun a gale.

Abbey stopped and collected the ball. Bouncing it cautiously, imagining the ball as a wave with a long amplitude and a long wavelength, she proceeded to the end of the driveway, where she would be in view of the man with the tan beret.

He was gone. She nearly dropped the ball, which would have rolled down the hill at a steadily increasing speed. Knowing her luck, it would have bounced high enough and have had enough forward momentum when it dropped off the raised roadbed at the bottom of the hill that it would have broken the picture window of Abbey’s former piano teacher’s house and landed in the center of Mrs. Grimwald’s beloved grand piano. Abbey quickly ran through the calculation, considering the incline of the road and the moment of inertia of the ball. About eleven meters per second, she decided. Definitely fast enough to smash a window.

She snatched the ball to her chest, and it hit her sternum with a thud. Basketballs were too hard, big, and heavy, she decided.

Looking for someone? The voice sounded amused. Abbey turned, clutching the ball.

The man in the tan beret had crossed the street and sat on the curb among the fronds of the juniper bushes that grew on the edge of their yard. His fingers twitched in the air as if he still held a cigarette.

No, she said. It occurred to her that she was still totally unclear as to what witches could do, and that she could be about to be vaporized, or turned into a civet or a lamppost. The image of herself as a civet was almost funny, and she had to choke back a cackle of freaky-sounding laughter.

I saw you on the docks a few weeks ago, he said.

Abbey nodded, then suddenly regretting it, shook her head. He smiled, and she realized he was very handsome, in a non-threatening sort of way, like he could have been a teacher or a folk musician. But he looked tired.

Your mother is the one who rescued us.

Abbey nodded, less reluctantly this time.

Things have changed a lot around here since... well, since I left.

Abbey blew a faint snort of air through her nose, glanced over her shoulder back at the house, and gave the ball a few more bounces in case her dad was listening.

How long were you...? she said.

Too long. Almost fifty years. Long enough for my parents to die and the love of my life to move on.

How old are you? It was a bold question, but Abbey was dying of curiosity.

The man elevated his shoulders. Good question. I was twenty when I went to Nowhere. Am I still twenty, or am I sixty-eight? I look twenty, but maybe I’ll drop dead in five years from old age. Or sooner, if I can’t give these things up again. He patted his pocket, where two cigarettes poked out. Listen, Frank and Francis are going to be here any second. We need your help. We need someone to help us figure out all this computer stuff that you all use now, and help us find that Jake kid.

Her help? Abbey was pretty sure this was exactly what she should not be doing. She stole another look over her shoulder. Francis? You mean Mrs. Forrester?

Nah. Francis is one of the guys with the tattoos. Francis is a common name in witching circles. It means Free Man. Witches historically have often wanted to escape their legacy and the ties that bind us all together. Hence the name. Your Francis—Mrs. Forrester—was always a rebel. He looked away for a few seconds, his lips pulled tight. Frank is also named Francis. It gets confusing. My name’s Ian.

I don’t know if I can help you, Abbey said.

The Camry rounded the corner below them and headed up the hill.

Think about it. I’m guessing your parents are trying to protect you from all of this by telling you nothing. But you can’t escape your genes that easily. The witching world will find you one way or the other, and you had best be prepared. Help us, and we’ll help you.

Abbey heard the front door of her house open and, bouncing the basketball again, started to back away from Ian. Her father wouldn’t be able to see Ian under the juniper bushes. The Camry stopped, and Ian darted across and down the street on a diagonal and hopped in the back. Abbey made her way back up the drive, bouncing the ball carefully.

What were you doing? Abbey’s father said.

Lost control of the ball. Had to fish it out of the juniper bushes.

Her father narrowed his eyes at the Camry, which had wheeled around in the cul-de-sac. Frank, or Francis—Abbey didn’t know, although she assumed for some reason that Frank would be driving—flipped Mr. Sinclair a friendly wave, and then the Camry retreated back down the hill.

Abbey flicked her head in the direction of Mrs. Forrester’s house. How much longer do you think they’ll be staying?

I don’t know. It’ll depend on Mrs. Forrester’s recovery and when she gets out of the hospital. We have to go down and get Caleb.

Dad, are you and Mom ever going to tell us anything about this witch thing? And about Mom’s illness, Abbey thought, but didn’t say.

Her father’s face tightened. Abs, you need to understand, once you go down that path, it’s very hard to turn back. It’s dangerous, and your mother and I aren’t convinced that any good can come of it. For all our society’s supposed fascination with witches, most non-witches do not like witches, and there are many very dark chapters in our history as a result. The more you know about witchcraft, the more you might find yourself doing it unconsciously. Your mother and I are still trying to figure out how much you should know and how much we should protect you from it. Energy attracts energy, and as soon as you start using the powers of witchcraft, you might find yourself surrounded by people we don’t want you surrounded by. People who might influence you.

A cool breeze slid down Abbey’s neck. It had been a balmy autumn, but winter was coming.

Have you ever done witchcraft? she said.

I’d rather not talk about it right now.

But you believe in it? Abbey pressed.

Her father stared at the fallen pink rose petals gathered in the garden beside the step. Yes, I do.

But how does it work?

The general belief is that it has to do with the trapped quantum energy that’s in all matter. Some people are able to use that energy to make things happen.

So no spells, potions, pentagrams, or hexes?

Her father shook his head. We have to go and get Caleb.

*****

After three weeks, Mark had decided that he rather liked living with the Sinclair family. (He missed his mother, of course, but he was less lonely now.) He did wonder if they were all a little distracted, sad, or stressed. It seemed very quiet in the house, and they didn’t seem to talk to each other very much. At least, not the way Abbey, Caleb, and Simon had talked three weeks ago, when it seemed mostly like non-stop chatter, which agitated him a bit. But now they were quiet, and it was nice to share space with other people who didn’t seem to have any expectations of him. Mrs. Beckham (or Ms. Beckham, as she had explained; Mark was trying to remember this, but he was very bad at names) had retrieved his atlases, including his precious Oxford, as well as some of his map-making supplies from his bedroom, and Mr. Sinclair had set several boxes of National Geographic magazines in his new room, dating as far back as 1954, filled with hundreds of maps to study.

The promised phone call from the very bad man (Dr. Ford) indicating a good time for Mark to go in and trace the map of Coventry Hill had not arrived (his bad feeling about Dr. Ford proving correct), and Mark had recreated the original at a smaller scale as carefully as he could using his 0.05 mm Ohto Graphic Liner Drawing pen on his 100% cotton, 13 by 9 inch paper. The BP marking on the map they had found in the Jag (the bad man’s vehicle) troubled him. When he had drawn the map that night in the dirt in the briar patch, he had intended to suggest that BP meant briar patch, but Abbey had immediately assumed it meant beaver pond, and he hadn’t said anything at the time, because he had become uncertain, which was why he was now studying contour lines. The contours of the creek bed on the original map would help him to know whether BP meant briar patch or beaver pond, since the beaver pond didn’t appear on the original map, as it had presumably just been a creek then. If the BP was a bit to the left of the bend in the contour lines, then it probably meant briar patch. If the BP was to the right and nestled in the bend, then it probably meant beaver pond.

But he needed the original map to know for sure. He had considered mentioning this to Abbey so she could help him get the original map, but he didn’t like to point out other people’s mistakes. He had told her as much as he could about contour lines and how they worked, hoping she would catch on, but she didn’t. He wondered if he should tell Simon, but Simon had been spending a lot of time in his room since the incident (as Mark was now calling it).

Mark was