All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [13]
Fiona tilted her chin up and tried to look “down” at him the way Audrey could. It didn’t work.
“At least now you know how to make two parallel lines meet,” Eliot told her.
“What do you mean?”
Eliot snorted. “It’s easy, but useless, really.” He crossed one of the map’s torn flaps so Lombard and Chestnut Streets, once parallel, angled toward each other.
Static electricity raced up his fingertips, growing stronger as he brought the pieces of the map together.
Fiona guided the other part of the map toward his. “I’ve felt something like this before,” she whispered.
The two portions of the map wavered as if magnetically attracted and then repulsed . . . and then the two sides snapped together.
Lombard and Chestnut crossed—at least on paper.
Fiona ran her fingers over the parchment. “This feels like that spot in the Valley of the New Year where there was a hidden exit. A spot where space folded.”
“Like there’s an extra space or a doorway”—Eliot pointed to the spot where the two streets intersected—“here?”
“We passed that spot and didn’t see anything,” she said.
“But did we really look?”
They stared at the map. The “intersection” was a block and a half away.
Fiona crumpled the outer edges of the map, and they both ran.
They dodged people on the sidewalk; Eliot careened off a trash can, stumbled, but kept going. He caught glimpses of other Paxington students, but didn’t bother to ask for help. There was no time left.
They sprinted toward the address where Paxington was supposed to be, where the lines crossed on the map.
It looked like the same place they had walked by earlier . . . but it felt different.
That static electricity sensation was here.
He slowed and stopped.
So did Fiona.
They looked for something out of the ordinary. There was only a wall made of roughened granite blocks.
Eliot ran his hand over the surface.
It was just rock . . . but there was something else, faint at first, and then stronger. Deep inside the stone there was a vibration, almost like he was touching the strings of his violin.
Fiona felt the wall with both her hands. “It’s like threads,” she whispered.
“Like music,” he said.
He spied a minuscule crack in the stone, and as he touched its edges, there was a pause in the music.
Fiona found the spot as well.
Eliot stared at the crack and found that when he looked at it from a particular angle—an angle that hadn’t been there before—the crack tilted and expanded and was really a four-dimensional corner.
Disorientation washed over him as this new space revealed itself. The sensation was like staring at one of those crazy M. C. Escher drawings: Everything appeared normal, until suddenly you saw an extra dimension tilting sideways.
Eliot and Fiona stepped around this new corner and found themselves—
—on a cobblestone boulevard running perpendicular to the main street.
It wasn’t as if this new passage were hidden. It opened quite plainly onto the main street behind them.
Eliot waved to a man as he rushed past on the sidewalk. “Hey, mister,” he called.
The man ignored him.
Apparently no one on the outside could sense this place, unless they knew exactly what they were looking for.5
There were a dozen stores on this in-between street: antique and curio shops, a few high-end fashion boutiques, a Chinese noodle house, and a café on the corner, where older Paxington students sat at canopy-covered tables. Farther down the boulevard, brick walls rose along the sides, weathered and ivy-covered, which ended a half block away at an intricate wrought iron gate.
Beyond those gates were majestic cathedral-like buildings stained black with age, structures with Greek columns that rose like a forest of marble, and wavering in and out of the ever-present Bay Area fog lorded a clock tower glinting with hints of gold filigree.
“It’s amazing,” Eliot said.
“Yeah. . . .” Fiona immediately sobered. “But the time!” She grabbed his hand and pulled him along.
Eliot shook off his wonderment and ran with her.
As they neared the gate, Eliot saw that it was shut. Had they let