It helped, but I knew the memory would never go away. It would be part of the Abbadon horror story as long as I lived.

  We met in the planning room. Although it wasn’t the same planning room we had met in to discuss how to stop the Shrieks and Shatterskin, it looked exactly the same.

  The Whistle Pigs designed all their places to look the same. In one way it was very comforting. We knew what to expect. On the other hand, it was disconcerting. Who knew where we were? There was no sun or moon or stars or landmarks to tell me if we were directly under the village of Dalry or somewhere far away.

  Aki took pity on me and told me that we were between Dalry and the Castle, and would be staying underground until we knew more, or as we had to deal with things topside.

  The Castle staff had been alerted and told that the Castle was going to be sealed off from the outside starting that day. They had let the staff know that they could bring their families into the Castle with them if they wanted. It turned out many of them already lived there, something I didn’t know, once again proving to me that I was not paying attention to the people around me.

  In the planning room, the Ginete brothers were leaning against the wall looking a little better, but their sparkle had not returned. They had refused to sit. They often refused to sit down. It was part of their nature to be alert, and that was working against them this time because they were taking on a responsibility that wasn’t theirs.

  I understood how they felt though. I think we all did. But I was worried. Wasn’t this a form of a rift? Weren’t we all responsible for how the Ginete felt?

  Niko turned to me, and said, “Yes, it is a rift, Kara. And yes, we are all responsible for how we all feel.”

  Turning to Pita, he said, “You couldn’t have known. We have never dealt with this before. Let’s look at what you did do. You eliminated the danger to the village. You kept us all safe from them. Who knows? If it hadn’t happened this time, they would have found another way. Let it go.”

  The Ginete nodded, and I could tell they were trying to pull themselves out of the grief, when I noticed Leif pull his staff to him, and touch it gently on the ground. I could see the blue haze I had felt before running along the floor of our room and up into the wall behind the Ginete, encircling each one of them like a halo around their entire body.

  The haze dissipated in a flash, and I was fairly sure none of the Ginete had seen it happen, but all five brothers were immediately back to themselves. Maybe everyone else in the room had noticed and were not acknowledging it, or perhaps Leif was only showing me. Either way, it made me wish that I had that kind of ability.

  Throwing lightning bolts was awesome, but to heal like that? I wanted to be part of it. Ruta leaned over and whispered in my ear, “It’s possible, Kara Beth.” Ruta, who only spoke when necessary, had just given me a gift I could cherish. Ruta was a healer, too.

  I smiled at him, and I swear he smiled back. I thought back to when I had thought of Ruta as a wooden stump and secretly called him Block Face. I wondered if the world had felt the shift between us. Abbadon could do its worst, but I knew we could stop him. We had each other.

  Twenty-Seven

  In spite of the Ginete’s improved attitude, the meeting was somber. Especially after we realized that the murdered man was Letha’s husband. I couldn’t imagine how terrible Letha and her daughters were going to feel, and I wondered who was going to tell them.

  “You are, Princess,” Niko said.

  I wanted to protest, or at least pout, but I knew that Niko was right. It was me, their Princess, who had to tell the two little girls that their father had died at the hands of his friends, and no one knew why.

  It was impossible to ask the two men. After being docile for about an hour after killing their friend, they started screaming again and ended up slamming themselves up against the walls of their room.

  The Ginete had experimented with piping in different levels of gas and had finally found one that would keep the men quiet, but not put them to sleep. However, if we were going to save them, Ruta would have to examine them somehow.

  For now, it was decided only to observe, and perhaps get them to talk through the intercom that the Whistle Pigs had set up in their rooms. The danger of infection was too high to do anything else.

  They had left the dead man in his room, and the temperature dropped to below freezing. Although it would have been good to examine him, and then return him to his family, we had no idea what we might be releasing. Things like autopsies were an Earth thing, not an Erda experience.

  By the time we had worked out all these provisions, the night was half over. It had been the worst day ever. It started pleasantly enough and ended up with one dead man, and two others in desperate condition. We all needed rest if we were going to be of any use the next day.

  As I headed off to my room with Beru by my side, I realized that I couldn’t go to my room yet.

  “I need to know more,” I whispered to Beru.

  She gave me one of her famous looks, but this one had a hint of compassion in it. “Still the curious one aren’t you. You know curiosity can get you in trouble?” Beru whispered back.

  “I’ve heard that. I think people say that nonsense to keep us from knowing things we should know. Sometimes it can cause trouble, but most of the time, curiosity can discover what needs to be known. I think it’s a good trade-off,” I answered, as if I was a wise one.

  Beru laughed a weak version of her tinkling bell laugh. “Okay, I’ll give you that one, young lady, but do us all a favor and think first?”

  “I’m thinking,” I said as I walked faster down the hall. “I’m thinking I want to see.”

  Beru quick stepped to catch up with me. She didn’t need to ask me where I was going. I was reasonably sure that she was planning to do the same thing once she dropped me off at my room. I wondered if she also planned to lock me in like she used to just for fun since she knew I had learned how to unlock doors at the wave of my hand.

  We reached the doors where we were going. These were doors I had no desire to unlock. I just wanted to see inside.

  The first room was where the dead man was laying. The Whistle Pigs had installed a window in the three doors. Not the usual thing for them. And they had to be careful not to make it reflective. Everyone knew that Abbadon used mirrors to see what was going on in the rest of Erda. But no one was sure if it was all reflective surfaces or just mirrors.

  I missed mirrors, although there was a good side to not having any. I didn’t worry about what I looked like even though I hadn’t seen myself since I fell through the portal and discovered I was a young woman in Erda instead of the twelve-year-old girl I had been in the Earth dimension.

  On the other hand, not having seen myself, I was never sure if I looked okay. But everyone had the same problem. If someone’s clothes needed adjusting, or their hair was not quite right, people stepped in. No embarrassment. It was just a helping hand.

  The dead man inside the room was never going to have a helping hand again. He lay there where he had been beaten. Teddy had told me not to look and I understood why. More than half his face gone. Bitten off I guess. There was no way I was going to tell his family that. They should remember him as he was before—before Deadsweep.

  I could feel the coldness of the room even though it was a well-sealed door. I pressed my hand up against the glass and promised the man inside that we would find out what happened. It wasn’t an idle promise. We had to find out.

  Beru and I moved to another room that was the holding cell for one of the prisoners. Prisoners, an utterly unfamiliar term in the Kingdom of Zerenity. There had never been a need for someone to be locked up. Sometimes people got into light-hearted trouble, expressing themselves in ways that may not have been the wisest, but the community always took care of it.

  I hated the idea that we had to lock these men up. We might need prisons for now. But I hoped the prisons would go away after we stopped Abbadon.

  If I thought I would be angry at the men who killed their friend, one look at them and I knew it wasn’t their fault. They were out of their minds. The gas was keeping them docile, but the agitation that ran through them was like a live current.

  “We haven’t been able to get them to eat,” Aki said, slipping up beside us. We hadn’t heard her coming. That was Aki. Not for the first time I was glad she was on “our side.” Quiet and calm, Aki was also cunning, and I suspected she was capable of things other than levitating and showing up wherever she wanted to. Not that those two things weren’t enough.

  The three of us stood at the door, watching the man inside go not so quietly crazy.

  “We’ll fix this,” Beru whispered. Aki and I nodded in agreement.

  Twenty-Eight

  The next morning, I met Zeid in the transportation room. At the meeting the night before he had volunteered to go with me. I knew that everyone approved. After all, at some point he would be my husband, and that would make him a Prince. Or something like that. It occurred to me I had no idea what he would become when we married. But then I didn’t even know when we were getting married, or if it was an arranged marriage or if we had chosen each other. It was still something that existed back in my memories, and no one seemed inclined to fill me in, including Zeid.

  What I did know was that I was happy that it was Zeid who would be my husband. The more I spent time around Zeid, even if it wasn’t just the two of us, the more I liked him. I could have said, loved him, but I wanted to like him first, and I did. Love, maybe, but we didn’t have time for that right now. He knew it. I knew it.

  At the moment, what was important was that I wasn’t going alone. Maybe it was Zeid’s responsibility, but I couldn’t have been happier that he wanted to come with me. It certainly wasn’t romantic. But at least we were doing something together. Something important. Something I wasn’t so sure I could do by myself. I wasn’t even sure I could do it with him. All I knew was it had to be done.

  The suits we had left in the transport room were waiting for us, but something had changed. I stopped in the doorway and stared. I heard the Priscillas giggling as they all flew in the room yelling “Surprise!” Perhaps it wasn’t a big deal, but what they had done meant so much to me I started to cry.

  “How did you do that?” I asked through my happy tears.

  “Magic. You know magic, don’t you, Kara Beth?” Cil teased. La and Pris giggled again with her and flew to my suit which the day before had been a stark white. Today it was a lovely mauve shade. Actually, all the suits were now different colors. Zeid had an azure blue one, matching his eyes. I looked at Cil, and she giggled. They knew what they were doing. The song “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” popped into my head. Cil winked at me.

  “We started with you, Kara Beth,” La said. “We knew how hard this was going to be for you, so we wanted to make it cheerier. Then we realized the town would feel better if you all showed up in colors instead of white, looking so stern and scary.

  “But we did something special to your suit,” Pris said. She flew down to my hand and pulled me over to where my suit was hanging and then turned up the cuff and showed me the ladybug appliqué. That did it. I really started crying. I was so happy I didn’t even think about being embarrassed.

  Zeid stood there looking confused but pleased. “You are happy, right?” he asked.

  When I nodded yes, he looked relieved and stepped back as I hugged the Priscillas the best that I could. They are little wiggly creatures, all wings and fluttery. But I managed to kiss all three on the cheek before they got away. I had to let them know how much their thoughtfulness meant to me.

  Plus they were right. It was going to be better showing up in colors. Nothing we had to say to the people of Dalry would make anyone happy, but at least our suits wouldn’t be so scary.

  After getting our suits on, we added the improved breathers and goggles that had appeared there overnight—another gift from the ingenious Whistle Pigs and Ginete working together. I couldn’t figure out which of them made what. They seemed to need each other to make something happen.

  The symbolism of that didn’t escape me. We all needed each other to accomplish anything. What did Abbadon need to make Deadsweep work? He wanted to be alone, but he wasn’t really. He used the energy of his captives to run his machines and keep his environment going as he destroyed everything else. He wanted to think of himself as alone. But he wasn’t. So what did he need to work with to have something like the Deadsweep? It was a question I thought we needed to answer. Perhaps later when we returned.

  At that moment the question was what could I say to Letha and her daughters that would mean anything. That would comfort them, and give them hope. Nothing would replace the man they loved. And we knew nothing about how or why he died.

  At the meeting, we had decided not to tell them how horrible his death had been. What would it serve? If we were able to rid the two men of the infection, how would they ever be accepted into their village again if the town knew what they had done? Would it matter that it was something else that had made them act that way? There was a chance we would have to keep them separate from everyone for the rest of their lives.

  The problem was, it was not just these three men. Deadsweep could be anywhere in the Kingdom. Friends and neighbors, husbands, wives, and maybe children could become infected. They would become someone else. Would we ever be able to return things to the harmony of how things were before?

  No one knew. I reached out for Zeid’s hand and nodded to the Whistle Pig who was standing by to lift us to the surface. All I knew at that moment was I was going to have to grow up a little bit more. Niko was right. It was up to me. Not only did I have to help save the Kingdom, but I also had to help find a way to heal it.

  Twenty-Nine

  We arrived topside a little way outside the village. I could see the Castle shining in the distance. It looked like a castle I had seen in one of my story books in the Earth Realm. A valley. A castle. All we needed was a rainbow and a dancing Queen, and I would be in that story. Except there was no evil in that childhood fairy tale. No Abbadon the destroyer.

  Not for the first time I wondered why Abbadon was so intent on taking away all this beauty. Yes, Aki had told me the story of the two bored brothers on the serpent-shaped spaceship who decided to experiment with the two dimensions of Erda and Earth. Just for fun. Right.

  Maybe if they had stayed on the planet Gaia they would have been disabused of that idea. Why experiment with this harmony and perfectness? Perhaps the trees would have had time to heal them of their boredom and desire to control. Maybe they would have leaned down and whacked them on the head with a big heavy branch and been done with all the craziness before it started.

  Come to think of it, why didn’t they? Nature is alive. Why not stop the infection—which in this case was two bored brothers—before it started? Questions with no answers.

  While all these whys rolled around in my head, Zeid and I stood there hand in hand enjoying the glorious sunshine, the gentle breeze, and the whispering of the leaves as they moved with the wind. It was so perfect I almost forgot why we had come.

  “Daydreaming, Kara Beth?” Zeid asked.

  “More like trying to understand how anyone could want to destroy all this.”

  “Any closer to understanding?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Maybe Abbadon is infected too,” Zeid answered.

  I looked at him and shook my head again. “No. I can’t let him get away with that excuse. He deliberately destroys. He knows what he is doing. He’s not out of control the way those poor men are.”

  “Maybe it’s a different kind of infection. Something to keep in mind, since, in the end, we will have to go after him.”

  It was something to keep in mind. Maybe evil was an infection. So how to stop it? Why did it exist in the first place? Because two bored brothers brought it here? Were they infected?

  I almost touched the star around my neck. I wanted to see the beauty of the intertwined life that existed but was invisible to most people most of the time. But Liza told me to practice seeing without it. I didn’t have to tell Zeid what I wanted to do. He waited while I breathed, calmed myself down, and unfocused from seeing the world that was in front of me. I wanted to see the world that existed beyond the visible world but was always present.

  Like with the magic-picture books, as my view shifted, the whole world refocused into something even more beautiful than I had just been seeing. More color, more grace, more interconnection. The depth that existed below our normal view was always so stunning I could only stay for a few moments.

  When it was over, I stood silently letting the tears run down my face.

  “That beautiful?” Zeid asked.

  “More than that, Zeid. It’s more than the word beautiful and it’s right here. Nature knows it, lives there. We only see the tip of it, live on the surface of it. Imagine what it would be like to live within that all the time.

  “Do you think it’s possible?” Zeid asked.

  I didn’t have an answer to that. We did live there. We just didn’t see it or know it most of the time. It was a rabbit hole I couldn’t allow myself to go down. We had something important to do. The glorious hidden-within-plain-sight world would have to wait. We had bad news to deliver.

  *******

  For a moment we wondered if perhaps we had come to the wrong village. Everything was so different than what we had seen the day before.