Chapter 10

They walked back down the path, the Time Palace looming before them. Its size was intimidating, and Conner started to wonder how they could find the medallion in a place that big. All of Daylight city could fit into it. Ten times, if it was copied and stacked on top of itself. As they crossed the parking disk, Conner realized that the entrance archway alone was big enough to swallow HiTeq headquarters whole.

The view through it showed a mind-bending collection of shapes and edges, floating and warping, all in hues of yellowish brown. Conner looked around, trying to see whether the space on the other side was a room or a hallway or what, but none of it made sense.

As they reached the entrance, Oliver held up the grav map. “There’s something going on right . . .” He reached forward, and his hand stopped, as if resting on an invisible wall. “Here.” He moved the map around, taking a few steps to the side, and then touched the invisible wall. A doorway opened in the air, with a yuman-sized hallway beyond it. “Hologram,” Oliver said.

“Hologram?” Conner looked at the small doorway, and then at the large one and the shapes beyond. He reached forward, and pressed his hand against what must have been the holographic screen. What a bizarre thing to find.

They entered the hallway, a narrow, eerily perfect rectangular passage. Compared to the open spaces outside and the immensity of the holographic pretend entrance, it felt cramped. After ten steps or so, they rounded a corner and entered a room, which seemed to be a dead end. It had a mirror on one side, but they immediately noticed that their reflections did not mimic their actions.

After staring at them blankly for a few seconds, the reflected Oliver burst out laughing. He said something to the reflected Mara and Conner.

“What in the depths is going on?” Mara said.

“I have no idea,” Oliver replied, as they all stepped closer to the mirror. “Maybe the nano-bio-tech of this place is creating replicas of us, trying to figure out who and what we are?”

“They better not grow red eyes and fangs and try to kill us,” Mara said.

Suddenly, the mirror and the ground around it spun, taking the three friends with it. Conner looked behind them, and saw that they were in another room like the one they had just been in, but the exit was on the other side. He looked back to see their three reflections wave, and then walk out of the room. “That was really weird,” he said.

“No kidding,” Mara said.

They left the room. After another hallway, they emerged into a large room, or what might better be called a cavern, with floating geometric shapes just like what they had seen in the hologram at the entrance. The ceiling high above had four triangles cut out symmetrically, letting in the blue sky.

“If this room really exists,” Conner said, “then why did there have to be a hologram at the entrance?”

“I think the logic of this place is beyond us,” Oliver replied.

Conner watched one of the shapes as it morphed, its four-sided faces elongating, consuming one another, and re-forming. It was a tesseract, but Conner did not know that, and even Oliver, were he paying attention, probably wouldn’t either.

“Time distortion over there in six,” Oliver said, pointing toward a hovering, slowly tumbling cube that had its corners cut off. He counted down. When he reached zero, the cubish immediately slowed so that it was barely moving.

“Where do we go?” Mara asked. Conner’s attention left the floating shapes and landed on the walls. There were many exits. It looked like this room was a kind of central area that connected to many other places.

“I don’t know,” Oliver said. “I guess we could make our way toward the center for starters.” He led the way toward the far wall. Partway there, he stopped. He looked at Conner and Mara, and pointed to the side, keeping his arm close to his body. “Right next to us, there’s a pocket of slow time.” He grinned, and looked in the direction he was pointing, and slowly moved his hand forward. Then he stopped, and laughed. “It’s like poking into a wall of honey!” He moved his arm around, and the tip of his finger followed lazily, as if he were dragging something heavy with it.

When his fingertip started turning purple, he pulled it back. “I guess it makes sense that my heart wouldn’t be able to pump blood very well into a region of slow time.” He put his finger to his chin, features turning grim. “Now that I think about it, I bet that unless it happened fast enough, if we tried to enter a zone of different time, our brains would fry and we’d have heart attacks.”

Conner looked at the empty region of space, and backed away from the invisible monster, his friends doing the same beside him. The thought that taking a wrong step could be deadly, and there might be no sign to warn him which step it might be, was terrifying. “Oliver,” he said, “make sure to keep looking at that computer thing at all times.”

“I’ll do that,” Oliver said.

As they moved on, Conner kept looking over his shoulder at the dangerous part of the room, as if expecting some dark and bloody aura to appear within it. But it didn’t, because that was unfortunately not how the universe worked.

When Conner looked forward again, he saw that Oliver was walking toward a place in the wall between two exits, instead of toward one of them. “Uh, Oliver?” Conner said.

In response, Oliver put one foot on the wall, and then turned sideways, walking up the wall as if it were the floor. Conner exchanged a bewildered look with Mara, and then raised his own foot. As he took the step, it felt as if the entire room turned on its side, rather than him.

He looked up and saw Mara still standing on the wall, er, floor. “Come on,” he said.

She shook her head, as if awakening from a trance. “Oh, right.” She stepped onto the wall.

“This way,” Oliver said, standing on the edge of a hole. “Except, the gravity in there is still sideways.”

“Which means . . .” Conner prompted.

“It means if we step into it, we’ll fall down.”

“So what do we do?” Conner asked.

Oliver studied the grav map. “Looks like we’ll have to stay here for six minutes until it changes.”

They stood in silence for a short amount of time. Then Mara said, “Hey guys, we’re standing on a wall.”

Conner and Oliver nodded. Oliver said, “Yep.”

Awhile later, when they were all sitting, Oliver said, “All right, the gravity will change in twenty seconds.” He crawled over to the hole and lay on his stomach, holding onto the edge.

“Um, what are you doing?” Conner asked.

“What am I doing? What are you doing?” Oliver said. “I told you, the gravity is about to change. Get over here, or you’ll fall down to the floor.”

“Oh,” Mara said, “you mean it’s going to change out here too?”

“Yes! Come on.”

Conner and Mara crawled over to the hole and grabbed onto the edge like Oliver.

“Here it goes,” Oliver said. The direction of “down” started to shift from down the hole, rotating toward the direction of their feet. As it hit a forty-five degree angle between the two directions, the three of them scrambled over the lip into the hole, which quickly became a hallway. Conner looked back into the room they had just come from, seeing the ground far below. He shook his head and followed his friends down the hallway.

The hall led in a straight line, and a bright light shone in from the end. After a few minutes, the end did not seem any closer. The hall must have been longer than it looked.

“Are you sure you know where we’re going?” Conner asked Oliver.

“Nope,” Oliver said.

Conner kept expecting the end of the tunnel to get closer, but it didn’t.

Oliver stopped, looking at the grav map. “Oh,” he said, “so that’s what that means.”

“What’s up?” Mara asked.

“This hallway is getting longer,” Oliver said.

“What?” Conner said.

Oliver gestured down the hall. “The end is farther away from us now than when we started. Sorry for not figuring that out sooner.”

“Well I could have told you,” Conner said. The exit now appeared small and dim.

“So what do we do?” Mara asked.

“Uh,” Oliver said, “you know how the gravity used to point that way?”

As if on cue, the ground started to tilt. Conner reached for the wall, hoping to find something to hold onto. His fingers found nothing, and he cried out with the others as the hall turned into a shaft. All he could do was put his arms over his head, shielding it from collisions with the walls.

After a couple of bumps, they fell out of the end of the tunnel, and Conner found himself surrounded by a brilliant white light, as if the air around him was glowing. Slowly, he lowered his arms, looking around. They had exited the tunnel, and were no longer falling. Mara and Oliver floated nearby. The room was cube-shaped, with exits on many of the edges, making it impossible to tell which side of the cube was the floor and which was the ceiling.

“What---” Conner began.

“Should we do now?” Oliver said, finishing his sentence. “Yeah yeah, I’m working on it.” He fiddled with the grav map. That sight was getting mighty familiar. He put a finger closed to pursed lips in thought, and then pointed. “We need to go there.”

“Great,” Conner said. “How do we get there?”

“Well,” Oliver said, “there is gravity on the floor. So all we have to do is get there. Uh,” He grabbed Mara’s arm, and shoved Conner in the chest.

“Hey,” Conner said, “what’s the big---” He couldn’t finish the sentence, because the wind was knocked out of him as he landed on his back.

Above him, Oliver looked from him to Mara and back. “My bad,” he called.

He turned back to Mara, and said some stuff which Conner couldn’t hear. They grabbed onto each other, changing orientations. Conner thought they were a little too grabby, and their bodies went through relative positions that made him wonder about their motivations, but eventually Mara was hovering with her feet pointed toward the floor, and Oliver’s hands were on her shoulders. He asked if she was ready. She nodded, and he pushed her down. She coasted down to the ground, landing with hardly a stumble. Oliver, on the other hand, hovered backward toward the ceiling. When he reached it, he pushed off it with all his strength, soaring toward Mara. Mara shrieked and jumped out of the way, making Oliver cry out and flail his arms, as he crashed into the ground.

Oliver groaned. “You were supposed to catch me,” he said.

“Sorry,” Mara said, looking pale.

Oliver got to his feet. “Ugh. I’m all right.” He waved a hand. “What now, Oliver. Yeah, I got it.” He looked at the grav map, then pointed. “This way.”

“No random gravity shifting this time?” Conner asked.

“Actually there is,” Oliver said, “but not for another three days.”

They emerged into another room, its four walls leaning together and coming to a point at the ceiling. There were carved symbols above each of the four doors, but other than that, the room was the same monochromatic tan as the rest of the palace. “This is very bland,” Conner said.

“Yeah,” Mara agreed. “Are we close?”

“We should be coming up on the center of the palace soon,” Oliver replied. “Whether we are close to the medallion or not, I have no idea.”

“These are different,” Mara said, pointing to the symbols. “Might they be a clue?”

Oliver looked up from the grav map. “Huh.”

Conner looked at the symbols too. There was a ribbon with some pieces removed, something that looked like an upside-down teardrop or tooth with fuzzy stuff on what might be described as its head, and a sideways stick with three branches. There was also a symbol above the door they had come from, which Conner was completely sure was supposed to be a tennis racket. Definitely. A stick with a round thing at the end? Tennis racket, one hundred percent.

“Do any of these look like something you would expect to see on the medallion of time?” Oliver asked.

Conner looked at the symbols again. None of them seemed particularly time-like to him.

“Maybe that one,” Mara said, pointing to the ribbon. “It’s like how time flows into the future from the past.”

“I’m thinking more like this one,” Oliver said, pointing to the branch, “because of how each of these forks represents choices and possible futures.”

“Oh,” Mara said, “Okay.”

Conner leaned toward Mara’s interpretation, but Oliver was the smartest of the group, so he was probably right. They passed a curve, and then another. One of Conner’s steps felt bouncier than normal. His next sent him floating off the floor. “Oliver,” he cried, “you didn’t say there was going to be a gravity change!”

“There wasn’t,” Oliver replied, sounding as surprised as Conner as he floated upward in front of him.

Conner put his hands over his head, pushing on the ceiling to turn himself around as he landed on it. Instead of flat, like the ground, the sides of the ceiling angled down to form a crease in the middle, making it awkward to stand.

“Careful you don’t twist your ankle,” Oliver said.

The walking was awkward. Each step not only had to push them forward, but correct for the sideways push from the previous step. The result was a kind of straddled hopping.

“So Oliver,” Conner said, “why didn’t you know about that shift? Are we in a part of the palace that hasn’t been mapped yet, or what?”

“No, we’re still in mapped territory,” Oliver said. “Maybe this one is just so infrequent that the scientists didn’t know about it yet. We’ll have to remember to---” He was cut off, as the section of the hall he was standing in was jerked into the wall, as if it were a hole through the edge of a giant disk, which spun until another hole the same size and shape as the hallway took its place, empty.

Conner looked at Mara, who looked as terrified as he was. They both looked back at the empty hall. Oliver was gone.

“Okay,” Conner said slowly, trying not to give panic a foothold. “What do we do now?”

“We, uh, we wait,” Mara said. “The palace will bring him back the same way it took him away. It’s all on a regular time schedule, right?”

As if in answer, the gravity started to shift again. The ground beneath them became steeper and steeper, until their feet could not get enough traction to hold them. Mara crashed into Conner from behind, wrapping her arms around him in a death grip, and they fell, screaming, down the hallway which had turned into a pit. They tumbled and bounced off the walls. The hall slowly curved underneath them, so that soon they were rolling down a slant, which came to an end, spilling them out so that they landed hard on the ground.

As his wits slowly returned, Conner realized that Mara was still clinging to him so tightly he could barely breathe. “You can let go of me now,” he said.

“Oh,” Mara said, loosening her grip. “Sorry.” She removed one arm, and Conner lifted himself up so she could pull the other out from under him.

“Are you all right?” Conner asked.

“Yeah, you?”

“Fine.”

He sat up, looking around, and found they had fallen into a long, wide hall, leading in both directions, with doors on both sides. It slowly curved toward one side, looking like it might make a circle. Far above them, the sky was visible, as there was no ceiling.

“At least we know which way is up,” Conner said.

“What are we going to do?” Mara asked.

“Don’t look at me,” Conner said

“Well what am I supposed to do?” Mara cried, “Oliver isn’t here to guide us!”

“I don’t know!” Conner said. “Think of something!”

“What am I going to think of?”

“Where we’re going,” Conner said. “What we’re doing.”

“Okay, uh,” Mara said. She sat with her knees bent so that one foot was underneath her, the other to her side. She stared at the ground, clutching the sides of her head in her hands, messing up her hair. It scared Conner. “We have to find Oliver, because he knows what we need to do.”

“Right,” Conner said, “and how do we do that?”

“I don’t know, help me!”

Conner looked at all of the entrances to the hall. They all looked the same, even the one they had tumbled out of. The only clue they had was the direction they had come from, which meant Oliver was probably in that general direction.

He looked back at Mara, who was sitting still as a statue. Her arm was partly lowered, and he thought holding that position would probably get tiring really quickly. “Hey Mara,” he said.

She did not respond. She did not move. Didn’t even blink.

“Mara, are you okay?” Conner reached a hand toward her, but as he did so, his fingers felt like they pressed into some kind of thick liquid. His eyes widened, and he pulled his hand back. She was caught in a slow-time region. Out of instinct, he stepped backward. But his foot hit the edge of something, and he tipped back, flailing his arms in the air, before falling into a pit that had opened up behind him.