Insight Kindling

  The Call to Search Everywhen Series

  *INSIGHT KINDLING is the second installment in The Call to Search Everywhen, a serial series that continues the storyline that started in TRAVEL GLASSES. The author highly recommends beginning with the first book in the series, as there are multiple storylines and characters from different times and places.

  To my mother, father and husband.

  To the readers of Travel Glasses who encouraged the

  continuation of Calla and Valcas’ story.

  To healers and the seekers of the lost.

  VALCAS AND I landed as swiftly as we’d flown away from the White Tower, where we’d left his past behind. I blinked, willing my eyes to adjust. As the white light faded, I loosened my grip on Valcas and let go.

  I swung myself off the back of his Estrel-Flyer and readjusted the straps of my backpack. I held my breath. A cross between a motorcycle and a hovercraft, the black and gold flying vehicle shone in the moonlight. It hadn’t changed into anything else—a car, a motorboat, a horse, or any other type of vehicle built for traveling by land, sea or sky. The Estrel-Flyer would have changed into something else had we landed in a real place or a made-up place. I immediately grew suspicious.

  I slid the travel glasses from my face up to the top of my head and looked around, squinting for signs of still waters.

  “I didn’t expect TSTA Headquarters to be a Nowhere,” I said, “especially when everyone there seems so worried about people getting lost.” From what I’d learned about traveling so far, Nowheres were either un-places or made-up places that were no longer real. Places of the lost.

  Valcas stepped off the side of the Estrel-Flyer and turned to look at me. At least I assumed he was looking at me. His sunglasses were still on his face, reflecting the moonlight, hiding his creepy eyes.

  “What? Say something,” I said.

  Dark eyebrows arched beneath the dark strands of hair spilling over his forehead down toward the darkness of his glasses. “You’ve learned a lot more about traveling, but you still don’t have much of a sense of direction.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” The blood drained from my face as I remembered just how little I trusted him. But Mom had said—

  I straightened my shoulders. “Where are we?”

  “We’re just outside of TSTA Headquarters. Did you think we could walk right in?”

  I rolled my eyes. “It’s called the Time and Space Travel Agency, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. It’s an agency, a very secure one. Don’t stray far from me.”

  I squinted as we walked. There weren’t any buildings, just lots of dirt and the occasional tuft of grass, all shrouded in a hazy midnight blue, illuminated by the silver glow of the moon.

  “You know where we’re going, right?” I asked.

  Valcas sniffed.

  “Are we going to jump off a cliff somewhere like we did at the meadow… to get to your palace?”

  Not that I was afraid. I’d traveled several times with the glasses by jumping from high places in order to generate plenty of momentum to get to different places and times. The first time this happened had been a surprise. Not long after Valcas and I had first met, he’d literally grabbed my arm while we were standing near the edge of a cliff. And jumped. I’d woken up in a palace in a kingdom Valcas said he’d usurped.

  “This is where I got the idea,” he said. “You’d better put your glasses back on.”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t want to lose them. We’re not taking the conventional way in. Licensed TSTA vehicles have their own entrance.”

  I covered my eyes with the travel glasses and kept walking, wondering how Valcas could see anything in the inky blackness. I couldn’t see beyond an inch or two in front of me.

  Minutes passed—empty minutes filled with nothing but the sound of our footsteps. Valcas stopped abruptly in front of me. I felt his fingertips graze my elbow.

  “It’s not my palace anymore,” he said.

  Then he grabbed me by the waist and jumped.

  I HADN’T seen the cliff coming. We fell, shrouded in darkness as thick and black as the open area where we’d been walking. Had I not felt the pull of gravity and the rush of wind sweep upward along my skin and clothing, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between falling and walking.

  I waited as the blackness succumbed to the bright white glow. Squinting, I held on to Valcas, just like I’d done on the Estrel-Flyer on the way out of the White Tower. I didn’t want to tell my pair of travel glasses to go somewhere else. I wanted to get the TSTA hearing behind me.

  Valcas and I landed with me still in his arms.

  I looked up at him and caught my breath. “You could have told me when we needed to jump. I’m not going to run.”

  “Good. Between the Uproar that’s after you and now the TSTA, I’m the least of your worries.” He let go of me and looked up at the sky. “Stay close by.”

  I followed Valcas’ gaze. The sky was a dirty slate of charcoal smeared with a scribbling of chalky clouds. Everything underneath it was thick with fog.

  “What’s an Uproar?” I asked.

  “Remember the being that knocked you flat to the ground at Winston Lake? Suffice it to say that the being is deadly. It was playing with you back then, testing you out.”

  “Okay, but what is it?” All I remembered seeing at the dock near the lake, where Valcas and I had first met, was a flash of bright white light. It attacked me multiple times, once just before Valcas arrived, and then again the next day, right before Valcas and I escaped using his travel glasses.

  “The Uproar is a disturbance. Chaos. A being that feeds on the blood of travelers and the lost.” Valcas waved his arms in front of him, as if he were trying to part the fog, to clear a path. “This is not good.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The visibility here is worse than I’ve ever seen it.”

  I tried to read the expression on his face, but I couldn’t. It was bad enough that the glasses covered his eyes. The fog covered everything else.

  “Take my hand,” he said. “We have to run inside.”

  As I stared at his outstretched hand, my stomach twisted into a knot. “But I’m not lost.”

  “I know.”

  Hand in hand, our feet pressed forward to the same beat. The gravel beneath us grated with each step. A bright white glow, thicker and more pervasive than the gritty fog, once again surrounded us. Without our travel glasses the light would have been painful. It would have forced both of us to close our eyes.

  I kept my eyes open as the light faded. Smooth polished stones replaced the rough gravel below us. We stopped running. I let go of Valcas’ hand and stepped forward.

  A steel blue building stood at the end of the stone pathway. Its façade of smooth brick-shaped rectangles reflected the sky like glossy mirrors. The door to the building was closed, barred shut with long mirrored posts. The stenciling on the sign above the door read:

  TIME AND SPACE TRAVEL AGENCY.

  I wiped sweat from my palms across my jeans. All I had to do was run, to use the travel glasses to transport me somewhere else. Anywhere but here.

  I KEPT my promise to Mom. I didn’t run.

  As Valcas and I approached the door, a beam of light from a tiny camera below the sign stretched out across both of us, starting with our feet. When it reached the tops of our heads, the light flickered off and the camera receded back into the wall underneath the sign. A ringing clang of metal releasing metal stung my eardrums. The bars on the doors sprang open. So did the door.

  Valcas turned to me and smiled. “I’ve never seen the door open that freely.”

  “Why not?”

  “The bars are intended to keep people out.
No one at the TSTA cares to see me. You must be in a whole lot of trouble.”

  Valcas’ laughter echoed off the walls as he walked ahead of me into the building.

  I gritted my teeth and muttered under my breath, “Is this some kind of sick payback for you?”

  I followed Valcas through the open doorway. The air inside the building smelled like vinyl and rubber cement. He looked back at me before turning a corner at the end of the hallway, and then looked back again before stepping through another open doorway on the right. The plaque on the wall beside it was also labeled.

  “Waiting Room,” I read. I stepped inside, set my backpack on the ground and sat in a chair across from Valcas, shrugging low in my seat. Both of us still wore our dark glasses, which was fine with me. I didn’t want to meet his eyes anyway.

  Instead, I busied myself by searching through my glasses, catching glimpses of Valcas’ memory of me as a baby—the way he held me with his hands, the adoration he felt when he called me beautiful, the resolve in his voice when he’d said he was looking for my father. The travel glasses did more than transport me through time and space; they allowed me to search and replay the recordings Valcas and I had burned inside them.

  From across the room, Valcas cleared his throat. “We could still be on our honeymoon, you know…”

  I lifted my head and looked at him—really looked at him—sitting there in a tan vinyl office chair. Black glasses, black slacks, black leather jacket. Each article of clothing contrasted with the tan chair and plain white walls, the same way his dark hair framed his tan face. He grinned at me, evidently amused by his poor attempt at humor about our feigned engagement; well, the first one anyway. After escaping the bright white light—the Uproar—Valcas had offered me his protection if I agreed to pretend to be his intended bride. That hadn’t worked out so well. I’d stolen his travel glasses and fled back home after he’d locked me in a room for four days. Let’s just say he’d developed a pretty warped sense of protection.

  Our second fake engagement was more my fault than his, according to the TSTA. After escaping the palace, I’d searched for and met the elderly inventor of the travel glasses, Edgar Hall, and then traveled into Valcas’ past to find out why he’d searched for me in the first place. What I’d found was a disturbed past version of Valcas—not quite as disturbed as he is now, but an intelligent and lonely teen caught in a made-up world where it was often difficult to figure out what was real and what was not. That version of Valcas had grown fond of me and convinced himself that we were engaged. How that happened still boggles my mind, but I had the evidence of his state of mind with me: a poem about me he’d written on a photograph of us, which I planned to present at the TSTA hearing as part of my defense.

  What I hadn’t expected to learn while traveling in Valcas’ past was that his order to protect me had come from my father, whom I’d never met.

  I swallowed a lump in my throat. “You knew my father,” I said.

  “Plaka was the only true friend I ever had.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  Valcas shrugged. “I haven’t seen your father in a long time—more than two decades according to Earth years. I wonder if I would recognize him now.”

  I felt tears beginning to build, but I blinked them back and tried to sound angry. “That’s not what I meant. What was he like? Where did you meet him?”

  “Tell me something, Calla—” Valcas stood up as he spoke. “How comfortable was your life before meeting me? Would you like to return to that? Take some time to think before answering.”

  I huffed. “You’re very good at evading my questions.”

  “You self-righteously assume that you deserve my answers.” Valcas sneered as he turned to leave the room.

  “Wait! I’m sorry—” I clenched my fists. No. “I’m not sorry that I escaped you and took your travel glasses with me. I feared for my life. You locked me in a room for four days. I had no idea that you were supposed to be protecting me.”

  Valcas dipped his head and frowned. I felt bad. For the first time since meeting him, he looked like the one who’d been fooled.

  “Why are you still protecting me? Is that how you keep him… alive?” I nearly swallowed my last word. I’d assumed that my father had been dead for a long time. I’d accepted that, but there was hope in not knowing for sure. Maybe, I thought, it was Valcas who refused to let go, to believe that his friend was gone forever.

  “I’ve protected you only because Plaka asked it of me.” Valcas stepped nearer to me, tight-jawed, looking down at me over crossed arms.

  “Oh, so then the story wasn’t true about you needing me to stand in for a bride?” The pitch of my voice rose higher the more I tried to keep it under control. “How do you expect me to believe anything you say?”

  “Yes, it was true,” he spat. “It just so happened that the situation also gave me a good reason to keep a closer eye on you.”

  “Why not ask my mother how I was doing? You seem to know her pretty well.” I frowned, crossing my arms too. I never asked him to protect me. And, as far as I knew, he wasn’t very good at it.

  “I went to prison for you.”

  “That sounds like a good place for a kidnapper to me!”

  Valcas gritted his teeth but said nothing as he left the room.

  I sat in silence, waiting. I felt chilled, betrayed and, now that Valcas was gone, lonely.

  I lifted my backpack off the ground and hugged it close to me. It held all that I’d brought with me—a change of clothes, a pair of pajamas sewn by Enta, a couple of travel journals that Edgar had given me, Shirlyn’s diary, the zobascope, my crumpled letter to Edgar and the photograph of me and the past version of Valcas.

  I pulled out the photograph and studied it. Valcas smiled at me, the version of him that I’d left back at the White Tower. I exhaled while tracing a finger across his face and his blazing green eyes, wondering how this shadow of someone else’s past could leave such a notable void.

  The photograph was half the evidence I’d brought with me to my hearing. The letter to Edgar was the other half. I opened the crumpled ball of paper and smoothed it out. The words written on it were in my own handwriting—words I’d used to trick Edgar into revealing the recipe for his youth elixir, the potion I’d hoped would save his life. It hadn’t worked.

  My lips trembled. I missed Edgar too.

  As I sat there, with these two written reminders of my interference with Valcas’ and Edgar’s pasts, I wondered what the punishment for their existence would be. Would it hurt as much as losing green-eyed Valcas and Edgar? I wondered. And I waited.

  Before long I heard a knock on the doorframe. I hurriedly slipped the photo and letter inside my backpack.

  Two people walked into the room, both with familiar faces. The face that did not have a sour look on it belonged to Mom. The sour face belonged to the present version of Valcas, so changed from the photograph of his younger self. I knew that the eyes behind his dark glasses were a holographic ice-gray color, milky and sickly looking. Terrifying. He looked and acted just as youthful, but I knew he was far more jaded. Something in his life had gone terribly wrong.

  Valcas waited inside the doorway while Mom advanced toward me.

  Mom seemed relieved and genuinely happy to see me, which was odd given how long it had been since she’d last visited me and Uncle Al’s cottage by the lake. I smiled warily, eying the long blond hair she’d plaited in a French braid that trailed down her back. Concern clouded her smooth face and sharp, dark eyes—the same black-brown color that mine used to be.

  I sighed. Mom was right. She hadn’t lied to me. She wasn’t a traveler. An unofficial object, such as the travel glasses, had never affected her.

  Mom hugged me tightly, thanking Valcas the whole time. “You are a dependable friend. Thank you, Valcas. This means so much to me.”

  “You’re welcome, Ms. Winston,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes. His voice could have charmed the curl out of my t
ightly wound mop of dark spiraled hair, but my doubts about him and the sour look on his face were enough to keep it tightly coiled. His allure worked wonders on Mom, though.

  “Please—Doreen is fine,” she said.

  Valcas had a cheerleader. Great.

  “Let’s have a look at you, Calla.”

  I tensed as Mom placed her hands on my glasses and removed them from my face.

  MOM GASPED as she looked at me. “Oh! Calla—”

  I blinked back the tears coating my hideous transformation. The last time I checked, my eyes were a sickly green, lighter than Valcas’ original emerald green eyes, and as dull as dirt. I winced, knowing the combined effect of my sapped eye color, rounded cheeks and sharp chin made me look feline and impish.

  “I’ve been studying the effects of the glasses,” Valcas said. “I hope to develop an antidote to the obvious flaw in my Uncle Edgar’s invention.”

  “How much more harm will come to her?” Mom asked. “Look at her already—”

  I bit my lip to keep from smiling. Valcas had lost his cheerleader.

  Mom sighed. I recognized it as her tired sigh, the one she used when she didn’t want to deal with something—the one she used whenever I asked questions about my father—which was usually right before she changed the subject. “We should have lunch before the hearing,” she said. “It will be a short procedure, but you should be alert and well rested.”

  Valcas stepped aside to let me follow Mom out of the room. He didn’t seem as high and mighty as he had been when he and Mom entered the waiting room. He was more like a dog walking with his tail between his legs.

  WE HAD lunch at a cafeteria. I didn’t pay much attention to what I ate. I’d grabbed a prepackaged sandwich and a bottle of water out of a cooler and placed them on my tray.

  Mom and Valcas watched me eat while they sipped black coffee.

  “What will the hearing be like?” I asked.

  “A couple of other offenders will present their cases before you,” Mom said. “You’ll get to see how the process works before you are called to the podium. All you need to do is be truthful. Don’t try to evade the Commissioner’s questions. The more cooperative you are, the better your chances will be.”