“I found a little information, as you said, in stories. Everyone was clear that there were limits. I got into the records from the black box of the ship the LAMP was recovered from too, which had some logs from the person who had the LAMP before.” She grimaced. “It took a while to break the encryption and piece the information back together, but I had time on my hands. It took three years before I found a way.”
Obviously, she had, but Lane was beginning to suspect that it wasn’t the usual way.
“What did you do to open the LAMP?”
“I pictured a pair of giant doors, like in some old movie on Earth, as completely as I could—visualized it—and then pushed them open. Why?”
Lane laughed. “Most people just say it out loud.”
“Oh. It didn’t say in the instructions, and I’d said ‘open’ near it several times without anything happening.”
“How badly do you want this?” Lane asked.
“With all I am,” Ariadne said, then shook her head. “But it won’t be enough.”
“I can’t break the rules of the universe. But I can probably bend them.” Lane met her eyes. “I’m not sure that we can do it, but I’m willing to try if you are.”
“Yes.” There was no hesitation.
“It might be dangerous.”
“Everything is dangerous. All the more so for me.”
“Okay, let’s go back to where we met.” Lane stood up, but stopped when he realized Ariadne hadn’t moved. “What?”
“Is there any danger to anyone else here?”
“No. It’ll either work, which might be dangerous to you or me, but no one else. Or it won’t, and then there’s no danger to anyone.”
Now she stood and joined him. “Let’s go.”
* * *
Lane spread some foam padding under a thin blanket on the cleared floor, just in case. Ariadne did something on her wrist computer to set it to send a message if she didn’t cancel it before their self-imposed time ran out, but Lane only caught the barest sliver of the technical details of what she was doing.
“Done,” she said, pressing another couple of keys.
Lane heard the nerves in her voice, but she didn’t hesitate to take his hand when he reached out to pull her to her feet.
“Okay,” he said, “picture the place you’ve wanted to go the most. Hold that image as tightly and completely as you did to open the LAMP. And I’ll try to make a portal like the LAMP’s to send us there for a few seconds. Or however long the energy lasts. I just know that this’ll burn through the power quicker than anything I’ve ever tried.”
Ariadne nodded and closed her eyes. Lane stood behind her shoulder and rested his fingers against her temples. “Ready?”
“Yes.” The word was barely a breath, but it was backed by her will and shimmered in the air. Lane pressed his will to hers, boosting it and channeling it. Then she raised her hands and pushed them out, as if she were pressing on giant double doors.
The world opened.
* * *
“Ariadne? We’re here.”
Her eyes went wide as she saw grass rippling around their feet and then gazed out over white chalk cliffs to a choppy sea, and the blue sky beyond. Wind tugged her hair in front of her eyes, and she pushed it aside with a laugh. She tasted the sea salt on her lips and finally believed that maybe, one day, she would again be somewhere other than Vale. With that, the growing panic that had been building for years eased.
She turned to Lane, who stood beside her, a hand under her elbow.
She smiled. “See, you can change people. You just have to take the long way around. Like the rest of us.” Her eyes fluttered closed, and Lane caught her before she fell, returning them in an instant to the little room in Vale.
He swore as he checked her pulse. But it was steady and strong under his fingertips, so he lowered her to the padded floor. As he sat, waiting for her to wake up, he studied her retreat, brimming with fresh Wish energy. For once, resupplying and moving on wasn’t the first thing on his list.
* * *
He tweaked a few things in Ariadne’s hideaway. The tiny room grew an annex, with a sofa and a pile of patchwork quilts, one of which he tugged over Ariadne. Next to it he Wished his bookshelf of favorite books. If he was staying a bit, he’d want those. He would have given her better computer equipment, but he knew when he was outclassed in a subject. Instead he Wished into existence a picture of the two of them at the top of the cliffs beside the old postcard. And, last but not least, he Wished a coffee maker, beans, and a battery-powered grinder onto a tray near the couch. Then he pulled out a book and waited.
Ariadne woke just in time to turn off the automated message to her mother.
“You could have deactivated it. I was fine.”
“You passed out. Even if it was just to sleep, I’m not a doctor and I’m not a computer tech. So I wasn’t going to mess with it.”
Ariadne made a face at him but didn’t continue to protest. Instead she asked, “What are you going to do now?”
“Stick around until I’m sure you’re okay. That little stunt probably shouldn’t have worked, and it took a lot of energy from both of us, whether you’ve noticed it or not.”
She stretched and slid her hands behind her head, a grin lighting up her face. “It was worth it.”
Lane nodded, only a little surprised to find that it had been, even if this new headache lasted a century.
That was what the Heart Scale Center advertisement whispered to Marcus and Grace as they stood outside the building. They clutched the newspaper between them, the paper flickering with promises pressed between black lines of vitalized ink. The scales in the picture moved up and down like the playground seesaw they used to jump on as children. Back when the city still made room for such things. Back when they were little and all that mattered was whether Marcus had remembered to bring the jump rope Grace liked when he knocked on her front door to play. Back before they’d been each other’s first kisses, first touches, first loves.
The parking lot swelled with cars, an attendant stacking them like bento boxes in a vertical iron grid. This place had become the most popular spot in the entire city; lines of eager people hoping to get an appointment stretched around the block.
“You sure you want to do this?” Marcus asked, trying to control his face and keep his expression blank. His mama always said his eyes told the world too much about him.