Revolving Door: Volume 3
Cords and Chains - II
Content warnings (may contain spoilers)
This chapter depicts decaying corpses (described), intravenous hypodermic needles, parental abuse and trauma response to abuse.
Don’t underestimate yourself. You’ll show everyone what you can do. We both will.
It was upon that statement that all of Pala’s resolve now rested, and all her fire, for she had never heard such words in her life before, so glowing and so certain—so certain of her.
The morning Liss was to brief Pala on her first mission, she dressed as tidily as she could. She pulled on a blue tunic, slightly too long, and tied a silver sash around her waist. She met Fen in the hallway—the purple tunic he wore was embroidered with subtle black flowers. Together, they climbed the wide stairs from the foyer to the prayer hall.
Pala had been told to bring note-taking materials. She clutched her sketchbook in her hands, a pencil slotted into the rings. “Did you sleep okay?” Fen asked as they walked in step.
She nodded. “Best sleep since we got here.”
A breeze rustled the leaves like paper; he inhaled as it billowed in through the windows. In place of panes, there were slanting wooden slats that could be lifted to let air in, or closed with a lever, perhaps to keep rain at bay. No mosquitoes here. Not like home.
This prayer hall had been made for an audience of five hundred, but today it was empty. The arching windows soared, open to the elements, and the floor had been built to withstand them too, sloping to shallow edge gutters which fed into drains. As they walked, footsteps amplified by massive echoes, Pala began to imagine standing in this hall in the downpour.
She was quickly disturbed from that exercise when she noticed that they had been the last to arrive. Noma stood at the altar transcribing a book. Liss lay on the altar top, head propped up on her elbows, watching the other girl write.
“Two minutes early, what a pleasant surprise!” Liss called out as they arrived at the altar steps, her voice booming across the hall. Together, Pala and Fen ascended halfway up the stairs, and by then Liss had sprung off the table. “Today is a momentous day, Pala. Your very first mission without me! The task is very simple. I have been made aware of the existence of a number of scientific documents that I would very much like to have. But they are scattered across a few worlds.”
“A few?”
“Oh, yes. There are more worlds than just our own, didn't you know? They have been travelled and documented by scholars of old.”
As she spoke, Noma stepped from behind the altar and exchanged a nod with Liss. She descended the steps to meet Pala and Fen, holding out a sheet of paper she had just filled with writing. She could not speak much English, but she relayed her words to Liss, and Liss did the speaking for her.
“The paper contains the titles and locations of the three documents. Read it carefully. Memorise it or take notes—we will be taking it back. This task is governed by a number of terms of success. Now, pay good attention…”
Pala flipped open her sketchbook and began to take notes with her plastic pencil—facetious utensils, hardly worthy of the gravitas of the instructions she was being relayed. Every one of Liss’ words rippled across the hallway, the pillars repeating her voice back to them.
Never before had she faced someone quite so blindingly terrible and grand. If her parents terrified her, then Liss was twice that: never unsure, never showing anything but the most transcendent of conviction. So sharp was the blade of her will that she felt it could cut anything, even space and time. And there was a cord on her wrist binding her to this towering being.
How could she be everything that Liss believed she was? But how could she bear to disappoint her? Liss gave absolutely no ambiguity in her instructions. “I expect all documents gathered in fourteen days or less. Am I understood?”
“Yes, Liss.” Pala bowed her head for good measure. Fourteen days was plenty to make six jumps.
“Wait, two weeks?” Fen burst out. “We have to get home sometime. I have medical appointments I can’t miss!”
Liss had never spared Fen the same cajoling circumlocution as Pala. To his interruption, she narrowed her eyes. But then Noma turned to her with a quick whisper, and Liss said, “Have as many visits as you need to stay alive. Pala can bring you there. But don’t you dare delay her work.”
“Sure, whatever,” he grumbled.
”Pala, I’m trusting you to keep a watch on Fen’s diversions. If you aren’t back in two weeks, I will come find you. Understood?”
“I…I understand.” Pala glanced at Fen, but he was still glaring at the floor.
“Good! Now, head back to your rooms and start preparing.”
Just like that, the freedom to move had been thrust back into Pala’s hands.
The first thing they did with it was to attend to the overdue matter of Fen’s obligations. It had been five days since they had left. Though, on tumbling out of the breach into his living room, Taito and Diyana flew into a furore and paced rantingly around the dining table, there was no panic at the pair’s half-baked excuse about a surprise vacation.
“Don’t frighten us like that again!” Diyana cried out while Taito patted her shoulder. “Next time tell us if you're going away. Okay?”
“Okay, okay,” Fen murmured.
Taito folded his arms. “You missed your appointment, my goodness. I thought you started writing them down?”
“I…it was just bad timing,” he mumbled. He didn't know how to tell them the truth, even now. How could he make it make sense?
His father sighed. “We can book another one, but you know they need a week.”
“Yeah. I'll stay until then. Then I gotta go again. Pala will come collect me.”
“No! No going anywhere,” Diyana cut in, with the sort of gentle force that always stopped him in his tracks. “We drive you home. And you stay put. No questions.”
“But—wait—no—”
His mother clicked her tongue, and Fen clenched his fists beneath the table, but that was the end of his protests. He exchanged a helpless look with Pala.
One awkward lunch later, the pair retreated to Fen's room to lounge in his bed. Rough fabric, too-thin blanket, all smelling of home—it was so soporific and drowning that briefly he did wish he didn’t have to go—that he had dreamt up that entire ordeal.
But Pala was here, sitting beside him, and on her wrist there was a knotted cord. Chances to linger were in short supply.
“Will you be able to get away from them?” Pala asked.
Fen’s eyes darted to his door. “Come get me when I’m done,” he answered. “By Travelling. You can do that, right?”
Pala’s eyes widened. “Yeah—but—won’t they get angry?”
He shook his head. “Even if they ground me after that, what can they do? I'll let them ground me a hundred times if it means I get to help you. But will you be okay doing Liss’ job without me?”
“I will be, I think,” she murmured. “I’ll just…focus on you when I Travel.”
“You can do it without me. I know you can. But—wait, let me give you something.”
Tumbling from his bed, Fen crouched by his desk and opened his drawer, rooting around among dried-up pens and unused notebooks until he pulled from its depths his spare key. Then he dug some more, and came up with a piece of string—dark red, the kind that students made friendship bracelets with, threading beads onto the strands.
He was long past those pastimes, but he could still thread the key onto the string without looking.
“Take it,” he said, stretching out to place it in her cupped hands. “It’s the key to our front door. That way…no matter what happens…you can always come home.”
“Thank you,” she whispered, looping it around her neck, like a charm. “I think…well, if you've gotta stay, then I should head off. The sooner I go, the sooner I'll be back.”
Fen’s face twisted with a frown. “Yeah, that's true. I'll see you…soon.”
She offered a wan smile, then leaned over and pulled him into a hug, both desperately clawing back these remaining seconds together. “Good luck at the doctor’s,” she whispered.
“And good luck finding those papers.”
Clutching that key in her fist, Pala slid off the bed, taking her warmth with her. She waved, eyes welling up, and made the next leap from his bedroom floor.
Then, Fen was staring at his stacks of dog-eared textbooks, space snapping back into place where his friend had been.
Fen was right: Pala was capable of Travelling alone—though she never was truly without him, warming his key in her palm before each jump.
She quickly learned she did not have to worry about food, drink nor sleep when she had five worlds at her fingertips. She could pilfer food from a picnic table or a supermarket, cook it on a stove in the next world over—instant noodles were her friend—and eat the meal anywhere that she pleased. Her backpack grew heavy with stolen snacks.
Sometimes she forgot where she had stolen them. Sometimes she forgot more important things. The English name of the tree that produced sweet white blossoms. The street number of her parents' house.
Although Travelling was mostly not taxing, she found that doing it thrice or more in a row made her too dizzy to walk. She began to space out her leaps by hours, taking ten minutes here and there to bathe and change.
She had avoided Havaiki entirely—she knew, if she thought too hard, that she would pop up next to Fen again and land him in hot soup with his parents. Instead, she chose empty hospital wards and campsite beds, places no one would check for days at a time while they were not in use.
It was in adventures strung together by those tiny comforts that Pala found the first document. Hidden two worlds past her own, the files were stored in a database on an island. But she soon found that with its author and the name of the lab, she could locate a hardcopy in the office of an employee who had thought to print and label it. She brought the dog-eared copy back to her temple home base and stashed it in a drawer.
The second document was in the locked room of an archive. The locals spoke English, so she asked about the text at the counter, and was gruffly told it was not available to borrow. But now she knew where the copy was held, it was easily uncovered and plucked from its place, for the lock had not been designed to protect against people slipping in from the gap between worlds.
*
The third document, or so Liss’ notes indicated, was in a Russian military base.
The lands around it were bleak and snowy. Pala found the edifice collapsed into a pile of rubble, spanning horizon to red horizon.
A second leap, back and forth, brought her into a chamber so dark she could not take two steps without stubbing her toe. She needed a torch. She leapt forward two worlds, aiming for a shop with lighting supplies.
She found herself in a souvenir store where every sign was in Spanish, a speaker somewhere blasting the local music while tourists milled about. A bottle opener torchlight with the name of Buenos Aires in blue would have to do. She snuck it away from that plane and returned to the world of reddening snow.
Once again, creeping through that icy, subterranean dark, Pala clicked the torch on. The thin white beam cut through the twirling dust. She shivered and pulled her arms closer. She could go get a jacket…but no, she had already leapt four times, and the dizziness was starting to set in.
The light beam met a fallen shelf. She tiptoed around it. It was too quiet, and the stench of decay was growing noxious here. As her next footstep crunched, a rat skittered away towards the fumes of decay, and she shrieked and stumbled to find herself…
…face to face with a person. A person, or their remains, slumped over the shelf, with no eyes in their sockets. Their spine showed through the decaying rags of their skin, and the sweet, putrid stench was so thick it seemed to stain the inside of her mouth.
Pala felt her stomach roil, her lunch threatening to come up. She could not scream, for she was sure she would vomit first. When she closed her eyes, she saw Liss throwing her to the ground, hitting her with a cane like her mother did. When she opened her eyes, she saw the corpse.
“I can’t—I can’t!” she choked, clutching the key that hung from her neck, and leapt, and she did not stop till she had Travelled four worlds up.
The memory of the decaying body carried Pala three hops. By then, all she remembered was having seen one, but none of its details.
When she crashed onto the clinic floor, right at Fen’s feet, he almost ripped out the cannula from leaping. “Pala!” he shouted, leaning resolutely back in his chair.
Across the room, the nurse dropped his phone and shouted, “How the hell did you get in here?”
Pala crawled to her feet while the horror settled upon her. “Fen, I can’t,” she croaked, tears spilling down her cheeks.
The nurse, much taller broader than she, seized her arm and dragged her towards the exit.
The last she saw of Fen while she was plucked through the door was his stricken, glassy stare.
*
Fen’s parents were waiting in the chairs outside the clinic. When Pala was sent out, they both straightened with surprise, with Diyana pointing. They called her name and waved her over. She sat down beside Taito, head hung, saying nothing.
Taito cleared his throat. “Um. Thanks for visiting Fen. I didn't know you were here.”
“Yeah. Of course, had to be here for him.”
“Did you really stop going to school? Why?”
“Er…I…decided my parents were right…”
Twenty minutes of increasingly nonsensical fibs later, Fen reappeared in the same hallway with a plaster over the needle site. He seemed in a greater hurry than he should be, for having just been on a blood drip.
“Can I talk to Pala for a minute?” he burst out.
His parents looked at each other, then at her. “Don't be too long,” said Diyana.
Fen grasped Pala’ hand and dragged her in the direction of the water coolers. Once out of the parents’ line of sight, he said, “Is everything okay? What happened?”
Pala shook her head. “I…I got two of the documents. But the third one…I ended up in a collapsed building, and there was—a corpse. I could see stuff I didn't want to. I saw a corpse and I just had to leave, and I forgot everything about it to make the jumps. But the document, I don't know where it is, and I can't go back, I can’t go back…”
He grasped both of her hands. “Hey. If it was in a collapsed building, just tell Liss that. The building was in ruins, the documents were destroyed.”
“You mean…lie?” Her eyes widened.
“It's not a lie if it's a reasonable conclusion based on what you saw.”
“I…guess so. It still feels like I'm making something up.”
“I know. It’s harder to say something than nothing.” He glanced at his parents. “Let’s just…go back to Liss’ world, okay?”
“You don’t want to tell them anything?”
He sagged, eyes drifting to his parents again. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we could just…tell them the truth.”
*
The pair stood before Taito and Diyana, glancing shakily at each other every few seconds. And Fen was the one who began to explain.
That Pala was a Traveller, that she could hop between universes, that she had been bound by a stranger beyond their world, with powers unlike anything they had ever seen before.
“Okay, stop telling tall tales,” was the first thing Diyana said. “What are you really sneaking away for?”
Pala and Fen looked helplessly at each other. “Nothing,” he pressed on. “It's the truth. I won't lie about something important—you know that.”
At first both parents raised their eyebrows and frowned. But then, Fen supposed, such oddities were whispered about often enough in Havaiki that they shifted quickly from disbelief to concern. And when Pala showed them her new rope bracelet, then leapt out of existence and fell back into the universe behind them, that concern became a confused terror.
“It's real? You're not making it up? There are… Oh, Fen. This is a lot!” Taito clutched his head.
“Why would I make this up?” Fen snapped. “Wouldn’t it be way easier if I’d come up with a more believable reason?”
Diyana frowned. “So this stranger, Liss…is stalking Pala? And she can explode things? With her mind?”
Fen nodded slowly. “I know it's very hard to believe, but we really need to go back. Please. If we don’t…I’ll be in a lot of danger.”
Diyana sighed. “If it's all true, then we can’t stop you from leaving,” she murmured, with a sort of halting surrender. “Right?”
He nodded again. “I'm only telling you this because I don't want to hide it from you. It’s not because I am asking your permission. I love you, Mama and Tā, but this is so important that I will break your rules for it. You can ground me for a year after I come back.”
With a sad smile, Taito clapped a hand on Fen’s shoulder. “I’m worried about you. I always am. You're a good boy—but you keep getting into all kinds of trouble. Giving us both heart attacks!”
“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I promise I'll keep as safe as I can.”
“I know. You’re sixteen, you can decide for yourself. Just don't forget next month's appointment, 'kay.”
Diyana turned to Pala. “You…keep our son safe, okay? With your…magical powers?”
“I'll try my best, Aunty,” Pala murmured.
He couldn't tell if his mother truly believed them, or of she was simply playing along while she processed everything in secret. They both seemed to be beginning to come to terms with it by now—that if he said he was leaving, that was that: they would open the door tomorrow morning and find his room empty.
Still, the dread in their eyes wrenched him in two.
Fen dashed forward and pulled both of his parents into the tightest hug he had ever given them. They both pulled him into their arms, snug as a sweater on a cold day, and he could see the glistening of their eyes when he looked up. “We'll be back. I'll make sure.”
Then, as they pulled apart, Pala reached out to take his hand. “Let's go report back,” she whispered.
Fen nodded back, returning her grip. It had to be done, one way or another. “Mama, Tā, I'll see you soon.”
Out in the vivid dusk on the Undying Ring, Liss sat with Noma on the temple’s highest terrace, beneath the shadow of that forbidding tower and its highest ring. They warded off the evening chill with each other’s warmth, arms twined together.
“I've known you so long, and yet I'm still learning new things about you,” whispered Noma.
“I'm learning,” Liss murmured, “that you're very easy to tease.” She shifted her grip so she could nuzzle Noma’s neck, drawing a tiny squeal.
“Liss!” Noma gasped, arms squeezing tighter. They sighed as they sank into the embrace, Noma burying her face in Liss’ shoulder. “Liss. If I can be honest…”
Liss grinned. “You can always be honest.”
“Well…so much is happening. Travellers…strange universes…you’re doing so much that I still don’t understand, no matter how much I read. And I can’t quite connect it all together, I can’t see how finding these documents is going to free us from Orsand.”
“That's all fair,” Liss murmured, musing in her mind's eye upon all the cords and chains that linked her grand plan together. “You remember what we discussed on the smuggler's island, don't you? None of us are free until we all are. So as long as there's a single place in the world that Orsand still controls…they will keep crawling back. No, Orsand doesn't exist without conquest. All its scientific knowledge, its secret technologies, it used to lord over the rest of the world. And now, we will use ours to eradicate them.”
Noma nodded slowly. “That makes sense…even if there's still parts I that I can't place in the picture. But it's alright. I don't mind not understanding some things.” With a simple smile, her eyes drifted towards the sea yet again.
Liss sighed. You have a shortcut to my heart, she thought, with a chill that—like the evening breeze—bore joy and fear in equal measure.