Tess sat on her bed, her nightie-clad knees a snowy peak in miniature. In her hands she held the device. She’d barely put it down in the hours since she’d gone to bed and she’d thought so hard—about Mr. Cleat and his Society, about what she’d seen that day, about Thomas and her father and how it could possibly all fit together—that she knew she’d never be able to sleep. Violet sat on top of Tess’s thick nighttime braid, but could offer no advice on what to do next. She thrummed gently, patiently, waiting for Tess to decide.
“It’s like a jewelry box, isn’t it?” Tess whispered to Violet. “Only there’s something in it better than jewels. It looked like starlight, didn’t it, girl? Starlight, captured somehow.” Tess chewed her lip as she thought. She slid her experiments notebook off the table that stood beside her bed and flipped to a fresh page, and then she thought for a moment, tapping the end of her pencil against her chin.
Solid starlight, she wrote. Does it exist? It had felt like the void at the heart of the viewer had been filled with something, not just light, when she’d managed to open it earlier that day. Tess had the sense that she couldn’t have stuck a finger through the void, for instance; there would be a barrier in the way. So the light has to be solid, somehow. She frowned. Like glass. But how is that possible? She thought for so long that she found herself doodling stars on the page, but nothing useful occurred to her. Violet grew so bored she began to crawl down Tess’s arm and away, determined to explore the crocheted jungle of the blanket.
Tess shook herself out of her thoughts, skipped a few lines on her page and began again under a new heading: Markings. She underlined the word three times, a sure sign she was about to draw some conclusions.
Equally spaced, she noted, and equal in size. They look precisely measured and cut. She picked up the viewer again and held it to the light, angling it so that the markers were illuminated one by one. Three metal, she continued, holding the viewer in one hand and writing awkwardly with the other. Three stone. And two precious stone—sparkling, faceted. One red-tinged, one green.
Tess nodded, satisfied with her progress. She placed the viewer back in her lap again. It was a warm weight, like something alive.
One has a tarnish—not quite like rust. More like dirt? She’d tried scrubbing the discolored marker with a wet handkerchief, rubbing it with a licked fingertip and scratching at it with her thumbnail, but none of these had made the slightest difference. Perhaps not significant. Might be a property of the metal? It didn’t look like anything Tess had ever seen, but she had to remind herself that this device wasn’t like anything she’d ever held in her hand before. For all I know, she thought, that metal might have come from another world.
The realization hit her in the gut like a swallowed-down mouthful of cold porridge. “But that’s exactly it,” she whispered to herself. Violet, busily attacking a rose made of knotted yarn, paused to look up at her. “They come from a different world.” She picked up her pencil again and began to write, faster and faster with every word.
Not just one different world—many? Perhaps a different world for every marker? They might be like…Her pencil hovered over the page as she tried to find the right word. Keys? She continued. Each marker is a setting—she underlined the word so hard her pencil nib almost snapped—that can bring the person using it to the particular world the marker comes from.
She sat back and stared at the words she’d just written. They made no sense whatsoever and yet Tess knew—felt—that they were right. Violet began the slow journey up the bed and Tess picked her up as she drew near. “But feelings are no good,” she whispered to the spider. “I need to do some experiments, don’t I? I’ve got to test this theory. Facts are what I need, not feelings.” Violet kept her thoughts to herself, but her gentle thrum was enough to let Tess know that, as always, she and her beloved friend were in agreement.
Taking in a deep breath, Tess ran her thumb over the surface of the device; did she dare to open the void here, in a house where there was nobody she could trust? Well, she thought with a shrug, there’s Millie. But nobody else. She dug her teeth into her lower lip, and before she quite realized what she was doing, she’d raised her thumb, ready to place it over the metallic whorls—
The floorboards creaked outside her bedroom door and there was a gentle but insistent rap. Tess jumped, scrambling to shove the viewer underneath her pillow. “Miss de Sousa,” came Mrs. Thistleton’s voice from outside the door. “It’s almost eleven o’clock and long past your bedtime. I’ll thank you to douse your light now, please, and get some rest.”
Tess didn’t trust her voice to reply. She simply leaped for the lamp and switched it off with quivering fingers. Luckily for her, it seemed the housekeeper was content to assume Tess would do as she was told.
“My thanks,” Mrs. Thistleton replied. “Pleasant dreams,” she added in a tone that suggested she felt disgusted by the very notion.
Tess lay back against her pillows and tried to catch her breath. She had to continue her experiments; that much was clear. But I can’t do them here, she told herself. Her thoughts turned to the chapel. It’s just what I need, she thought mournfully, but how am I going to get there?
Just then a gust of night air puffed her curtain out into the room. Behind the billowing curtain, there was an open window.
Thomas yawned. He lay on his sleeping mat on the workroom floor, reading a newspaper by torchlight. The news was almost two weeks old, but Thomas had to rely on what he could swipe from under his guardian’s nose and Mackintosh usually kept the papers in his bedroom for days after he’d finished reading them.
“My parents’ bedroom, I mean. Not his,” Thomas muttered to Moose, who gave him a sympathetic look.
Thomas flipped the paper closed. Its headline screamed about the still-ongoing Liverpool Blitz, and the photo beneath it was chilling. Dublin felt safer than anywhere in Britain, but only just. Thomas hoped the enemy wouldn’t think of dropping bombs here, too.
“But I suppose it might be exciting, eh?” he said to Moose, who perched on his hand to take a better look at the picture of the destroyed city across the narrow sea, his nose twitching all the time. “The whine and the waiting, then the boom.” Thomas tried to grin, but fear quickly suffocated his enthusiasm. The radio broadcasts and the newspaper reports made it sound like the war was a great adventure, but Thomas knew better than that. He knew how death felt, up close.
He threw the paper on top of the pile he’d scavenged. There were a lot of uses for newspaper, Thomas had discovered, particularly when you were trying to sleep in an abandoned observatory in the middle of winter. He guarded them like they were treasure.
Finally he flicked off his torch—and blinked, confused.
“Do you see that, Moosie?” he asked the mouse. Moose’s nose quivered and he scampered to Thomas’s shoulder. There was a bluish light coming from downstairs, shining up through the trapdoor.
Carefully, but as quickly as he could, he peered down through the trapdoor. At the bottom of the ladder, he could see an eerie but welcome sight and he couldn’t help but laugh. It was the girl he’d seen earlier, floating in her shining circle, peering at him across the gap between worlds.
“You’re back!” he said, clattering down the ladder. He could see his own wide smile reflected on her face and she gave him a wave. Moose ran up onto his head and the girl laughed. It made no sound.
She held up a finger as if to ask him to wait and the next second she lifted her hand again—and there was a spider as big as her palm.
“Aargh!” Thomas said, recoiling a little, but the girl raised her eyebrows at him. She brought the spider closer to the surface and Thomas and Moose leaned in. The spider’s eyes shone with a friendly light and Thomas found himself smiling at her.
“She’s very lovely,” he said, speaking slowly so that his words were clear. The girl—Tess, Thomas suddenly remembered—grinned widely and nodded.
Then the girl was speaking. Thomas watched her lips, frowning in concentration. “Where are you?” she said.
“Dublin,” he replied. “Ireland.” He spelled out the words, but the girl’s confusion remained. “Where are you?” he asked, and she turned away to scribble a note. When she held it up, all Thomas could do was blink.
“Hurdleford?” he said, frowning. “In the Briternian Isles? I’ve never heard of it.” He looked at her and noticed she was chewing on her lip, just as he did when he was thinking hard.
Tess turned away to scribble another note. This time it read: I want to go where you are. No idea how! Help me?
Thomas barely had time to say “Yes!” before the light in the void faded and Tess once again vanished from view.