Tess sat on her pew in the old chapel and took the viewer out of her pocket. She let it sit in her palm for a moment or two, its markings reflecting what light there was, and thought about the theories she’d been forming over the past day or so. Could they be right? Was this viewer not just a way to see between worlds, but a way to move between them? Could she use it to help her rediscover the ability she’d lost, or forgotten—and if she could, where would she go? Who might she find? Question piled upon question and Tess squeezed her eyes shut against the flood of thoughts.
I’ll just have to experiment, she told herself in a calm no-nonsense voice. I’ve done hundreds of experiments. These ones will be no different. Despite her best efforts, her mind fizzled and crackled, overflowing like a witch’s cauldron. It took all her effort to quieten it enough to open her eyes again.
She looked down at the viewer sitting innocently in her hand. She ran her thumb lightly over its surface, feeling the metal warm to her touch, and placed her thumb right at its heart. Gently, she pressed.
Immediately it began to open, and quicker than a breath, the shimmering circle had reappeared. Faster than a thought, Tess put it to her eye. She blinked through the circle and movement on the floor caught her eye. A mouse! She almost drew her feet up in horror before she realized it was Thomas’s mouse. She turned to her right, a smile already breaking over her face, and there he was, the boy from another world who already seemed so familiar. This time when he waved, she waved back.
“Hello,” she whispered, smiling.
A smile was his silent reply. Then Thomas picked something up from the pew beside him and held it up for Tess to see. It was a notebook, rather battered-looking. Some words were written on its cover in an elegant looping hand.
She read the words. Helena Molyneaux, Notes, 1936.
Tess felt her heart flutter. “Who is that?” she mouthed.
Thomas chewed on his top lip. “My mother,” he replied after a moment or two. He put the notebook on his knees and began to flip through it. Finally he reached the page he wanted and then he held it up.
On the page Tess saw a diagram and instantly she knew what it was because it reminded her exactly of the conversation she’d had in the bower seat with Mr. Cleat the day before. She saw ten straight lines piled on top of one another, just like sheets of paper in a stack. Then the note-taker—Thomas’s mother? Tess supposed it had to be—had drawn an x on one of the sheets in the middle, with arrows pointing away from it, both up and down. Tess’s eyes widened as she stared at the diagram and her thoughts began to coalesce.
An event, Tess reasoned. One big enough to have an effect on neighboring realities, just like Mr. Cleat was talking about. This is his Interdimensional Harmonics. She held her breath and continued to examine the page. Written beside the diagram, on the same level as the x, was the word Tunguska and a date: 1908. She peered at it, wondering, Wasn’t that the year of the explosion in the Rus Empire? Is Tunguska the name for it—or perhaps the name of the place?
She met Thomas’s eye and nodded, giving him a small smile. If he was surprised that she seemed to understand the diagram, he didn’t show it. Instead he flipped through his mother’s notebook again until he found another page. He held it up and Tess missed a breath. Her mouth fell open as she stared at the page and Thomas’s expression turned solemn.
On the new page of Thomas’s mother’s notebook was a drawing of something that looked a lot like her device. It wasn’t exactly right—perhaps it had been made by a person who’d only ever considered it as an idea—but it was close enough.
And underneath it were written two words in Helena’s handwriting: The Star-spinner. Beneath that was a newer note, written by Thomas. IT’S CONNECTED, SOMEHOW, WITH THE EXPLOSION, Tess read.
Tess’s hand shook. Connected? She jerked the viewer—the Star-spinner—away from her face and stared at it, watching the crackling light of the void without looking through it. It doesn’t change anything, she told herself, trying to dampen her sudden fear. You have to know.
After a minute or two she peered through again and found Thomas. He seemed worried, as though he’d expected her not to come back, and he smiled when he saw her.
“Your parents?” Tess asked. “Can they help?”
Thomas’s answer was short. “Dead,” he said, and then he looked away. Tess felt sick. When he looked back at her again, Tess mouthed, “Sorry,” but Thomas didn’t—or couldn’t—reply.
He wiped his face, taking off his glasses to rub his eyes. Eventually he put them back on and sniffed, blinking at Tess. She felt a yawn building and tried to hold it in, unsuccessfully. He followed her example a second or two later. “Come back soon?” he said, his eyes soft with hope.
Tess made a face, balancing her notebook on one knee as she wrote. LESSONS START TOMORROW. LATIN! I’LL COME AT NIGHT.
Thomas stuck out his tongue, looking disgusted. “Latin!” Then he grinned. “I’ll be here,” he said.
Tess nodded just as the light began to sputter. “See you tomorrow!” she called, and Thomas’s grateful smile was the last thing she saw before it went out completely.
Thomas went upstairs, bringing his mother’s notebook with him, and slid it back among its shelf-mates. Then he settled himself on his sleeping mat and looked at the spines of his mother’s collected notes, sighing. He wished again that he’d been able to bring all of them.
Since he’d retrieved the books from the house, he’d spent a long time just looking through them, thinking about how clever his mother had been—and his dad, too, for he was to be found in these books as well. On several occasions his square, firm hand would appear, writing a question or observation, correcting a formula, leaving a doodle. A page in one of the notebooks had a pen-and-ink sketch on it, one which his mother had drawn of his father as he’d pored over something or other, and Thomas had studied it for hours.
That notebook was now beneath his pillow.
He sat cross-legged in the light of a candle and thought. Moose sat on his knee, gazing out into the darkness, and Thomas stroked his back.
“I was so sure they’d sent her,” Thomas whispered, and Moose’s ears twitched. “So sure, Moose. I’ve been waiting so long for a message, keeping an eye on their stuff, watching the Oscillometer like a hawk”—his gaze flicked to the gently hissing machine on his desk for a brief moment—“but when I saw her coming, I thought, This is it! I thought, They’re not actually gone.” He rubbed angrily at his leaking nose, squeezing his eyes shut behind his glasses, but the tears came anyway. “But they are gone, Moose. They really are.” He wiped his face on his sleeve and tried not to sob. “They’d never leave me without saying anything, they’d never just go and not try to let me know they were all right. They’d never just forget me.”
After a few minutes he lifted his face and sniffed, the ache in his chest so painful it felt like the air he was breathing had claws. “But Tess has proved one thing. Mum and Dad were right all this time. They knew this was possible, what Tess and me are doing.” Moose turned and scampered up Thomas’s sleeve until he came to rest on his shoulder. “I’ll make sure they aren’t a laughingstock anymore. Whatever Tess needs, I’m going to help her—and then together we can figure out how to prove my parents were the best scientists the world has ever known.”
He reached into his shirt pocket and took out a few crumbs of cheese. Moose crawled onto his outstretched palm to nibble at them and Thomas felt his heart slow and the pain in his chest gradually lessen. “You were the best present they ever gave me,” he whispered, running a gentle finger down Moose’s back. The mouse responded by putting one tiny paw on Thomas’s thumb and the boy smiled.
Finally Thomas blew out the candle and they lay down to sleep. High above the heads of the boy and his mouse, dashed across the face of the clear night sky, a web of stars was sparkling; in another world, in which the stars had been scattered in a different configuration across the heavens, a girl and her spider were dreaming of them.