The Slanted Worlds by Catherine Fisher Page A

least they were keeping him here. There was no sign of the military. Allenby wanted the credit for this for himself.
    Allenby crunched the cigarette in the ashtray. The door opened; the sergeant came in with two mugs on a tray. As he set them down, he gave Jake a particularly filthy look.
    Jake grabbed the tea with both handcuffed hands and drank it gratefully. The hot sweetness was a glorious comfort.
    Allenby watched. His calm, alert face was hard to read.
    â€œWhat is this machine?”
    â€œI told you. Alicia used a very strange device. It won’t have been destroyed. It looks . . . appears . . . to be made of glass. Black glass.”
    A flicker. Hardly anything, in those steady eyes. But Jake was sure.
    He put the mug down. “You
have
found it.”
    After a moment Allenby said, “Let’s say we’ve recovered . . . something. Something we don’t understand. But . . .”
    â€œTake me there. I’ll get it working for you.”
    Their eyes met across the table. It was a game of chess, Jake thought, with London the board and himself as one of the pawns, the smallest of pieces. But it had to work, because if Gideon failed him, he certainly wasn’t going to be stuck here for the rest of his life.
    Allenby sighed. Abruptly, he scraped the chair back and stood. “I must be a bloody fool,” he said.

    Sarah said, “You can’t do it, can you?”
    Piers, sitting on the floor among a pile of wiring as big as he was, looked at Venn.
    â€œIt’s not that I can’t do it exactly,” he said warily. “I mean, given time, given a bit of leeway, I could. But to be honest, I’d rather work on that page you brought.”
    â€œJake needs us now!” She scrambled up and walked angrily to the mirror, staring into its enigmatic curves.
    The mirror slanted her own gaze back at her. She knew Piers and Venn had been up all night re-aligning it. Once, they had tried to activate it. At four o’clock a shudder of noise and energy had rippled terrifyingly through the house, waking her and sending her racing out into the dark corridor and crashing into Wharton’s startled panic.
    â€œWhat the hell was that?” he’d yelled.
    Now he lay in an armchair dozing, his maroon dressing gown tied tight over a pair of ridiculous pajamas with little anchors all over them.
    She looked at the film canister. “Can we see this?”
    â€œI’ll have to find the old projector,” Piers said, not looking up.
    She frowned. Then she touched the bracelet. Gideon had told her about the Blitzed world. And Jake was there, locked up in some cell, fuming with restlessness and fear. She knew how that felt.
    â€œWhere’s Gideon?”
    â€œGone back to the Shee.” Wharton yawned. “Everything needs to seem normal. If Summer knew . . . Really, sometimes I fear for that poor boy’s sanity.”
    Venn had said nothing for ages. He watched Sarah, his glance sharp and cold.
    She said, “Listen to me. We can’t just work in the dark. We don’t have any more time to experiment and get things wrong over and over. If we make a mistake, we could miss him by years. We could be too late.” She turned to face him. “You know what to do, and you don’t have any choice about it. There’s only one man who can possibly help us now, and that man is Maskelyne.”
    Venn, leaning on the filing cabinet, stood upright. He walked slowly into the very heart of the labyrinth and stood beside her, and the dark glass showed her his face, subtly warped. He said quietly, “How can I trust you, Sarah? How can I ever be sure of you? What we want is so different.”
    â€œWhat we want is the same.” She turned on him. “Jake back. David found. Leah saved.”
    â€œAnd then?”
    â€œThen you give me the mirror.”
    He smiled, remote. “You make it all sound so easy.”