Chapter 16

Kaitlyn Carter

April

Kaitlyn Carter dreamt she was a butterfly. It was a beautiful dream! And it was a normal, regular dream—not like her dreams of the place with all the doors. She had big, beautiful wings that were white and blue and pink, and they sparkled in the sunlight. The square-cube law didn’t apply in this dream, so she was able to flit about as gracefully as a real butterfly. She fluttered over her house and up into the cloudy sky, which became stained by colors from the sunset. The clouds all moved willy-nilly, scurrying about like big bright beetles on important business. She laughed as she kept flying up, and up, and soon she was in the stars. They were big crystals drifting around, and she could push them. When they bumped into each other they made beautiful musical noises, and they scattered aurora-like trails of light behind when they moved. Kate clapped her hands in delight when they collided. She started a chain reaction, and soon the whole sky was all shivering and sparkling with light and music.

She awoke with a smile.

She sat up, yawned, fumbled for her glasses on the bedstand nearby. On her lap lay a big book of fairy tales from around the world. Kate loved fairy tales. They were so weird and interesting! She had always wanted to be and/or meet a princess. One of the ones she read last night, she remembered, had been about a man with a horrible scar. He had been in love, rejected because of the scar, but eventually had overcome obstacles and got the scar removed, and it all worked out. Kate had hoped it would end with personal growth on his part, but this had been a false hope. The moral, apparently, was that physical disfigurement obstructs true love. Kate found this to be a big fat load of baloney . She hoped so, anyway.

She reached for the mirror by her bedside and took another look at her face. No change. Same as every day since the end of January. Her left shoulder and cheek and neck looked like they were made of glass and partially shattered.

Kate hopped out of bed and got dressed. It was a big day! And tomorrow…tomorrow would most likely be even bigger . She had to make sure everyone would be okay.

In any case, she had to mess with the McFinnium one more time, being super-extra-careful, of course. And for this she needed to talk to Aunt Becky. Aunt Becky didn’t know anything about science, especially theoretical pseudo-science like the McFinnium. But she knew a lot about the scientist named Riley McFinn. After all, she used to be married to him.

Kate put on a white and blue dress with green flower print. She went to the window and checked the sky. Grey and overcast. Looked like it might rain. The roof of the lab had still not been fixed, but she had improved the temporary tarp covering to make sure it was completely secure and waterproof. She still wanted to get the roof back, but she had been so busy! And now…now she had an uneasy feeling that maybe it was too late, and after tomorrow the roof situation wouldn’t matter very much.

Looking at the sky usually reminded Kate of important things, and today was no different. The dark clouds weighed upon her, reminding her that something bad was about to happen. But also, something good. Something, in fact, maybe beautiful, like the blue sky hiding up there unseen behind the clouds. It was always up there, even in the worst storms. And the thing about storms was, they came with rainbows!

Of course, this did not include storms occurring at night. Obviously .

Her lab coat hung on a hook by the door. She grabbed it on her way out and in the hall she donned it with a spin and a flourish, for a moment surrounded by a swirling kaleidoscope of clouds and snowflakes and butterflies. It was a bit stiff and heavy from all the paint on it, but that was fine. Also there was a big ugly dark maroon spot on its left shoulder, which was not fine at all . But she couldn’t get it out and she didn’t want to make a new coat. Like her scar, it reminded her to be careful.

She marched through the shadowy, empty corridors of her wing until she reached the Study. Chess sets filled the study—all different kinds, from all over the world. Aunt Becky had started the collection long ago on her travels, and Kate continued to acquire ones she liked, although she didn’t travel much. Several chess sets were in use, paused mid-game. Most of these were games between Kate and Aunt Becky, who sometimes went days without seeing each other but always found time to come in here and make moves on the different games. It was one of the few activities Kate enjoyed with her aunt. Kate didn’t think this counted as quality time, but it was close. Sort-of. She also had a couple games with Jim, and she had recently started one with Heidi! Although Heidi was impatient and not used to playing an extended game of chess over the course of days or weeks.

The Study also contained a large number of maps and globes. A big sepia-toned globe dominated the center of the room like a star around which everything else revolved. It looked like a pin-cushion, stabbed with a little colored pin in every location that Aunt Becky had traveled to, which was almost everywhere. The different colors had different meanings. A big green one skewered their current location. Kate had checked to see where Heidi lived, off the southeast coast of New Zealand. It was roughly antipodal to where Kate lived! She had shared this exciting news with Heidi, but Heidi had not been very impressed.

Kate lingered a moment in the Study. She liked it here. Books lined the walls, and all the chess sets and globes created an atmosphere that was very studious . It smelled like paper and ink, like dust and concentration and knowledge! Liz had loved this room, predictably. Callie liked it too, for some reason.

The big sepia-toned globe was a gift to Aunt Becky from Kate’s father, Nicholas Carter. He had signed his name on Antarctica, where even his sister had not ventured. Even in the dim light, Kate could make out the black pin on the Atlantic, marking the approximate location where Nicholas Carter’s plane had vanished. His personal plane was probably there at the bottom of the sea, and Aunt Becky believed that Nicholas Carter was right down there with it.

He had taught Kate chess. He had taught her calculus, fluid mechanics, quantum theory. His books were all around her, lining the walls of the Study. For years after the crash Kate had believed that maybe someday her father would suddenly show up at the front door and then they would be able to sit down and play their first game of chess in a long time. She would tell him everything she had learned, and all the crazy things her uncle McFinn was doing. They would bring back the horses and ride together again. But maybe that was all childish. She always thought he had been special, like he was secretly some kind of superhero. She always thought there was no way he would just die in a random plane crash. He would come back, suddenly and when the world needed him the most, like Sherlock Holmes from the Reichenbach Falls. But it had been four years.

Kate sniffed, slapped her cheeks, wiped her eyes. She had work to do! And she had to do it right. Something her father could be proud of. But first: McFinnium. Some of Uncle Riley’s notes mentioned a cascade, the kind of self-generating exponential increase in energy of which McFinnium was capable. She had discovered these notes in his old study, snooping around after the explosion two months ago. This cascade sounded a lot like what had happened when she had blown up her lab. It sounded a lot like what Mr. Sheppard described happening at October Industries at the same time.

And she was beginning to think it had something to do with the Museum. Kaitlyn Carter feared that she might have missed something terribly important. And so, she needed some more McFinnium. She had to make sure.

Kate wandered around the mansion searching for Aunt Becky. She found the famous Rebecca Carter in the kitchen. Rebecca Carter was the kind of person who managed to butter her bread imperiously, her every movement deliberate and performed without hesitation. Even her stance as she stood there assembling her sandwich indicated that any man foolish enough to attempt to interfere with her present activity would meet with swift judgment.

Rebecca Carter stood tall, strong and indomitable. Her dark hair, now beginning to fade to iron-grey, hung in a thick, short braid. Her thin, hard face bore marks of a ferocious kind of beauty (AJ and Liz thought so, anyway), either marred or enhanced by three old scars running parallel down from her right temple to her jaw. Claw marks from a tiger (Panthera tigris). Aunt Becky had many scars, and they all had interesting stories to go with them.

She wore her usual khaki cargo vest, boots, and utility belt complete with revolver and a hunting knife. She always was ready for adventure. On the kitchen table lay a hunting rifle, shells scattered around.

More than one man had made the mistake of attempting to court her based on her appearance alone. None of these men proved a match for the violence of her personality or the forcefulness of her lifestyle. Kate thought that Riley McFinn was probably the only person in the world who could have married her, which he did. They were both crazy! An adventurer right out of a book, and a mad scientist. Probably too crazy for each other, or maybe their craziness canceled out. The marriage hadn’t lasted long, anyway.

“Aha!” said Aunt Becky. “There you are. Saved me the trouble of tracking you down.”

Kate took a closer look at the table. It was heaped with tools and supplies as though Aunt Becky were packing for a trek in the Serengeti, although it could just as easily have been for a trip to London. Aunt Becky packed like that no matter where she went. “G-go-going somewhere?” she asked.

“Alan Sheppard is visiting Riley. He advised me to stay out of it.” Aunt Becky finished creating her sandwich and took a huge bite.

“Oh.” This meant that Aunt Becky would definitely not stay out of it. Kate thought that Mr. Sheppard knew what he was doing, and probably they should do what he advised. But there was no use trying to talk Aunt Becky out of it. Or out of anything, ever. “I n-n-need some m-more M-mc-mcfi-finnium.”

Aunt Becky’s ever-stern gaze softened a bit at Kate’s stutter. Kate hated her stutter. What she hated most about it was the way it seemed to endear her to her aunt and generally make people pity her. She had begged Liz not to tell anyone about it. Not yet. When she met them…well, she’d deal with that when it came up.

“Don’t have any, kid,” said Aunt Becky, chewing. “Only one man can make it, and he didn’t give me much. You blew it all up.”

Kate considered trying to explain to Aunt Becky that Riley didn’t really make the McFinnium so much as pull it like taffy from another plane of existence, but decided not to bother. Aunt Becky wouldn’t care much either way.

“I’ll see if I can bring you some back,” Aunt Becky continued. “He’s got a soft spot for his niece.” She finished the sandwich in her fourth and final chomp and washed it down with what looked like a whole quart of milk.

“Okay,” said Kate. “Have a n-nice trip!”

“Ugh, Scotland in April,” said Aunt Becky. She slapped a broad-brimmed leather hat onto her head. “It’s still January there. It’s January half the damn year in Scotland. Now Mozambique—there’s proper weather for you. When I led the Quairi expedition we nearly froze, drowned and passed out from heat stroke in the same…”

Kate slipped away. She had better things to do than listen to a half-hour-long anecdote about one of Rebecca Carter’s great adventures. There remained a possibility that McFinnium still existed somewhere on the premises of the estate. She needed a means of determining if this was true, and then of locating it. She didn’t think she would need much of it to test the cascade theory (carefully!). One of the weird things about McFinnium was that mass didn’t seem to have much correlation to energy output—either in intensity or in spectral type. The color and shape of the crystals were much more important.

Kate went out back to her lab. Whiskey hopped up and ran circles around her as she crossed the field. The wind pressed against her from the north, carrying the scent of rain, and thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance. It seemed strangely dark for mid-morning. She shivered.

In the lab she hastily donned her lab ensemble of protective gear and then opened the lab vault , where she kept dangerous and/or sensitive items and materials. It had a big scary radiation warning on the front, as well as a biohazard sign. In this vault lay the devices shipped to her from the South Pacific by Alan Sheppard. One looked like a white left-handed glove with circuitry woven into the material. One looked like a complicated spyglass. The last resembled a big grey plate. They had strange properties. The plate, for example, could fix its location at any point, even if it was just hanging in the air. And once so fixed, it could not be moved. Kate had fixed it in the air and then jumped on and down on it, and it hadn’t budged. Nothing she had tried could move it, until it was un-fixed. She still didn’t really know why this happened. But it couldn’t happen anymore. The McFinnium crystals inside of it had died. She didn’t know why this had happened, either. Until the crystals had died, she thought that McFinnium was a conduit for some inexhaustible source of energy from somewhere else . Maybe she was right, and the crystals were flawed? The person she should really talk to about this was McFinn himself, her ex-uncle. But nobody could ever find him if he didn’t want to be found. And he was currently up to something.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The crystals had died in the other devices as well, their mysterious inner light snuffed out. Instead of being sources of strange energy they became simple crystals, albeit ones with peculiar-bordering-on-the-impossible molecular structures. McFinnium did not appear to have protons, like some weird kind of stable neutronium, and it reacted to other elements in ways that she could not yet fully predict.

She spent the rest of the morning disassembling and reconfiguring a Geiger counter. This project met with failure, but it was a successful failure in that it allowed her second attempt to succeed. By noon she was the proud owner of a device capable of (usually) detecting McFinnium radiation (of some types) within a small area. It was a rough job, but she thought it would work. It sometimes accurately detected the dead crystals when she hid them all over the lab. At the very least, it didn’t seem to pick up on anything else .

After lunch she systematically scanned the entire mansion. She was locked out of Aunt Becky’s private quarters, but she tried the walls all around it and didn’t detect any McFinnium within. It took her nearly an hour, and the very last place she looked was in her own wing, and more specifically in her own room at the top corner. She had detected nothing up to this point. She entered her room not to look for McFinnium, but to consider what to do next. But as soon as she walked in, the McFinnium Counter began clicking.

She scanned her room and narrowed it down to her bed. Under her bed, in fact, where she kept…

Kate blinked. She tossed the counter on her bed, twisted one corner of her mouth down and folded her arms in stern disapproval. Really ? Did her father make her a chess set in which the pieces were actually made of a rare, unstable, mysterious substance that his brother-in-law created?

Kate shook her head and got down to dig out the chess set. It came in a heavy titanium box (the first clue). It was probably lined with lead, although she had never checked. She pulled it out and heaved it up onto her bed. She unlatched it and flipped the lid open.

The squares of the board were alternating cloudy blue sky and starry night sky, expertly painted on stone. But now the board was broken, shattered dead in the center as if it had been struck with a hammer, just like the skin of her left shoulder. Cracks threaded through the alternating day-sky and night-sky surface of the board. But what about the pieces? Kate dumped both cloth bags onto her bed, scattering light and dark. The pieces were of crystal, and they had been beautifully carved in the shapes of animals. The white queen was a butterfly, the king was a dog, the rooks were some kind of lizard, the bishops were dragons, the knights were cats (they looked like Callie!), and the pawns looked like various kinds of birds. The dark side had a bunch of different animals too, like a frog, a shark, a chameleon, an eagle, and more. Now, on her bed, most of the pieces had shattered to tiny fragments. Kate aimed the McFinnium counter at them, just to be sure. It went wild.

She picked up the butterfly (which she was sure was supposed to be her, in the cute fatherly way in which her dad designed this board), and whipped out a magnifying glass for closer inspection. Active McFinnium glowed with a subtle inner light. Were these pieces dead? Yes, it seemed so.

This was the work of resonance . All existing McFinnium was connected somehow, and when one experienced a power surge (via cascade, for example), other McFinnium around the world registered this, and maybe somehow responded. The pieces must have shattered or burned out from resonance, most likely due to the explosion in her lab two months before, despite their protective case.

She frowned at the broken board. Why would her father give her a chess set with McFinnium? Because he knew she’d need it someday? Because it was important? It must be; he wouldn’t just give her something that might explode unless it mattered, right? Unless he didn’t know how dangerous it could be at the time.

She paced back and forth in her room, brows furrowed in contemplation. Eventually she realized that she was staring at her door. The door gave her an idea. There might be a way to bring the dead McFinnium back to life. And…maybe she should go to Chicago.

A message sound from her computer interrupted her brainstorming. Kate collapsed into her pile of stuffed creatures to check it out. Heidi. Good.

HS: Kate

KC: Heidi!

HS: I’m a little nervous about meeting everybody.

KC: Don’t be nervous

KC: You already know me, and you’ve been talking to Liz a lot right?

HS: Yes

KC: Well, you’ll meet Eric first. Don’t take him seriously! Isaac is a weirdo but he’s nice. And you’ll love Jim! Everybody loves Jim!

HS: I do love Jimothy.

HS: I’m sorry, maybe that was weird

HS: I didn’t mean anything serious by that

HS: Just that he’s different

HS: In a good way

KC: in a GREAT way

KC: ;)

KC: oh I wish I could be there with you!

KC: actually...

KC: I might be going to Chicago to meet up with you guys!

HS: Really? That would be great.

KC: I don’t know for sure yet

KC: there may be some things I have to do here

KC: but I will if I can!

KC: Heidi, do you know where Mr. Sheppard is going while you are in Chicago?

HS: I don’t know. He’s been very busy these last two months.

HS: Why?

HS: Does it have to do with October Industries?

KC: Yes. And I think it has to do with the incident in January.

HS: “Incident?”

HS: Are you saying that you know what happened?

KC: I have

KC: some ideas

‎ KC: but it is a capital mistake to theorize before having all of the evidence!

HS: I already know that whatever October Industries does, it isn’t entirely legal.

HS: Their online presence is a front.

HS: But Alan has done a lot of dangerous things.

KC: Yes he has

KC: Well, whatever happened over there in January, it was something bad

KC: like, REALLY bad

KC: I don’t know whether they think Mr. Sheppard is still alive

HS: But you seem to know that something is about to happen.

KC: Yes, but I don’t know what, exactly!

KC: AARRRGGH!

KC: My uncle knows, but I can’t reach him!

KC: I wish my dad was here

KC: I’m really not very special

HS: Kate, you are the most special person I know.

KC: Mr. Sheppard is special too

KC: The next time you see him...

KC: you should give him a big hug!

KC: I’ve got to go now, Heidi!

HS: Okay. I trust you, Kate.

KC: :D

KC: <3

KC: I know you are good with guns

HS: Yes?

KC: It might be hard to find one once you are in Chicago

KC: But maybe...

KC: you should try anyway

KC: just in case

HS: OK Kate. I will.

KC: Bye!

Kate closed her laptop, then growled at the blank wall for a moment. Heidi was lonely . Kate knew it, and it made her mad. Well not for long! They’d be together soon.

All right. Time to play for the butterflies.

Kate strapped on the electric bass in the corner of her room. It was black and green and heavy, with angular edges. She had designed it. She liked to play it for her butterflies. She took it, along with the broken white butterfly queen of the chess set, down to her butterfly room. Once inside, she took a moment to appreciate the smell of life, the warmth, the bright happy light, the living confetti fluttering all around her. She always thought the butterflies seemed happy to see her. She knew they were.

The lepidopterarium (now there’s a word she would never be able to say out loud!) occupied a space roughly twice the size of her room. Full of plants and flowers and butterflies, there was a little clearing at the back with a chair and table just for her! Also an amp.

She set up and tried out a few notes on the bass. Beautiful! She loved the sound of the electric bass resonating in this room. The butterflies did too; they gathered around like an eager audience. Kate closed her eyes, leaned back, and began to play. She didn’t play any of Eric’s or Isaac’s music, although she enjoyed picking out bass lines for their pieces. No, she always improvised for the butterflies. They liked that. She tried to recall fragments of the songs she heard in her dreams. She began with a single line, and bit by bit added layers of complexity.

A few minutes in, once she had a good groove going, she opened her eyes. The butterflies danced around her, flitting about in what seemed like some complex pattern on the verge of comprehension. Kate opened her mouth in a broad silent laugh and closed her eyes again.

She drifted away in the music. Her mind went back to the butterfly dream. This was as close as she could get to that. To flying. To touching he stars.

She didn’t see it happening, but her scar began to shimmer with color, and the crystalline butterfly on the table began to glow.