Page 37 of Skalterra By Nightmare (The Skalterra Duology #1)

If I closed my eyes, it was like being back in Skalterra. The train shook the same way the steamcart had, and I pretended the soft murmur of voices of the other passengers were those of Orla, Fana, and Tiernan.

Maybe if I imagined it vividly enough, I’d be able to pass through the Rift myself and find my friends. If Liam weren’t sitting next to me, I might’ve whispered Ciarán’s name, just to see if he could hear me.

“Falling asleep?”

I pried my eyes open to deadpan at the seat back in front of me.

“Not if you wake me up.”

“You weren’t asleep yet. Trust me. When it comes to you, I’m an expert in the subject.”

I rolled my head to the side to look at him. He sat with one leg stretched out into the aisle, and his smile fought against the bags that weighed heavy under his eyes. Guilt nagged me at the periphery of my worries.

“Have you been sleeping?” I asked.

“Not well,”

he admitted, and the smile slipped.

“Any advice?”

I shook my head and settled back to face forward again. Blue sky and ocean blurred with the green of passing forests outside my window as we hurtled along the coast.

“Not really. I haven’t been sleeping well either.”

“Nightmares again?”

The sudden edge in his voice made me turn my palm downwards. The scratches I’d put there had fused back together, and I no longer needed bandages, but the angry red marks were still sore.

“I haven’t really been sleeping enough to have nightmares at all.”

I spent most nights whispering for Ciarán in the dark, begging him to pull me back to Skalterra. He never responded, and I wasn’t sure he could hear me, but I refused to stop. Until I could talk to my father and figure out what he knew, it was my only way to try to get back.

“But my narcolepsy issue, it’s all better.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I told you, I was seeing a doctor, and they fixed it.”

I turned back to him and forced a smile through the lie.

“No more carrying me up staircases.”

“Oh, good. I was about to add a dumbwaiter to the shop. I could shove your body inside, and use a pulley to hoist you up to Ethel’s apartment.”

“Putting that architecture degree to good use, then.”

He chuckled softly and let his shoulders relax.

“Yeah. I’m glad you’re okay, though. I was worried.”

“I’m the last person you should worry about.”

“But you make it so easy.”

I slumped in my seat, sliding my shoulders down the vinyl.

“Tell the truth, are you on the clock right now? Is Gams paying you to escort me to Von Leer?”

“Only if you consider train tickets and hotel rooms to be legal tender.”

“I’m sorry.”

What was supposed to be sarcastic came out more genuine than I wanted, but Liam replied with a crooked smile and an awkward shrug.

“I like hanging out with you, especially now that I know I won’t have to catch or carry you.”

He slouched down in his seat to be at eye level with me. His smile softened.

“You should try to sleep though. It’s a long ride to Von Leer, and you look like crap.”

I smacked his shoulder, but grinned.

“Sure. This train is freezing, and I have the most important interview of my life tomorrow morning. Sleep should be easy.”

“Sleep, Wren. You’ll want to be rested for that lecture you’re going to tonight.”

I jolted upright, and Liam laughed.

“How did you find out about that?”

If he told Gams, she would tell Mom, and Mom would be furious.

“Von Leer posted about it yesterday. You were planning on going, right? You’re into all that rock stuff.”

“Geology is rock stuff. Rocks are only part of geophysics.”

I relaxed back into my seat. Liam didn’t know the speaker was my biological father.

“The lecture is about paleomagnetism, which isn’t quite what I want to go into, but I’ll still have to know it.”

“Right. Which is why you should sleep. I’ll need you awake enough to explain everything in the lecture to me.”

Something warm and soft settled across my chest, accompanied by the smell of sandalwood deodorant and waffle cones.

“I don’t need your hoodie,”

I murmured, but the thrum and rattle of the train were already lulling me to sleep.

It wasn’t a good sleep by any means. I spent a lot of it in a timeless fog somewhere between waking and unconsciousness. Sometimes I was aware of Liam sitting next to me, but his presence became all too acute when I realized I was using his shoulder as a pillow.

I sat up in a half-asleep stupor, mumbled something that was sure to have been devastatingly quick-witted and sharp-tongued if it had been at all intelligible, and then tried to lean against the train window instead. The vibrations of the rattling window shooting through my skull forced me to resort to slumping forward on the seat back tray in front of me for the next hour.

However, the moments of sleep that snuck in were better than nothing, and by the time we were halfway through the mountains, thundering past valleys of pine trees and cliff faces streaked with waterfalls, I felt more rested than I had all week.

Liam let me watch the mountains blur past in silence. Maybe he knew I was stewing in thoughts of how this could become a familiar train ride for me if my interview went well. Maybe he was lost in his own thoughts about returning to campus without his cousin.

By the time we rolled into the Bergdale train station, the mountains had reduced to foothills, and it was hard to see much through the forests that cradled the sleepy college town.

My nerves crescendoed, knotting my stomach and tightening my throat. When the train bumped to a stop, I briefly considered staying put. There were a lot of unknowns waiting outside the comfort of the carriage. If I stayed seated, if I let the train carry me to wherever its end destination was, I wouldn’t have to face those unknowns.

But Liam extended a hand to me, already standing in the aisle.

“This is us.”

He shouldered his backpack.

“Want to see where you’re going to live for the next four years?”

I held his hoodie against my chest as I took his hand and followed him onto the platform.

It was a sunny day in Bergdale, and the historic downtown district bustled with summer vacationers in shorts and hiking boots. We wove between them on the boardwalk style pathway that connected storefronts and shops. The smell of freshly-baked waffle cones made me breathe deep, and I looked around for the source.

Liam caught me staring at the ice-cream and laughed.

“I hope you aren’t thinking about cheating on your favorite ice-cream scooper.”

“Gams only stocks three flavors. It’s not personal.”

“Excuse you, it’s four flavors.”

“If you say so.”

I stood on my tip-toes to better survey the surrounding street. The buildings were rugged and wooden, as if to emulate an old mining town. A river gushed somewhere out of sight, the gurgling of the water intermixing with the rush of wind through the trees.

“Where’s campus?”

“Through those trees there.”

Liam nodded at the forest, and I whipped around to stare at him with blood pounding in my ears.

“Don’t worry, we won’t go through the woods. We’ll go around.”

A bell tower in the distance tolled out two o’clock, and I bounced on the balls of my feet.

In five hours, I would be sitting in a lecture hall listening to my biological father speak.

As we walked, the historic district turned into something a bit more modern, with bars and hotels, but we veered left before we strayed too deep into the busy streets.

We passed over a footbridge towards athletic fields that were busy with some sort of soccer camp. The forest stayed to our left as we wrapped around it. Trailheads hinted at quicker paths between campus and the train station, but Liam had been courteous enough not offer them up as a possibility.

Buildings rose around us in a mishmash of old and new architecture that told the story of an expanding campus. I wondered which buildings had been here when Mom had been a student, and which had been added since then. Oak trees growing between buildings and green lawns gave the campus a cozy, park-like vibe, and a fountain spitting water to our right reminded me of the city fountains in Vanderfall.

“What do you think?”

Liam asked.

I stared at the glittering windows, the gardens, the lawns, and the clock tower that rose from the stone building at the center of campus.

“It’s okay.”

“I know. It’s stupid how nice it is, right?”

The knot in my stomach loosened as I sighed.

“Yeah. I hate it.”

I needed to get in. I wanted to make this my school. I wanted to spend late nights holed up in the window-laden library typing up reports on tectonic shift. I wanted to complain about how the school put too much money into making the student center look nice, and not enough into making the cafeteria food taste good. I wanted to spend warm afternoons after class playing frisbee on the quad, and I didn’t even like frisbee.

The trashcan to our left rustled, and the largest squirrel I’d ever seen bolted from inside, carrying a banana peel.

“Holy crap!”

I jumped into Liam, grabbing his arm, and he laughed.

“You’ll get used to the squirrels.”

“Was that a squirrel? Or a small raccoon?”

“If you thought that was wild, wait until you see the one with two tails.”

He led the way deeper into campus.

“Rumor has it that the science majors are conducting experiments on them, but not everyone believes that theory when it comes to old Two-Tails.”

The back of his hand brushed against mine as we walked in the shade provided by a row of oak trees.

“And what do you believe about Two-Tails?”

I grinned. The shifting light that spilled through the tree canopy caught the edges of Liam’s curls as he smiled back.

“He obviously stole the tail from another squirrel, who is now running around campus tailless.”

“I’m sure someone would’ve noticed a tailless squirrel.”

“Not if he’s hiding among the marmots by the river.”

He stopped to point at a building made of sand-colored stone. It stood three stories high, and its roof was adorned with chimney-like vents and a greenhouse.

“That’s the Life Science building.”

“Where they experiment on squirrels.”

I nodded.

“Allegedly.”

“Allegedly,”

he repeated, and then quickened his step to hasten us around the corner. A second building connected to the Life Science building by a skybridge, but boasted walls of brick and glass instead of sandy stone.

“And that is where you’ll be, in the Earth Sciences center.”

I tried to imagine what it would look like in the fall, when campus was full of students, and maybe I’d be one of them.

I wanted it so badly that it hurt, burning an aching hole in the pit of my stomach.

“Where do the architecture students go?” I asked.

“With the engineers. But this—”

“It’s a very nice building,”

I insisted.

“but imagine if you took me to that ice-cream shop in town, let me see all the amazing flavors that Gams would never stock in a million years, and then told me I couldn’t have any. If tomorrow morning goes well, we can come back before our train leaves.”

His face relaxed into a smile.

“Of course. But there’s no turning back now. You’ve officially committed to a full, in-depth tour of the engineering building.”

Liam continued down the path, beckoning me after him.

“If we see Two-Tails, you have to buy dinner.”

“How’s that fair?”

I chased after him, indignant, smiling, and wishing campus could always belong to just the two of us.

Liam’s tour was extensive and thorough, covering nearly every building on campus. While there were plenty of squirrels, they all had just one tail, so Liam paid for dinner. If he hadn’t, I probably would’ve thrown my food away. It tasted fine, but the closer we got to the lecture, the more my stomach clenched with nerves.

“Is your eye okay? You’ve been messing with it,”

Liam noted as we walked back across campus towards the main school hall. I snapped my hand back to my side, embarrassed to have been caught pulling at my eyelashes.

“Yeah, sorry. Big lecture. Big school.”

I gestured vaguely at the surrounding campus. Sprinklers chittered as they watered the quad, and I thought back to Mom getting doused on Linsey’s front lawn. I pressed a knuckle against my temple.

She’d be so angry with me if she knew where I was headed.

“You must really love geophysics if you’re this nervous about a lecture. You know there’s no test at the end, right? Just enjoy all the rock jargon and volcano talk.”

“It’s paleomagnetism, not volcanos,”

I reminded him.

“And you don’t actually know there won’t be a test.”

There was already a line of people waiting outside the amphitheater doors, and I shivered even though the evening was warm.

“Is this guy a big deal?”

Liam hissed.

“It’s packed!”

“He’s a moderately-sized deal.”

I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t told Liam my connection to the speaker yet. Maybe because I knew he’d say it was a bad idea. He might tell Gams, who would tell Mom. I could hardly stand the thought of telling them I wanted to study geophysics. I didn’t want to know what they’d say if they could see me standing in line to hear Maxwell Brenton, PhD, speak.

Or maybe I was afraid Liam would make this too much about me when really it was about finding out if my father knew anything about Skalterra, and why I might be lucid when called there as a Nightmare. It had been one of Ferrin’s theories, after all, that I was somehow connected to Skalterra through family.

The line shifted forward, and Liam murmured something about them opening the doors.

I wondered if Maxwell Brenton would be on stage already when we filed in. Or maybe he’d be sitting down near the front. An usher handed me a program as we walked through the front doors and through the lobby. My father stared sternly up at me from the front page.

“Paleomagnetism,”

Liam mumbled next to me, reading off his own program.

“What does that mean?”

“The study of how Earth’s magnetism has changed over time. Kind of. That’s a watered down explanation, but I’m not exactly a student yet.”

We passed into the amphitheater, and I pressed into Liam’s shoulder. The other attendees ranged in age. Some of them didn’t look any older than undergraduate students, while others sported grizzled gray and white beards that would’ve put Galahad’s to shame.

Liam found us a spot near the middle of the room.

“Wren?”

Liam asked again. I slapped my hand away from the back of my neck and into my lap.

“Hmm?”

I forced an ambivalent smile.

“You don’t need to be nervous.”

“I’m not.”

I flipped through the program until I found my father’s biography. It listed all of his accolades, degrees, awards, and accomplishments, and even though I’d read it all before online, it still stung that nowhere did it list he had a daughter.

Mom had said he knew I existed, but what if that had been a lie? What if he had no idea he had a daughter at all?

I screwed my eyes shut. I wasn’t here to connect with my estranged father. I was here for answers about Skalterra, to help save Orla, Fana, and the world as we knew it.

I opened my eyes to polite applause that echoed through the theatre. The lights dimmed, and the opening slide of a presentation took up the large white screen that hung over the stage.

A woman in a pantsuit introduced herself to the audience as the dean of the Von Leer School of Geophysics, but she sounded muted, like she was underwater.

A dull buzzing had taken over my brain. There, in the front row, a brunet head bobbed along with the woman’s introduction, until she called his name and stepped aside to make room for him at the lectern.

He stood up and waved off the ensuing applause. He shook the woman’s hand before she exited the stage, and then he pivoted to look out over the crowd.

Maxwell Brenton, PhD, looked just like his pictures.

My fingers balled into fists, my nails digging into my palms.

For the first time in over eighteen years, I was looking at my father.