Two Months Later
On any regular Saturday in Los Angeles, the Grove would have been teeming with people. Now the whole place was eerily empty. The plate glass windows of the shops were darkened, or in some cases, broken. The doors were locked and chained. The fountain in the middle of the shopping center was still, its water a flat pool collecting leaves and bits of dirt and trash. Red biohazard tape cordoned off a section of the pavement that stretched from the movie theater to the Banana Republic.
And inside the taped-off section, things were floating.
Liv looked down from her perch on top of the Grove’s parking structure, watching as a Sunglass Hut kiosk floated three feet above the ground and gently brushed up against the wilting leaves of a palm tree.
The sight should have been shocking, even terrifying. But over the past two months, it had become the new normal. For reasons no one seemed to be able to explain, there were places in Los Angeles where gravity had ceased to work the way it should.
At the intersection of Santa Monica and Highland, tires, plastic bags, coffee cups, and even an abandoned car looked to be strewn haphazardly on the ground. But the items were actually fixed to the pavement, completely unmovable. No tractor could budge them, and nothing could pick them up.
On a side street in front of a donut shop in Calabasas, a manhole cover went shooting up from the pavement and into the sky. Then gas pumps, mailboxes, an entire bus stop bench. They floated through the air like pieces of paper caught on a gentle breeze, only to fall again and land some dozen or more feet from where they started.
Many people in the country were skeptical about the “Gravity Incidents,” as they’d come to be called. Only people who stayed behind in LA (of which there were very few) or brave scientists willing to enter the city had seen the incidents with their own eyes.
Liv was looking down at some of those scientists now as they wandered around the floating kiosk in yellow hazmat suits, waving devices in their hands and seemingly unbothered by the 110-degree heat. Despite their best efforts, no scientists had been able to figure out what was happening in the city. The orange sky was spreading, south over Torrance and north over Thousand Oaks. Earthquakes were a daily occurrence. More Gravity Incidents were popping up every day.
And then there was the lightning storm. It had burned down half of Venice and knocked out electricity for the western half of the city. Shocks of brilliant light shot down from the red-orange sky, forked to the ground one after the other, seemingly without end. Liv had watched the whole thing from Daisy’s abandoned Malibu beach house, her stomach a hollow pit of dread.
Turned out the professor hadn’t lied after all.
Now she sat with a similar feeling in her stomach, watching some more portal damage unfold. She knew there wasn’t anything she could do to help out here. The only way she could be of any use was to keep tracking down Joe’s leads on the remaining Knights of Valere, and hopefully find the mysterious “Martin” that Professor Billings had mentioned.
Not that she’d had any luck with his information so far—all of their leads had turned up either empty houses or, in a couple of terrible cases, dead bodies—and she didn’t even know if “Martin” was a first or last name.
Still, she would do more good continuing to look for Martin than she would scouting out some scientists. They were out here looking for some reason, some clue as to why all this was happening, and she already knew what had caused it—her. Well, her, Malquin, Cedric . . . anyone who’d opened or used a portal between LA and Caelum.
That’s the real reason she came to check out this latest Gravity Incident. Even if being here wouldn’t solve anything, she wanted to see the damage she’d caused with her own eyes.
After another half hour, the scientists finally wandered away from the taped-off area, taking their instruments with them to a kind of makeshift base camp set up in the parking lot next to the Coffee Bean. Liv used this as her chance to take a closer look. She ran down the stairs in the parking structure, passing the moped she’d hidden near the back wall. Her own car had been towed or stolen from Daisy’s street shortly before LA fell to pieces, so she had no idea where it was or how to get it back. But she’d found a set of mopeds in the garage of Daisy’s beach house, where she’d been staying for the past couple of months. The find had been fortunate, since the rest of the garage held only useless old toys, beach chairs, and a box of illegal fireworks. Thankfully, the mopeds still worked, ran on little gas, and were easy to maneuver on the closed-off streets of LA.
Liv slipped out of the parking structure and made her way toward the red biohazard tape, careful to keep her back against the wall. From this vantage point, she had a better view of the items floating beside the kiosk. It was a lot of scraps of paper, mostly, plus dirt gently floating in the air alongside some errant palm leaves, a chair, some paper shopping bags, and, weirdly, a bunch of individual pieces of popcorn.
But there were no clues as to how the portals were causing this to happen. And that was the problem, really—how little she knew about this, and how little anyone on Earth knew about magic. How could anyone be expected to stop what they didn’t understand, or even believe in?
Liv sighed and backed away. She had an afternoon of tracking leads ahead of her, and staying here punishing herself wasn’t going to help any. Just as she turned around to go back to her moped, she saw a figure blocking her path, his back to her.
He was tall, nearly a head taller than Liv. He wore an all-black outfit, like some kind of guard or soldier, though the shirt seemed a little tight on his frame. His dark brown hair was cut just above his ears. From his body language, he looked uncomfortable, either from the intense midday heat, or from his too-tight uniform. And then he turned his head, just a little, and Liv saw his profile—the hard line of the jaw, the ready posture of the shoulders, so familiar . . .
Liv froze in place, one foot still up in the air. She could barely tell if she was breathing. The soldier’s features were blurred through a slight shimmer, like a heat mirage. But he could almost be . . . he kind of looked like—
The soldier turned again, and disappointment crashed into Liv. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t even close to being him. But before she could berate herself for being so stupid, for getting her hopes up for even a second, she realized she had another problem.
The soldier was staring right at her.
“Hey!” he called out, starting to run toward her.
Liv turned and sprinted into the parking garage. Her feet hit the pavement and echoed across the empty, cavernous space. She heard footsteps behind her. If this guy caught her, he’d turn her over to the evacuation teams, and with phone lines down, she’d never be able to tell Joe what happened to her or where she went . . .
She reached her moped and jumped on, hitting the gas just as the soldier reached out for her. She turned and saw how close she was to him—just inches away. He looked barely older than she was.
She gunned the moped, and the soldier’s fingers slipped from her arm. When she turned around, she saw him sprinting—in the opposite direction. She turned her way through the winding parking structure and finally got to the opening, where she had to slow the bike down a bit to direct it around the wooden barrier meant to keep non-paying cars out. Then she was out again under the orange sky, zipping toward the main road, free . . .
The black car came out of nowhere, pulling in front of her and slamming on its brakes. Liv barely had time to twist the handle of the moped and skid it sideways so she didn’t run into the car. It wasn’t marked—not LAPD or any official government agency that she could see. The same young officer was behind the wheel.
Liv saw two more black cars moving toward her—he must have radioed for backup. They were coming at her quickly, blocking her in from all sides. Her only option was to go back the way she’d come.
She turned around quickly, the moped squealing against pavement. It tipped toward the ground, and she put one leg out to stop it from falling. Then she made her way back inside the parking structure. She heard the black car squeal as well as it turned to follow her. She once again went around the wooden barrier, and a few moments later, she heard a splintering crash as the officer just drove his car straight through it.
His car was faster, she knew. And she was outnumbered.
She drove out the other side of the parking garage, riding her moped through the pedestrian walkway into the shopping center. Amazingly, the black car followed. She heard the sound of metal scraping concrete as it rounded a corner, but it kept on coming. The officer followed her past a boarded-up steak restaurant, alongside empty storefronts, over the unused trolley tracks, until they both neared the red biohazard tape.
But Liv didn’t stop as the tape grew closer and closer. She sped up. And behind her, the officer in his black car sped up as well.
The red tape was just a few feet away, and then a few inches, when Liv jerked hard on the handlebar, turning the moped right. It almost skidded out from underneath her, but she managed to get it back under control. She pulled out of the ninety-degree turn and drove around the outer edge of the biohazard tape, sticking to the sidewalk nearby.
The black car wasn’t so lucky.
The officer tried to turn at the last minute, too, but his car was just too big, going too fast. He turned a hard right, but the car kept skidding right through the tape, into the heart of the Gravity Incident. For just a moment, nothing happened. The car’s momentum kept it skidding across the pavement. But then it started to lift. It was as though the car had hit an invisible ramp, and its momentum sent it soaring up into the sky. But instead of coming back down, it stayed up there, ten feet above the ground.
Liv stopped her moped for just a moment to look. She could see the officer’s face through the front windshield, his eyes and mouth opened wide in shock. But he wasn’t hurt, and the car stopped rising. It floated gently, its tires brushing against the awning of a nearby candy store.
Before the officer or the panicked-looking scientists could catch their bearings, Liv revved the moped again, this time driving it into the narrow walkways of the farmer’s market. If they wanted to catch her in there, they’d have to follow her on foot, and her moped would outpace them easily.
Maybe she’d even have time to pick up some organic trade coffee before heading back home. Or at least, what was passing for home these days. Not that there’d be much time to sit around and rest once she got there.
Los Angeles wasn’t the same place she’d left behind, the place she’d been homesick for in Caelum. And if she wanted that place back, she was going to have to keep working day and night to fix it. She was the only one who could.