"The long and short of this bloody mess is this," the second man said. "Something is breaching the traversion tunnels created by the arches. This means anyone who goes through one of these arches could drop out in a completely random place—maybe another realm, maybe the Gloom." He threw up his hands. "I have no bloody idea. The other problem is these cracks in the traversion tunnel are wreaking havoc with the Obsidian Arch network. We still don't fully understand the magic behind these things even though our people have studied them for centuries."
I thought back to the tunnels of light depicted on the global map in the control room while an arch was in use. The magical pipes carried people from one point to another. If one had leaks in it—my mind flashed to the terrifying journey I'd taken from the small arch in Thunder Rock to El Dorado. It had dropped me into several different places, some of which were most definitely not of this earth before depositing me where I'd wanted to go. At the time, I'd been trying to get back to Elyssa after cherubs had separated us in the depths of Thunder Rock. But a strange bubble in reality had prevented me from reaching her, and I'd been sucked back in and dropped through a broken arch in the dead city of El Dorado in the far southern reaches of Colombia.
The operator's explanation shed new light on what exactly had happened to me. The arch I'd taken must have malfunctioned for some reason, leaving cracks in the traversion tunnel and allowing me to fall into different realities for a span of seconds before sucking me back in and finally depositing me at the other end. I'd been very lucky. Otherwise, I might have been trapped forever in a hellish nightmare of a realm. One of them had been filled with cherubs. It wouldn't have taken long before they'd sucked me dry and turned me into a shadow person.
"A special arch?" Shelton said, ignoring the man's concerns about the tunnels. "I wasn't told anything about that."
"Probably because you're there to secure the area, not work on sensitive magical equipment," the first operator said, his nose elevating to a condescending angle.
"I know that, but securing the area means I gotta know the layout. I need to know what's high priority and where we can fall back if things get ugly."
The second operator sighed. "Battle mages think they're such badasses."
Shelton smirked. "We do our job just like you do yours. Now, you want to be safe, or do you want to keep things from me and make my job more difficult?"
The first operator considered it for a moment and shrugged. "The layout of the control room is supposedly very similar to this one with one major exception."
"And that is?" Shelton prodded.
"The special arch we're supposed to work on looks like a half-sized version of an Obsidian Arch, except that,well"—he looked at the other operator—"it's white and black."
My mind flashed back to the information Miles had given us. The arch the Seraphim had used to invade our realm the last time was the same exact color combination.
Jeremiah Conroy intended to fix it.
Chapter 10
Shelton and I exchanged troubled glances, before he recovered and turned back to the man. "I'll need a diagram with the layout of the control room."
The men exchanged confused looks. "We don't have one," the first said. "Nobody's ever documented it to the best of our knowledge."
"Then how does Jeremiah Conroy know there's even control room there, much less this special arch?"
"How does he know anything?" the man replied, as if it were the stupidest question he'd ever heard.
"I hear he has demons who work for him," the second said in a conspiratorial whisper. "And not the small ones either."
"He's insanely powerful," the first said, nodding his head vigorously.
"He told us to expect a similar layout to this one, but that's about it, other than our engineers will be working on the white and black arch."
"What the hell?" Shelton said. "What does an arch like that do?"
The operators shrugged in unison.
Shelton leaned forward. "It's important I know."
The first operator shook his head. "He didn't tell us. His engineering crew was supposed to be here tonight to help us with the arches."
"With the Obsidian Arch shut down, how are they gonna get here?"
"He might have to fly them over the old-fashioned way," the first said.
"All right." Shelton motioned me to follow him. "We're gonna look around and base our information off this room. If you find out anything else, let us know."
We walked down the rows of small arches. Each one stood about ten feet tall with a silver ring embedded in polished obsidian at the base. Straight aisles ran between the arches, wide enough for several people to walk abreast of each other. Shelton ran his hand along the twisting architecture of one arch, his brow wrinkling.
"What is this stuff anyway?" He shook his head. "It feels like rock, but it doesn't."
I touched the slick surface, my hand following the odd spiraling design. "No idea."
"Tell me again how you used the arch in Thunder Rock."
Looking around the room, I spotted a row of arches separated from the others by a slightly wider aisle and led Shelton there. From here we could see the travel map on the wall. I pointed out the symbols next to the map and the symbols on the floor in front of some of the other arches.
"At the time, I didn't know enough about Cyrinthian to have a clue what those meant. Now I know those are numbers, each one corresponding to an arch. You touch the button, the arch lights up. Then I think you select a destination from the map, step through, and end up at the corresponding arch at your destination."
"That easy, huh?"
I shrugged. "It's just a guess. A cherub was trying to devour my soul at the time, so I only had a few pants-wetting minutes to figure out how the arches worked."
"But from what you told us, it didn't go down like that." Shelton nodded at the symbols on the floor in front of the separate row of arches. Each one consisted of a circle with multiple lines crisscrossing it, each line extending past the edges.
"Yeah, most of the numbered arches were broken, and the cherubs cornered me at an arch like this one." I knelt and touched the symbol on the floor. "I looked that symbol up the first chance I had. It means omni."
"Like omnidirectional?"
"More precisely, it means all." I rubbed a hand over the slick metallic substance. "I didn't need to indicate on the map where I wanted to go. I just closed the circle and willed it to take me home."
"And we saw how that turned out," Shelton said with a wry chuckle.
"I get the feeling these arches are more advanced. Like maybe these were added separately from the others." I stood up. "Just look at the layout."
Shelton stood back and looked at the room. "I think you're right. Notice how the map is centered on the other arches, but this row juts out to the side?"
I followed his gaze and saw what he meant. "When I thought of home, the arch flashed through the images of a bunch of places—my old house was one of those—before finding Elyssa. But you want to know what's really strange about it, now that I think back?"
Shelton snorted. "Everything?"
I shook my head. "No, the arch seemed ready to take me to a location where there was no corresponding exit arch."
He took in a breath. "It could take you anywhere, no other arch required? Do you know what that would mean for travel?"
"It would be almost as advanced as the Key of Juranthemon."
"Yeah." Shelton nodded. "It'd be a close second."
The Key of Juranthemon coupled with the Map of Juranthemon allowed the user to create instantaneous travel portals between any doors, at least according to Underborn. Unfortunately, the notorious assassin now had both of those relics, having forced me to choose between saving Felicia's life, or giving him the map and key.
I inspected the omni-arch. The piano-black material was triangular where it met the polished black floor. It twisted like a vine from there, somehow gaining more angles and sides, though my eyes had trouble finding where exactly the changes in geometry took place. The linked arches, by comparison, remained triangular from one end to the other, even though they twisted en route. "The angels must have been working on a new kind of arch before the Grand Nexus blew up."
"Maybe they never got them operational." Shelton walked a circle around the arch. "Because something went wrong when you tried to use it."
I told him my theory about the cracked traversion tunnel. "It's like I fell out, but the tunnel sucked me back in."
"And you end up coming out at a broken arch in El Dorado." He braced his chin on his knuckles, eyes lost in thought. "Maybe the destruction of the Grand Nexus broke the arches."
"I'm going with that answer for now," I said. "Maybe we should give one of these a test and see if it works."
Shelton shook his head, eyes wide. "Hell no, kid. I ain't taking the chance of ending up in angel central. Let's look around more and see if anything else sticks out. Then I got more questions for those operators."
I couldn't blame Shelton for his caution. For all I knew, trying to power an omni-arch could cause a catastrophe. The way my luck had run, it was likely. We looked around for a while, and Shelton interrogated the operators, but they had little more to offer than they had earlier, so we left and headed back toward the door leading to Queens Gate.
The vampire protestors were back at it again, I noticed, and we had to wait in line since the security guard who'd screened us earlier was still intent on harassing everyone. I just hoped he didn't do body cavity searches. The line remained long as ever, thanks to the broken arch preventing people from departing and forcing them to seek a place to stay in Queens Gate.
"You've got to be kidding me," Shelton said, his lips curling into a snarl when it was our turn. He scowled at the guard. "We just passed through here a little while ago, and the arch is shut down, so it's not like anyone else could've come in."