The Fire Chronicle Read Online Free PDF

like … Sorry.”
    “Allow me to explain about the nature of time.” The old man dipped his finger into his wineglass and dabbed a string of watery red spots across the tabletop. “You must not imagine that time is a road unspooling before us. Rather, all time—past, present, and future—already exists. Say we are here.” He pointed to a dot in the middle of the line. “And your sister was here in the past; then she chose to skip over us and land here, in the future.” He brought his finger down further along the line. “In that case, we just have to go forward, and we will eventually meet her.”
    “You mean,” Michael said, “tomorrow, she’ll just suddenly be there?”
    “Tomorrow, the next day, the week after that—there’s no telling when.”
    “But why would she do that?” Emma demanded. “Why wouldn’t she just come back right away?”
    The old man shrugged. “Who knows? We will have to ask her when we see her. Till then, we must continue with our own work. It is what she would want.”
    Michael saw Emma nodding. The wizard had held out a thread of hope, and she had grasped it with both hands. For his part, Michael tried hard to make himself believe that Kate was waiting somewhere in their future; he wanted to believe it, desperately. But what if Dr. Pym was wrong? What if they never saw Kate again? He saw life stretching ahead of them, a life without their sister, and the road was dark.
    He took a sip of his lemonade, then set down the glass. The drink had gone flat.
    Dr. Pym checked the time and suggested they order dinner. He spoke to the small woman—the signora, he called her—in Italian while Emma looked about the restaurant saying, “Get some a’ that! And what that bald guy’s got over there!”
    It was amazing, Michael thought, the change that had come over her. Emma had embraced the wizard’s theory wholeheartedly. She’d decided that Kate had jumped into the future, and they had only to keep pressing forward and they would join her. Any other possibility had been dismissed from her mind.
    Nice to be young, Michael thought, and gave a weary sigh.
    As the food began to arrive—pasta with sausage and peas, a salad of red and yellow tomatoes covered with hunks of softwhite cheese and green strips of basil, a pizza heavy with garlic and onions and tiny fish that Emma picked off and put on her brother’s plate—Michael did his best to make a show of eating, but each bite was an effort.
    “Now,” the wizard said, rolling up his pizza like a taco, “I want to apologize that I was never able to answer your letters. Be assured, I did receive them. However, we are together now, and I want to hear every detail of your lives since Christmas, everything you didn’t tell me in your letters. I am all ears.”
    The children protested that he should answer their questions first, but the wizard insisted, and they finally gave in, telling him about the awfulness of the Edgar Allan Poe Home, about the awfulness of Miss Crumley, about the feral cat population that had dwindled all summer and the mystery stew the cook kept serving, about the week in July when the showers had broken and how people a block away had complained about the smell; one story led to another, and when they were finished, Michael found that his neck and shoulders were less tense and that he’d eaten two helpings of pasta and that things did not seem quite so black as before and he realized that this had been the wizard’s plan all along.
    “How perfectly terrible,” Dr. Pym said. “Now, I’m guessing you must have a few questions for me.”
    “Yeah,” Emma said through a mouthful of sausage. “Where’ve you been all this time? Where’s Gabriel? Why’d you leave all of a sudden on Christmas? Who’s this stupid Dire Magnus guy? And where’s he keeping our parents?”
    “And what’re we doing here?” Michael added.
    “My goodness, what a deluge. But I will answer the last question first. Oh dear.” The