The Golden Spiral Read Online Free PDF

the events.
    I thought it was Zo, and if it was, then I wanted to be there.
I didn’t want to lose him—I couldn’t. The tension fell into
frustration. It was so dark, though. And I wasn’t fast enough. I saw something up ahead.
    “What? What was it?”
    Dante continued as though he hadn’t heard me; maybe he hadn’t. A halo of white fire sped toward me out of the darkness. I thought at first that I had reached the other side, that what I was seeing was sunlight through the open door. But this light burned everything it touched—the walls, the ceiling, the entire machine—even me.
    “It burned you?”
    It burned everything. Dante’s voice sounded strained, feathered with panic at the edges. When it reached me . . . I didn’t have anywhere to go. I couldn’t escape it. The light— he made a strangled noise like a growl. I felt myself . . . fading, dissolving. Then the light passed over me—through me—and then . . . darkness.
    A tremor shook me, so violent it made my teeth click together. I wrapped my arms around my chest. I could imagine Dante’s wall of light so clearly because I had seen it as well. But from the other side. I had the scars on my throat as a reminder of what had happened in that moment of destruction.
    In my memory, I was on the desolate bank, alone except for the black hourglass door that had shut behind Dante. As I replayed that moment, I saw again the door disintegrating in a flare of white light.
    “Dante,” I whispered, “do you know how long you have been—wherever you are?”
    He paused, then said, No. I can’t sense the river at all. There is just me and Tony and the darkness. All the stars are gone, too.
    “It’s been almost three weeks.” I closed my eyes against the thought of Dante wrapped in unending darkness for so long. I took a deep breath and said the impossible. “You never made it out the door. I think you’re still there somehow.”
    What? I’m still in the time machine?
    “I think so.”
    Dante was quiet for a long time. So long, I started to wonder if we had lost our tenuous connection.
    But if the time machine is gone—if the door is destroyed—then how can I leave?
    “I don’t know,” I said, hating how often I found myself saying those words. “But there’s got to be a way.”
    Tony screamed again, a piercing howl that brought sudden tears to my eyes. The cry seemed to take a long time to fade away. Even still, I could hear a low moan bubbling continuously in my inner ear. What had happened to Tony to cause such agony? And—I almost didn’t dare think it—would it happen to Dante too?
    He must have been thinking along the same lines because his next words were low and fierce.
    Hurry, Abby. Please.
    “I will,” I said. “I’ll figure something out. Promise me you’ll hold on, that you’ll be here when I come back.”
    Silence.
    “Dante? Answer me!”
    And then I felt his presence next to me so powerfully that my body trembled in anticipation. He was clearly still somewhere else and I was still in my dream, but suddenly the barriers between us were as thin as smoke.
    I felt the ghost of his hands slide up my arms, my shoulders, to the curve of my neck.
    “Dante, do you promise?”
    Yes. The word rolled through me like thunder. I felt his lips touch mine in a kiss so lightning-fast it left the ends of my hair crackling.
    Sound washed over me, the roar of a flood overrunning its banks—
    And then he was gone.
    I shivered with the loss, feeling a tingling numbness where he had touched me.
    My thoughts felt equally numb, sluggish and leaden. These kinds of dreams were exhausting, but I knew I’d need to have more of them if I wanted any chance of solving the riddle of how to free someone from a prison that didn’t exist.
    I wasn’t even sure how I had the dreams in the first place. Was it something I did before falling asleep? Something I ate? Maybe they couldn’t be controlled at all, and I was simply at the whim of an unknown