“Sorry for the mess,” Jacob said a little sheepishly. “And our cable doesn’t work.”
“We can’t get the news?” Aria asked.
“No. No Internet, haven’t even seen a paper in ages.” He shrugged and put his hands in his baggy jeans. He wore a plaid shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, and his hair was thick and disheveled, but still attractive. Alexander seemed a little protective of Aria right off the bat, Phoebe noticed. He made sure to stand close to her and keep a hand near hers or on her back. Fighting off a potential rival.
Alexander made a face as he glanced around the room, taking everything. “What have you been doing all this time?”
“What does it look like, brother?”
“Beginner art school?”
Aria cleared her throat. “It’s not the form that’s off, it’s the subject matter.”
Jacob shrugged, noticing which one she had her eye on: a boy wielding a sword, devilish look on his face. “A lot of the past, mostly.”
“Your brother?”
Jacob’s eyes, the color of his black hair, turned down.
Phoebe tried to think of how to break the awkward silence. She could spend hours in here analyzing his drawings, contemplating why Nina hadn’t taken them down. Scenes of violence, of a boy shot and lying in a pool of blood; of pyramids and sphinxes, mummies and spears, and more blood. Rivers of it. In a few drawings she could pick out the unmistakable figures of Caleb and red-haired Xavier Montross. In others, Nina lying on a slab (in a coma?), while the world burned. Another showed a submerged city of stone-lined walls and seaweed-covered pyramids.
“Can we see your mother?” Phoebe asked the young man, finally breaking the silence. The kid really, who the last time she had seen him, had just fired the shot that had killed his brother — and helped saved not only their lives, but the lives of most everyone on the planet.
He looked up at her with a pained look. “She knew you’d be coming.”
“How?” Aria asked. “I blocked us.”
“Yes, your blue haze.” Jacob smiled. “Very frustrating. Never could spy on you, brother.”
“Only fair,” Alexander responded, pointing to a glass cabinet, and the bowling-ball sized sphere inside. The artifact uncle Xavier swiped from the Smithsonian. You have your shield, we have ours.” He grasped Aria’s hand. He knew that if all went according to plan, they were also going to need that artifact, to help shield Phoebe’s twins and keep them safe.
Shrugging, Jacob pointed out the window, beyond the wind-swept lawn and the few leaves rustling by, to the base of the lighthouse blocking out the view of the ocean. “She’s up there. Like she is a lot these days.”
Phoebe waited. She motioned to Alexander to keep his mouth shut for a minute and let Jacob speak.
“We still knew you were coming.” He pointed to the drawings on the east wall, particularly one beneath an ornate seafarer clock. The air was musty in here, but had turned decidedly chillier in the morning air. The sound of distant gulls filled the room, as if coming from upstairs or through the vents. “This one I drew yesterday.”
Phoebe craned her neck and peered over Aria’s shoulder to see. A hastily but impressively sketched vision of the United Nations building in New York City. An angry crowd of figures and dots and smudges in front of it, lining the streets while above, the sky was rent by sideways-arching lightning bolts.
A cry from behind her: soft and thin, but surprising after the babies had been so quiet. Joined suddenly by another.
“The twins?” Aria turned her head. She gave Alexander’s hand a squeeze. “You two continue here, I’ll go tend to them.”
“Thanks, Aria.” Phoebe watched her go and then stepped closer, to Alexander’s side. “And this…you saw this yesterday?”
“It’s happening,” Jacob said. “The world will know about us, and they won’t like it.”
“No,” Alexander agreed, “they won’t. It’ll be like…” He glanced over to the comic books piled in a corner by the couch. “The X-Men and the mutant threat, when governments stepped in to round up the evolved humans and take away their powers…”
“Or kill them.” Jacob rung his hands together. “Figured someone would come for us. Hoped it would be you.”
“They have our dad,” Alexander said soberly, the only way he could, but still got choked up.
Aria cleared her throat. “And your uncle Xavier.”
Jacob nodded, stepped back and displayed the picture he had been hiding. Phoebe gasped, stepped forward, hand to her mouth.
A black crow — always the symbol Caleb had used for himself and his own father — caught with its leg in what looked like a bear trap. A crown of horrid thorns dug into its head over the beak, with blood drops seeping down and staining the black feathers crimson.
“He’s in bad trouble…”
“Where?” Phoebe asked, her eyes scanning the nearby drawings for a clue.
“I couldn’t tell, only a glimpse I saw of this. A glimpse, but again and again, this same vision, of the crow, in agony, tortured. I don’t know where.”
“We’ll find him,” Phoebe insisted.
“Namodal?” Alexander said absently, his eyes looking a far way off.
Jacob frowned. “What?”
Phoebe took his shoulder, and Alexander seemed to snap out of it. “I don’t know. Just a name, a place I was told to go to. I just…can’t focus. But that’s a clue, a part of the answer.”
“No,” Jacob said. “The name I’m sensing with all this is strange, but different. Dreamtime. I don’t know what it means either.”
“I may be able to help sort that out,” Phoebe said. “But not yet. Could you tell, Jacob, was he alone, or…?”
“Alone. Uncle Xavier, I think he’s somewhere else. Somewhere a lot closer than my father, who is…” He scrunched his eyes shut, and then shook his head. “I don’t know. I see rocks, giant rocks, red ones.”
“Like Mars?” Alexander’s voice cracked in rising dread.
“Like it, but not really. I don’t know.”
“It’s okay,” Phoebe assured him.
“No, it’s not.” Jacob’s eyes opened and he blinked rapidly, trying to keep back tears. “I have to help, have to. Because…well, mom isn’t herself. Hasn’t been. Since Isaac, since coming here. Since she almost died herself. I don’t see her much. Sometimes, when she tries and we’re close and she touches me or hugs me…she gets visions herself.”
That’s right, Phoebe thought. Nina’s power was always one triggered by contact with another person. It was how she first probed Caleb and found out much more about him than she should have.
“This past week, it was all too much for her. She ran out a couple days ago, rushed to the lighthouse and hasn’t been down since.”
Phoebe glanced around again, about to remark on how well the boy had been doing providing for himself and cleaning up, but thought better of it.
“It’s okay. We’re here now, and we’ll talk to her.”
“I don’t think it will work. She may not even let you in there.”
Phoebe raised her head, took a deep breath and went for the door. “I’m not leaving without her. Without you, Jacob. We need you both.”
The wind was stinging and cold, the worst she could remember since she had come here with Jacob ten months ago, at the end of the winter season. Caleb had found this place, networking with the existent Keepers for a perfect hideaway. A renovated landmark, fully functional as a lighthouse and still in service, but with a current keeper ready for retirement. Nina assumed his position quickly and graciously, and with the ancient orb Montross had stolen from the Smithsonian a few years ago, she had the perfect cover. No one could find her or Jacob, if any of Calderon’s old cronies were still about to come looking.