Thirteen Forgotten Worlds (Seam Wardens Book 1) Read online

  But Spencer ignored her. “What were you saying about tricks?” he asked Uncle Mike. He pressed one of the floating symbols and the gate closed.

  “I was saying that this was all done... with tricks and illusion.” But Uncle Mike didn’t seem quite as certain as before.

  Spencer played with the controls on the box and another portal opened up again. He stuck his head through the portal for a moment and then pulled it out.

  He stepped to the side and motioned Uncle Mike toward the portal. “All the incontrovertible proof you could possibly ask for is in there.”

  Uncle Mike took a step back. “There’s no way I’m going in there.”

  Spencer raised an eyebrow. “Oh, so you are acknowledging the gate actually goes somewhere?”

  Uncle Mike frowned. “No, I’m not...well, maybe. I don’t know! Look, this can’t be real. I admit these are great tricks, but what you are telling me breaks all the laws of physics, so there has to be a trick to it.”

  Spencer had him, and he knew it. “It’s either real or it isn’t,” he said. “Just stick your head through the portal and you will have all the proof you need. If I’m wrong, Tamara and I will be on our way. But If I’m not, then you let Pierce become a Seam Warden.”

  “I’m not–” Uncle Mike began, but Spencer interrupted him.

  “Since you’re so convinced it’s not real, what’s the harm in agreeing to the deal? It’s a sure thing for you, right? I’m just a crazed lunatic who’s using tricks.”

  I watched Uncle Mike as he thought this through. He was a very logical man, and Spencer had pushed all the right buttons. There was no logical reason not to take him up on the offer. The only way he could lose is if what Spencer told him was true.

  "Fine," Uncle Mike said. He walked over to the portal and stuck his head through. For a moment nothing happened. Uncle Mike stood perfectly still, then he pulled his head back from the portal and stumbled backward several steps.

  Spencer caught him before he fell to the ground and helped him regain his balance. Uncle Mike was breathing heavily and his eyes were wide with fear.

  “What did you see?” I asked.

  He said nothing and just shook his head.

  “Now, don’t worry,” said Spencer. “We’re not taking Pierce there. I just wanted to give you a glimpse of some of the creatures we protect the world from.” He patted Uncle Mike on the back. “I think you’d agree that this is a worthwhile occupation, am I right?”

  Uncle Mike took in a deep breath. He stood up straighter and looked me in the eyes.

  “This is what you really want to do?” he asked.

  I had no idea what Spencer had shown Uncle Mike, but whatever he had shown him, it seemed to have worked. “Yes,” I said. “It is. I don’t want anyone to go through what I had to when monsters killed my parents.”

  Uncle Mike nodded. He thought about this for a moment. “Ok,” he said. “You have my blessing. I’m not going to attempt to stop you.”

  I gave him a hug. “Thanks, Uncle Mike. This means a lot to me.”

  It looked like I was going to become a Seam Warden after all.

  4

  My First Underground Secret Base

  I gripped the handle of my suitcase tightly as I stepped through the gate. I felt a strange vibration as I walked through, almost as if electricity ran through my entire body. The feeling was gone in an instant and I emerged into a huge room.

  The ceiling in the enormous room was four or five stories high and the walls were lined with thousands of locked compartments. It looked like a huge wall of post office boxes were stuffed inside a warehouse.

  Not exactly what I was expecting.

  The portion of the room where we appeared had been divided into grids each ten feet on a side. Each grid was enclosed by temporary barriers similar to those used for line control where a strand of webbing pulls out from one pole and attaches to another.

  Several men with orange, multi-pocket vests rode between the aisles of the grids on what looked like a grown-up version of a kid’s scooter – except for the fact that the scooters floated a foot off the ground, had no wheels, and seemed to be self-propelled. Some rode alone, while others pulled small trailers loaded with various boxes and miscellaneous tools.

  “This is your headquarters?” I asked. The floating scooters were cool, but the rest of the place was disappointingly low-tech compared to what I was expecting.

  “We call this area the gate hub. It’s only a small part of headquarters. Think of it like the airport,” said Tamara. “This is the place for arrivals and departures. We tune the gate boxes to marked arrival and departure locations. It helps keep us organized and spread out more. You can’t open a gate where another one is currently open, so we assign spaces to reduce confusion and accidents.

  I followed Tamara and Spencer as they wound their way through the labyrinth of barriers and out of the gate hub. We exited the room into a series of long corridors. Each corridor had a high ceiling and was wide enough for five people to walk next to each other.

  Large windows lined the walls, spaced out every twenty feet or so. I watched out the windows as we walked, but something about the windows felt...off. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. The windows were spaced far enough apart that I couldn’t easily look back and forth between them, so it took me a few minutes of walking to realize just what it was that felt wrong.

  Each window showed a different location.

  I stopped and stared, my analytical curiosity needing to understand what I was seeing. If these were windows – and they sure looked like it to me – how could they be looking out at different locations?

  Tamara saw my confusion and let out a laugh. “You aren’t crazy,” she said. ”Those aren’t really windows in the traditional sense. They are more like video feeds. They show live views from various locations across the world.”

  I stared at the window trying to see any pixels or anything that would tell me it was a video rather than an actual view, but I couldn’t see anything that indicated otherwise.

  “But how?” I asked. “Why?”

  Tamara chuckled and shook her head. “I don’t understand how the technology works. That’s not my strong suit. But the why is easy enough. The majority of our complex is underground, so we can’t have actual windows. Without any view to the outside world, people start to have some funny reactions. Some people feel cramped and claustrophobic. The windows help alleviate that feeling and give the illusion of being above ground and able to see outside.”

  “But that isn’t the worst part,” Spencer said. “A smaller group, but still enough to be significant, get too comfortable in the tunnels and develop a fear of the outside. When it is time for them to rotate to an assignment that requires them to leave headquarters, they can’t do it without going into a panic.”

  “Having a view to the outside helps with both cases,” Tamara said. “Plus, most of us like to see the different views of the world.”

  We continued walking while Tamara and Spencer pointed out items of interest as we went. The building was huge, and in several places, there were moving walkways as well as those hover scooters I had seen in the gate hub.

  We passed an area full of doorways on either side of the hallway. Each door was numbered, but many of them boasted decorations or were painted different colors.

  “This is one of the residential sections,” Spencer said. “These doors all lead to family housing units.”

  “Families?” I asked. “I thought you had to be eighteen to come here?”

  “Sort of,” Tamara said. “That’s true for people who were not born into the Seam Wardens. We don’t allow anyone younger than eighteen to stay here for an extended period of time.” She gave me a rather sad smile. “You were a rare exception, Pierce. But those kids whose parents are Seam Wardens stay with their families until they turn eighteen and go through cadet training. Then, they stay in the cadet barracks until they finish their training and are assigned a living sp
ace of their own.”

  Cadet barracks? That didn’t sound very promising. I envisioned a large room with hard cots, a trunk at the foot of my bed for the few belongings I was allowed to have, and communal showers.

  Was this really what I signed up for?

  We continued making turns through the halls until we reached a section that made me stop in my tracks. All the rooms in this section had glass walls on the outer edge. I had once gone to play racquetball with a friend, and this reminded me of that place. Along the length of each glass wall ran a set of small, metal bleachers three rows high. It was obvious they were there for people to watch what was happening inside.

  Inside, each room was slightly different. Some had racks of objects that looked like weapons, others had weight equipment, and still others had climbing walls and obstacle courses.

  I headed straight toward a room that at first glance was nothing but bare concrete. The walls and floor were mostly plain and unadorned. On the far side of the room was a bank of targets set on poles. There was a channel in the floor that allowed the targets to move from side to side with the aid of some type of motor.

  My eyes immediately jumped to the far side of the room and found the control panel I knew would be there. I had seen this room before or one just like it.

  The memory. Spencer. Boom Sticks.

  “I’ve been here before,” I said.

  Spencer and Tamara stopped and turned to face me. “What do you remember?” asked Spencer. A small smile made the corners of his mouth twitch up.

  “I watched you practice with the Boom Sticks here,” I said. “I begged you to let me try.”

  Spencer clapped me on the shoulder. “That you did, Pierce. Every day you begged.”

  “And he broke every safety rule by giving in,” Tamara said. Her voice was stern, but there was no real anger there.

  “Kind of like taking a ten-year-old boy along on a mission?” asked Spencer.

  Tamara blushed. “It was just supposed to be an observation,” she said. “No one could have predicted a full breach.”

  I wanted to hear more about that, but his point having been made, Spencer just shrugged and began walking once again.

  We started moving through more populated sections of the building. Those we passed greeted Spencer and Tamara with a quick nod or in some cases a salute, but their gaze lingered on me.

  I was the curiosity.

  The few kids I saw were younger than me and dressed normally, for the most part, but almost all the adults we met were wearing the long-sleeved, black shirts along with tactical vests and cargo pants. It was clearly some sort of uniform. It was time to finally ask.

  “What’s with the black shirts and vests?” I asked.

  “What about them?” asked Spencer.

  “What’s the point of them? Why is everyone wearing practically the same thing?”

  “It’s the Seam Warden uniform,” said Spencer. “Both our vests and cargo pants have trans-dimensional storage pockets."

  “The black shirts are actually body armor,” Tamara said. “Super light, but practically impenetrable. You don’t want to be caught in a fight without it.”

  I remembered the way the Stoki had slashed at Tamara with his claws, and how they had seemed to slide off the fabric.

  “None of us really understand the technology behind the fabric,” Spencer said. “We got it as a trade from Parse – one of the worlds we regularly connect with. The explanation I heard is that it somehow has the ability to diffuse the transfer of kinetic energy through the fabric. At this point, all I really understand is that it works. You can take a large caliber rifle round to the chest without it penetrating or even knocking you down,” Spencer said. “Although I wouldn’t recommend testing it. I learned the hard way that it really hurts.”

  We reached a junction with a large, metal security door. Spencer and Tamara stopped in front of it. The massive, metal door looked like one of the blast doors from the Death Star.

  “This is Command Central,” Tamara said. “This is where we monitor the Seams and oversee missions remotely.”

  She stood in front of a screen mounted on the wall beside the door. Tamara exhaled sharply onto the screen and it lit up a bright green color. The huge door lifted with a hiss of compressed air.

  I blinked in surprise. It was clearly some kind of biometric security, but I had no idea what it was actually measuring. A breath pattern? Was that somehow more secure than a fingerprint or retina scan? I would have to find out more about it when I had a chance.

  We crossed into Command Central and the door hissed closed behind us, leaving me feeling more than just a bit trapped. We walked down a long hallway lined with strange, glass cabinets. A red bar with the word “Emergency” written in white lettering was printed across the front of each. It looked like they were designed to be broken open, like a fire extinguisher. Inside each cabinet were what appeared to be gas masks, Boom Sticks, and gate cubes.

  The hallway opened into a huge, open area. On the far side of the room was a wall completely covered in screens all showing various bits of information or video feeds. A walkway completely encircled the room with several sets of stairs leading down ten feet or so into the main area. A dozen people sat in front of what I assumed were some type of computers. They each had several large screens in front of them. They sat with their palms resting on shiny, black mats right where I would have expected to see a keyboard. They were completely still, but I could see information flashing across their monitors. I couldn’t tell if they were somehow interacting and entering data, or if they were simply watching and absorbing.

  In the center of the room were three chairs set up on a raised platform. Two of the chairs were occupied by large men and the third held a petite woman, maybe just over five feet tall.

  They each wore the standard black shirt and vest of Seam Wardens. On each of their shoulders was an insignia I didn’t recognize. It looked military, but it wasn’t anything I had ever seen before. I suspected it indicated some sort of rank or maybe team identification.

  Each of the three chairs was surrounded by a transparent bubble that had dozens of screens projected onto it. Some were maps, others technical specs, and still others looked like live video feeds. The three people made swiping motions with their hands to move screens and reposition the data in front of them.

  “This is where we run our mission critical operations,” Spencer said. "Those three are in charge of this current operation and can monitor everything from their observation chambers. They can monitor vitals and health status of all the people in the operation, switch between individually mounted cameras, or monitor the larger view from an aerial drone.”

  We walked along the outside of the room and into another corridor. This corridor was lined with small glass rooms filled with beds and medical equipment. All of the rooms were empty.

  “This is where we connect to the second skins,” Tamara said. “But it doesn’t look like anyone is here today.”

  Second skins. That sounded familiar. “What are those?” I asked.

  Tamara smiled. “Something you have been wanting to try for a long time. Think of them as robots you can project your consciousness into and control. They allow us to safely explore some of the more dangerous worlds and go places where humans cannot survive the environment.”

  “Do I get to use them?” I asked.

  “Eventually,” Spencer said. “Once you’ve completed your cadet training. All Seam Wardens get trained on them.”

  “But just to warn you,” Tamara said, “not everyone is good at them. It takes a certain kind of mind to run them with any kind of efficiency. Less than a tenth of the Wardens who train on them develop the proficiency needed to take them out on an actual mission.”

  Despite Tamara’s warning, I was still excited to try them out. I had visions of myself battling Godzilla with my consciousness projected into Voltron. It was like I had died and gone to six-year-old boy heaven.

  We left t
he command center through the opposite side. By now, I was starting to get lost. I typically had a pretty good sense of direction, but we had made enough twists and turns that I was having difficulty remembering how to get back to the gate hub. I knew I would eventually figure it out, but for now, it felt very disorienting.

  Not my favorite feeling.

  We made several more turns and entered another area through a set of huge, steel doors with the words “Cadet Wing” written above them.

  “This is the Cadet training area,” Spencer said. “This will be your home for the next year while you learn how to be a Seam Warden.”

  The hallway made a large loop with a massive room in the center. I peered in through one of the many windows, but the room appeared to be completely empty. Along the hallway were several glass-encased training rooms like the ones we had seen earlier.

  There were multiple classrooms as well, set up amphitheater style with tables placed in descending semi-circles, each several feet lower than the others until it reached the flat bottom where there was a podium with a huge screen behind it.

  For some reason, the realization that part of the training was learning in a classroom was comforting. Learning concepts and facts had never been a problem for me.

  “Let’s show you the barracks,” Tamara said. We walked past more rooms whose purposes I could only guess at. I stopped as we passed one of the practice rooms, and I realized that it was occupied.

  The light was dim, but I saw a girl with strawberry blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, holding a rifle and shooting holographic targets of strange creatures. She wore goggles, ear protectors, and the black shirt and tactical vest of the Seam Wardens, but with two yellow stripes encircling the left bicep.

  I stood there, entranced, as she defended against wave after wave of monsters. No sooner did they appear, then she shot them in the head or through the center mass.

  Deadly and beautiful.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off her. All my higher brain functions seemed to shut down leaving me to stare at her like a slack-jawed yokel.