Inwardly, Alli winced. Leave it to Douglas to reduce everything to dollars and cents—even her apparent disappearance and the loss of an entire month of her life that she couldn’t account for.
“I’ll call you when I get there,” she said and kissed him lightly on the cheek, though honestly, she really didn’t want to get anywhere near him. Though she didn’t understand why, getting physically close to her fiancé just felt uncomfortable, which was really strange. It had never bothered her before, but now it felt wrong.
Well, add it to the list of weird things happening today, Alli told herself.
She had to get up to the Mother Ship and try to find some answers. As she had told Douglas, she had a very strong feeling that somehow the Kindred had something to do with what had happened to her.
She only wished she knew what it was.
Thirty-Six
“Oh, I’m so relieved you’re back, all safe and sound!” Sophia gave her a big hug, squeezing Alli tight for emphasis as she pulled her into her suite. “Come on and sit down. You really don’t know where you went?” she asked, examining Alli’s face anxiously as they both settled on her couch.
Alli shook her head. “I wish. Douglas is going crazy about it but I don’t remember a thing. The last thing I can recall is going to sleep in bed beside him. And the next morning—or what felt like the next morning to me, anyway—when I woke up, he was insisting that I’d disappeared and been gone almost an entire month somehow!”
“You did and you were,” Sophie assured her. “We thought maybe you’d come back up here to the Mother Ship somehow, even though your shuttle was still at your house on Earth. We turned the whole place upside down looking for you.” She leaned forward and looked into Alli’s eyes. “What we were most afraid of was that you’d somehow been taken by that Kru’ell One you’d been dreaming about. I even had Doctor Lambert monitor her PORTAL, but we couldn’t find you anywhere, even though she was combing through different universes for days!”
Alli shook her head. This was too much to take in all at once.
“PORTAL? What’s that?” she asked, skipping over Sophie’s other strange statements about Krue’ell Ones and different universes.
“Oh, didn’t I introduce you to Doctor Lambert yet?” Sophie asked. “Caroline’s a scientist and she built a machine that acts like a window into other universes in the Multiverse. Or, well, she thought it was a window but it turns out that for certain people, it can act more like a door. Caroline herself got sucked through into a different universe and we had a terrible time trying to get her back again.”
“Really?” Alli shook her head. “Whoever heard of being sucked into a whole other universe?”
“Well, that’s exactly what we were afraid happened to you,” Sophie explained. “Especially after you told me about those strange dreams you had about the Kru’ell One warrior.”
“What?” Alli’s temples began to throb for some reason. “What are you talking about?” she asked, frowning. “I never had any dreams of any warrior.”
Sophie frowned.
“Yes, you did, hon,” she said. “You were telling me all about it the last time I saw you. About how you always saw him in a hall filled with shadows and he said he was coming for you.” She shivered. “Really scary stuff! So of course we were afraid that you somehow got sucked through the PORTAL and wound up in his universe.”
By now Alli’s head was positively pounding.
“I don’t…don’t remember telling you about any dreams,” she said to Sophie, rubbing her temples to try and ease the ache. “I don’t even remember having any dreams. I’m beginning to feel like I’m going crazy!”
“Oh dear—I shouldn’t have said anything!” Sophie exclaimed. “I’m so sorry, Alli!”
“No…” Alli took a deep breath, trying to calm the pounding in her head. “No, it’s all right. It’s just hard to hear that I’ve apparently lost even more of my memory than I thought. I mean, an entire month is gone but so is the conversation I apparently had with you about weird dreams and warriors from an alternate universe.”
“Sylvan and I were so worried about you after that,” Sophie confessed. “We were actually glad that you went back down to Earth because the PORTAL can’t work there—it has to be out of Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field. But when you went missing…”
“Show me the PORTAL,” Alli interrupted. She didn’t know why, but it seemed important to see the machine Sophie kept talking about that led to other universes.
“Oh well, if you think it will help jog your memory or something,” Sophie said uncertainly.
“Maybe it will, if I somehow went through it, like you seem to think,” Alli said.
“I don’t see how, since you disappeared from Earth. Though I supposed it can’t hurt to have a look,” Sophie said thoughtfully. “But you’ll have to stand well back from it—it can be dangerous!” She frowned. “I have to tell Caroline—Doctor Lambert—to cancel her search for you, anyway. Come on—we’ll go see her and the PORTAL now.”