Cascade Read Free Page A

hers was cold. Mine was hot. Just like last time.
    “I know it feels like plain old stone to you,” I said to my mother, “but for me and Lia, our prints are hot.” Mom stepped forward and touched it again, then turned and then felt my forehead. I laughed under my breath. “I’m not running a fever, Mom. It’s real.” I put both palms on her face, so she could feel the residual warmth from my right. “Feel that?”
    I knew from her expression that she did. She was beginning to believe. Being there, so close to the portal, made my heart pound. I knew I wanted to go back. But I couldn’t. Not without Lia. And she was nowhere close to jumping back in.
    “What if we don’t pull off the wall in the same time period, Gabi?” she asked, reading my look. “What if we end up in Etruscan times?”
    “That’d be all right by me,” Mom said drily. As an archaeologist specializing in the Etruscan era and populace, she dreamed of seeing everything firsthand.
    I frowned. I hadn’t thought of that. There was no dial, no program, no way to set the year you wanted to hop into. Last time, I’d pulled my hand away when I finally figured out what was happening. I just happened to end up in 1342.
    I looked around the tomb, trying to figure out an answer. “The urn! When it’s broken, we’ll know we’re there.”
    Mom frowned and bent by the remains of the urn, picking up a piece and staring at its edges under the beam of her flashlight. She looked up at me and I bit my lip, but then seized on the situation, as a means to an end. “Look at that, Mom. The shards, the layer of dust atop them, like it’s been there for centuries, right?”
    She nodded slowly. “Grave robbers, most likely.”
    “That would make sense. But I broke it the last time we came through. When I went back to 1342, this place was sealed up tight. There was no hole in the ceiling. It was totally pitch black inside. I couldn’t see where I was going, and knocked it over. Sorry,” I added quickly, with a grimace. After all, I was an archaeologist’s kid, and I’d just admitted to destroying a priceless artifact. I knelt next to her. “But think, Mom. Think hard. When we first got to this site, was the urn broken or whole?”
    She paused for several seconds and blinked rapidly. Two memories clearly collided, as I hoped they might. Conflicting memories. One of the urn, whole. One of it broken. “I…I don’t think it was broken.”
    “But look,” I said, gesturing again to the shards. “That’s like centuries of dust on them, right?” I rose. “Because it happened almost seven hundred years ago. When I was there. Facts, Mom. Facts. They’ll lead you to your theory. Is there anything else in here that is different? Different from any other tomb? Any clue to tell us it’s a doorway to a different time?” I turned and examined the frescoes in the dim light. “Even better would be anything that tells us how we might control what time we’ll land in.”
    Lia stood in my way, arms folded, shaking her head. “There’s no steering wheel for this thing. You remember. We move fast , Gabi. You take a breath after it’s broken and we might be thirty years off. Besides, we’re moving backward. And remember? It’s pitch black in there.”
    She was right. If I waited for the urn, and passed it, I might arrive when Marcello was a baby. That wouldn’t be cool. “The light! That’s how we’ll know. I opened the tomb. At some point, someone rolled that rock back into place. Marcello wouldn’t have done that, not if he thought I was coming back. I just have to wait past that…and, well, I don’t know exactly how I’ll know. But we have to try.”
    “They might have rolled that stone back a hundred years after we left!”
    “We have to try,” I repeated.
    “You’re crazy,” she said, eyebrows lifted.
    “Please, Lia. Just for a while. I have to go. I have to.” I dared to glance at Mom, wondering if she would keep us from the