but he did not dare make himself so visible. After his fourth vault, he finally materialized near the safe house: he recognized the sound of the Sonata Stream.
Up close, the Sonata Stream was but another mountain brook, the kind that was everywhere to be found in these parts—clear, cold water, rocky banks, red and gold fallen leaves carried swiftly on the currents.
It sounded ordinary too, the burbling of water, the rustle of tree branches overhead, the chirp of an occasional bird or insect. But if one happened to be at just the right distance, all the commonplace sounds somehow combined to form music. Not figurative music, but literal, as if the stream had learned to pluck lyres and strike tiny triangles to mark the rhythm of its progress.
Whenever he and his mother went on a long walk, she always made sure to pass by the Sonata Stream. This had been their mountain, their playground, their safe refuge from her despot of a father and the attention of Atlantis, circling ever closer. And she had wanted him to feel its magic in his bones, to always hold in his heart a deep well of reverence and wonder.
He allowed himself a minute to listen. This would be the last time he stood upon the loamy soil of his childhood, the last time he breathed in the scent of home.
Then he vaulted back to ferry Kashkari and Amara to the grassy slope beneath a sheer rock face. Behind the rock face was a surprisingly large living space, room after rough-hewn room, the furniture simple and sturdy, the granite walls faintly reddish in the light of the sconces.
It was where Fairfax would have stayed during the previous summer, if things had not gone ill for them. They had made such plans. Every moment he could have stolen away from the castle they would have spent together, training and strategizing, but also just holding hands and leaning on each other, storing up a reserve of happiness and hope to see them through the darker days to come.
Instead they had spent no time together at all. And as much as Titus wished to draw on the good times they had shared to keep despair at bay, he felt like the safe house, full of should-have-beens and little else.
“There is a bath in the back, with hot water,” he told his companions. “Go ahead and make use of it.”
He walked into the kitchen. There were no fresh foods in storage, but a large variety of preserved and dehydrated nutrients. He set a pot of water to boil over a flameless stove and added an assortment of ingredients to make a vegetable potage. As the soup bubbled, he opened several packages of waybread, soaked the brick-like pieces in water, then put them in a warm oven, as per the heating instructions.
When he was done, he leaned against the rough stone counter, more exhausted than he cared to admit. Only the first day of the journey, and already he felt as if he had been traveling for years. More than anything he wanted to swallow a dose of sleep aid and pass a few hours in blissful oblivion. But first he had to make sure his companions were properly fed. Maybe he ought to put out some dried fruits on the dining table, or—
“Titus,” came Kashkari’s voice.
He turned around. “Yes?”
Kashkari stood in the doorway of the kitchen, a copy of The Delamer Observer in his hand. The expression on his face made Titus’s heart sink even before he said, “I’m afraid I have bad news.”
Titus could scarcely credit what he was reading. Demolished. Return to service by the beginning of next year.
“Can your disruptor be used on a different translocator?” asked Kashkari.
Titus shook his head. He had not been involved with the making of the disruptor, which he had inherited from Prince Gaius, his grandfather, who had long sought ways to get into Atlantis. But the instruction had been very clear: it would work only on that particular translocator.
Which was the reason translocators 1 to 4 of Delamer East, though becoming obsolete, had never been replaced: it was a security weakness in that particular generation of translocators that the disruptor sought to exploit.
Could this have been a coincidence, the demolition of the translocators when he most needed them to function as usual? And who, besides himself, Fairfax, and Kashkari, even knew of the existence of the disruptor?