The Law of Nines

He gestured to the little refrigerator under the counter. “You want something to eat?”

“No, not now. I’d rather get going and then eat.”

She went back to toweling her hair dry.

“You could use the hair dryer and have it dry a lot quicker.”

She gave him a blank look. “The what?”

Alex smiled. “Here, let me show you.”

He took her into the bathroom and lifted the hair dryer off its rack. He turned it on high and played it over her hair a moment before turning it off.

“See?”

“That’s amazing,” she said, taking it from his hand and looking it over. “I can do a similar thing with magic, but magic doesn’t work here. I didn’t realize you would have technology to match it.” She handed the hair dryer back. “Do it some more.”

Alex switched it back on and directed the warm air around on her hair. She turned her back to him and let him work at blowing her long fall of wavy blond hair dry. When he had finished, she turned back around and looked him over.

“How come you look clean?”

“I took a shower while you were still asleep.”

“Oh,” she said, going back out into the main room. “I thought that we agreed that ladies go first.”

Alex smiled. “I win any way I can, even if I have to break the rules.”

She gave him a meaningful smile. “I’m glad you do.”

“How do you feel?”

“Like a new woman.”

“Well, you look as beautiful as ever.”

She smiled. “So do you.”

“If you’re feeling better, then I’d like some answers,” Alex said, turning serious. “Before we were ambushed and the lights went out, my mother said that they asked her all the time about the gateway. When you heard that word—gateway—you said that you had figured it out, that you knew what they wanted.”

She nodded. “They want the gateway.”

Alex rolled his eyes. “I got that much of it. But I don’t know what it means.”

“Well,” she said as she started folding her dirty clothes and packing them into the duffel bag they’d bought back at the outlet mall, “do you remember when I told you about how I tried to take the painting you gave me back to my world to show to people?”

Alex nodded. “You said that on the journey back it simply vanished. You said that you didn’t know what happened to it, but that the experience confirmed what people had suspected, that things couldn’t be taken back from this world to yours.”

“So, if nothing can be taken back to my world, why would people from my world come here? Why would Radell Cain have been sending so many people here for so long? What could they possibly want, if they can’t take anything back?”

“Knowledge, maybe?”

“Well, I suppose that’s not out of the question, but I think that Cain wants something more basic. They’re after something specific and they’ve spent a long time and a lot of effort trying to get it. Why do you suppose they kept your mother prisoner all that time? Why do they want you?”

“Obviously, I guess, they want the gateway. But I don’t know what that means.” Alex opened his hands in a gesture of frustration. “What the hell is a gateway? Why would they want it?”

She tucked her folded jeans into the duffel bag and then straightened. “It has long been speculated in some quarters that ever since our worlds were separated, some form of connection remained between them. It’s always been an obscure theory, though.”

Alex eyed her suspiciously. “So what does this obscure theory say?”

“Well, do you remember me telling you how the Lord Rahl banished all those people to this world to end the war?”

“Yes. You said that they didn’t come here the way you did, that it was thought that the worlds were for an instant joined at the same place and time and when they separated the people who wanted to live without magic were left in this world and your people in that one.”

“That’s right. That’s why it’s called the separation event. Not a lot is known about what happened back then, but it’s thought that Lord Rahl somehow bridged the void between our worlds, brought them together for a spark in time in order to send the people who didn’t want to live with magic here.”

“You mean he sent them through a gateway?”

“No, but according to this theory, there had to be an actual place of connection, a small breach in the void of nothingness between the worlds, an opening through time and space, that allowed everything to remain in balance while the worlds were brought together and then the separation was taking place. The fact that we can come here and return is claimed to be proof that the connection still exists; otherwise, they say, we couldn’t cross the void between our worlds.

“The gateway, some theorized, was a side effect of the separation event, an anomaly, an artifact, that remains to this day.

“Other believers in this gateway say that it had to be created by Lord Rahl to balance what he was doing, or the separation event could not have taken place.”

“Seems to me to be a pretty important event. Why is this all just speculation? Why isn’t more known?”