It's so good to be able to update again! Summer is a very productive time for us teen authors, isn't it? Speaking of productivity, I was recently accepted into an early college next year (yay!). Not only does that mean I don't have to suffer through more years of high school, but I'll have a much more flexible schedule next year, which hopefully means more time for writing!! Queen Saralee will certainly be pleased- maybe, someday, I'll be half as smart as she is... Anyway, back to the story- 

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"Swan." 

Nemesis whispered my name so gently that at first, I thought I was still dreaming. Yet, when I forced my eyelids apart, I was able to make out the shapes of her piercing, purple eyes staring down at me in the darkness. 

"Is it already time?" I whispered hoarsely, glancing at the holographic alarm clock beside my bed. Sure enough, it was 2:57 in the morning- three minutes before the time Lillae, Zaliana, Nemesis and I had agreed to meet at the entrance to the back courtyard. 

"Yes. I disabled the palace's interior security cameras, but the system resets itself much more frequently than I thought it would. They should be back up in five minutes." 

"Five minutes!?" I hissed in alarm, leaping clumsily out of bed without bothering to question how she had managed to mess with the most advanced security system the Scientist Clan had to offer. It was just one of those tricks one expected someone like Nemesis to have up her sleeve. 

"I hope you are less preoccupied with your appearance than your elder cousin is, because you will not have enough time to change out of your pajamas," Nemesis commented, already at the door. There was something about her straight face that made me want to laugh despite the fact that I was a member of the royal family- though that was very easy to forget- about to break the law. 

"That's alright." I looked down at my fluffy, blue pants adorned with tiny spaceships and fuzzy cat socks as I stealthily followed Nemesis down the hall. The attire of a seasoned criminal. 

A chill ran down my spine as we walked in silence down the spiraling stairwell that led away from the royal family's personal quarters and toward the public portion of the palace. It was slightly unnerving to see a place that was usually abuzz with the activity of various servants, officials, nobles, and family members completely and totally empty. The cold marble beneath me sapped the heat from my feet through my socks and I gripped the engraved wooden banister for support despite the stairs being more than sufficiently wide. I wouldn't dare admit it in front of Nemesis, but I was beginning to question allowing her to be dragged into this. 

Was the possibility of reconciliation with Lillae worth risking my one and only friendship?

"The others are to meet us at the back door to the royal garden. I'm not entirely familiar with the layout of the palace...would this be the quickest way there?" Nemesis paused to whisper in my ear at the bottom of the staircase, pointing with her left arm past a sea of sitting rooms, dining rooms, meeting rooms and rooms for who-knows-what at a barely perceptible curve in the hallway that led directly to the left. 

"It is..." I trailed off in surprise. She knew about the back hallway! I had grown up in Icicle Hall, and was still discovering secret passages hidden behind bookshelves and under rugs, each a part of the centuries-old castle's complex and convoluted history. That Nemesis was familiar with the ancient servant's passage that linked the garden to the second floor was more than a little impressive. Well, she had said that her grandmother used to work here...

"Then let's go," Nemesis whispered with conviction, raising her wrist to inspect her bulky, black Aural watch. "We've got two minutes and forty three seconds before the cameras are back online." And then, she took off. 

I followed haphazardly, half-running and half-skating on the bottoms of my socks toward the end of the hallway. There, instead of continuing onward past more Icicle Hall tour stops and spacious lobbies, Nemesis and I stepped to the side into a much smaller hallway. Though most of the palace was decorated extravagantly to celebrate the rich historical tradition of the Arystenn family, it was clear that this little passageway had been spared all such efforts. It was barely wide enough for Nemesis and I to walk through side by side and it smelled strongly of stale air. I found myself squinting as I made my way through the windowless darkness, stepping blindly over the upturned crates and boxes that covered the floor. 

Before long, the slow reappearance of light and widening of the space around us signaled that we had reached the other end of the tunnel. Sure enough, in front of the glass double doors that led out into the garden stood Lillae and Zaliana. Lillae, crossing her arms over the front of her designer v-neck, eyed my crudely assembled outfit and sleepless eyes with an air of mocking superiority. Zaliana simply ran her hand through her thick mat of black hair, too tired to take notice of my appearance. 

"Seventeen seconds," Nemesis read unceremoniously from the face of her watch. "We really must get going." 

Lillae, ever the hero, pushed the doors open without much regard to all the noise she was making and stepped confidently out into the garden. It didn't take long for the rest of us to follow. 

"Zali and I will wait here," she said commandingly, sinking down into a squat behind the nearest hedge. "You and your...er...friend will have to hop that fence to get to our tunnel of interest. CT me if you discover anything revolutionary." With that, she gestured to the tall fence that marked the left boundary of the royal garden- a fence that now looked like a much more intimidating barrier than usual. 

"Imperial chickens." Nemesis made a faint clucking noise under her breath as she strode quickly toward the fence. I smiled briefly, following her, before I came to notice something I hadn't seen before. Nemesis was very excited for this. Almost too excited. 

It was true. Here she was making jokes while my half-royal blood froze over from anxiety. I remembered how she had volunteered to participate in our little outing while I had been all but blackmailed into joining in. As I channeled my Aura through my feet in order to boost myself over the fence, I couldn't help but wonder if Lillae had told her something she hadn't told me. Perhaps this was a gesture of friendship on my cousin's part after all. 

The thought brought a smile to my face and I felt my Aura balloon underneath me, lifting me gently to the top of the fence. I leaped to the ground, landing softly in the tall, wet grass. Above me was the city sky, not entirely free of stars thanks to Aunt Tara's recent anti-pollution campaigns, and in front of me stretched a seemingly endless field of grass interrupted only by a structure that looked like a sorry, half-grown skyscraper. The black tube's diameter roughly matched my height and it leaned precariously to the left, reaching for the nearest palace window but never quite getting there. The Tunnel That Leads To Nowhere. 

"Well?" Nemesis smiled, excitement- no, scientific curiosity, in her case- brimming in her eyes. "Are you coming?"

A moment of confused tension hung between us, but we both soon knew what we wanted to do. We took off in the direction of the Tunnel, the pads of our feet gliding over the wet grass as it grew closer and closer. We paused in front of what appeared to be its entrance: a circular trapdoor etched into its side. Whatever Zaliana had done to the guards, they were nowhere near us, so we were free to ponder the six concentric dials that marked its middle. It was obviously a lock, but it was like no lock I had ever seen before. First of all, it was very bulky, with the smallest dial being the size of my first, and the letters around the dials were in no language I had ever encountered even at the IAYN.

"It is nothing more than a simple combination lock," Nemesis chimed in. Of course she knew that. "The mechanism is an Earthen one, and so outdated that no one would know how to crack it. Quite clever on your family's part, I'll have to say, and very confusing for the common Lessaenite. Think of the servants who have to clean this place every so often...I highly doubt they could remember the code to a lock as foreign as this one. The Scientist Clan would've had to leave some sort of clue to the combination, something to jog the memory..." Nemesis' hand slid down the smooth metal of the door around the lock as she spoke before pausing above a faint engraving that I hadn't even noticed before. It was in the same language as the letters on the dials of the lock.

"To the barren mother we go," she read, clearly struggling to decipher the letters. Frowning, she raised her arm to match the angle of the tunnel, closing one eye as she looked past it to the sky. And then, her face lit up in a brief moment of understanding. She retracted her hand and began turning the dials. I watched, holding my breath as she placed each into position before pushing the innermost one in. A brief rattling noise ensued before the door began to move, opening ominously inward. 

"...how?" I whispered, summoning a ball of Aura into my hand for light as I raised my leg to step into the tunnel. 

"There was a lot of guesswork involved," Nemesis admitted. "My first thought was that the 'barren mother' referred to planet earth, as it once nurtured the universe's first intelligent species but is now a radioactive wasteland. My limited knowledge of astronomy told me that this tunnel is pointed exactly in the direction of Earth as if attempting to travel to the planet, and the word 'Earthbound' contained the correct number of characters to fit on the lock perfectly," she shrugged, as if this feat of reasoning was nothing. 

I simply nodded my head, not sure whether I was too physically exhausted to make a response or merely didn't have one. The tunnel's upward incline was steeper than it had appeared from the outside, as I was on my hands and knees now, gripping the metal seams between the tunnel's segments as I hauled myself upward with nothing but Nemesis' feet in front of me to guide me. 

She stopped climbing so suddenly that I nearly fell back down the way I had come from the sheer surprise. When she stood up, I noticed that the tunnel had leveled out to a square platform that was just wide enough for me to rise to my feet beside her. I gazed at her in surprise: even in the limited light that my glowing hand provided, her face was a canvas of emotion, her bottom lip trembling as she stared steadily ahead. 

Turning my eyes to the spinning, black expanse in front of me, I realized what had her so transfixed. If it was what I thought it was, it was the stuff of legend...something straight out of a sci-fi novel. Something that I hadn't known we had the technology to detect, let alone create fifty meters from the royal palace. It suddenly made sense why my family and the Scientist Clan had put so much effort into hiding it- if it were to go public, it could revolutionize the field of Aural astrophysics. 

My trembling fingers found Nemesis' as the two of us silently looked, mesmerized, into the dark, shimmering, star-filled depths of a wormhole.