Bonfires Burning Bright by Jeremy Bishop, Kane Gilmour Read Free Book Online Page A

arms, each with a foot-long talon on the end. The limbs twitched madly for a moment, and then fell still.
    “What are those things?” Cash asked, grunting as Kyle packed his wound from behind.
    “Not the worst things that are out here tonight.” Frost answered.

 
     
    9
     
    Winslow stood from his chair and leaned down over the punctured journal. He’d been translating it long enough now that he could perform the substitution decoding in his head and read the journal as if he were fluent in the language.
    Getting the whole picture with a chunk of the book’s center missing was tricky business. Joshua and Lisa worked on the diagrams and blueprints, while Winslow poured over the journal, always getting a partial picture of events on each page.
    He had to remind himself that the book had been picked up on an alternate world—not his Earth, or the Prime Earth, as he was coming to think of it. Things on the world this journal had come from were likely radically different from their own. The burned out husk of a landscape and fire-breathing lizards were proof of that. It was possible that nothing in this book applied to their Refuge. Their Ellison. But his gut said there was some overlap. If even half of what he was reading turned out to be true, he would be able to piece the rest together.
    The theory was very similar to what he’d come up with on his own. The technology was beyond his grasp, but between him and Cash, they might be able to make a go of it. The thing he really wanted, and wasn’t getting, was the motivation behind putting the technology in place. He understood now, how you could take an entire town and its inhabitants and shift them to another reality or plane of existence. The theories—if not the practical application—on that had been viable since Einstein’s day. The true question was why . Especially after DARPA had pulled their support from Ellison’s project.
    The journal discussed Ellison’s anger over DARPA pulling out of the project, but then he had decided to continue on without them, and in secret. The project itself was referred to as J.L. Winslow couldn’t figure out what those initials referred to yet. The only other details about the purpose of the project were oblique, like with Ellison constantly referring to himself being on the ‘straight path’ with regard to the project.
    With each page, Winslow’s frustration mounted. He felt sure he would have all the answers if the middle of the book wasn’t missing. Plus he was getting really tired. He’d stopped trying to keep track of Earth days and nights, because the hours on these other worlds didn’t correspond. All he knew was he felt exhausted, and stressed, like he hadn’t felt since leaving JPL. His body ached and his thoughts grew loopy. He’d even started to think of the journal as a big paper donut.
    He ran a finger through his messy gray hair, and rubbed the bridge of his nose, pushing his glasses up onto his forehead as he did so.
    “Anything new, Joshua?”
    “Well,” the boy scribbled furiously in a document. “It’s a lot of technical terms for parts of the pylons—what these documents call ‘Repeater Elements.’ I only understand about half of what I’m reading and writing. None of these things is a clear instruction manual for Jacob’s Ladder.”
    Winslow’s eyes snapped open. “What did you say?”
    “I said there’s no easy operation manual. Everything is really technical—”
    “No, no,” Winslow cut the boy off. “That name. Jacob’s Ladder. What’s that about? Was that written somewhere?”
    “Yeah, it’s the name of the project. Where is it?” Joshua started looking through the stack of pages.
    Lisa, seated next to him, found the page in her pile. “Here it is.” She handed the paper to Winslow. It was a memo from someone at DARPA authorizing the start of Project Jacob’s Ladder, and requesting an update after a period of five months. The document was dated five years ago.
    Winslow