The Emerald Atlas by John Stephens Read Free Book Online Page A

there.”
    Kate had now accepted that what had happened to them was magic. The truth was, it explained a great deal, not just the book Michael had found, but how, for instance, an entire mountain range could have been hidden from view. So fine, magic was real. Right now, she was more concerned with how they were going to get out of here.
    “Where do you think he’s taking us?” Emma asked.
    “He’s probably going to execute us,” Michael said, pushing up his glasses. The day was warm and humid, and they had all three begun to sweat.
    “As long as he executes you first, Mr. It’s-Just-a-Photo-Album. ’Cause I’m definitely gonna watch that.” She turned to their captor. “Where’re you taking us, stinker?”
    “Don’t talk to it,” Kate said.
    “I’m not afraid.”
    “I know you’re not,” Kate said, though in fact she knew the opposite to be true. “But don’t anyway.”
    After ten minutes of being forced along with grunts and shoves, the children came overtop a short rise, the woods opened, and Michael stopped in his tracks.
    “Look!”
    He was pointing toward the river. At first, Kate didn’t understand what she was seeing. It was as if the water had gotten halfway down the gorge, gone under the narrow stone bridge, and suddenly stopped, a quarter mile shy of the falls. Only there were no falls! No river shooting down to tumble over the cliff! Kate looked back along the dry groove of the chasm to where the blue strip of water halted. She noticed what looked like a wide wooden wall built across the gorge, and it hit her: Abraham’s dam!
    She glanced toward the town, to the shimmering lake in the distance, and saw the same large boat from before, floating on the glassy surface. In the other Cambridge Falls, the one they’d left, there was no dam, no lake, and hardly any trees. What had happened to change everything? Was their ragged captor to blame?
    “In The Dwarf Omnibus ,” Michael was saying, “G. G. Greenleaf writes about dwarves being master dam builders. Not like elves. All they ever want to build are beauty parlors.”
    Emma groaned and said that she and Kate didn’t want to hear about dwarves. “We’re gonna die soon enough; don’t torture us.”
    The creature emerged from the trees behind them and began waving its sword.
    “Come on,” Kate said.
    As the children picked their way down the hill, Kate’s hand went to her mother’s locket. It was up to her to get them out of here, up to her to protect them. After all, she had promised.
    “Are those …,” Emma said.
    “Yes,” Kate said.
    “And—”
    “Yes.”
    “What’re they doing with them?”
    “I don’t know.”
    The creature had brought them down out of the woods to a clearing beside the dam. Up close, it was indeed like a huge wooden wall—perhaps twenty-five feet thick—and the whole thing was bowed, curving in a gentle C from one side of the chasm to the other. The front faced a long stretch of still water. The back—nothing, a void.
    But none of them, not Kate, not Emma, not even Michael, were looking at the dam.
    The reason was simple.
    They had found the children of Cambridge Falls.
    In the center of the clearing, forty or fifty boys and girls were massed into a tight knot. Kate guessed the youngest was about six, while the oldest looked to be near Michael’s age. There was no shouting, no pushing, no running about; none of the behavior Kate knew was normal when children were gathered together. Fifty children, give or take, stood in one place, perfectly still and quiet.
    And around them paced nine of the black-garbed, moldering creatures.
    There was a harsh bark, and the children’s captor drove them forward.
    “Emma,” Kate whispered, “we need to ask these kids questions. So don’t do anything, okay?”
    “What’re you talking about?”
    “She means don’t start a fight,” Michael said.
    “Fine,” Emma grumbled.
    The creature forced them into the back of the pack. Kate was relieved that most