The Otherworldlies by Jennifer Anne Kogler Read Free Book Online Page B

the cave near the entrance to the beach. The sunburned man was calling it the Den.”
    “What?”
    “He pointed out this hole to me and after he left, I crawled through.”
    “That’s impossible! We’ve been in that cave a million times before.”
    “It was there. I swear. There was a strange inscription on the floor, with strange lettering. It looked very old. And there was a drawing on the wall.” Fern looked pleadingly at Sam, who looked confused. “I know all this sounds crazy, Sam, and that nobody is going to believe me, but you know me, I don’t—”
    “I believe you,” Sam said. He looked at his sister with an earnest intensity. “I saw you disappear.”
    The twins looked at each other for a moment without saying anything.
    “You did?”
    “I almost talked myself out of it in the last day. Like I couldn’t have seen it, but talking to you now, I know what I saw, Fern. You just vanished. Like a ghost.”
    “Maybe that’s what I am.”
    “If you were a ghost,” Sam said, “I wouldn’t be able to do this.” He grabbed her wrist and twisted his hands in opposite directions. “Indian burn!”
    “Ouch!” Fern said.
    “Shhhh,” Sam said. “I just thought of something.” He narrowed his eyes and began to focus on the computer screen in front of him. “There’s a word for it. Like in Star Trek when Captain Kirk says, ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’ Only you can do it all by yourself.” Sam began typing.
    “Since when did you start watching Star Trek ?”
    “I don’t know; the reruns are always on when I’m flipping through.”
    “You’re such a closet nerd.”
    “Do you want to figure this out or not?”
    “Sorry,” Fern said, half smiling.
    Sam clicked the mouse with fervor, scanning the rapidly changing windows. “Yes! Here it is. Teleport. I bet you teleported,” Sam said, his whisper growing raspy with excitement.
    He pointed to the screen. Sam had typed ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ into Google and had come up with thousands of websites. He’d navigated through a series of links and had come up with a page explaining the “Art of Teleportation.” A man in the corner kept disappearing, than reappearing.
    “‘Although teleportation is not yet possible, it will be,’” Sam said, reading from the screen. “They’ve already done it with photons. It says here that researchers at Cal Tech did it in 1998.”
    “Photons?”
    “I think they’re like particles. See, it’s exactly like Star Trek ,” he said, pointing to a sentence on the screen that mentioned Captain Kirk and Spock. “Only that was made up. And you’re real!”
    Sam looked at his sister with absolute wonderment.
    “What’s all this stuff about entanglement and destroying the object that you’re teleporting?” Fern asked, quickly scanning a paragraph of text under the question “What do people mean when they say teleport ?”
    “Have you tried doing it again?” Sam said.
    “Are you kidding? No way!” Fern said, shivering at the very thought of it.
    “Why not?”
    “What if next time I do it, I get destroyed, like it says in this article?”
    “You’re not going to get destroyed.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Fern, don’t you get it?” Sam said, impassioned. “You can do something nobody in the world has been able to do before. It’s like you’re a superhero.”
    “I’m not a superhero. I’m a freak.”
    “Superheroes are freaks. They’re good freaks.”
    “Sam, there’s no such thing as a good freak.”
    “Of course there is. Star Trek is full of good freaks. Superman’s a good freak. Um,” Sam said, trying to come up with other examples, “and Lance Armstrong—I hear his heart cycles blood twice as fast as a normal person. He’s a good freak. Or Einstein—he was a good smart freak.”
    Fern let a halfhearted chuckle escape her mouth.
    “Man,” Sam continued, his face animated, “this whole thing is incredible!” He began to focus on the computer screen once more. “Now what was that