Worldweavers: Cybermage by Alma Alexander Read Free Book Online Page B

the sight component of this grouping, and you’ve chosen to attach yourself to that unknown symbol instead. So that sense might have migrated.”
    “But it was Fire and Air that lit up for me, before,” Thea said. “Not water.”
    “As I said,” Mrs. Chen said, “it isn’t an exact science. Tess, if that seems the best fit…”
    “No, wait,” Thea said. “If she’s unsure, let’s see if the other two have a stronger reaction to anything. Magpie?”
    Magpie reached out with her right hand, biting her lower lip. “I’m not sure I know what— oh! ”
    “What is it?”
    Magpie stood transfixed, her eyes wide, her hand hovering just above the Earth face of the cube. “I can feel…it feels like…tree bark, under my fingers,” she said. “And…silk. And…and… feathers ?”
    She touched the face, and it too changed color very subtly, shading into a coffee-with-a-lot-of-milk shade of white.
    “Between you and Tess, Ben,” Thea said.
    “I so don’t want to do this,” Ben said, staring at the cube. He had wrinkled his nose several times already, as though in anticipation of a sneeze that never came, his usual allergic reaction to the faintest whiff of magic. He did so again as he spoke, scrunching up his face into a grimace and shaking his head. “It’s like that infernal feeling when there’s a sneeze just hovering in the back of your nose, tickling, but you never quite sneeze and it drives you bananas.”
    “Try it. I think yours is the stronger link,” Thea said.
    Ben sighed and reached out for the cube. His hand hovered briefly over the Water face, but then he shook his head and glanced back at Tess over his shoulder.
    “You were right, I think. This one does nothing for me.” He shifted his hand over the Air face, and then, suddenly, let go of an explosive sneeze that made Rafe, halfway across the room, jump and jolt a book off the professor’s shelf. “Oh, yes, I think this one’s mine,” Ben said, after he sniffed a few times and rubbed at his watering eyes with his free hand. His fingers touched the Air face, and it, too,changed color into pale, pale blue. “I can smell ozone,” he whispered. “Like you sometimes can in a thunderstorm. And apples. Yes, apples.”
    “I think that’s the taste I had,” Tess said, reaching out resolutely toward the Water face, which began to shade into a pale green as her fingers got closer, the color of shallow water over white sand. “Apples…”
    She touched the Water face.
    And everything went away.
     
    Thea found herself standing alone in a thick, roiling white fog. She looked down at her hands, but she wasn’t holding the cube, not in this place, wherever it was. But the new gadget, the wrist-computer that Humphrey had given her, was still on her arm. She squinted at it through the drifting mist, flicked it on, and typed Cube 1: white fog, starting place. She didn’t have a clue where she was or what had happened, but it was obvious that she was no longer in the professor’s office holding an Elemental cube with her friends.
    Speaking of whom…
    “Marco!” Thea called out experimentally. Her voicesounded muffled by the fog, unable to carry very far. But almost instantly there were several responses.
    “Polo!” Magpie called out from somewhere to her left.
    “Likewise,” Tess’s voice came floating from somewhere behind Thea.
    “Where are we?” Terry asked.
    “What did you do ?” said Ben at the same moment.
    “Oh, great, you instantly assume it was me,” Thea said, pitching her voice to carry.
    “Your idea,” Ben said.
    “Well, thanks for the vote of confidence.”
    “Seriously,” Terry said, “where are we? I can’t see my hand in front of my face in this fog.”
    “Don’t move, let me find you,” Thea said. “Whatever else happened, I’m still the anchor, so don’t drift off by yourselves. One at a time. Terry, keep talking.”
    “I think your voice comes from somewhere over to the right of me, and you also