Page 205 of Keldori By Daybreak

He grunted, clearly still not believing a word I’d told him about Skalterra, and turned the key in the ignition.

Orla yelped as the old engine rumbled to life, grabbing Iseult’s hand. Fana, meanwhile, didn’t seem to notice. She stared out her window with resolved, tired eyes, holding a bagel but not giving it any attention.

Orla’s excited titters amplified as Maxwell threw the van into reverse and backed out of the parking spot, but then she fell silent, leaning across Iseult’s lap for a better look out the window as we wound through palm tree lined streets towards the highway.

I looked out my window too. I’d thought coming back to Keldori would feel familiar, that it would be a relief. Maybe it was because I was still so far from Keel Watch Harbor and in a place I’d never been, driving with the father who hated me, or maybe it was because I’d been Skalterra too long, but it didn’t feel like coming home.

Too much had changed, but I didn’t know what or who.

“What is that?” Orla jammed a finger against Iseult’s window at a passing billboard as we merged onto the highway. “By the Three Magicians, there’s so many of them!”

“It’s called a billboard,” I said. “People use them to advertise services.”

“They’re hideous!” She grinned. “Look at that house! It’s huge!”

“That’s a hotel, actually.”

Iseult’s knuckles turned white where she gripped the fabric of her seat, and she pressed against her headrest.

“This is too fast,” she said, then flinched when a motorcycle revved past us. “That is too fast!”

“We’re going ten under the speed limit,” Maxwell grunted from the driver’s seat.

“It’s no different than a steamcart,” I assured Iseult.

“That was too fast, too,” she snapped.

“They’ll be okay,” Ciarán said in my head, and I turned back to face the windshield. “It’s a lot all at once.”

“I know the feeling,” I replied.

“Twenty-four hours,” Ciarán reminded me. “This will all be over in twenty-four hours.”

I nodded. He couldn’t see the movement through my seat back, but he would still know I’d made it. He would also know it wasn’t nearly as confident I was pretending it was.

I’d half-expected the drive to go wrong after the misadventures we’d had while crossing Skalterra, but the most exciting thing to happen was a bit of traffic when trying to get through Los Angeles and Orla wanting to purchase the entire snack aisle of a gas station when we stopped for a quick break.

I convinced her to choose just three snacks and promised that we would have all the time in the world to try all of Keldori’s candies soon enough.

Back on the highway again, Orla, Fana, and Iseult remained transfixed at their respective windows until they each succumbed to exhaustion and fell asleep in their seats. Ciarán was awake, but his consciousness was sluggish and heavy where it pressed against mine.

He didn’t want to leave me alone with my father, but someone needed to stay awake to make sure Maxwell continued to comply. Ciarán needed the rest, however, and I knew just the way to lull him to sleep while keeping myself awake and alert.

“Tell me about Paleomagnetism,” I said.

Maxwell had the audacity to snort. “You aren’t getting into college.”

“Paleomagnetism doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Your lecture was hard to follow.”

“If it was hard to follow, it’s because you lack the necessary baseline education to understand the principles I was explaining.”

He was trying to annoy me, and it was working a little bit. It was also keeping me awake, though, so I leaned into it.

“Then educate me, Dr. Brenton.”

Maxwell gave an exasperated sigh that rasped at the back of his throat in irritation, but the opportunity to flex his knowledge in his field must’ve been too much to resist.

“Earth has geographic north and south poles that form the axis around which the planet rotates, but it also has magnetic poles because there’s a magnetic field around the planet. Those magnetic poles shift over time, and as a paleomagnetist, I study those historical shifts. Sometimes the shifts are small. We call that polar wander. But every few hundred thousand years or so, the poles flip entirely. The north end of the magnetic field becomes south and the south end becomes north.”