Chapter Seven: True Blue Worlds — Part 3
“Imagine the energy of your mind flowing along the lines. That should help. Whether she can actually make contact with such a poorly designed circuitry on her end is another issue entirely.”
Orchid concentrated, as silly as it sounded to her at the moment, taking the entire pattern in her mind and letting her energy flow through it. Bamboo did the same, and their energy shot across the surface, causing it to turn a luminous green, until Alon’s energy flowed over it, brightening the glow and shifting the frequency color to something like the color of dying seaweed. What Bamboo and Orchid sensed from the circuitry, they sensed in a way so alien to either of them that they didn’t know how to experience it. One moment they were in space, the next, invisible guests in a room in which resided only Jun. They had felt their drop to her with such clarity that they could trace the path to the surface of the planet without much effort at all. They felt rather than saw Jun’s circuit board heat up with the effort of transmission, and knew that their time was limited. When the signal died, leaving them consciously back in orbit around Earth, Orchid, Bamboo, and Alon stared at each other. Jun had been holding a piece of paper in front of the glyph that had an address, some number coordinates, and two words that Orchid felt were markings for intersecting roads. Jun spoke something to Alon, though the expressions of words, if conveyed, were only heard by him.
“I saw everything.” Bamboo said, hiding none of his wonder.
“I didn’t hear anything.” Orchid added, inputting the coordinates that had been on the paper Jun had hastily written on. The coordinates would put them on the opposite side of a continent, as close to Jun as she dared take them, given the population density of the city the woman had chosen to take shelter in.
“The circuitry leaked. You picked up ghost resonance in your head. It’s kind of a side effect of multiple person access.” Alon put the zero point transmitter away, pulled his pack to his back.
Within moments the three of them had dropped through atmosphere and were just over the surface of the planet, dropping slowly into a busy, noisy city, moving toward a specific point at an altitude that Orchid felt would be safest. Settling, finally, into a driveway between a bookstore and a bar, Orchid began looking about for Jun, and found her, in a few moments, staring at them from inside a mostly glass structure whose purpose seemed solely to sell items. Though its design seemed primitive to Orchid, its purpose was easy to conceive. They walked along the side of a nearly deserted roadway, an odd threesome that got few if any looks from the people passing around them, until they reached the entrance to the store, Orchid stepping inside even as Jun, staring in shocked surprise at the three of them, overcame her temporary paralysis and gave her father a close hug.
“Jun’s in a store whose entire front is made of glass.” Orchid said, so Bamboo would know where they were heading. Swift hovered nearby, Glyph and Spunky moving closer to him.
“Papa.” She yelled, grabbing her father tightly and not letting go.
“Yes dear, squeeze less tightly.” Alon said, sounding winded.
“Uh, Hello again.” Bamboo said nervously.
Jun paused, still holding her father, studying Bamboo closely. “What are you doing here?” She asked.
“I went back to Zon to say hello, and found your father.” Bamboo stammered. “We uh, brought him to you.”
While the trio continued talking, Orchid synchronized her mother’s map to the terrain around her, tracing a path to the Eighth Point of Entry, marked as a building in the same city as Jun’s bookstore. Orchid doubted that the proximity was a coincidence, as Jun was an immigrant and Points of Entry often entertained visiting extraterrestrial and hume life, and assisted immigrants arriving on planets from other worlds with settling in.
“We’ll have to get together soon.” Jun said, speaking mostly to Bamboo.
When Alon and Jun went into the back room of the bookstore together, Orchid squeezed Bamboo’s arm tightly, Bamboo leaned in and hugged her around the waist.
“Time for us to meet our mother.” Orchid said.
“You found the Eighth Point?” Bamboo asked as his mind slowly shifting gears.
Orchid squeezed his hand, set it inside her elbow. “Yeah, it’s close enough to walk. Hold on to my arm, please, we’ll be there soon enough.”
The Eighth Point of Entry turned out to be a bar of the same name with the number Eight placed under it in several hundred languages. The building was in every sense of the word nondescript. With blacked out windows, a squared off front of plaster and paint, a flat roof some ninety feet from the ground and a line of hopefuls that went all the way into a nearby alley, Orchid figured that whatever was in the building drew quite a crowd. She didn’t wait in line, though she knew that many would expect her to, and put herself face to face with a massive, threatening woman whose job, it seemed, was to ensure that certain people were excluded from enjoying the benefits of the establishment. The bouncer blocked their progress more or less courteously, stopping Orchid and asking for ID. The heavyset lady with beads woven into her hair gave Bamboo a contemptuous look while Orchid pretended to search a small pocket for whatever it was the bouncer had asked for. Fortunately, Spunky had scanned the cards of others, and in the course of those few moments, produced the duplicates of the card needed to grant both Bamboo and Orchid entrance into the bar. It was a perfect duplicate of identification provided by the city-state for the purposes of age verification.
