Chapter Ten

“So where are we going?” I asked.
“It’s in a building at the edge of the city,” he said. “Where the train station is in your dimension. There should be another purple door there.”
He stopped at a building, and got down off the motorcycle. “Come on, then. Let’s go, let’s go.”
I followed him into the third dark and red building, and followed him through the maze of doors until we found the purple one.
He opened it, and we went through it.
My eyes were almost completely blinded with the light. I couldn’t see anything at first, and then I looked around me. Behind us there was no building like before, but instead an empty wall with the purple door right in the center. Around us was nothing. Nothing except a white-blue sky and a completely empty and open desert.
“Wow,” I said, rubbing my eyes.
Lucas handed me a pair of sunglasses. I put them on, and everything looked normal instead of the blinding white that it was before.
“Thanks,” I said. “What sort of place is this? Are we still in London?”
“London doesn’t exist in this dimension,” he said, putting on his own sunglasses. “We’re in the Desert of Naharah.”
“Naharah?”
“Yeah.”
“Like… Sahara?”
“No. Naharah.
“I see. And what’s so special about this place, then?”
“Well… the door leads into here.”
“So there’s no one here? Just us?”
“As far as I know, yeah. Good thing I’ve got that extra chocolate cake.”
“Do you have any water?”
“What?”
“Water! You know in those movies everyone always dies of thirst when they go out into the desert. Well, what if the same thing happens to us?”
“Oh, it won’t.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“You’ve got to trust me that it won’t, Caity-cakes.”
“I hate having to trust you,” I said, crossing my arms and pouting my lips.
“Why?”
“Because you’re so mysterious, and it always seems like you’re hiding something from me, and I never know if you’re telling the truth or not!”
“Caity-cakes, if I always told you the truth, I wouldn’t need you to trust me.”
I didn’t quite get it, but I didn’t know how to respond to him, either. So he hopped on his motorbike, beckoned for me to join him, and I got on it as well.
The only good part about being in a deserted desert was the fact that there were no girls around the general vicinity for Luke to shag. It was so annoying when he went off with another girl, so stupid, really, and I hated it every time I saw him with some trampy whore who clearly did not know who he was or what he was capable of.
Suddenly, Luke’s motorcycle stopped.
“What’s the deal?” I said. “I almost fell off!”
“It wasn’t me,” he said, rapping his knuckles on the dashboard. “What’s wrong with this thing? I swear, it’s never given me problems like this.”
“Why did it stop?” I said.
The ground shook again, and the motorcycle fell over, and Luke and I both rolled off of it onto the ground.
The shaking continued for about five minutes before the ground was finally still.
“What was that?” I asked.
Luke stood up, and looked around.
“An earthquake?” I asked. “Do you think your motorcycle knew that there was going to be an earthquake, so it stopped so we wouldn’t get hurt when we fell off?”
“No,” Luke said. “The motorcycle only knows things about the secrets of inter dimensional science. It isn’t programmed to know things like earthquakes and stuff.”
“That’s stupid,” I said. “So your motorcycle can detect when something is up with the forces between dimensions, but it can’t even predict when there’s going to be an earthquake?”
“Caitlin, this wasn’t a normal earthquake,” Luke said.
“The ground shook when we were in that weird dark version of London, too,” I said. “But I suppose you were too busy shagging that whore you couldn’t even tell.”
“Seriously, Caitlin, please stop talking for a moment.”
I shut up. This was the first time I ever heard Luke sound genuinely concerned about something.
“If the motorcycle can only detect things when something is wrong with the forces between dimensions, and it stopped, then that earthquake was not the shaking of the earth, but something that’s wrong with the inter dimensional forces. I don’t know what’s wrong, though, but it’s obvious something is.”
“So what?” I asked. “Are the universes falling apart or something?”
“They could be. Like I said, there is a finite and precise balance between dimensions, and if something is messing that up, then I’m going to have to be the one to stop it.”
“Then you should go find out what it is,” I said.
“You’re coming with me, of course,” he said. “I promised you the day of your life, and even though the beginning of the day wasn’t really that great, I’m going to make sure everything ends with a bang!”
“I hope you don’t mean a literal bang.”
“Come on, then!” he said, making the motorcycle stand up straight again and hopping on, without even fully hearing what I had just said. “There is not much time to lose. Get on, get on!”
“Hey… Luke?” I said, standing up.
“Hurry, hurry!”
“Luke! Lucas!” I said.
“Yes, what is it? Tell me quickly, like I said, we haven’t got much time.”
“Lucas, I’m really thirsty,” I said. “Seriously. We’re out in the middle of the desert, there are no people to be seen, and I need some water really bad.”
Luke swore under his breath. “All right, then, come on. Get on. We’ll try to find some place where they’ll have water.”
“Can your motorcycle detect it? Like an oasis or anything?”
“Erm… no.”
I raised my eyebrows. “So it can detect when there’s a problem with the forces between dimensions… it can tell you when inter dimensional forces are out of balance… It can save your life when there are inter dimensional dangers… but it can’t even find you water?”
“Calm down, calm down!” he said. “Honestly, the more you yell like that, the faster you are going to dehydrate. We will find you water, I assure you, but first you are just going to have to calm down.”
I crossed my arms again, but did as he told me. I didn’t want to risk getting dehydrated and fainting or something. I needed to keep my eyes open to see what the hell Luke was doing.
Some lights on the dashboard of Luke’s motorcycle flashed green, and by the time they started flashing purple, my eyes were closing, and everything went black.