Free Worldweavers: Cybermage by Alma Alexander

one day, mind. Tomorrow we’re back at school.”
    “I’ll get Mrs. Emmett to show you to your rooms,” Humphrey said. “I’m certain that the house has already taken care of what’s necessary.”
    “It’s an Elemental house,” Terry said, in response to Ben’s obvious confusion. “It takes care of your needs as soon as you utter them out loud. And sometimes all you have to do is think them.”
    “And you spent the summer in this place?” Magpie said, her eyes sparkling. “Awesome!”
    “Ah, Mrs. Emmett,” Humphrey said smoothly as the door of the study opened to reveal the housekeeperhovering on the doorstep. “I’m afraid we’ll all be imposing on your hospitality a little longer.”
    “I’m already aware of that,” Madeline Emmett said. “I just wanted to let you know that your rooms upstairs are ready.”
    “Well, then. We’ll pick it up after breakfast tomorrow,” Humphrey said.
    They filed out of the office and followed Mrs. Emmett up the stairs. Thea, the last out the door, turned to cast a lingering look at the white cube that sat on the professor’s desk. The sense of wrongness persisted in her, with that last image they had seen replaying itself over and over in her head. There was something very important about those pigeons. About Tesla’s connection to them. About the fact that one had died.
    Something very important.
    If only she could pin any of it down to something—anything—specific.
    Mrs. Emmett showed them to their rooms. The boys were in the room that had been Terry’s the previous summer, the girls in the one that had been Thea’s. The Elemental house had rearranged and refurnished the rooms to accommodate its visitors.
    “This is so cool,” Magpie said, coming back intothe girls’ room after an inspection of the entire area. She kicked off her shoes as she settled cross-legged onto her bed. “I just went into the bathroom, and I saw five brand-new toothbrushes arranging themselves on the vanity counter. It’s as though the place was expecting us!”
    “It does even weirder things than that,” Thea said.
    “Like what?”
    “Shoes,” Thea said.
    Magpie glanced down to where her shoes had been. She did a double take as she realized that they had been neatly placed on the floor by the foot of her bed.
    “But I didn’t…” she began, perplexed.
    “This place tidies up after you,” Thea said, laughing. “Your half of our room back at the school would send the Elemental house into a complete tailspin. It wouldn’t be able to rest until it had found a place for everything.”
    Magpie grimaced. “I don’t know if I’d survive here for long if it insisted on putting things where it thinks they should go—but it’s still awesome.”
    It seemed to Thea that her roommates fell asleep almost before they were fully horizontal in their beds. She herself could not seem to go to sleep thateasily, haunted both by the memories of the past summer and by an insistent gnawing sense of having missed something important in the visions the cube had showed them.
    When she finally did drift off to sleep, she had a chaotic dream in which she stood talking to a young man whom she recognized instantly as the young Tesla. Then she was standing by the bedside of an old man with white hair whose thin skin stretched tightly over his high cheekbones, revealing the shape of the skull underneath—and this, too, was Tesla. Then Tesla was a little boy, standing beside a homemade water mill in a tumbling creek, a large cat padding in his wake. Then it was the old Tesla again, his astonishingly blue eyes flickering open and looking straight at her. A slow smile spread across the wasted, skeletal face, and his lips moved as though he was speaking to her. But the dream didn’t come with audio, and all she heard was silence, the deep white silence of falling snow. Indeed, when Thea flicked her gaze to the nearby window, there was snow coming down outside, drifting white veils of it. And