Free The Undertakers: End of the World by Ty Drago Page B

ninth—wasn’t very big. But it seemed roomy enough for Future Steve, who was busily working at a long table topped with a collection of weird “sciencey” stuff. Emily was with him.
    Around them, running along the octagonal walls, were metal shelves that reached from floor to ceiling. Most were filled with gadgets, all of them carefully labeled Project This or Project That. Some looked to be prototype weapons of one kind or another. Others were more mysterious—though, on one shelf, I spotted a set of the magnetic boxes that Emily had used on the manhole cover in the courtyard.
    How many of these gizmos did my kid sister dream up?
    It was surreal.
    As we approached, I saw that Emily was loading Maankhs into a cardboard box . Four other boxes had already been filled.
    “What’s the count?” Maxi Me asked her.
    “Exactly forty,” my sister replied. “Then we ran out of slivers.” She looked up at him, her expression worn. Suddenly, to my eyes, she looked even older. “Not enough.”
    “You heard?” the chief asked.
    She nodded. “Through the external microphones. But we didn’t feed it through the rest of Haven.”
    “Good,” William told her. “No point panicking everyone. We’re not beaten yet.”
    That struck me as odd since, from what he’d said up on the Observation Deck, “beaten” was exactly what we were.
    Emily threw a glance my way. “I know it,” she replied.
    “Steve,” William said.
    The guy with the broken glasses looked up from what he was doing. In typical Steve Moscova fashion, he’d barely noticed us until the chief addressed him directly.
    Maxi Me said, “It’s time to tell Will why he’s here.”
    The professor nodded.
    He retrieved a small white box from a nearby shelf and presented it for inspection. I’d seen it before, or one like it. Amy had put it in her satchel right after she and I had come through the Rift.
    “Do you know what this is?” he asked me.
    “A time machine,” I replied.
    “Incomplete, but not wholly inaccurate. I call it a Rift Projector. It creates a tear in the fabric of spacetime, allowing people and objects from one time and place to move to another time and place.”
    “It’s how Amy kept pulling me out of my time whenever I got hurt or she wanted to tell me something,” I said.
    “One and the same.” He turned the box over in his hands. “You’ll notice there’s no electrical plug. It doesn’t have batteries, either. Can you guess what powers it?”
    I couldn’t. Then, all of a sudden, I could . “The Anchor Shard?”
    He grinned. “Very good, Will! Yes, the Anchor Shard. The very one, in fact, that we all used back during the First Corpse War to heal the injured, conduct Rift experiments and so forth. Well, not exactly the same, I suppose. You see, just when the first war ended, the Anchor Shard was … damaged.”
    “Damaged? How?”
    The man in the broken glasses pushed their taped bridge a little further up his nose, a nervous gesture that I instantly recognized. “On the last night of the First Corpse War, when the Corpses attacked Haven, I got this idea to fit our Anchor Shard into a harness with a battery and a kill switch. This allowed me to charge it briefly and then release that charge directionally, atomizing anything the energy wave touched. I used it against the invading dead.”
    Tom had told me some of this. In fact, to me, it had all happened only yesterday. During the final battle, Steve had suddenly shown up with his brand new Anchor Shard weapon to successfully defend one of Haven’s— my Haven’s—three entrances, saving Tom and God-only-knew-how-many other Undertakers in the process.
    I smiled. “Kind of the first Maankh .”
    “A bit,” he admitted, though he didn’t return my smile. “Except I never counted on the effect my idea would have on the crystal. The repeated charging and discharging ended up damaging its structure, making it brittle. Toward the end of the battle, the Anchor Shard