Free Skybuilders (Sorcery and Science Book 4) by Ella Summers Page B

question of what he believed.
    Ariella sighed. “The Helleans have been around only since about a decade after the Xenen expulsion, right?” she asked Leonidas.
    “Yes. They showed up around the same time as the Avan and Selpe empires were formed. It was a busy time.”
    “That was over five centuries ago, which is nearly another two centuries after the Elition portal system was formed. Seven hundred years,” she stated. “No new portals have been created since then. No one knew how to do it. Do you see where I’m going with this, Silas? You’re speculating that someone created a highly unusual and never before seen type of portal in a floating city that was built two centuries after the only person who knew how to create portals died. Died in the process of creating the portals, I might add.”
    “Actually, the floating cities didn’t start popping up until just over a hundred years ago,” Leonidas pointed out. “It’s a fascinating tale. Packed with plenty of action and espionage, of course.”
    His eyes drifted upward in an expression of blissful contemplation that reminded Ariella of Marin. She always looked like that whenever she was prattling on about some technological doodad or another.
    “Ok, then six hundred years after the creation of our portals. Better yet,” she said, arching an eyebrow at Silas.
    “I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe possible,” was his cryptic reply.
    Ariella certainly didn’t doubt that. “But have you seen a vanishing portal? Or have you seen anyone create a portal recently?”
    He said nothing. That answered that then.
    “We still have two minutes,” Leonidas said, checking his watch. “Maybe I can still get some answers out of that man outside the room.”
    “You are asking the wrong questions,” Silas spoke suddenly, his eyes whitening as he looked at Ariella. “What you should be asking is why this window hasn’t been repaired when everything else was.”
    “Actually, I was wondering just that,” said Leonidas. “Enlighten us.”
    “A lure. Something to keep us standing here, contemplating the nonsensical. Something to…”
    “Silas?” Ariella asked.
    She extended a hand toward him. Not only had his eyes gone white, but his face flushed pink and his chest heaved, as though he were breathing the thin air of a mountaintop terrain. Except he was an Elition Phantom. And he was Silas. Silas Thorn was never flushed, and he was never out of breath.
    “Silas, what’s going on?” she asked.
    “It’s been so long,” he grunted, holding onto the wall for support. The plaster split and crumbled between his fingers. “It’s happening.”
    Leonidas rolled his eyes. “Well, that’s not vague at all.”
    “Enough,” Silas spat through clenched teeth. “Look.”
    Ariella turned, gasping as she saw it, a ripple in the air. It was a distortion that twisted everything around it, like looking through a pool of thick soapy liquid. Silas’s shoulders drooped, as though the weight of a building sat upon them.
    A moment after Ariella saw it, she felt it—not a weight but a dizzying whirl of screeches and colors. She stumbled and would have tumbled to the floor had Leonidas not caught her arm.
    “What the hell is going on here?!” he shouted at them.
    Ariella closed her eyes, and the next moment the vertigo vanished. A familiar—yet unfamiliar—jolt shot through her body. She knew what she would see — or not see — before she even opened her eyes.
    The lab had vanished. Silas was right. She looked at him long enough to receive a cool stare, then turned around to take in the scenery.
    In place of the sterile lab, they stood in the middle of a forest of trees so tall and thick that they blocked out most of the sunlight. She tried to place the plants, but they were all unknown to her.
    So Silas’s vanishing portal had spat them out inside an unknown forest that stretched on for as far as she could see. Marin and the Selpe brothers were in there. Maybe.