Globetrotters ​Chapter 6 – Gold Matter

“Are you sure you're the strongest of your country?” Donny looked down at Nanya from his perch by Amy's handle, which was indignantly reminding him of her absence. He felt like it was thundering a mallet into his soul every three seconds. Donny glanced back down at Nanya. She was kicking and pulling but could barely make each step. “Amy says I take forever to do this.”

“It's the bone structure of our people – and the substance of our muscles,” Nanya explained through gritted teeth, “They don't appear to be as formed as yours. Like, I'd probably struggle in a straight line race against the chubbiest kid in your class with the worst asthma. In fact, where I come from, it's incredibly common to have asthma, hay-fever and eczema.”

“Wow, this must actually be torturing you then? Knowing that I, an unskilled, hold-back boy who had never been up here until yesterday can get up here no problem?” Donny teased, with a soft grin.

“Well, I was using it as motivation … then you put it that way and yes, it's like you're stealing what's left of my identity and not even replacing it with Amy's,” Nanya muttered.

“Sorry. Look, would you like some help?” Donny wriggled forward on his branch and outward.

“No!”

“Okay, sheesh,” Donny slid back, but stayed further out so that Nanya could grab the handle when she reached the top.

“Sorry, it's just, I have to do this myself, otherwise I really am lost, okay?” Nanya peered up at him, her eyes begging.

Donny nodded submissively, “Okay. Whatever you need.”

Nanya returned determinedly to her struggle. Eventually, it took her about four minutes to get up the tree. Once she got into the back and forth swing of it, she sort of levered up the tree, like a tsunami roiling back and forth under or along the surface of the ocean. Her face displayed the epitome of passion and will. Never would she stop, not even once she was within range for Donny to reach out his hand and help haul her up.

She swung – with surprising grace for all the trouble the climb had caused her – onto the branch above Donny.

“Well done,” he congratulated her quietly. His brain had suddenly numbed by how much she'd resembled Amy in those last few steps. She'd emerged from the house that morning with hair frizzed up, properly like Amy's. Donny wondered if Amy's hair was at this moment restricted by an unforgiving ponytail similar to the one Nanya's had been grappled back in when he first met her. The hairstyle had seemed to be working against Nanya's head rather than with it.

“I normally sort of get to somewhere where the pain from my head is just something I'm feeling. It doesn't trigger something in my brain that makes me stop any more. It means I can go just as fast as you or Amy, maybe faster than you at least by the sounds of it. It just hurts. It's like if it tickled. If it tickled to climb the tree, would you stop?”

“It does and I don't,” Donny stated, then, noticing that Nanya was frowning hopelessly at him he added, “Honestly, you must not notice because of the pain but shimmying up the branches like that rolls up the bottom of your top and the branch tickles just below your belly button. Have you not noticed that?”

“No, Donny,” Nanya sighed, “I've not.”

“You know, you don't have to take everything so seriously. There's no prize for this tree – and no forfeit either. Don't you ever want to relax?” Donny sighed. He slid his left leg around the back of the branch and locked his ankles together. Leaning back, he placed his hands behind his head and gazed up to the sky.

“I'll be dead in sixteen years I do not have time to relax,” Nanya muttered. She stood on the branch and leant against the trunk.

“If you have sixteen years left then surely you should be using that time to be happy?” Donny sat up abruptly.

“I am happy. I'm happy because I know I make my brother happy. And he makes me happy – which makes him happy. It works both ways.” Nanya made a back and forth gesture with her hands.

Donny knew he was beaten, “Okay. I'll stop. Jeez, I'm sorry, I never knew I was this insensitive.”

“You're not. It's just your humour. I mean, what have you ever needed to be sensitive about before?” Nanya shrugged.

“Well there was that time that Amy got those weird spots on her face that looked like little faces and I gave them all the names of Doctor Who characters,” Donny murmured, nibbling on the nail of his right index finger.

“That, um, yeah, you should probably have learned from that.” Nanya smiled and sat back down.

“No, she thanked me,” Donny countered, a little pride seeping into his voice, “She said it cheered her up.”

“I'm sorry, I know that's all you're trying to do.” Nanya smiled limply.

“Uh-huh. Me too, I mean, if moody is all you know, then I'll leave you to it.” Donny gazed out toward the town. Only a few nights ago, he and Amy had been in this exact spot, except with the places reversed – and it had been darker. They'd stayed there for hours after school. His stomach clenched at the thought of her and he nearly choked.

“I wasn't moody when we won today. That was awesome,” Nanya's eyes lit up, “It never occurred to me that the brain could be used for more than just strategy, tactics and money management. I've never used my brain for … fun … before. I've not done a lot for fun before.”

“How are you finding it?” Donny shuffled forward. His curiosity was beginning to replace some of his pain at Amy being gone and he was keen to keep it that way.

“I feel guilty, like I'm procrastinating or something.” Nanya chuckled wistfully.

“What do you feel like you're putting off?” Donny asked, with a slight head tilt.

Nanya just wanted to inhale his face, drink the tree, snap up this entire world. There was no rush here. Sure there were deadlines to have things done by but they were often days away. Everything advanced so slowly and so little happened at once. This world was so calm – so carefree.

“I'm putting off trying to go home,” Nanya admitted quietly.

Donny creased his forehead for a moment, then his eyes brightened and he held up a finger and yelled, “Eureka!”

“Oh, oh, oh. I know this. I know this!” Nanya stuttered, “The – the, eh, guy with the bath what's his name? The one with the crown.”

“Archimedes, yes. But I was thinking – you appeared right down there,” Donny motioned with his free hand to the ground where he'd lost his friend, “Why don't we go take a look. There must be some indication of what happened down there.”

In a flash of ill considered, adrenaline-fuelled lust for grace, Donny swung around the branch he was sat on and dropped to the ground with a crunch – the stones, not his bones, as he soon realised and thanked God for. He ungraciously toppled backwards from his haunches into a comfortable sitting position, which became less comfortable when he realised how sodden the ground was. He was soon on his feet and sprang towards Nanya.

Nanya had not lowered her eyebrows since she'd slid down the branches to the ground. The pain was refusing to quiet or lessen and when had spotted Donny in a crouch under his branch, she had shuffled meekly over to where he stood. She'd realised his attempt at ninjadom and had snorted down multiple squeals of laughter at the image of him being serious enough to be a ninja for one second. She beckoned him over with a sigh and together they scoured the ground for signs of disturbance.

“I've got it,” Nanya called. She hid the guilty disappointment from him as well as she could. It was true what she'd said. She didn't really want to go home, not yet.

Donny leaped the few yards between them, thudding into her side as he skidded to a halt, “Sorry.”

“It's fine,” Nanya shrugged, then pointed to the ground where she had crouched down, “Look.”

The stones were in tact, but woven between their structures were a few smidgens of gold. Donny realised with a jolt that it was the fascinatingly, hauntingly compelling energy that had wreaked this havoc. He spotted his hand reaching out for it with the passing interest of a spectator and yanked it back. The searing pain it had burned within his bones was still fresh in his mind. He could only imagine – no, he couldn't imagine – what it must have been like for Amy when she'd started to disappear. He'd always thought of teleporting as a peaceful, instantaneous process. Maybe that was only if you were being transported within your own dimensions. Perhaps because everything of yours that gets relocated still tangibly exists somewhere in your world, it's harder to notice that it's not longer part of your person. So … when Amy was separated into the two worlds, she must have been half-existing in two places, ruptured across two separate universes that she herself was the bridge between.

Of course, Nanya had also been a bridge. I couldn't have been easy for her either. Evidently not, given that she was focussing hard on the gold energy trails on the ground with a harrowed stare. Perhaps she was trying to block the memory out.

“Did it hurt?” he whispered, “I mean obviously it must have but did you manage to ignore it? Like you did with the tree?”

“No,” Nanya shook her head immediately, “Not even the noblest of old age Vurakans could have pretended that that wasn't happening. No, I feel no shame in crying about that. It does not pain me to say that I howled and screamed and wept. In fact, I'd have felt empty, without emotion if I had been able to hold that in. Emotions are not what the Vurakans wanted to ignore. I know it sounds like that Vulcan thing you were going on about earlier and I know the word Vurakan itself does too, but we want to rid ourselves of pain, not feeling, the natural pain that we are afflicted with. That was too much to suppress.”

"Did it hurt from the beginning for you?" Donny asked, without taking his eyes from the ground.
"No it didn't. I'd take it from you knowing that that it didn't originally hurt for Amy either."
"It didn't. I mean, it hurt me from the start," Donny sighed, sinking into a deep kneeling position.
"Why would it have hurt you?" Nanya turned to face him.
"Well, I tried to break it from Amy and it flooded into me. I wouldn't let her go. I'd be abandoning her to the agony I was in." Donny's eyes were locked on the gold. They were as unable to wrench themselves away from it as he had been able to let go of the swirls.
"You idiot!" snapped suddenly.
"That's almost exactly what she said,” Donny mumbled, finally managing to tear his head away from the ground.
"Well she was right. It attacked her. It was clearly intended for her," Nanya's voice was distant.
"That's why I intervened - wait what do you mean 'intended'?" Donny's eyes widened, "You think somebody actually did this?"BEEP BEEP RING RING, squawked Nanya's pocket.
"Oh for God's sakes," Nanya breathed, recovering from the shock of the phone. She handed the object hurriedly to Donny, who worked his magic and jammed the phone against his ear.
"Hello again, Celia.” Donny raised himself to his feet, “You know, if you really don't want me to answer the phone, you should probably teach Nanya how to. What? Yeah - she's here. I didn't just steal Amy's phone which by the way it's a bloody good thing she forgot to take to school on Friday. I doubt there's much signal in Elsion... Why yes I do know about Elsion. I know all about thirty years of life and the Vurakan Championships and how they suppress pain. Plus, we've just found the remains of the golden energy stuff which is more than you've done so for the love of God just tell me what the hell is going on!"
Donny sank back down to the ground beside Nanya, stinging himself on a mote of the energy. He gasped and dropped the phone. Nanya scrabbled for it but he flapped a hand to signal not to.
"She hung up anyway," Donny muttered.
"Stopped talking?" Nanya's eyebrows arched quizzically.
"What? Oh, yeah that's what that means. Sorry, yeah." Donny arched himself and scuttled away from the gold energy.

“Did you actually hear what she wanted to tell you?” Nanya chuckled, “Or were you too busy flapping your feathers?”

“Flapping my feathers?” Donny sat back down away from the energy and raised an eyebrow at her.

“Yeah!” Nanya mimed a chicken in a huff, pouting and harrumphing, “You know, to get agitated?”

“We … we do not have that.” Donny chuckled then began to laugh properly. All of his emotion was tumbling out of him and he was powerless to stop it.

“Aw, man, you're missing out,” Nanya smiled, “Just saying 'flapping feathers' winds you down and makes you laugh. Thinking about a chicken throwing a tantrum has cheered you up, admit it!”

Donny was clutching his stomach and resisting the urge to roll about on the ground. He only didn’t out of fear that he'd run over the gold stuff again. But yes, it definitely had cheered him.

He nodded and returned to her earlier question. “Yes, she did say what she wanted. In fact she opened with it. She wants you to go home.”

“Are you allowed to come with me – and I take it by home you mean Amy's place? Not Elsion.”

“I'm sure she'd much rather you went home to Elsion but I really don't see that as an immediate possibility. Even with this,” he gestured exasperatedly towards the gold.

“Should I take some back?” Nanya suggested.

“Or …” Donny's eyes widened, “We have ourselves a little experiment.”

He knitted his fingers together and tapped the tips against each other, cackling a low villain’s laugh as a plan formed in his mind. He snatched Nanya's hand and examined her fingernails. They were gritty and stubby but sturdy, which would increase the accuracy of his results. He pinched her right index finger and held it as steadily as he could. She extended rigidly in the air.

“Thanks,” he muttered, his eyes scanning the ground for a stone large enough and with enough of the golden-plasma-stuff.

“What am I being thanked for?” Nanya asked warily, “I feel like I'm helping you with something but I'd be a lot more comfortable if I knew what that was.”

“Well,” Donny selected a stone and plucked it from the hardened, frosty mud, “I needed something vestigial, something you wouldn't miss too much. I reckoned the tip of your fingernail would do the trick. I'm using the stone because I've no idea what touching it again will do to me. It could be nothing, or perhaps a sting like salt on a wound – but either way I still run the risk that it may set me on fire and fry my entire person, okay?”

“Um … I guess?”

“Good.” Donny transformed into full scientist mode. His hand steadied and his eye zoned in on the particle of gold. It could have fitted on the head of a pin, easily. He could sense the friction acting upon it as he tilted the stone forward toward Nanya. He could feel the weight of the particle outbalancing the frictional force and knew abstractly somewhere in him precisely how long its descent would take.

It thudded – Donny felt it in his tense awareness like a thud – onto her finger, with no noticeable effect. Until, suddenly, somewhere in the process of Donny blinking, it was gone – and there was a barely perceptible chip in the white of Nanya's nail where it had been.

“Well,” Donny murmured, “It would appear you've begun your journey back to Elsion, one molecule at a time.”

Celia could see no point in her decisions. Perhaps she'd simply excluded Donny because he'd been so presumptuous in the assumption that he wouldn't be. Maybe she saw this as a family matter. As much as she loved Donny and loved to teach him about how human beings should and shouldn't behave, as well as how they actually did, he was not family. Not a blood relative. That fact seemed to have been plaguing the poor boy since he first met Amy. When Amy had broken her arm and knocked herself unconscious, falling out that damn tree, Donny had been the one to call Celia. He had helped to load Amy into the ambulance. Then he was shut out and told to go home, only to stress out over his best friend for the four hours before he got the call that she'd woken up – all because of the fact that they were born to different parents.

Still, she could always assure herself that Donny's mother, Julia, would never speak two words to her again if she got Donny muddled up in this mess. The mistakes were Celia's and she was furious that even Amy had been involved. She'd lugged her equipment down from the furthest nooks of the loft, setting up a temporary laboratory in her basement. There were monitors and resistors and capacitors and diodes that all did their job in a combination too abstract for her to understand the precise science of it. Her analogy was that there were little cracks in dimensions all around them, spidering out from the immense rifts of wormholes. If you could sort of … jimmy a lever of the substance she'd found – gold matter – into the little gaps, then you could widen a hole large enough to wriggle anything as large as a lorry through.

From what Alicia – Nanya – had told her, the gold matter had entombed she and Amy as they'd been shoved through. It sounded painful. The stuff wasn't supposed to touch you. The idea was that it made the gap; it wasn't supposed to use you to make the gap. Celia had so far determined that Elsion technology really was developing. Last time she'd visited, fourteen years ago, they'd barely even heard of toothpaste. They'd been warding off plaque with leaves of mint they plucked from bushes. By Nanya's description, the world of Elsion, or at least the country of Turntour, was neck and neck with roughly Victorian Britain. Medicines were what their lives pivoted around and most of their remedies involved plants. There was no time for technology – they had to stay alive. Apparently, they'd only fifty or so years ago averaged an age of death of about twenty-five. How could none of them see that it was hesitant advances in X-Rays and scans that had already bought them five years? No, they were all so stubborn, determined to carry on with their herbal remedies and their witch-doctor treatments. Celia shook her head in despair and frustration.

Nanya seemed keen to involve Donny too, said he'd accepted her story of where she'd come from with elation, rather than the scepticism she'd expected. What was it about that boy? Why did everyone seem to look up to him. She loved to pester Amy about Donny, asking in the voice of a petty school girl if they were going out, singing about them kissing in a tree. That had fallen away as Amy had grown up and been more confident in politely asking her mother to shut up. She still couldn't resist wondering herself though. Would they grow up with the friendship, with thoughts of romance developing almost into incest? Celia thought that perhaps she hoped this wouldn't happen. Donny was the only thing that kept Amy's mind at all in Earth. She was always reading or watching television or drawing, seemingly anything to get away from the world and everything it contained within, even Celia. Especially Celia? Unfortunately, someday Amy was sure to find some super-active, mountain-climbing, head in the clouds hippie with long hair and a guitar to dote over and bore her mother to death with all his glorious 'adventurous qualities'. No, the Donnys of this world were underrated by the Amys. It seemed about time for an exception to this custom, though what Celia could possibly hope to do about it was both unimaginable and unimportant.

There were far more significant matters to attend to. For a start, the doorbell was ringing. Celia stood up from the kitchen table, where she'd been sat hugging a mug of tea and hurried down the hall. She seized a set of keys on a compass keyring from her jacket as she passed her six pronged coat rack. On the porch was not who she'd expected.

Well, maybe she'd expected Donny – but she hadn't prepared for him to appear without Nanya.

“Where is she?” Celia snapped.

“Look, I don't know what you've got against me recently. It's not my fault that Amy is … away.” Donny flapped his hand in agitation. “In fact, I nearly died trying to stop that from happening. My parents have no idea that Nanya isn't Amy – you wouldn't believe how good an actress she is actually – so there's no reason they'd get suspicious about anything because I was spending loads of time over here. In fact, they're more worried about the fact that I appear to have been banished from your house. They at first seemed to assume that I'd done something to Amy but now they're really confused 'cause as far as they know, I've barely stopped talking to her in days.”

“Are you done?” Celia crossed her arms.

“I don't feel done but I can't think of anything more to say,” Donny's features projected gloom that wrapped her in his sorrow and confusion. She was thumped hard with the realisation that he'd not smiled when he'd said hello, which would be the first time in years he'd not been happy to see her. Donny was happy to see everyone. Or at least, he liked them to think he was. Did he no longer care if he offended her with sullen manners at all? Did exclusion hurt him that bad?

“Donny I'm sorry. I can't say I regret not letting you in but it's just …” Celia tailed off helplessly.

“I know, I know. I'm not family. But Nanya is not your daughter. I don't know what you seem to think but she isn't Amy. She may look exactly alike and maybe she's like, but Nanya is not family!”

She could sense the desperation in his tone, in his posture, in his eyes. He was on the edge, silently singing with all of his lungs, everything about him exerting maximum force on anything. He was doing whatever he could do to promise himself he was helping, to distract him from his loss. Celia empathised with him and peered into his eyes.

“Oh, fine, you persistent little terror,” Celia sighed, “You can come in.”

Donny made to move through the door into the house. He knew it like his own home but he hadn't even set foot in since that dreadful night when he lost Amy.

“Ahem,” Celia tutted.

“Oh, right,” Donny smacked his forehead, “Nanya, you can come out. She's letting me in.”

Nanya peeked out from behind some thick bushes a few houses up. She strolled down to them, shaking off some frost that had been deposited on her head, “Nice blackmailing technique, eh.”

“Genius,” Celia murmured, “Now get in, you two, before the neighbours start wondering what's going on.”

“I am a neighbour,” Donny interjected, though adhering nonetheless.

Nanya trotted up the steps and quickly followed suit, following Donny and Celia into the house's living room. There was an orange corner couch – which was somehow circular – dominating the room. It wasn't in the centre or anything but every time Nanya entered the room, her eye was struck by the violent tone and could not seem to rip her gaze away. There was one of those television things that Donny obsessed over but Nanya didn't see the big deal. Once the magic wore off and you understood that it was only science, you just got frustrated because you couldn't take part. The people on the game show couldn't hear you, no matter how loud you shouted. Nanya wondered if it was that irritating being in a Vurakan audience. Surely not: anyone who wasn't taking part in the Championships probably had no wish to.

She took her place on the couch and yelped as her hand hit something sharp. She overturned her palm to inspect it and uncover what had pricked it. Nothing, it seemed. There was a bead of scarlet blood balanced in the centre of her palm, now trickling down her hand. She sucked away the blood, then licked her finger and scrubbed her hand. She uncovered nothing but a minuscule hole in her skin – about the size of the chip off of her fingernail from earlier … oh.

“What have you been doing with it?” Nanya asked coolly.

“With …?” Celia was sat on the opposite prong of the couch but now leaned forward concernedly.

“The gold stuff.”

Celia ceased up for a brief moment that Nanya probably only noticed because she'd been waiting for it, then she found her calm and continued, “Why would you say I had?”

“Well because I have a very small, unexplainable mini-wound in which a pinhead area of my skin has gone walkabout and there is no veritable culprit thorn or needle that could have jagged me.”

“AH!” Donny howled, springing up from the point of sharpest bend, the mid-point of the couch, “There's loads of it here! I just leant back into some! What the hell, Celia?!”

Celia's eyes were closed as if she were focussing on how to take out a competitor. Nanya was certainly as on edge as she habitually was during the duration of the combat stage. It was her least favourite stage. She despised hurting people – well, except that Gresham girl. She was fun to put in her place. But other than that, the girls she'd been up against had been noble and brave and intelligent and everything that she tried to be. It seemed nonsensical to be knocking them to the ground with nunchucks full of water. The containers were plastic tubes connected by wire but Nanya knew from experience that they could certainly pack a punch.

“You aren't meant to touch it,” Celia mumbled.

“Sorry?” Donny seemed genuinely intrigued.

“I don't want you to think I made it that way. That pain you felt – it was my fault but it wasn't my making. I should have just left it all as it had been: theoretic.” Celia sighed and directed her gaze toward the blank television screen.

“What are you talking about?” Donny shuffled along the couch and sidled in next to Celia, sort of in the way a mature and married son would comfort a recently widowed mother.

“Come on,” Celia stood up and led them down the basement steps.

They emerged in a room of surprisingly clear air filled with desks and paper and machinery and numbers. Numbers everywhere: on the logos of equipment, scribbled on the paper, scrolling down what looked like miniature television screens. The screens reached to about half a foot under the ceiling and were jumbled up so that some were heaped sideways and a couple looked as if they would topple at the slightest attempt to use them.

There was only one corner, however, that really captured the attention of both Nanya and Donny. The corner furthest from them when they entered from the door – which was from that perspective to the right side of the room – housed a ceiling high container, within which was piled several dozen cubic feet of the golden matter that had stolen her world from her.

It seemed so innocent to Donny, like a silo of glitter. It was guilty though, guilty of stealing his best friend, of almost killing him, of making Amy think that she would die. It had robbed both girls of everything they were confident in – though Donny didn't doubt that Amy was thriving in the Vurakan Championships, now that he stopped to think about it. The entire room became sinister for the silo.

How could Celia have created this instrument of pain – given that she'd also moulded Amy into the kind, sensitive, well-rounded person she was. This was the science side of Celia, the experimental part that she always kept well away from her physical world of home life. Donny had always wondered what it would be like to meet this half of her but had never considered how he'd respond. The last thing he'd expected was his current urge to lunge at Celia and berate her for being so egotistical to actually feel the need to prove to herself that she could transport people from one world to another. That was nice for science-fiction but the key word there was fiction. No sci-fi stories were ever pretty. Despite his earlier exultation that alternate dimensions did exist, he'd begun to wonder why he'd wanted this to be the case.

“Celia?” he squeaked.

“Yes, Donny?” Celia croaked, her voice quivering with the effort of keeping tears in check.

“Did you – do … this?” his own voice began to crack.

“No – that's the worst part,” Celia mumbled almost incoherently.

“What do –”

“It's the worst part because it means that there's somebody else who is doing it,” Celia choked, “Somebody in Elsion.”