Emilie and the Sky World Read Online Free

gasped. “How long has it been there?”
    The professor’s voice was grim. “I first noticed it twenty-two days ago. It was much smaller then.” She pushed her hair back from her face in an exasperated gesture. “I should have gone to Meneport then, instead of just sending a wire. But it’s been getting steadily larger. I kept expecting it to stop.”
    Daniel straightened up and motioned Emilie over. She hurried forward and leaned down to the eyepiece, trying to look as if she knew what she was doing. Fortunately, it was fairly straightforward, and she found the right angle to see through the glass lens without much trouble.
    She saw intense blue sky, and in the center, a ring of brilliant colors – reds, greens, deeper blues than the sky – with a silver-white spiral woven through it. A description of it would have sounded like something rather beautiful, rather like the description of lines of dark storm clouds against the sky sounded like something beautiful until the hail and wind started. Emilie stood up and stared at the professor. “It looks like a hole.”
    “That’s because it is a hole,” the professor said, “It’s an opening in an aetheric stream.”
    “But why would that happen?” Emilie said. She wasn’t sure if that was a stupid question or not, but the hole didn’t look like something that was supposed to happen. It looked wrong, strange, threatening.
    “That’s what we’d like to know,” Daniel said, leaning down for another look through the eyepiece.
    “Yes,” Professor Abindon said, “There are a number of possible reasons I can think of, none of them good. But the one I’m rather afraid of is that it’s opening because something is making it open. Something is out there, pushing its way through to our world.”
     
     

Chapter Two
    Late that afternoon, Emilie, Daniel, and Professor Abindon boarded the fast steamer for Meneport. Daniel thought they would arrive perhaps half a day behind the Marlendes.
    In a highly agitated conversation that morning, Daniel had convinced the professor that they could reach the Marlendes more quickly by going directly to Meneport themselves. Daniel had pointed out that the Marlendes were likely to spend all day today at the shipyards with the damaged airship. And Emilie had thought, though she didn’t say it aloud, that if Miss Marlende had been ignoring the professor’s wires, she wasn’t likely to bring them immediately to her father’s attention once they reached their home again. Obviously, there was some sort of disagreement or sore point between Professor Abindon and Miss Marlende.
    Emilie had suggested that they could send a wire directly to Lord Engal, who was likely to have secretaries and so on who would bring it quickly to his attention.
    Professor Abindon had glared at her. “You want us to send a wire to Lord Engal to tell him to tell Marlende to read his mail?”
    “Yes,” Emilie had replied. “Why not?” Emilie was torn between the feeling that she should be showing more respect for the professor, and the feeling that she wasn’t particularly in the mood to be spoken sharply to for what was a perfectly valid idea. It made her miss Rani more than she already did.
    “Hmm,” the professor had said, eyeing her again.
    But in the end, they had decided it was best to deliver the news in person, not least because then they would also be able to deliver the extensive notes and drawings that the professor had made, chronicling the aetheric disruption’s first appearance and progress. “Aetheric disruption” was what the professor had told Emilie to call it after Emilie had referred to it as a sky hole. Apparently, that sounded rude, though Emilie hadn’t figured out why yet.
    Emilie and Daniel had gone to Karthea’s house to pack their belongings. Emilie hadn’t explained to Karthea about the aetheric disruption, mainly because every explanation she rehearsed as they walked back to the house had sounded alarmist at best. The