The Gossamer Crown: Book One of The Gossamer Sphere Read Online Free Page A

real.  I don’t know why you’re messing with me, but I don’t appreciate it.”
    Caitlin’s assistant stood and walked over, placing her hands on Lizbeth’s shoulders.  She was shorter by several inches.  Lizbeth found it difficult to maintain eye contact – there was something very weird about the woman’s blue eyes, like looking into some kind of bizarre swirling galaxy.  A shaft of fear went through her.  She tried to think of it as irrational, but wasn’t quite convinced.
    “Is it real, this incarnation?” The woman asked.
    Lizbeth sucked in a breath.  She’d heard that phrase a hundred times, watching her father’s clips.  It was his greatest magic trick, the one where he changed a person from the audience into a white jaguar.  The woman, it was Caitlin, wavered right before Lizbeth’s eyes.  Her nose flattened out and the transformation spread quickly down her cheeks, to her mouth, forehead, ears.  It wasn’t like a computer morph on television.  The change was fast, but Lizbeth saw each hair sprout, whiskers grow, teeth become thin and pointy.  The eyes, though, they didn’t change at all.  The white jaguar gripped Lizbeth’s shoulders with her claws, blue swirly eyes staring out of a sleek, spotted face.
    In her mind, Lizbeth heard the rest of her father’s incantation, “ Or is it prestidigitation ?”

Chapter Six
    San Francisco, California
     
    Zach had done all he could, which wasn’t much.  It wasn’t just that people were disinclined to listen to an eighteen-year-old kid.  It wasn’t even that his scientific credentials were nonexistent.  The problem was the message.  No matter how he worded it, “The Big One is coming” sounded like something a lunatic would say.
    For someone as accomplished in martial arts as he was, Zach didn’t exactly have a reputation for being levelheaded.  Through his art, fantastical creatures came to life.  His designs were brilliant fractals and complicated mathematical patterns.  His imagination was legend among family and friends, many of whom didn’t quite “get” him.
    So when he’d irrationally requested that his mother pack up and leave for awhile, she looked at him like he’d grown a second head.  He tried telling his friends about the electromagnetic pulses and they’d fondly accused him of messing with them.  He called every scientific institution that seemed relevant in the Bay Area and got nowhere.  He finally took the ultimate and admittedly harebrained step of filming an appeal to the masses and posting it on YouTube.  For dramatic effect, he made two big signs and strapped them together to wear over his shoulders.  In retrospect, he probably shouldn’t have written “The End is Near” on the front and “Goodbye San Francisco” on the back.  It was supposed to be a satirical attention-getter, and it worked, but not like he’d intended.  He received thousands of hits on his YouTube page over the course of the next two days, but comment after comment entreated him not to take his own life.  Early Monday morning a mild earthquake shook the region, not The Big One by any stretch of the imagination, not even Zach’s.
    He still believed something was wrong, but realized the problem was much more likely to be health-related.  Even after the little earthquake he kept getting those electric shock sensations.  In fact, they were getting more frequent and more severe.  He reluctantly asked his mother to make an appointment for a checkup. 
    At school, he walked into the student lounge and overheard some kids talking about his idiotic meltdown.  He had no idea how she knew, but the cute new cashier at the snack bar came right out and asked him if he was “Doomsday Guy.”  It was his second week of college, and he’d gone from nondescript freshman to infamous loon in one weekend.  If the doctor didn’t find anything wrong, he suspected his next appointment would be with a shrink.
    He sat down at an unoccupied