Chapter 20

While the procedure to shift the cargo seemed simple, it did have its problems.

Creating the hidden rooms on both ships was the easy bit. Zeke had to suit up, because he had to have the doors to the hold open to space. He also had the gravity compensators turned off.

Raul used his runner to slowly steer a container over to Zeke by using the grappling arms so Zeke could release the tether. Zeke then cheated and blinked the container into the hidden room.

It amused him that if he thought of the container as being stationary and not hurtling through space, it appeared were he wanted it in the hidden room and stayed there. He’d experimented with the phenomena some years before.

He’d done some crazy stuff as a teenager.

Zeke then blinked an empty container to himself. After connecting it to the tether from Raul’s ship, he pushed it gently back out of his hold. Raul used the arms of the runner to guide the container where he wanted it behind his ship and then retrieved the next container.

Raul hung around outside to keep an eye on the containers while Zeke closed the hold and then went to move his ship to align the main holds. Once they were docked again, Raul put the runner away.

Three hours after they started, Raul met Zeke in the packed second hold of Condesa with Sofia. Zeke was scratching his head as he looked at what was in the second hold on Raul’s ship. He knew the other two were just as full.

Jokingly, he said, “Raul, this would go quicker if you could levitate.”

“See, I also wish I could do this,” Raul replied sadly.

Zeke frowned and looked at Raul critically. “Go take a break. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Raul wondered what he said as he watched Zeke stride away.

Zeke went to his cabin.

He opened one of the doors to his clothes cupboard. He pushed the clothes on the hangers to one side and stepped in. He walked through the back and into what amounted to his wizard’s laboratory. He’d had to shift everything from Bella to this new room.

In the room, Zeke kept a supply of metallic and non-metallic elements, dried herbs, an assortment of plant materials and other objects he had collected for his magic. Making potions was not his favourite activity, but he had dabbled.

Zeke got his satchel to appear and removed his magical box from it. He put it on the bench, opened it, and put his hand inside.

As the list of items came to his consciousness, he perused it.

Before he had fixed the Usekh, he had played at making wands to give to his brothers.

However, he didn’t have any gems to put on them, just the DeRay crystals. So, he went prospecting for gems. He found this was harder than he thought. Basic minerals he found easily. However, he didn’t know enough to find the gems easily, as they were buried in small clumps or very spread out.

It didn’t help that every time he went out, Frank sent someone to follow him. They would even come up to him and demand to know what he had found. It got so bad that, for a while, Zeke stopped prospecting altogether.

Zeke knew that Frank still believed that he had somehow hidden the golden box. During that first year, after getting on the turps (getting drunk), Frank would turn the house upside down, looking for it. He did it several times, much to Patricia’s displeasure.

The box had simply turned up on Zeke’s bed after he moved back into his room. Then, he hid it by creating the satchel. He sweated for two months while learning the spells to hide it.

Ptah had loved hiding things, so he had played with the dimensional storage spell many times. Zeke found four different versions in the journals. His biggest problem at the time was that he only had the wand, and none of the other items in the box would go to him. He had to fix the Usekh.

For a year, every night at dinner, Frank would demand to know where Zeke went that day. Zeke would always answer, ‘nowhere’ or say nothing. His mother or one of the twins would answer on those occasions.

Zeke had buried himself in his schoolwork to the point he almost became a hermit in his own home. While he did play with his brothers, kept up with regular exercise, and worked with Vic in the workshop, he rarely left the domed area that covered his home.

That went on until he was thirteen and a half, and he finally fixed the Usekh. All of the spells he had learned but couldn’t do before were suddenly at his fingertips. Blinking or transporting himself had been the first he perfected. It gave him the freedom to explore once again.

Zeke appeared to maintain his hermit-like existence until he completed High School just before he turned fifteen. At dinner one night, Frank realised this from Zeke’s conversation with his mother about the courses he planned to study.