The Echo Beyond the Stars (eBook)

The Mirror Star

LaTonya T. Dudley (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
400 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
979-8-9938512-6-6 (ISBN)

Infos

When a meteor shatters above Harbor Glen, mirrors across town begin to move on their own. Each reflection reveals a secret fear. Zoe must face her shadow self to restore the Flow before the world splits in two.

Textauszug

Chapter 1 – The Night the Stars Spoke 

Zoe Harper woke before her alarm, certain someone had said her name. Her room was dark and quiet except for Milo’s soft snoring at the foot of the bed. Outside, Harbor Glen lay wrapped in fog—the kind that made the lighthouse beam look like a silver ribbon winding through the night. Zoe listened hard, heart thumping. Nothing. Then the lighthouse blinked.

Once… twice… three times… and paused.

Zoe sat up. The blink pattern was wrong. The lighthouse always swept in a steady rhythm—slow, patient, counting the ocean’s breath. This—this was a message. She grabbed the compass from her nightstand. The silver face looked like a tiny moon in the dark. Under the glass, the needle didn’t point north. It trembled and rose, as if trying to stand on tiptoe.

Milo lifted his head, ears pricked. He gave a small whuff that meant I heard it, too.

“Okay,” Zoe whispered, sliding into her jacket. “We’re listening.”

They slipped out onto the porch. The air smelled like salt and rainwater and something cold and far away. In the distance, the lighthouse blinked the same strange pattern—three quick flashes, a pause, three more. The fog thinned for a breath, and Zoe saw the beam bend—just slightly—as though it were reaching upward instead of out to sea.

Milo trotted beside her as she hurried down the quiet street. The town slept with windows like closed eyes. A gull called once and then thought better of it. The harbor was so still that the boats looked painted on.

Zoe reached the pier and stopped to breathe. The compass warmed in her palm. Far above, the sky felt—busy. Not loud, exactly. Alive. Like listening to a shell and hearing not just the sea but all the tiny sounds hidden inside it.

“Zoe!” a voice hissed.

She turned. Amira jogged toward her, hair in a lopsided braid, glasses fogged. Leo followed, hoodie over pajamas and sneakers untied, holding a bag of something suspiciously donut-shaped.

“You saw it too,” Zoe said.

“Couldn’t not,” Leo puffed. “The lighthouse blinked in my window. I thought Harbor Glen had invented star Morse code.”

Amira set a small case on the pier and flipped it open. Inside: her tablet, a battery pack, and one of the singing shells from the museum, its pale blue surface veined with silver.

“Dr. Reyes texted me,” she said, breathless and bright-eyed. “She’s getting weird readings at the university lab—frequencies you only see during solar storms. But there’s no storm. It’s like… the sky is humming.”

As if to answer, the lighthouse blinked again: three pulses, a pause, three pulses, a pause. The pier boards seemed to catch the rhythm and pass it quietly from plank to plank.

Leo offered the bag. “Emergency sugar?”

“Always,” Zoe said, taking a bite and grinning despite the chill in her stomach. She set the compass on the shell in Amira’s case. The moment metal met mother-of-pearl, a thin line of light knit the two together, barely there, like a spider thread in moonlight.

The shell hummed.

Three notes, clear as water. Then silence. Then again.

Amira’s hands flew. “Recording. Mapping. Oh—oh wow—look.” Waves on her screen sharpened into a shape—a spiral of dots that tightened and then untied itself like a knot.

“It’s the Flow,” Leo said softly. “But backwards.”

Zoe stared at the screen. For months the True Flow had sung to them from ocean and stone. They had listened and sung back until the world remembered its own heartbeat. That melody had risen into the sky and faded into peace.

Tonight the sky had answered.

A breeze lifted, cool and sharp. The fog tore into sheets and drifted low over the water. Above the lighthouse, the clouds thinned enough to show a spill of stars—ordinary stars, familiar as freckles—and something else. A shimmer. Not bright like lightning. Not far like planets. A hush-colored gleam, moving with intention.

“Am I imagining that?” Leo whispered.

“No,” Zoe said, and felt the compass pulse once, like a tap on the shoulder.

Footsteps clanged on the pier. Mr. Finch arrived in his overcoat, scarf crooked and face alert in the thin light. “I thought I’d find you here,” he said mildly. “On nights when the world speaks, sensible people sleep and poets go outside. And Sleuth Squads, apparently.”

He followed their gazes skyward. The lighthouse blinked again: three, pause, three. Mr. Finch’s expression changed—something like pride, something like the way a person looks when they recognize a song they haven’t heard since childhood.

“Reverse cadence,” he murmured. “An answer.”

Milo wagged as Captain Dory strode out of the mist, mug of tea steaming, sweater sleeves shoved to her elbows. “You feel that?” she said without preamble. “Like the air’s holding its breath.”

Amira pushed her glasses up. “Dr. Reyes is picking up the same pattern bouncing off the ionosphere. It’s not just over us. It’s everywhere.”

“Sky current,” Zoe said, surprised to hear the words leave her mouth as if the night had placed them there. It felt right. “Like the ocean has rivers we can’t see. The air must, too.”

Dory’s eyes warmed. “Good name. Feels like a river, doesn’t it? Quiet, strong, going someplace it’s decided on.”

The shell’s notes rose, softer now. Amira tapped her screen, watched numbers dance. “Same three tones. But listen to the spaces between them—the pauses aren’t empty. They’re full of tiny sounds. It’s information.”

Leo leaned close. “Information that says…?”

Amira grinned without looking up. “Give me an hour and a second breakfast.”

Mr. Finch settled on a coil of rope like a king on a crooked throne. “We could fetch Reyes, set up on the museum roof. Better line of sight, less seagull commentary.”

Zoe kept her eyes on the sky. The shimmer above the lighthouse curled inward and drifted like a jellyfish—slow, dream-sure. The compass grew warmer. For a heartbeat she felt as if the night were a room and someone had just stepped into it.

“Do you think it’s them?” Leo asked quietly. “The ones below the sea. The ones from… wherever stars have currents.”

Zoe didn’t answer, because answering would make the thought too small. Instead she closed her hand around the compass and thought of Margaret Glass, of Elias smiling like a tide, of Neris with eyes the color of deep-water light. She thought of the three notes that had become the world’s lullaby.

“Let’s get higher,” she said. “If the sky is talking, we should be where the light meets it.”

They cut through town at a run, their breaths puffing in little clouds. Harbor Glen slept on, fishermen’s boots and school backpacks waiting by front doors, notes on fridges reminding people to buy milk. The familiar ordinary made the strange beautiful, not frightening. It felt like holding both sides of a coin in one hand: home and horizon.

At the museum, Mr. Finch wrestled keys while Dory worked the stubborn door with an expert hip.

They climbed two flights and a narrow ladder and burst onto the roof. The night was bigger up here. Closer. The lighthouse beam passed at eye level, and the stars felt like a thousand lamps set out for a welcome home.

Amira set up fast—a tripod, the shell on a cloth pad, her tablet angled to drink the sky. Leo cleared space and kept Milo from stepping on important cables with gentle shoves and muttered apologies. Mr. Finch produced a thermos like a magician and poured cocoa that tasted of cinnamon and salt. Dory walked the roof’s edge, face turned to the wind like a ship’s figurehead.

“Ready,” Amira said. “If this is scorable, I’ll score it.”

The lighthouse blinked again: three, pause, three. The shell answered: three notes, drawn longer, the way a person repeats a word in a new language to be sure it’s right.

On Amira’s screen, the pauses between notes resolved into tiny staircases of sound. “See these? They’re numbers. Ratios, actually.” Her voice thinned with awe. “They’re building a bridge out of math and music.”

Leo whistled under his breath. “The universe speaks fraction. Figures.”

Zoe laughed, quick and surprised, and the laughter peeled away her last bit of fear. She lifted the compass to the sky. The needle rose and held. The glass fogged with her breath and cleared.

“Zoe.”

She froze.

It wasn’t a shout, and it wasn’t in her ears. It was a shape the air made, out of cold and distance and the tiniest threads of sound stitched together. Her name, spoken gently, the way you might say a word you learned moments ago and already loved.

Zoe swallowed. “I’m here.”

Amira didn’t look up from the screen. “I heard that,” she whispered. “Waveform registered. It used your exact vowel curve. That shouldn’t be possible from—”

“From up,” Leo supplied, eyes wide.

The lighthouse beam bent a little farther, as if tipping its forehead to the sky. The shimmer above compressed, brightened, and then unfurled into a shape Zoe didn’t have a word for—like coral made of moonlight, like a constellation deciding to become a flower.

“Accord received,” the night said, not in sound so much as in certainty.

Zoe felt her knees want to sit and her heart want to run. Instead she stood very still, because stillness felt respectful, and said, “We’ve been listening.”

A drift of light slipped down the beam and broke apart into particles finer than fog. They brushed her...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 9.11.2025
• Reihe/Serie: Harbor Glen Mystery Adventures
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch ► Bilderbücher ► Religiöse Bilderbücher
• Schlagworte: courage and identity • fantasy for kids • mirror star • reflection mystery • Self-discovery
• ISBN-13: 979-8-9938512-6-6 / 9798993851266