Page 164 of Skalterra By Nightmare
Mom had said he knew I existed, but what if that had been a lie? What if he had no idea he had a daughter at all?
I screwed my eyes shut. I wasn’t here to connect with my estranged father. I was here for answers about Skalterra, to help save Orla, Fana, and the world as we knew it.
I opened my eyes to polite applause that echoed through the theatre. The lights dimmed, and the opening slide of a presentation took up the large white screen that hung over the stage.
A woman in a pantsuit introduced herself to the audience as the dean of the Von Leer School of Geophysics, but she sounded muted, like she was underwater.
A dull buzzing had taken over my brain. There, in the front row, a brunet head bobbed along with the woman’s introduction, until she called his name and stepped aside to make room for him at the lectern.
He stood up and waved off the ensuing applause. He shook the woman’s hand before she exited the stage, and then he pivoted to look out over the crowd.
Maxwell Brenton, PhD, looked just like his pictures.
My fingers balled into fists, my nails digging into my palms.
For the first time in over eighteen years, I was looking at my father.
38. Paleomagnetism
My father was tall, like I had figured he would be. Gams and Mom both fit neatly beneath my chin, so I knew I hadn’t inherited my height from them. Maxwell Brenton, meanwhile, was willowy and lean with a mousey hair color that matched mine perfectly.
He was already talking, but I had no idea what he was saying. My brain only registered the sound of his voice, low and even, but with a jovial lilt. The crowd laughed at something he said.
“I don’t get the joke,” Liam whispered next to me. I hushed him rather than admit I had missed the joke entirely.
Slides about seafloor expansion took up the screen, and I tried to absorb as much information as my poor, overwhelmed brain would allow.
“If you look right here at the center of the screen—” Maxwell Brenton used a laser pointer to circle a cluster of symbols on his map of the Pacific Ocean, “—you’ll see the magnetic anomalies that our research focused on. The location being so close to the Cascadia Subduction Zone was aHugobenefitof what we were trying to do, because—”
He cut off as laughter rippled through the amphitheater, including that of my own.
“Someone better tell him not to quit geology, because his jokes suck,” Liam whispered. “I didn’t get that one either.”
“It’s geophysics, not geology,” I corrected under my breath. “And the joke is Hugo Benioff. He studied the Ring of Fire. It’s a volcano thing. Now shush.”
“It’s even less funny now that I have context.” Liam’s white smile glinted at me in the low light, and I elbowed him into silence.
The lecture was dense, combining theories of ocean floor spread and continental drift, but Maxwell Brenton, PhD, was fun to listen to. He cracked jokes, he let a scientist in the third row heckle him about polar wander in an exchange that left the auditorium wheezing with laughter, and the more he spoke, the more I needed him to like me. Not as a daughter necessarily, but as a prospective scientist.
Every laugh he elicited from the crowd made me glow with misplaced pride, and I hung on his every word, even if I didn’t quite understand them all. I’d thought he’d be austere and stern, like he always had been in my imagination. However, he was charming and funny, and suddenly I was feeling very guilty about my admissions essay focusing on what a crappy person he was.
Through the jokes and the tangents, at the core of the lecture, he was painting a picture of how Earth as we knew it was formed by the physical laws that governed our world. Those physical laws had to govern Skalterra as well. They had to have played a role when the Four Magicians shaped the mountains, plains, canyons, and rivers of Skalterra.
The more my father spoke, the more he explained how continents moved and formed, the more certain I became.
He had all the answers to what had formed Keldori.Of coursehe had to know about Skalterra too. Maybe those anomalies he’d labeled on his screen were relevant somehow. Maybe that was where Ferrin would break through the Rift.
Applause broke through my thoughts, and the lights came up in the auditorium.
“Is it done?” Liam straightened up and rubbed the sleep from his eyes.
“I think so. Was that already an entire hour?”
“God, it felt longer than that.” Liam groaned.
The people around us started to file out, but I stayed seated, watching my father where he stood on the stage answering the questions of a couple scientists in the front row.
“Can you wait for me outside?” I asked, still looking at Dr. Brenton.
