Chapter Two
The Craftsman, Section Four
While her father demanded some peace and her mother and brother hurried down the stairs, Kara Constantine sat in her room, reading some book on world history. It was a long, thick tome filled with all sorts of quotes and anecdotes, and usually Kara would find something like this gnawing away at her time till she was finished.
Yet today, even more so than the intricacies of the World Wars, the events just outside her door fascinated her. What exactly is so important about Dad’s work that he can’t find a moment to talk to us? I can try to help, but it’s not going to work. And so Mom will go back to cleaning out the house or something, and Ben’ll go back to playing with his figures. We’re all under the same roof, but we may as well be in different countries. This isn’t how a family is supposed to work.
But it wasn’t just that which drew her attention — that was how things always were, after all. It was the stranger, Janus, who she’d overheard leaving the house. It’s good that he’s gone. Now I can figure out how to get everyone back together without having to account for another person. There surely has to be some way that we can be a family like we used to be — together, all the time, always there for one another, instead of all split.
It’s like a puzzle, isn’t it? I’ve got to get all the pieces into the right place. But Dad won’t listen. Ben will probably refuse to get his head out of his figures. There’s nothing I can do but wait, Kara thought, frustrated. Yet she couldn’t concentrate on her book with all these thoughts rattling around her head, and slowly put it down, pacing around her room.
She looked over at the strange, multi-colored, multi-faced prism that Janus had given her. A couple of the diamond-shaped faces had been lined up so that their colors matched, but more often than not they were still jumbled about. Kara took the prism in hand, the pointed ends digging into her palm just a bit.
Now, here’s a puzzle that I don’t have to wait to solve. Again, it’s basically just a Rubik’s cube, and I’ve solved plenty of those. But it may still be a challenge, Kara surmised, sitting down in her chair and beginning to twist the pieces around. Maybe when I’m done with this, Dad will have the time to listen, to be with us again, so that we can all be together.
But the more that Kara shifted and swapped the pieces of the prism around, the more she saw something underneath. It was a glimpse at first, some amethyst crystal at the very centre that she thought nothing of. Perhaps it was just whatever allowed all these pieces to move, after all. She could not, however, ignore it after almost half an hour of fiddling with the prism.
If it really was the centrepiece, why would it be colored like that? Why not just whatever’s convenient — white or black or whatever color Dad had lying around? Kara considered, as she flipped a corner piece into place, turning one side completely blue. Janus went out of his way to make the middle this color. There must be some meaning behind it. If I can’t solve the puzzle of my family… I’ve got to at least solve this one.
