Eternity's Wheel (5 page)

“That's essentially it, yeah.”

“And you're saying there are hundreds of us, spread out over every dimension.”

“The number is probably incalculable,” I said, recalling when I searched for my name in InterWorld's dimensional database. I'd come up with a few thousand matches on my name alone; who knew how many versions of the rest of there were, all with names like Josephine and Jo and Jakon and Josef.

Those last three were teammates of mine. I missed them.

“It's hard to say how many of us there actually are,” I continued, pushing aside my sudden melancholy. “Since there are more dimensions being created and destroyed every day. Every second, even. But that's too much to get into right now,” I said quickly, seeing her open her mouth to ask. She shut it irritably, her expression heated. “What matters is getting back to the base we've got, getting you and whatever others we can find trained, and stopping FrostNight.”

She was staring at me, and I was starting to realize how crazy I sounded. Not just in terms of “You expect me to believe things that sound crazy.” Even if you bought everything I was saying about HEX and Binary and time travel and multiple dimensions, even if you decided that was all completely real and sane, I still sounded crazy. My plan was to pick up as many untrained recruits as I could and go head-to-head with the worst baddies in the universe—
both
of them—with no backup or plan B. No matter which way you looked at it, it was both insane and suicidal.

But it was also my only option.

“Okay,” she said abruptly. “Let's do it.”

I just looked at her.

“What?” she said finally, her tone and posture ratcheting up a notch. “Isn't that the answer you wanted to hear?”

No
, I thought unwillingly. To tell the truth, I'd never really thought about whether she'd agree or not. There was never an option in my mind. The plan had been to find Josephine,
convince her to help me, take her back to base, then go find all the others and do the same. The fact that she'd agreed to fight in a war she hadn't even known about until five minutes ago made me feel sick, like I was knowingly sending her into a minefield without a map.

In a way, that's exactly what I was doing.

“Yeah,” I said, but I don't think she believed me. I know I didn't.

G
ETTING
J
OSEPHINE TO AGREE
to let Hue take us into the future was easier than I thought it would it be. Getting her to actually
do
it, however, was harder.

“No way,” she said adamantly, watching the way Hue rippled over my body like a suit of Silly Putty.

“It just feels a little weird,” I insisted. “It doesn't hurt.”

“I don't care if it feels weird, I don't want that
thing
that close to me.”

“His name is Hue,” I said, pushing down my temper. “And he's a friend of mine,
and
he's helping us. You don't have to do anything except trust me, okay?”

She fell silent, a muscle twitching in her jaw. She was only willing to trust me so far.

“Look,” I said, taking a step closer. Josephine drew back but didn't step away. I held out my hand. After a hesitation
that started to grind on my nerves—we didn't have
time
for this—she took it.

Go to her, Hue
, I said silently.
Slowly. She's scared
. With Hue wrapped around me like a second skin, I'd found we could communicate without speaking. At least, inasmuch as I could ever communicate with Hue; he seemed to understand basic language (several different ones, in fact), but sometimes there were concepts or nuances that confused him. Or he just ignored me; it was hard to tell.

The Hue putty began to flow down over my arm, toward our hands. I felt her fingers tighten in mine and a resistance like she wanted to pull away, but I held her firmly. Hue moved over our fingers, slowly covering her hand to the wrist. There he stopped, waiting.

“It does feel weird,” she said, though she didn't seem as spooked.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Like Silly Putty, right?”

“Like what?”

“Never mind.” I sighed. This was a common cultural difference with para-incarnations of myself. Even though both our worlds had McDonald's, there was nothing saying that whoever had invented something like Silly Putty in my world had also done it in hers.

“It's kind of like Putty Dough, I guess,” she said.

Close enough. “Sure,” I agreed, still holding her hand.
“Now,
trust me
, okay? We're going to do exactly what I said. You have to get closer to me so that Hue can cover us both; he's not that big. Then I'm going to Walk. You'll understand it when you feel it.”

“Fine,” she said shortly, like she was agreeing before she could change her mind. I stepped forward, putting my arms around her shoulders, while hers settled somewhat hesitantly around my waist.

Honestly, I wasn't really sure how this was going to work. I didn't know if Hue needed to be covering Josephine as well, or if I just needed to be touching her. All I knew was that the chances of something going wrong if she panicked were pretty high, which is why I was holding on to her.

Hue stretched paper-thin over us both, and I felt Josephine press closer against me. It was like being in a sensory-deprivation tank, I would imagine, at least at first. I ceased to feel the air on me, to hear the birds, to see the brightness of the rising blue sun.

And then, as I opened my eyes, I could see and hear and feel
everything
.

Hue was like the universe's best looking glass, like the missing element that made everything fall into place. That made everything make
sense
. Walking was no longer about finding the door, it was about suddenly realizing you were surrounded by doors and you knew exactly where every single one of them went. It was like sitting down at a test
you'd never studied for and finding you knew all the answers anyway.

I could feel everything. I could feel Josephine's wonder and terror, her slow understanding and her deep yearning. She was experiencing what she'd been born to do, and I could already feel her fear giving in to eagerness, to the desire to learn.

Even though I theoretically knew where
all
the doors would take me, it's always easiest to go someplace you've already been. I followed the path to future InterWorld flawlessly, and all too soon we were standing there in the purple dawn light, there on that crumbling base.

Josephine let go of me as soon as Hue receded, taking a few steps back, though she didn't look afraid. She looked like she understood.

She walked slowly down the gravel path, alternately staring at the smoke-blackened trees and the scorched ground. I still didn't know what had happened here; perhaps at some point, when I had time, I could have Hue show me.

All I knew was that sometime in InterWorld's future, the base must have been attacked. There were burns all over the place, areas where the ground was dark, rust red with the memory of violence. There was nothing here, not even a breeze. We were alone on a dead world.

“This is the future,” Josephine asked, though it didn't sound much like a question.

“Several thousand years from where we were, yeah. I don't know how far exactly,” I said, catching sight of something glinting in the morning sun. I knelt to inspect it, finding a twisted scrap of metal that could have been anything from a blaster shell to a piece of jewelry. It wasn't recognizable as anything but junk now.

“So why keep fighting?” she asked.

“What?”

“Why even bother? You said you have to get back to your InterWorld, but it'll just be this eventually. Even if you save it back then, it'll wind up like this.” She gestured at the area around us, the shattered glass and dead trees and broken doorways. “You'll lose anyway.”

I was silent for a moment, watching Hue float off toward one of the rooftops. He settled there, perched on the edge of it like a balloon-shaped gargoyle, and turned the same color as the metal. I'd never really seen him camouflage before, but the guy had a hundred little tricks I wasn't aware of.

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, shoving my hands into the pockets of my sweatshirt. “Eventually.”

“So why are you even bothering?”

“Because if I don't, all this”—I shrugged, indicating the devastation around me—“will happen everywhere a lot sooner. There won't even be this left. There won't be anything.”

She scuffed her foot against the gravel path, watching the
pebbles scatter this way and that. “But doesn't the existence of this ship in the future, even if it's deserted, mean that there
is
a future? That the world doesn't get destroyed?”

“It doesn't work like that,” I told her. “FrostNight will erase everything, past, present, and future, all at once. If it's released, this entire dimension, this entire timestream, will all be gone.”

She seemed to accept that, though she folded her arms and huddled in on herself, as though she didn't like what she was about to say. “Okay. But, still—let's say you do gather us all up, and we go stop this FrostNight thing. Let's say we save the world, or all the worlds. Why not just let us go home, then?”

I took in a breath, held it for a moment, let it out slowly. “Because InterWorld guards against HEX and Binary. That's what we do. We track their movement, and we thwart them. We make sure they don't get more of us, don't get more weapons. Don't hurt innocent people or take over entire worlds and use the inhabitants for cannon fodder. We're the thorn in their sides, and that's all we can manage. We may not be much, but we're the first line of defense. We're the
only
line of defense. We've gotta keep being that, no matter what. It's all we've got, even if in the end, this is all that's left.”

To be honest, I hadn't really been sure what I was going to say when I opened my mouth. The words had just come to me, based on a bunch of different things, mostly stuff I'd
heard the Old Man say. He wasn't a man of many words, but the ones he did use tended to be pretty effective.

Josephine was looking at me with her eyes narrowed, like she still wasn't sure what my game was. “I still think you're crazy,” she said, “but now it's for different reasons.”

“Yeah,” I said, and turned to walk into the base. After a moment, I heard her follow me.

“First order of business is to get to the control room,” I told her as we picked our way through the debris in the hallways. “There might still be some auxiliary power cores laying around. I have no idea when this happened, so I don't know if they'll still be good.”

“What if they're not?”

“Then we hope they can be recharged.”

“Recharged? How?”

“That depends on how old they are,” I explained, shoving down my rising impatience. I had nothing to do but explain things as we made our way to the control room, and she really didn't know any of this. I imagine I was much the same when Jay had first picked me up. “They can be charged a few different ways, if the transducers are still working. Thermal energy, chemical, electromagnetic, etc. The ship mostly runs on kinetic energy, as I understand it.” I glanced back to see if she was following all this, then elaborated. “Meaning, once it gets started, it'll work up its own momentum and charge itself.”

“I see,” she said, climbing her way over a pile of rubble. “So how do you get it started?”

“Well, some kind of pulse. A shock, or—”

“Like a static shock?”

“It'd have to be more powerful than that, but that's the right idea.”

“So if the trans . . . ducers aren't working?”

“We fix them somehow.”

“How?”

“I don't know how,” I admitted. “So let's hope they're working.”

“Okay,” she said, sounding dubious. I could practically hear her second-guessing her decision to come with me, as I obviously didn't know what I was doing.

She was pretty much right.

It didn't take long for us to make our way to the control room. I was anxious every step of the way; I kept expecting to run into bad guys, or worse—what was left of the good guys. There was nothing, though, no bodies of any kind or evidence of anything living. On the one hand, I was glad. On the other, I wanted to know what had happened here. I wanted to know how to stop it.

We did find some used-up power cores, and some of them still had juice. Not enough to get the ship up and running but enough to give us a boost for the mechanisms that still
worked. Such as activating the solar panels.

“At least we'll have some power once the sun rises overhead,” I said, flipping a long line of switches that activated the panels all over the roof of the main building.

“So this is both a ship and a town, sort of,” Josephine observed, carefully watching what I was doing.

“Yeah. The whole thing is a ship—it just doesn't
look
like one. It doesn't look enclosed, but it is. At least, it is when the shields are working, so we can phase to worlds that don't have the right kind of air for us.”

“But this world does, right?”

“Obviously, or we wouldn't be breathing.”

“How did you know it would?”

“I've been here before. The ship can't phase without the engines, and the engines don't run without power. I knew it'd be in the same place.”

“So we can phase again if we get power?”

“Maybe. I know power makes the ship run, but I don't know exactly how we make it phase. I know how HEX and Binary do it with
their
ships, but . . .” I shook my head. That wasn't on the table.

“How?” I should have seen that question coming.

“They use us,” I said as bluntly as I could to keep from discussing it further. “They take our ability to Walk and use it for their own ships.”

She pressed her lips together, looking away. Even as new
to this as she was, she knew what it was like to Walk, and I think she already couldn't imagine having that taken away. I knew how she felt.

“Come on,” I said, flipping one final switch. “It's time for a lesson.”

I hadn't really bothered looking out any windows the last time I was here. I'd been in too much of a hurry, too desperate to get back to where I belonged. Back then, I'd assumed the ship was still floating above the ground, cruising along at about five thousand feet as usual.

I'd realized it slowly as we made our way through the ship this time, but we were actually docked: completely and utterly still. We were sitting on the ground in a wide-open field, nothing but grassy plains visible as far as the eye could see. There might have been a sparkle of water in the distance, but it could just as easily have been a trick of the light.

“Are we alone on the planet, too?” Josephine asked, once she'd taken in the size of InterWorld itself. We weren't talking the size of New York or anything, but it certainly would have taken a while to walk all the way around it.

“Depends on your definition,” I said, pointing to a group of butterflies collecting around some flowers. “We're the only people. This is a prehistoric world.”