It was a little like punching it, except we weren’t moving. We were standing absolutely still, and the world was changing around us. The trees grew taller, then shorter, one was struck by lightning, then was whole and green again. I couldn’t tell if we were going forward or backward; then I realized it was both. A figure walked past me and then split into two; one went left, the other right. More and more figures began to form around us; soldiers, mostly, running and jumping or ducking and hiding, often splitting into two different versions, one of them falling and lying still, the other crawling to safety—and all the while J/O, flickering in and out, came ever closer.
I could sympathize with how Acacia had felt on Base Town, when we’d gone into overdrive. I would rather have sailed over the waterfall in a barrel again, even with all the stitches I’d needed.
Finally, finally it stopped. I didn’t even know where we were now, but I knew there was a bush nearby, and I knew I had to rid myself of anything I’d eaten in the last few hours. I would have been humiliated, except I could hear Acacia doing the same thing a few feet away.
I recovered more quickly, and was able to crawl over and rub her back while she curled there miserably, gasping for breath. “Are you okay?” I managed, and she nodded. “Here.” I pulled a little flask from my boot, uncorking it and offering it to her. She looked at me like I was absolutely nuts. “Trust me.” I took her hand and pressed the flask into it, again enjoying knowing something she didn’t. I remembered the first time Jay’d offered it to me, and I’d assumed it was alcohol; I guessed Acacia was doing the same thing.
She smelled it hesitantly, then took a sip; I couldn’t help a smile as her brows lifted in surprise, and her features relaxed. “It’s pretty good, huh?” She took another sip and handed it back to me, shifting around to use my knee as a pillow. She nodded, and I took a sip from the flask myself. I’ve never gotten a straight answer about what it was, and I frankly didn’t care—all I knew was that it wasn’t alcohol and therefore didn’t have any of the nasty side effects, and no matter how small a sip you took, you immediately felt like you were rising from the softest bed in the nicest weather, with the smell of your favorite breakfast in the air. You felt like you were ready to take on the world.
I finally took a moment to look around, not that I could see much. Everything was gray and foggy, covered in a thick mist. Shadows and shapes moved through it; and while it wasn’t the kind of mist that obscured my vision, it just made everything a little hazy. It was like looking at something through a patterned glass window: You could see shapes, but not make out details.
“Where are we?”
“That’s hard to answer.” Acacia’s voice drifted up from my lap, weak and strained.
“Is there a better question?”
I think she smiled, but I couldn’t quite tell. “You could ask where we aren’t.”
“Okay. Where aren’t we?”
“Anywhere.” She took a deep breath, shifting to sit up. I helped her, keeping a hand on her shoulder to steady her. “We’re not anywhere.”
She looked awful. She still seemed dizzy and had the shakes, and her skin was pale and clammy. I offered her the flask again, but she shook her head.
“We’re not anywhere? So we’re nowhere? I’ve been in the Nowhere-at-All, and this isn’t—”
“No, it’s not the same.” She took another breath, raking her hair back behind her ears. One of her nails was broken, split to the quick and bleeding. “I dropped anchor. Without a destination.”
It was starting to make a little more sense, sort of. “So we fell through the world?”
She shook her head. “We fell through time.”
I looked around at the figures, misty and distorted, walking around us. It was like they were overlaid—one would walk right past, then bend down to pick something up from the ground. Then it would straighten and go on its way, except there would still be a figure standing there, looking at whatever it was. Then that one would go off in a different direction. They were all over the place, sometimes even walking right through me.
“Are you okay? He shot you.”
She nodded, moving part of her shirt aside to show me. The shirt itself was seared through, but the skin beneath it was unburned. Red, yes, with the faint start of bruising, but unburned. “Skin shield.”
“Is that…like a suit, or something?”
“Sort of. It’s not really something you put on like clothing—it’s just a…an energy shield. I’ve gotta recharge it, now…that was a strong blast.” She sighed, running her fingers over the area. Her fingernails sparked, circuitry pulsing with green light, and a thought struck me.
“Can you recharge this?” I held out the little shield disk I still had, the one I’d found on the mountain. Acacia took it from me, turning it over thoughtfully.
“I think so. It’s the same kind of thing as my skin shield, just…well, less advanced. No offense.”
I shrugged. Acacia held her hand out, palm up, fingers bent and apart. She rested the disk on her fingernails. A spark of electricity jumped from one to the next, around to four of her fingers; one of her nails was still broken. The disk glowed faintly blue.
“Neat trick,” I commented. She smiled, but didn’t respond.
I counted the seconds until she was done. Twenty, not the full thirty it usually took to fully charge a disk. Acacia’s fingernails were more powerful than anything we had.
She handed it back, and I powered it up. The surface of it flashed, then displayed a blue serial number: FB242.
“That can’t be right,” I muttered. Acacia looked at me questioningly.
“Did it work?”
“Yeah, but…this is the one I lost. The one the quartermaster got mad at me for. The one I had to leave on Earth FΔ986.”
“Where did you find it?”
“At the…” I realized I hadn’t told her about the rockslide yet. Maybe she already knew. “On the mountain. On top.”
“Are you sure it’s the same one?”
“Yes.” She looked skeptical. “I’m absolutely sure. The number is FB two forty-two, and my mother’s birthday is February twenty-fourth. I remember noticing that when I checked it out. It’s the same one.”
“So how’d it get there?”
“I don’t know. I saw it fall. I left it behind; I didn’t have a choice.” I powered it down, clipping it back to my belt. This was all getting immensely confusing. “I was trying to throw it to Jo when she was falling, but Joaquim grabbed her and they both Walked….”
“Could someone have gone back to get it?”
“I don’t…” I sighed, running a hand through my hair and looking up at the sky. It was both sunny and cloudy, and dark storm clouds loomed off to the west. If I looked closely, I could see rain falling around us, but we weren’t wet. The ghostly figures still milled about, walking or jogging or falling, everywhere I looked.
And one of them looked familiar.
“He found us!” I started to scramble to my feet, but Acacia grabbed my wrist.
“No,” she tugged on my arm, and I paused. “He hasn’t. He’s looking, but he can’t see us. If he could, he’d be here. He’d be clear.”
“Can he find us?” I sat back down.
She shook her head, then brought up a hand to rub her temple in frustration. “I don’t know. He shouldn’t be able to. He shouldn’t have been able to Walk through time. Walkers can’t do that, right?” She looked at me.
“No,” I said, “except for relativistic and sidereal changes from world to world.” Think of going from New York to LA—that’s TimeWalking in a way. But you expend a certain amount of time traveling between them, whether it’s just a few hours by a Boeing 747 or a few months by a Conestoga. “The closest we come is the In-Between, but that’s to get us from one world to another; it’s all about where we go, not when.” I had a sudden, dizzying flash of the awesome math it required just to move about outside time: to go six months forward or back instantaneously and
not wind up floating, flash frozen, in space because the Earth had moved out from under you on its merry way around the sun. Sir Isaac had had things simpler when time was serenely separate from the rest of the universe and not all bound up as part of space.
“I don’t know how to, anyway,” I told her. “No one I know knows how, unless they’ve been hiding it from me. We didn’t learn it on InterWorld.”
She scooted around so that her back was to mine and we were leaning against each other for support. I leaned back with some relief; my ribs were killing me. “What did he say?” she asked. “He said he didn’t answer to TimeWatch. What else?”
I thought—as much as was possible, anyway, with pain still clamoring at my nerve endings. “Uh…he said he didn’t need your technology. And that he was…anchored…? No. Fixed on our souls.”
“Essence,” Acacia said assuredly. “He said ‘essence.’ That he was fixed on your essence, and he’d follow it anywhere. But that’s not how we do it. It’s not TimeWatch technology. We can track people, but not like…” I felt her sit up a little straighter against me, felt her breathing quicken.
“Acacia?”
“They do that,” she said, her voice shaky. “They do that.”
“‘They’?”
“The things we’re sworn to fight. But he wasn’t—”
“A Techmaturge?”
She whirled around, and I almost fell at the abrupt lack of support. “How do you know about them?” Her stare was intense. I heard the ghostly echo of Jay’s voice: erase you…she’ll see that you’re expunged…
“How’d I know you were a Time Agent? Simple. I did my own research.” It was mostly true, and I wasn’t sure how to explain that I’d been told by the psychic imprint of my former mentor. I mean, she’d probably believe me, but it seemed better not to tell her.
After a moment she took a breath, looking up toward the foggy gray-blue sky. “Okay. He can’t actually have Techmaturge power, or we’d be dead. But he still managed to fix on our essence and follow. How?”
“Well, what else did he say?” We were both silent for a moment, thinking.
Finally, Acacia shook her head. “He just said he didn’t need our technology, and that he’d fixed on our essence.”
Something pinged in the back of my mind. “No, hold on. He said ‘we.’ He said, ‘We don’t need your technology.’”
“‘We’?” Acacia looked at me.
“J/O doesn’t talk like that. He says I, first person. He may be a cyborg, but he’s always been his own cyborg. The only robots I know of who refer to themselves in the collective are the—”
It hit me all at once, and I thought I was going to be sick again. “The Binary,” I managed, as Acacia just looked at me.
“You said he’s a cyborg.”
“He comes from a world closer to the technological end of the Arc. More advanced in science. They inject you with programming microchips the day you’re born. People live longer, are healthier, all of that.”
“Could he have been a traitor this whole time?”
“No,” I said, a little too forcefully. She raised an eyebrow; I took a breath. “No, I don’t think so. He’s been on my team for so many missions; he was captured by HEX once—he’s just like me. He’s one of me. I think…” I fell silent, and Acacia nudged me with a shoulder.
“You think what?”
“I think this happened recently. Like when we got Joaquim. We were on a Binary world, and J/O had to hack into the mainframe to get some information for the Old Man. Something backfired, and…he was unconscious when I rejoined the team. He was out for a few days.”
“They infected him,” murmured Acacia, confirming what I’d just realized myself.
“Doesn’t he have antispyware or something?” I wondered aloud. “Even my world has that, and we’re not half as advanced!”
Acacia snorted, but I was too upset to find it even faintly funny. My friend was a member of the Binary now. No wonder he’d been trying to kill me. I put my head in my hands.
“Hey, it’s okay, Joe. We can fix him.” She paused, then went on, though seemingly reluctant to do so. “I…this doesn’t solve how he followed us, though. The Binary can’t time travel, either. The only ones I know who can are the Techmaturges, but even their ability is limited. That’s how we stay on top.”
“If they can time travel, couldn’t one of them have come back and given him the power?”
“They can’t transfer it like that. It’s much more complicated than that. Every time someone tries to change the time line, alternate worlds are created. And I’d know if one was here, or had been here.”
“How?”
“Because it’s my job to know. We keep close track of these guys. There aren’t many, but—”
“But their power can destroy worlds with a single glance, I know.” I ran my hands through my hair, grabbing two fistfuls of it in frustration. “I have to get back. I don’t know if he’s just after me, or everything—but InterWorld might be in danger.”
I felt her sigh, felt her hair brush against the back of my neck as she looked away. “I don’t think you should go back yet, Joe.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not safe.”
My response was a laugh that came out a whole lot more bitter than I intended it to. “Nowhere’s safe right now, Acacia. My team and most of another just barely made it back alive from a simple capture-the-flag mission. One of us didn’t. And we were just followed through time by a Walker, someone who’s supposed to be on my team—” I stopped, but not because Acacia was talking. I wasn’t even sure what she was saying—telling me to calm down, maybe, or explaining why she thought it wasn’t safe. I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about the rockslide and J/O’s virus and the shield disk. I was thinking about how he’d been on standby for a while, and I hadn’t seen him until we went on our training mission. I was thinking about how he’d still been unconscious in the infirmary when I’d signed out to go off Base.
Someone had to have gone back to F△986 to get the shield disk—but it hadn’t been him. He’d been plugged in right up until the capture-the-flag game, and the Base Town sensors automatically filed it if someone Walked off world. I’d seen the sign-outs before I left; J/O hadn’t left Base.
He’d been plugged in, though. To the infirmary. Could he have gotten access to the sheets, scrambled it so that his name wasn’t there? No, he couldn’t have done both, not in that amount of time….
The more I thought about it, the more certain I was: Someone else had gone back to Earth FΔ986. Someone else had picked up the lost disk, recharged it, and brought it on a simple training mission instead of turning it in. Someone who’d been in the rockslide and survived.
“There’s someone else.” I cut Acacia off midsentence, gaze locked on the silhouette of J/O as he Walked, trying to find us. “There’s another traitor in InterWorld. He’s there right now. I have to—”
I never saw her move. All I knew was that I felt an abrupt prick at the base of my neck, like something had stung or bitten me, and then my entire body grew uncomfortably warm. I couldn’t move. The shapes around me were growing fuzzier, my vision was suddenly filled with a faint purple glow, and static crackled in my ears.
I didn’t even feel myself falling, but I definitely knew it when I hit the ground. Still, the pain seemed far away, held just outside my body by that shining purple light. I tried to get up, or at least roll over and look at Acacia, but my limbs weren’t responding to my brain. For one brief, horrified moment, I remembered when Lady Indigo of HEX had laid a spell on me. There had been a little voice of reason inside me, screaming at me to run, but I’d simply stayed at her side and obeyed her every command. For an instant, I was terrified that Acacia had done the same. Then she stepped into my line of vision, knelt, and put a hand to my head. She looked sad.
The ground beneath us vanished, and once again we fell through time.
The TimeWatch headquarters—what li
ttle I could see of it—seemed a lot like InterWorld. It wasn’t that Acacia had put a spell on me, exactly, but she’d somehow disabled my motor functions. I was only half conscious when I felt ground beneath me again. It was white tile, shining with the reflection of the bright lights above us. Voices rang out around me, one of them Acacia’s, but I couldn’t make out the words.
She had me in some kind of antigravity grip. I occasionally saw sparks of purple and green around me, saw her nails glowing as she took me through the corridors. I couldn’t tell if I was walking or not, or if my feet were even touching the ground. Everything was bright and clean and shining, the colors all soft and muted, beautifully luminescent. After only a few rooms we stopped, and I was moved to some kind of gurney. Now I could see everything above me, and I forgot about worrying where I was going or what was happening as I gazed up into the domed sky.
I couldn’t tell if it was an open roof or a window or if it was painted on—but it was beautiful. It looked like the night sky except white instead of dark blue, with a thousand sunsets swirling behind the misty clouds. The “stars” were all blues and greens and peaches, lavenders and rosy hues; and there was no single sun or moon but rather thousands of them, small and large and all sharing the sky. Some parts grew darker, others lighter, then they’d switch, giving the impression of a pulse or faint heartbeat. It wasn’t just in that one room, either. It was everywhere we went, down hallways and through corridors, with Acacia pushing me along like a patient on the way to surgery.
That was an unsettling comparison.
Gradually, I became aware of hushed voices around me. I tried to turn my head to either side, and couldn’t. I could just barely see figures out of the corner of my vision, hazy and indistinct, like those we’d just left at the time vortex. They were whispering. The static in my ears had died down a little, and I could make out someone saying “Is that him?”
Acacia took me through several halls and rooms, and into something resembling an elevator. I couldn’t tell if we were going up or down, but I assumed down because when we got out, the sky was gone. It wasn’t as bright anymore. The walls were gray instead of white.