She glanced at me, and I offered a smile. Josephine was silent as she walked behind me. We both understood.
“This way,” she said before I could say anything else, veering off to the right. The air was clean enough now that I could see the path outside our bubble, and we were definitely up in the mountains. The incline got sharper, and the air got gradually thinner.
“We aren’t going to run out of oxygen or anything, are we?” Josephine asked.
“I doubt the mountain goes that high,” I said, and she reached out to punch my arm. The good arm, thankfully.
“I know that. I meant the bubble we’re in.”
“Oh,” I said, glancing around. That might actually be a legitimate concern.
“We are not in a bubble,” Jari explained. “I am purifying the air around us in a small radius as we walk. You could easily reach outside of my range, if you wished.”
“And you can do that anywhere? Even underwater?”
“Yes.” She sounded proud. “Underwater, far underground, anywhere. It is specifically the ability to create the environment I need to survive, no matter what is around me.”
“And you said you can adapt, too?” Josephine asked.
“Yes. I can either create the bubble for those I am with, or I can allow myself to breathe wherever I am.”
“Do you grow gills or anything? Like, do you change your shape?”
“No, that is my brother’s gift. He can become a water dweller; I can simply dwell in the water as is.” She sounded irritated again; I was beginning to guess that she thought her brother’s shape-shifting was a better ability than hers.
“That’s really cool,” Josephine said, and then we had to explain the colloquialism to Jari. By the time we got that sorted out, the air had cleared up enough that Jari dropped her not-bubble, and we walked into a makeshift base.
My knees went weak with relief. There were at least half a dozen temp camps, which could fit four people if you got cozy. There were twice that many Walkers doing various chores, and I recognized most of them—and one in particular, a girl most recognizable by her beautiful white wings.
“Jo!” I shouted, surprising myself as I darted forward. I was further surprised when she moved forward as well, meeting me in a hug.
Though Jo was one of the first people I’d interacted with at InterWorld, our relationship had always been chilly at best. Still, she was a teammate and (as far as I was concerned) a friend, and the first of either I’d seen in four or five days.
I hugged her tightly, though I was careful of her wings and she was careful of my shoulder. She pulled back almost immediately, looking embarrassed at her uncharacteristic exuberance. “Joey,” she said, her voice heavy with relief. “You’re—” She cut herself off from saying the word okay; I obviously wasn’t all that okay, given the sling, wrist brace, and number of bandages on me.
“Alive,” I filled in. “So are you. I’m glad,” I said honestly, and we exchanged wry smiles. It was kind of like that right now; “alive” was about as good as we could hope for.
“I am also pleased to see you relatively well, though not uninjured,” said another voice, one I would have recognized immediately even if not for the overabundance of formality in his tone.
“Hey, Jai!” Oh, what the hell—I hugged him, too, something he accepted with a hint of surprise. “Are you all right? I haven’t seen you since . . .” I trailed off, not knowing what to call it. I couldn’t say the accident, because it hadn’t been one.
“I was fortunate enough to remain mostly unscathed,” he said, “and I attempted to provide the same fate for our comrades. With little success,” he added softly, his brown face filling with sorrow. I squeezed his shoulder.
“It would have been a lot worse without you,” I said.
A small crowd was gathering around us, a crowd of people I recognized. They all took turns waving or greeting me, saying they were glad to see me or expressing relief that I was alive and here. There was the rest of my team aside from J/O: Josef, twice my size and built of thick, dense muscle, and Jakon, my sleek, furry wolflike cousin, and others who weren’t on my team but had missed me anyway. J’r’ohoho, the centaur from a primitive world who’d nevertheless excelled in his science classes, and Jaya, with her red-gold hair and sweet voice.
They were all here, all glad to see me. It was a homecoming, of sorts, the kind I hadn’t yet had at InterWorld. No one here had been glad to see me before, had given me hugs, or said they’d missed me. It was nice, not just for myself, but because Josephine was watching with a quiet understanding. I was glad she could see the camaraderie we all felt for each other firsthand.
“How did you all get here?” I asked finally, raising my voice to be heard above the chatter.
“That’s something you and I should discuss,” said a new voice, firm but not unkind, and a few people stepped aside to reveal Joeb.
“Hey,” I said in greeting, another wave of relief washing through me. It wasn’t just that I was glad to see him. He and Jai were both senior officers, which meant I wouldn’t be the only one making decisions now. I didn’t have to do this all on my own anymore.
“Come sit,” he said, gesturing to a few travel cots that were set up around a portable heater. It was warmer now that we could actually feel the sunlight, but I imagined it got cold up here.
Joeb and I sat down on a cot. All the others followed, some also sitting on cots and others on the ground, leaning against one another and otherwise getting comfortable. Apparently, it was story time.
“The Old Man pulled me into his office six days ago,” Joeb began, his brown eyes serious. “He said there had been a security breach, a leak he’d just discovered.”
“It was Joaquim,” I said. A murmur went through those listening.
“It can’t have been,” someone said.
“We’d’ve known,” someone else insisted, and a few other voices rose up in agreement.
“It was Joaquim,” Joeb said clearly, his voice rising once again above the chatter. He let that sink in for a moment, glancing out over the faces of those assembled. “Captain Harker confirmed it before we left.”
I looked out at them, too, seeing the same disbelief I had felt, the same betrayal that had been twisting at me for days. “He’s dead,” I said, and Joeb looked at me. “He was a creation of Binary . . . and HEX,” I said, and another murmur went through the crowd. “They’re working together now. They used a combination of science and magic to create what they call FrostNight, and they used me and Joaquim to power it. Acacia helped me escape, but Joaquim was . . .”
“Killed?” asked Jo, when I faltered.
“Used up,” I said, unable to look at her. I couldn’t look at anyone; I kept remembering Joaquim’s face, still contorted into a mask of fear and anger, no emotion or depth or life left in his eyes at all. “He was powered by magic. And us, of the essences that are stolen when we’re caught by HEX.” Now I did look at her, and all of them, my gaze roaming over the faces of these comrades who were just like me. They all looked as sick as I felt.
“FrostNight,” Joeb said, after a moment of silence. “What is it?”
I took a breath. “Basically? A self-perpetuating supercontinuum that rearranges all of time and space in its path.”
A short silence followed my statement. Those who’d had any manner of basic classes at InterWorld Prime looked appropriately concerned. Others, such as Jari and Josephine, looked like they had absolutely no clue what the hell I’d just said.
“Okay,” said Joeb, who was one of the ones looking concerned. “What is its path, exactly?”
“Everywhere. It’s a self-aware manifold; it can reach into any dimension.”
“It has to disperse eventually,” someone ventured from the crowd. “Doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” I snapped, then put a hand to my forehead. I hadn’t meant to be short, I was just frustrated; I didn’t know nearly as much about this as I needed to. I’d seen it creat
ed, but I still knew next to nothing. “It was powered by us, by me and Joaquim and all the souls they’d infused him with. They got all of . . . them, of all him, but I escaped.”
“How?” someone else asked, and I wasn’t sure if I was imagining the hint of suspicion or not.
“Acacia,” I said, and Joeb held up a hand.
“Hold on,” he said, looking at me sympathetically. “Why don’t I tell you our side of the story, and then you can fill in the gaps for us.”
I nodded, grateful, and he continued. “The Old Man called me into his office two days after we extracted the twins.” He nodded to Jari and the hawk. “He said there was a leak in InterWorld, and that everyone was in danger. He instructed me and several other officers to take small groups of people off base for training, and not to return until we heard from him. He also gave me an ADT”—he pulled an advanced dimensional tracker, a small, circular device, from his pocket—“and told me to keep an eye out for you.”
“For me?” I accepted the tracker as he handed it to me, staring down the screen. It had exactly one blip, a little red dot in the center. Me. “I’ll be damned,” I muttered, staring at the dot. I remembered sitting in the stark white infirmary, barely feeling the shot as it stabbed into my arm, still numb from my injuries and Jerzy’s funeral the day before. “He had me injected with a tracer the same day he sent you off Base. Hours before, I’ll bet. He said it was for my own safety, but now I’m not so sure.” After all, this wasn’t the first time the tracer had come in handy. The Old Man had to have known it would, but how?
Acacia, I realized, my hand clenching around the ADT. She was a Time Agent. She must have known this was going to happen, must have warned the Old Man.
I did my best to fight down a surge of anger, and instead handed the ADT back to Joeb and tried to concentrate on what he was saying. Why couldn’t she have warned him about any of the other horrible things that had happened in the last week? Jerzy’s death? Binary and HEX working together? The Professor sacrificing his “son” to create a self-aware soliton that will erase everything in the Multiverse, for God’s sake! She didn’t find any of that to be half as important as having me injected with a tracer?
“Joey?” Joeb’s voice pulled me out of my thoughts, and I realized I’d completely lost track of the conversation.
“Sorry. What?”
“I asked if you knew why Captain Harker hadn’t contacted us yet. I mean, I assumed I was waiting for you, but I imagine you haven’t brought us orders to go back to base.”
I shook my head. “No. They’re . . . InterWorld is compromised,” I said, hating the words as they left my lips. There was the sound of a collective intake of breath from everyone sitting around me. “It’s been locked onto by a HEX ship. They’re running, I don’t know where to and I don’t know for how long. I think they’re stuck in a perpetual temporal warp, at least for now.”
“I was afraid of that,” Joeb said. At my look, he shrugged. “The InterWorld formula is . . . it feels like a broken link right now. Like it wouldn’t take me anywhere if I tried to use it.” He sighed, reaching up to rub the back of his neck, turning his head this way and that to stretch muscles made tense by worry and stress. I knew the feeling. “So that’s my side of it. We’ve been sitting on this mountain for the better part of a week now, running some rudimentary training and waiting to either hear from the Old Man or see your little dot show up on the ADT.”
“What about the other officers with their teams? Do you know where they are?”
“I don’t know if any of them actually made it off base,” he admitted. “I grabbed my recruits pretty quickly—my teams, and what I could of yours.” He nodded to where Jo, Jakon, Josef, and Jai were sitting nearby, listening.
“Most of mine were injured in the rockslide,” I murmured, more or less to myself. Why had the Old Man had him take the injured Walkers off base?
Joeb grinned at me. I blinked at the expression; for obvious reasons, his smile seemed kind of out of place. “They wouldn’t take no for an answer when they found out we were going off Base,” he explained. Jakon bared her teeth at me in her signature fierce smile, and Josef shot me a thumbs-up.
I hung my head, giving a quiet laugh. That was my team, all right.
“Okay,” I said, the word coming out as a sigh. “Ready to hear my side of it?”
It didn’t take me long to tell Joeb and the others everything that had happened to me. I had told it so many times, to Mr. Dimas and to Josephine, that I did so mechanically now, letting my brain detach from what I was saying and think about other things. Like how to get them all back to InterWorld Beta.
I hadn’t expected to run into so many Walkers at once. Honestly, I was concerned that having so many of them here would draw unwanted attention from our enemies, especially if we tried to Walk. Walking, if you weren’t careful about it, tended to alert the capture agents of either HEX or Binary. Not always, but they did have specific sensors for it. That’s how they’d find us, when we first discovered our power, before we even knew what was happening. . . .
Would Hue be able to take all of us at once? Or, if he was covering me, would I be able to Walk all of us through time? Though that many of us Walking at once would still have to blip some sensors, somewhere.
But, assuming FrostNight had been released, would they even care about what we were doing? You will not be able to Walk far enough away, Lord Dogknife had gloated to me. He’d left me alive on my home world; he obviously wasn’t too concerned with what I would or wouldn’t do. Would they even be paying attention enough to notice if that many of us Walked at once?
Damn it. There was too much I didn’t know.
“So, when Acacia sent me into the future to keep me safe,” I continued, “she sent me to a future version of InterWorld. I was able to get back, thanks to the tracer the Old Man injected me with, and Hue. Hue can act like an encounter suit and form himself to me. When he does, I can Walk to any timeline. It’s like . . . like I become multidimensional, myself.”
“Is it safe?” someone asked.
“Yes.” Surprisingly, it was Josephine who spoke up. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m still not sure I trust that little balloon, but we Walked through time easily enough. And we found you.”
I nodded. “So, we do have a ship. It’s just a matter of getting to it, and powering it once we’re there. Once we get the warp engines up and running, we can take the ship to our own timeline.”
“Then what?” Joeb asked, watching me carefully.
I took a breath. “Then we split into two groups. One group is responsible for extracting new Walkers, and the other will be training. Hard.”
“Okay,” Joeb said, holding up a hand. “I know why we’re getting new Walkers; it’s what we’ve always done, and it ensures HEX and Binary won’t find them first. But what, specifically, are we training for?”
“To stop FrostNight.”
A moment of silence followed, then Joeb asked “How?”
“I don’t know. But, if we can get InterWorld Beta up and running, we can use the library to research possible solutions.” That was met with more silence, and I sighed. “I know it’s not much of a plan. If any of you can think of anything better, believe me, I am all ears.”
“How long do we have?” Joeb said, after the silence had stretched for a moment more.
“I don’t know. It’s been days since I was dropped on my world. We have to act now. It may already be too late, but it’s either we do anything and everything we can, or we roll over and give up.”
“No one’s suggesting we do nothing,” Jo spoke up, a little sharply. I took a breath—I’d been starting to get frustrated, and Jo’s tone was a warning, a reminder that getting upset wouldn’t fix anything.
“I know,” I said, glancing briefly at her in thanks. “And I know you’re all willing to do whatever is needed.”
“One thing at a time,” Joeb said. “The first thing we have to figure out is how to get back Joey’s In
terWorld.”
“InterWorld Beta,” I corrected under my breath. I wasn’t comfortable with it being referred to as mine.
“How many of us do you think your mudluff could take at once?”
“I don’t know. He took me with no problem, and he managed to take me and Josephine, but I don’t know if he could take all of us. I don’t know what would happen if we tried and something went wrong.”
“Better safe than sorry,” Joeb said.
“We’re not being safe either way,” Jo pointed out, “with so many of us here. If what Joey said about Joaquim and the way they powered him is right, they might be able to do that again. They might able to sense us, the way we can sense each other. They might come here.”
“Would they bother?” Joeb asked, echoing my earlier thoughts.
“I don’t know,” I said again. If felt like the millionth time I’d said those words in the last few minutes, and it was infuriating. I wasn’t being any help to anyone. “Lord Dogknife seemed pretty confident that there wouldn’t be anything I could do to stop them. Whether they’ll be watching us anyway or not, I . . .” I trailed off, unwilling to say those three words again. “I can’t say,” I said instead. It was a little better.
“Better safe than sorry,” Joeb repeated. “Let’s assume they can—and will—sense us, whether we stay in a group or Walk. That means we have to get as many of us to InterWorld Beta as we can. They won’t be able to follow us there, right?”
“Right,” I said, hoping desperately that I was right. I had to be. They didn’t have any way to travel through time, not like I could if I had Hue with me. “They can’t Walk through time.”
“No one can, except your mudluff. Thankfully.” Joeb smiled at me.
And Acacia, I thought unwillingly, and managed a smile back. I wondered if what Acacia did was technically Walking, or something entirely different. We hadn’t had much time to discuss the mechanics of it.