by Ty Drago
“Sorry,” I told it. “Nobody home.”
The red energy shuddered in desperation. The creature had no face, not in this form. Nevertheless, rage and terror seemed to radiate off of it in waves.
Then it died, just popped out of existence.
The way they always do.
Tom was the first to recover. “Well, so much for the element of surprise.”
“Thanks for the heads up, little bro,” his sister added.
I climbed unsteadily to my feet and then helped Helene and Steve to theirs. The Brain Boss hurried to the Rift and poked his head inside. A few seconds later, he pulled it back out and said, “Have a look at this!”
Two at a time, we looked, pairs of us squeezing into the strange opening.
Just beyond the Rift, utterly motionless, was what looked like a shining white slab. Nothing below it. Nothing above it. Nothing around it. Whatever-it-was simply hovered, as still as a block of concrete maybe six feet wide and ten feet long.
“What is that?” Helene asked, jammed beside me in the round opening.
“Not a clue,” I replied.
We pulled our heads out, turned and, along with the rest, looked expectantly at Steve.
“I think it’s the Energy Ferry the older me described,” he said. “That Malum who came through just now … his Self must have somehow ridden it here.”
We all absorbed this.
“Think we can … ride it over there?” I asked.
“He didn’t,” Helene pointed out.
“He who?” Alex asked.
“Who?” said Alex.
“The Malum. Once he got here and found no host body, why didn’t he just ride the Energy Ferry back home?”
“That’s a scary question,” Jillian remarked.
“It is,” Steve admitted. “Look, there’s no manual for any of this. We don’t know how that ‘ferry’ out there even operates. Yes, it looks solid, but looks can be deceiving. You might step on it, only to have it vanish and drop you all the way to that rippled floor. Then, even if you survived the fall, those Ethereal ridges are too high and too steep to climb.”
“One way to find out,” Tom said. He stepped past me and leaned into the Rift. Then, before anyone could stop him, the chief climbed through the opening entirely and disappeared from view.
Both Sharyn and Jillian rushed forward, almost knocking Helene and me over in their hurry to reach the portal. As the rest of us gathered around, the girls poked their heads through the hole, and stayed there.
And stayed there.
And stayed there.
“What’s happening?” Amy asked, sounding frightened.
“How the heck should I know?” Burt exclaimed.
Then, without warning, Sharyn climbed through the impossible doorway as well. She just raised one leg and stepped out of the world. An instant later, her second leg followed.
“Oh jeez …” I heard Alex mutter.
I went forward and took Jillian’s arm, pulling her out of the hole. She fought against me, but just for a second. After that, she came willingly enough, though her face looked pale with worry. “Are they okay?” I asked.
“They’re fine,” she replied in a small voice. “They want you and Helene to join them.”
“They do?”
“Yeah.”
“Right now?”
“Yeah.”
Helene and I swapped worried looks. We both knew what the other was thinking: It’s one thing to announce you’re going to cross the Void, destroy the Eternity Stone, and salvage the future. But it’s another thing entirely when doing it means actually stepping through a tear in spacetime and climbing onto a ferry made of what you hope is really really really hard light.
Know what? Add one more “really” to that.
“You don’t have to do this,” I told her.
“Neither do you.”
“Yeah, I do,” I said.
She smiled, but without a trace of humor. “I know. Me, too.”
“I’ll go first.”
“Okay,” she said.
I looked at the others—the Undertakers. My friends, all of them. Even Alex, maybe. “Six hours,” I said. “After that, assume we blew it and send in the next team to try again.”
“Don’t forget this, then,” Burt called, holding up the Binelli gun.
“Right,” I said, accepting the heavy weapon.
“And these,” Steve said, handing Helene a backpack weighed down with extra liquid nitrogen tanks. “Don’t drop them. If one of them punctures … well, you don’t want to be around if that happens.”
“Got it,” she said.
Amy came forward and hugged us both. She seemed so small, so completely sweet. Why then did my mind flashback to a rainy Observation Deck and a woman with water-soaked hair and a knife in her hand?
I can’t let that happen.
I won’t.
“Be careful,” she whispered to me.
“Aren’t I always?” It was a lame attempt at a lame joke.
“No,” she said, very seriously. “You’re not.”
She stepped back and, to my surprise, Alex came forward and offered his hand. “Good luck, Ritter.”
“Thanks.”
“I still don’t like you,” he said.
“I don’t like you, either.”
He almost grinned. Almost.
After that, Steve and Burt hugged Helene and patted my shoulder.
Jillian grabbed my hand, looked searchingly into my eyes, and said, “Bring him back to me.”
I remembered a statue standing in City Hall’s courtyard. That Tom Jefferson had been much older than this one, killed while fighting the dead in the Second Corpse War, rather than wasted on some otherworldly battlefield.
But dead was dead.
“I will,” I replied, trying to put as much certainty as I could behind those words.
Later on, I would regret them.
A lot.
Chapter 34
Elsewhere
So … third doorway in spacetime in the last thirty-six hours.
Gotta be worth a footnote in somebody’s book!
Jill had been dead on. The ferry was a solid lighted rectangle, ten by six and maybe a foot deep. All around us, the tunnel’s walls seemed to glow, as if the Anchor Shard’s energy had melted its way through the Ether, and the surfaces were still hot from it.
As I stepped gingerly through the Rift and onto the Energy Ferry, I expected to feel something. A tingling? Maybe an electrical charge?
But there was nothing. In this strange place between dimensions it didn’t feel particularly hot or cold. The air was breathable, though it had funny a texture to it that’s hard to put into words. Behind me, the round portal through which I’d just stepped was burned into the face of a smooth wall. I touched its surface with my fingertips and found it to be rock hard and as black as midnight.
Ether.
The mountain between dimensions.
The mortar between the bricks of the universe.
The stuff that elsewhere was made of.
“I don’t get how there’s gravity,” Sharyn said. Then she hopped up and down experimentally on the ferry’s surface. Her doing that made me twitch.
A voice replied, “As far as I can tell, the direction of gravity is dependent on the Anchor Shard’s placement relative to the floor.”
Startled, the four of us turned to find Steve poking his head through the Rift. It was crazy weird to see him like that.
“English,” Helene told him.
“The crystal’s jagged,” he said. “That makes it heavier on one end than the other. The difference isn’t much, but it’s measurable. Before we left, I did measure it and marked the heavier side with some masking tape. Then I made sure that side was resting downward when I ran the current from the car battery through it. If I hadn’t, you all might be standing sideways right now, or maybe even upside
down.”
“Would we have noticed?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Probably not. Gravity’s gravity. Down is where down says it is.”
Tom remarked, “But it makes an already messed up situation just a little bit less messed up. Nice work, Steve.”
“Thanks.”
Helene asked, “But how can we even be standing here? The Malum can’t bring their bodies. They gotta ride the ferry as lumps of red energy, right? So how is it that we can be here in the flesh?”
“I don’t know,” Steve said. “Just like I don’t know what kind of environment’s going to be waiting for you on the other end of this ride. We’re off the map here, guys … outside of science and reason. But listen. There is one thing I can tell you.”
“We’re listening,” Tom told him.
The Brain Boss said, “It’s the connection between the Anchor Shard and the Eternity Stone that made this tunnel. Both connections are equally important, kind of the same way a bridge has to be attached to both sides of a gorge. If one side or other gets destroyed, the whole thing collapses.”
“What’s that mean?” Helene asked.
“It means,” the chief replied. “That when we waste the Eternity Stone, we’d better get back across the tunnel quick.” He gestured at the strangely rippled walls. “Because all this is gonna close up tight around us.”
The boy in the Rift nodded gravely.
Sharyn said, “But Professor Steve-o told me we’d have a four-minute escape window.”
Steve shook his head. “That was with the javelin. I have no idea how much time you’ll get with the Binelli Gun. Maybe the same. Maybe less. Maybe none at all.”
We all looked at one another. Nobody spoke, but I could tell that all of us were thinking the same thing.
This could be a one-way trip.
I wished I could talk Helene into staying behind. Heck, all of them. I’d seen enough friends die to last me forever.
But they were Undertakers, and I knew they’d never let me do this alone.
“Good luck,” Steve said. He looked suddenly miserable. “I’ll keep the crystal going on this end for as long as I can.”
“We know it,” Sharyn told him. Then she stepped close and did something I’d never seen her do before: she kissed the boy’s cheek. It was a tender gesture, totally unlike her, but given the circumstances, it seemed pretty okay. “See ya soon … genius!”
Blushing a little, and with a final nod, Steve withdrew back through the portal.
Suddenly, the four of us were alone on a glowing rectangle hanging between dimensions.
“Okay,” Helene said. “Um … how do we start this thing?”
Tom stepped up to the front edge of the light block, raised one muscled arm, and pointed down the tunnel.
“Take us there!” he commanded.
And the block began to move. The motion was slow and smooth, like a cloud lazily crossing the sky. No jerk, no sudden acceleration that might throw us off. Just an easy, gradual glide.
“How’d you know that would work?” I asked him.
He shrugged and replied, “Didn’t. But I figured this thing’s really just a fancy subway train. And, since there ain’t no tickets or conductor, I thought I’d … you know … ask.”
And asking had worked.
So how does a lighted rectangle floating through the stuff between worlds understand English? Or did it somehow read the intention behind the English?
And do I even give a crap?
In nervous silence, we rode the Energy Ferry, the tunnel walls, with their strange valleys and ridges, floating silently past.
The chief studied his watch.
“One minute gone,” he reported.
We all nodded.
The tunnel stretched on.
“Two minutes,” he said.
Then three. Then four. Around us, the air stayed breathable, the gravity normal. That was the good news. The bad news, however, was becoming pretty obvious.
This is taking too long.
I stepped to the front of the ferry and said, “Go faster!”
We didn’t.
I said, “Move more quickly!”
We didn’t.
“Might be we got a problem,” Sharyn muttered.
“Look,” Helene whispered, pointing.
The ceiling rose suddenly upward. The walls, I saw, did the same, as if our tunnel had opened into a massive cavern that had been carved out of the Ether. Curiously, the floor stayed level, still about twenty feet below us and keeping steady. I wondered vaguely if that had something to do with Steve’s alignment of the Anchor Shard.
As the Energy Ferry continued forward, gliding as smoothly and levelly through the cavern as it had through the tunnel, a bright light appeared in the distance, faint at first but getting gradually brighter. As more seconds passed, the source of the light began to take shape, gain detail.
The Eternity Stone.
It was big—really big—a gigantic crystal, as tall and massive as a six-story building. It occupied a place in this huge Void that was some distance away from the spot where we were headed. Directly in front of us, taking shape the closer we got, was a landing of sorts, almost like a dock on a river, wide and straight and sheer. Below it, the rippled floor ended at a smooth vertical rise, as high as the ferry. The whole thing reminded me of a sea wall.
“I think we’re here,” I said. “The Malum homeworld.”
“There’s no Rift on this end,” Helene pointed out.
“There wouldn’t be,” replied Tom. “They live in the Ether.”
Beyond the landing, the cavernous Void kept going, extending away to the limits of our vision—huge and seemingly endless.
With the Eternity Stone “guarding” its entrance.
Like the Anchor Shard, which had been cut from it, the big stone looked jagged on both ends. The top of it reached halfway to the ceiling of this high Void. And, just as Professor Moscova had told me, the bottom of it hovered a few feet above the floor, which was surprisingly smooth in the Malum homeworld—or homevoid, or whatever. No peaks and valleys, like in the tunnel and cavern. Just flat, hard Ether as far as the eye could see.
“At least we’re still breathing,” Sharyn remarked.
True enough. For whatever reason, Earth’s atmosphere had reached this far. If it hadn’t, we’d already have been flopping around on our backs on the Ferry, gasping for air like landed fish.
Then Helene said, her voice a hoarse whisper, “Um, guys? Check out the welcoming party.”
She pointed to the edge of the landing, toward which our ferry was headed. Beyond it, the flat, black, featureless landscape was dotted with holes. Hundreds and hundreds of them, each big enough to swallow an entire person.
But no buildings. No trees. No roads or any other signs of life.
How can anyone live here?
Then, creatures began emerging from those holes in the Ethereal floor. Lots of creatures.
Ten legged creatures.
More and more of them gathered at the edge of the landing, crowding it with their tightly packed bodies.
“Welcoming committee,” Sharyn supposed.
“Well,” the chief said with a sigh. “We expected this.”
I’d always figured this trip was a risky idea. Now it seemed like a really stupid one.
“What do we do?” Helene asked.
By way of an answer, Tom stepped to the rear of the ferry. Pointing his finger homeward, he commanded, “Take us back that way!”
Nothing changed. We were still steadily floating toward the landing, the huge Void, the Eternity Stone, and the mob of Malum.
The chief sighed, but he didn’t seem surprised. “Maybe they’re controlling it,” he guessed. “Or maybe it is like some kinda automatic subway train … just goes one way at a time.” He came up to the front again. “Listen up,” he said, looking into each of our faces. “If there’s talkin’
to do, I’ll do it. The rest o’ you keep back. Will takes the Binelli gun. Helene, you got the extra canisters to keep it armed. That Eternity Stone’s a good ways from the landing, which means we gotta figure out how to get close enough to freeze it. So that’s our play. But if things go south and we get separated, don’t wait for a signal from me. If it looks like you’re in range, go ahead a take the shot.”
“Got it,” I said.
Sharyn pulled Vader from the sheath slung across her back. “Say the word, bro,” she told Tom.
“We don’t fight ‘less we gotta. You know more’n most what these things are about. I’m all into goin’ down in a blaze of glory … but not ‘til we do what we came to do. Otherwise, it means nothin’.”
She nodded grimly and reluctantly sheathed the sword.
Helene looked at me. I looked back at her.
“It’s gonna be okay,” I said.
“Liar,” she said. Her smile wasn’t a happy one.
But it was a brave one.
The rest of the trip took less than a minute. I didn’t bother counting the seconds. It was all I could do to steady my raging heartbeat. The closer we came to the end of our ride, the bigger the Void looked. And, off to one side, the Eternity Stone seemed to lord over all of it, big and glowing and wrong.
But, so far, it remained well out of the Binelli Gun’s range.
Still more of the ten-legged monsters emerged from still more holes. Dozens became hundreds, until their weird bodies covered the edge of the Void. All of their strange heads were pointed at us, their red eyes showing.
“Everyone be cool,” the chief told us in a soft voice. “No sudden moves.” Then he looked right at me. “And whatever happens in the next few minutes, remember why we came. That Binelli is for the stone … period. Do not use it for nothin’ else. Got it?”
I felt myself reflexively grip Steve’s latest invention more tightly. I glanced at Helene and Sharyn, but Tom had spoken too softly for either girl to have heard him. That command, maybe the chief’s last command, had been meant just for me.
I was the one with the gun.
And he knew me too well.