by Neil Gaiman
“So, since we don’t know what would happen if something went wrong while we tried to Walk through time, we should go in small groups.” Joeb stated. “But, since we have to assume they’ll be able to sense us Walk and might send out scouts, we should take as many at once as possible. Thoughts?”
“I think the best compromise is to go in two groups.” I ventured. “Split right down the middle, and do it that way. Agreed?”
I glanced around. Most of the Walkers looked doubtful, but some of them were nodding. It really did seem like the best option.
“Okay,” I said. “I want Josephine to take both groups. She’s the quietest Walker I’ve ever met; if she takes you, you’ll definitely get there undetected. We’ll send any of the injured first—”
“Which should include you,” Joeb said. I shook my head.
“Not a chance.”
“You’re pretty beat up,” Jo pointed out.
“I’m not going first,” I said. “I’m making sure you all get there safely, and that’s final.”
“You’re the only one who knows firsthand about everything that’s going on,” Jo insisted. “If we lose you, we’re stumbling around in the dark.”
“We’re doing that anyway. You know as much as I do now. Jo,” I continued, when she started to argue again, “I want you in charge of the first group.”
As I’d hoped, that surprised her enough to derail her next protest. Instead, she said “Me? Joeb is . . .”
“I’ll stay with the second group,” Joeb said.
Jo frowned. “But Jai’s a senior officer, too.”
“And he needs a translator,” I told her, and there was a quiet ripple of laughter. Jai smiled serenely, not minding the joke at his expense.
“Any and all wounded—except me,” I clarified, as Jo started to shoot me a glare, “will go with the first group. This includes Jakon, Josef, Jai, Jo, and Josephine. Jo is team lead. Then Josephine will come back here, and take the second group. Agreed?”
“I am predominantly uninjured,” Jai finally pointed out.
“But you’re also a senior officer, and I want you there to help Jo in case something goes wrong,” I told him.
“Very sensible,” he agreed. “Shall we apportion ourselves into commensurate assemblages?”
I looked at Jo.
“Yes, let’s split into two even groups,” she said, catching my look. She almost smiled as she spoke.
I sat down with Jo, Jai, Josephine, and Joeb to figure out how we should be divided, while everyone else broke camp. Neither task took long, as five of us were already put in one group, and there hadn’t been much of a camp to begin with.
All told, there were roughly fifteen of us in each group (specifically, there were fourteen in my group and fifteen in the other—we always made a point to do an exact count for any mission). We stood a ways apart from each other, in case anything went wrong. Josephine looked stoic and determined, though I was sure she had to be nervous. I smiled at her as we stepped forward.
“Okay, Hue,” I said, and the little mudluff floated up from where he’d been in the hood of my sweatshirt. It was weird; while I rarely ever saw him shrink or grow, he always seemed to fit wherever he needed to. He was now bigger than the hood he’d been resting in, about the balloon size he usually was. I hadn’t even noticed him there, so he must have made himself smaller. I supposed that was one benefit of being multidimensional.
“C’mere, Hue,” Josephine called. He floated over, settling on her outstretched hand. I was worried that he wasn’t going to cooperate with her, or would bond with her for long enough to let her get back to InterWorld Beta and then wander off. I was hoping, if that did happen, that he would come back to me; the last thing we needed was to be stranded here until Hue decided to meander back. The little guy hadn’t let me down yet, though. He’d wandered off for weeks at a time, but he’d always come back.
“Do what you did with us before,” I urged, when Hue perched on Josephine’s hand. He flickered from blue to white, then flashed silver for a second. “Yeah, like that. Help her get back to the ship.” I wasn’t sure why silver reminded me of the way he’d flowed over me, but it did. . . . After a moment, though, I had it. The silver encounter suit I’d worn once had flowed over me in the same way. Hue had a very specific way of communicating with me, mostly seeming to rely on my visual memory. I’d always sort of wondered about that.
Hue bobbed up and down a few times, seeming to bounce against Josephine’s hand. Then he moved sideways, except part of him stayed on the tips of her fingers. He started to move around her like that, covering her slowly, like he had before. I suddenly felt anxious, like the first time my mom had let my little sister walk to the corner store by herself. I’d been certain she’d inherited my horrible sense of direction and would get hopelessly lost on the way there.
“Remember to center yourself,” I told her. “You’re not making a path, you’re—”
“Finding one that’s already there,” she said, standing still as Hue spread to her feet and up her torso. “I know. I’ve Walked several times over the past few days, remember?”
“Okay, okay. As for the rest of you”—I tilted my head to address the dozen or so Walkers behind her—“Josephine is Walking, you’re following. Don’t lose her. You won’t be able to find the path on your own; you can’t see the ones that weave through time.” I wondered if Acacia saw things the same way we did; if the timestream was like a bunch of paths that she could follow forward or backward.
“You guys ready?” Josephine asked, and was rewarded with silence; we were all trained well enough to know that if there was a chorus of yeses, we wouldn’t hear the one person who was saying no. She glanced at me and I nodded, so she took Jo’s hand and inhaled—
and vanished, which was what it looked like when someone Walked. They were gone in the blink of an eye, like they’d disappeared into thin air, midstep. I could feel them leave, because of my own ability to Walk; it was like sensing a door opening and closing when you’re alone in a room. You know it happened, even if you weren’t looking.
“Okay,” I said, turning to my group. There were a few faces I recognized; Joeb, of course, and the twins, who had asked to stay with him. Jarl was no longer a bird, and his resemblance to his sister was striking. The one hope I had of telling them apart was the neatly trimmed beard on his face; his hair was just as short as Jari’s and he had her same red hair and bright green eyes.
I put a few more names to faces, like Jirho and Jijoo, and one or two others I saw around the back. They were all people I was used to seeing here and there, but there weren’t many of them (aside from J’r’ohoho) I had regular classes or training sessions with. “It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes for Josephine to get back.” Assuming everything goes according to plan, please oh please, just this once let everything go according to plan. . . . “So we’d better get ready.”
“If she’s traveling through time,” Jirho piped up from the front of the group, “shouldn’t she be able to come back immediately? Just a few seconds after she left?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” I said. Conversations with a Time Agent had given me a basic grasp of this stuff, and I hoped I sounded sure enough that they wouldn’t question me. “She’s still anchored to her personal timeline. She can stay in the past for as long as she likes, but time will keep moving. If she stays for five minutes, she’ll return five minutes from when she left.”
“That’s disappointing,” someone else said. “What’s the point in time traveling if you can’t go back to fix mistakes?”
“What’s the point of being able to Walk?” I shot back, and a few of them looked thoughtful. There was no point, really. It was just something we could do, and we were lucky enough (or unlucky enough, depending on your perspective) to be able to use it to our advantage in a war.
“Once we get to InterWorld Beta,” I moved on, “there will still be a lot to do. I’ve got the basic functions running on solar
power for now, but we still have to charge the transducers. Once we get the soliton array working, the engines will be able to move us forward and backward again. Then we can get the ship back to our timeline, and we won’t have to rely on Hue to get us back to base.”
“How are we powering the transducers?” J’r’ohoho asked. It always amused me to hear the centaur version of me talk about technology; though he’d come from a tribal society that had practically just invented the wheel, he’d taken very quickly to all his science lessons and was usually top of the class.
It was so like him to ask the hard questions.
“We’ll find a way when we get there,” Joeb cut in, probably sensing that my answer was about to be another version of I don’t know. I was, again, immensely grateful. “Let’s worry about one thing at a time.”
I had only just finished speaking when I once more had the sense of a door opening nearby, which fortunately meant we had one less thing to worry about. Josephine stepped back through thin air a few feet from where she’d been previously, looking quite pleased with herself. Hue (again seeming smaller than he should be) was perched on her shoulder.
“Welcome back,” I said, over the small round of cheering that bubbled up as she reappeared. “Everything go okay?”
“No problems,” she said. “I dropped them off in the courtyard.” She paused, her pride at a job well done fading. “Some of them were pretty upset to see it like that.”
I nodded, glancing at the others. I had explained about how I’d been sent to future InterWorld and found it destroyed, but knowing it wasn’t the same as seeing it. InterWorld Base Town was home as much as the places we’d all come from had been, and seeing it like that was more than hard. It was hopeless. It felt like we’d already lost. “We’ll get it fixed up again,” I told her, though I was saying it for everyone. “It’ll be better than new, and then we’ll get back to our InterWorld and rescue the rest of us. It’ll feel like home again.”
I held out both hands, one to Josephine and one to Joeb, and nodded at the former. “Let’s go. Why don’t you do the honors again?”
“Oh? I figured you’d want to do it yourself, you’re such a mother hen,” she shot at me, but she looked pleased. “Okay, Hue. One more time.”
Hue (who seemed to be a shade or two paler than his usual neutral color; this probably was tiring him out) flowed over her once again, barely brushing over my fingers where Josephine was carefully holding my injured hand. Then she Walked, and so did Joeb, myself, the twins, and the nine others with us.
It felt different this time. It was like stepping through a door, as usual, but we found nothing on the other side. No path. Darkness closed around us as we went over the threshold, so quickly that none of us had time to warn one another. I felt Josephine stumble and fall, and I followed her, pitching headlong into a void.
Joeb’s hand slipped from mine, and my mouth opened and my vocal cords vibrated with a shout, but there was no sound. There was nothing at all.
I clutched tight to Josephine’s hand, but I wasn’t even sure I could still feel it in mine. I thought I smelled perfume, something sweet, like roses. I heard something, too, an echo that might have been a breathy laugh, and then the darkness swallowed me whole.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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IT’S NOT THAT I passed out, exactly. When you pass out (which, as I’m sure you know, I’ve done a few times in my life), there’s a sort of white-hot feeling around your forehead when you regain consciousness. Waking up isn’t even the right term for it. It’s like coming back to yourself after you’ve been gone, except you’re not really sure where you’ve been.
That’s what it felt like at first, but I knew I hadn’t actually passed out because I didn’t have that white-hot headache. It was more like when you walk into a room for a specific reason, but then can’t remember why, so you just stand there and feel lost.
I opened my eyes to complete and total blackness, and my first thought was Why did I come here? Then I remembered Josephine, and trying to Walk through time, and my second thought was Where is everyone?
I was starting to see things in my field of vision that made me worry I was about to pass out, little bright motes of light that were there and gone when I tried to look at them. They swirled and wove around me dizzyingly, so I stopped trying to focus on them. There was a weird feeling in the air and that sweet smell that reminded me of spring and the color pink.
I had to find my friends. I didn’t even care where I was, as long as I found Josephine and everyone else.
I tried to sit up and realized that I had nothing to brace myself against. I was floating, weightless, suspended in midair. The white lights dancing around me were stars, or at least they looked like stars. I’d never been sure, but seeing them cemented my reality. I knew where I was.
This was the Nowhere-at-All.
I’d been here before, twice. I’d hoped to never come back. It was kind of like the In-Between, except where the In-Between was everything, the Nowhere-at-All was nothing. It was entirely dark, not dark like you couldn’t see anything but more like there was nothing but dark to see. There was nothing here, aside from little lights that may have been far-off stars or tiny, close sparks, and yet you always felt like you weren’t alone.
It was HEX’s domain.
I couldn’t move my arms or my legs. I shoved down a surge of panic and lifted my head to look around. My wrists and ankles were restrained by an invisible force, and I realized that some of the little white lights I’d thought were big and far away were actually close and very small. They were spread out around me in a pattern that I first mistook for an unfamiliar constellation. It was symmetrical and, honestly, beautiful, arcing out above and below me to either side. Horizontal lines looped back and forth over diagonal ones pulled taut, strings of tiny white sparks like you’d see around a Christmas tree or like morning dew on a spiderweb.
A spiderweb . . .
I still couldn’t move my arms and legs. Adrenaline surged through me (I was calling it that, but with the realization that I was trapped in a giant spiderweb, it was probably just panic), and I wiggled with all my might, but I couldn’t see anything but those little white lights that might have been stars.
“Josephine!” I yelled and heard my voice echo back to me. “Joeb!”
“I’m here,” Joeb’s voice called from somewhere to the left of me. I couldn’t see him.
“Joeb!” a female voice called, also from the left, though it sounded farther away. “Jarl and I are here!”
“Most of us are, I think,” Joeb said. “Everyone, sound off. One!”
“Two!” someone else’s voice called, then it was “three,” then, after a slight pause, “four!”
The interesting thing about a group of people—any people, from any world—is that they often develop a sense of cohesion, a flow, a pattern. Back on my world, they’d done numerous studies on the flow of pedestrian traffic in big, densely populated cities like New York. The way people wove through crowds and around sidewalks while looking down at their cell phones is miraculous, and has something to do with social instinct. It’s the thing that’s not working when you run into someone in a hallway and then do a little dance trying to get around them.
It’s also the same instinct that lets a roomful of people have a conversation; you develop a sense for when it’s your turn to speak, or when someone else is going to. Like I said, some people are better at it than others. But we were all different versions of one another, which meant we had roughly the same instincts and social patterns.
“Five!” came a distant call from behind me, then “six” and “seven” in voices that sounded the same—probably the twins.
“Eight!” rang out to my right, and then I felt like it was my turn. “Nine!” I called, and the numbers went on. Sure, once or twice two people would start to say the same n
umber, but one of them would always stop and go directly after. When no more voices rang out, we were at fourteen. We were missing one.
And I hadn’t heard Josephine.
“We’re missing one,” Joeb called.
“It’s Josephine,” I said, and then someone screamed.
It was a startled sound, involuntary, loud and shrill. I knew it was one of us.
It came from behind me, and I craned my neck to the point of pain. I couldn’t see anything but blackness and more stars. My heart pounded against my chest. I held my breath, racking my mind for something, anything to do or say.
“Jenna!” another voice from behind me yelled. “What’s wrong?” There were two different girls named Jenna on base; the middle-Arc Greenvilles like the one I’d come from were more common than the fringe ones, so some of us had the same names. I knew both of them in passing; one had shared my Alchemical History class, and reminded me of my little sister. The other was a new recruit, shy and sweet, and I don’t think she’d ever been out on a mission before. I thought I’d remembered seeing her in the crowd when we were preparing to leave, but I wasn’t sure now. My mind had been elsewhere.
“Jirho, can you see her?” one of us shrilled, and I recognized in their voices the same panic that was threatening to bubble up inside me. I struggled against the light web, only succeeding in causing myself pain as I twisted my shoulder and wrist.
“No, I can’t see anyone!” Both voices came from behind me. No one, yet, had called out from above or below me. It was like we were suspended in a line, or several lines.
Jenna screamed again, a long, thin sound that trailed off into a wail and ended in a sputtering choke. It sounded . . . final.
“Everyone stay calm,” Joeb called from my left, though I could hear the undercurrent of tension in his voice. “Focus and try to—”
“Demon spawn!” a thick, rich voice yelled. The gravely tenor was unmistakable; it held a slightly higher note in its fear, like a horse’s neigh. J’r’ohoho. “You will not take—eeeeaaaaggghhh!”