by Neil Gaiman
“Yes. It has already begun, and I am here to help you stop it.”
I felt my stomach sink into my shoes. “It’s been destroying worlds this whole time?” I said. I had been prepared for this, of course. Everything I had been doing since I left Mr. Dimas had been preparing for this—I’d been gathering up Walkers for this very reason, to take the fight to Binary and HEX, but some small part of me had still been holding out hope that maybe Acacia and I had managed to stop it before it was released.
“Yes,” Avery said. “It has.” Despite his words, his tone wasn’t at all accusatory, just matter-of-fact, which still kind of grated on me. I shoved the irritation aside. There were more important things to worry about than my ego.
“Okay. So, how do we stop it?”
Avery paused, and for the first time I saw his mask of composure slip an inch. He looked uncertain, and worried. “We are not sure. This is the only timestream in which this has ever happened. If there had been others and it had been stopped before it could complete its purpose, we would have record of the events. If it had come into existence and not stopped, there would not be any . . . anything.”
That took me a moment to decipher, but I was fairly confident I got it. “You mean, if FrostNight was ever completed it would have eradicated everything, including TimeWatch.”
“Yes. We would not exist, had it ever happened.”
“So . . . what you’re saying is, you work for an organization that has record of everything that has ever happened and ever will happen, and you have no idea how to stop this thing.”
There was the sound of metal clicking against metal as Avery tightened his grip on his sword. I inched one foot back defensively, but the motion seemed to be more of a nervous habit than a threat. I was oddly comforted by the discovery of this quirk; it made him seem a little more human.
“Yes,” he said reluctantly. “That is what I’m saying.”
I took a deep breath.
I didn’t know what else to say—what could I say? None of us, anywhere, knew how to stop FrostNight, and yet we were the only ones who had a chance. Luckily, I was saved from trying to figure it out. There was a sudden shudder and a hollow moan, and the high-pitched whine of long-unused machinery. The dim room was flooded with light as the autoillumination system kicked in, and we both squinted in the sudden brilliance. Through the open doorway, I heard the cheers and whistles of the other Walkers as InterWorld hummed to life around us, like it was waking suddenly from a nightmare.
We stood there in silence, looking at the walls, the lights, and each other. I couldn’t help thinking that this was Josephine, all around us, here but gone. Not even a soul or consciousness, just the spark that had started the flame.
This ship was her vigil, the candle at her funeral. The spark was gone, but the flame remained. And I would make sure it burned for as long as I could.
I don’t know what I was expecting or hoping for, but Avery didn’t break the sudden silence, nor did he look like he was going to. I don’t know if he was thinking about Josephine or Acacia or something else entirely, and I had no real desire to ask him. I finally settled for, “What now?”
He shrugged. “Now, I suppose you continue on with your plans, while I attempt to facilitate them.”
“Meaning you’re here to help.”
“Yes.”
“Great. Can you do anything useful?”
He leveled me with a long look, but answered, “I can help your cyborg friend make sure this ship stays running and expand your time parameters so you may reach your desired timestream.”
“Great,” I said again. “Let’s go do that, then.”
I turned and left the Old Man’s office. I could hear Avery’s footsteps echoing hollowly behind mine as he followed.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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I HAD MISSED THE way the working ship felt beneath my feet. It wasn’t something I’d noticed until it was gone, but you could feel the hum of the engines through the floor no matter where you were. It was like standing next to a washer or dryer when it was on—a vibration against your feet so faint you barely felt it. I hadn’t realized it until I’d stood on an InterWorld with no power, the floor cold and hard and dead beneath me.
Now it was thrumming again, alive and itching to fly. I felt it the moment I stepped into the engine room; the console was on, all the lights and dials and digital readouts blinking and humming and waiting. Still, I stayed there only for a moment after I escorted Avery back to J/O. I couldn’t make myself look at the cots lining the back, the still forms occupying them all covered in sheets.
Instead, I went to the Wall.
Our monument to the fallen stood silent and still, not even a breeze sweeping through the hall to rustle the scraps of paper and feathers and fur. It extended a full three sectors past what I was used to; the InterWorld of the future had seen the deaths of thousands more of us.
I walked it for a time, up and down, memorizing the bits and pieces of people’s lives, the scraps of feelings and hopes and dreams. They were all that remained of the comrades I’d never known, of those who’d fought and died long after whatever my end had been. I went back and forth, twice, from the infirmary to the remains of the automatic double doors that led out to what had once been the gardens. The long silver boxes that served as our coffins were still sitting out there, silent shapes in pools of sun, lined up in neat rows. I stepped out into the bright daylight and made myself open one.
Despite my fears, it was empty. I didn’t know if the thin layer of dust that coated the bottom was all that remained of a person, if the boxes themselves transported the body within to somewhere else, or if these had never been filled in the first place. It had been so long since anyone had been here, it didn’t matter. This place was all just ashes and dust.
The box was light enough to move, so I pulled it inside, to the hallway. I stared at the Wall for a long moment, thinking, and then I started taking it down.
Feathers, bits of glass, paper made thin and brittle with age. Jewelry, faded pictographs and drawings, dusty and yellowed books, drawings so faint you could no longer tell what they were. I put them all into the long silver box carefully, and when that box was full, I pulled it back outside and got another one.
Some of the papers crumbled to dust in my hands, particularly when I got further down the line, to the things that had been put up even longer ago. I cried for those papers, and the lost memories of people they had represented. Several times I stopped entirely, horrified at what I was doing, before I was filled once again with renewed determination. If ashes and dust and memories were all that remained of this InterWorld, it was our duty to fill it again with purpose. With hope.
The new recruits wouldn’t see hope when they looked at this Wall. They wouldn’t see hope when they saw the coffins outside, or how many of us had already died. These deaths weren’t personal to them. They were a nightmare, a horror story, a holocaust long past. They were legends and myths, shoes too big to ever possibly fill. They were my ghosts now, mine alone.
Microchips and nanochips, pottery, threads and scraps of clothing and candy wrappers, a long red braid and bits of foreign currency. Everything went carefully into a long silver coffin, and when I finally finished hours later, long after the sun had dipped behind the distant horizon, I was tired and hungry and blessedly not alone.
My team had joined me slowly, over the course of the day. Jakon, Josef, Jo, Jai, and J/O all came to help me put the memories to rest. Avery stood and watched, though he never said a word. He followed us silently, seeming to feel his help wouldn’t be appreciated, though he looked like he understood. He even looked sympathetic as I took down my own monument to Jay, the dirt and rocks from the planet he’d died on that had spelled out “I’m sorry.”
We worked in silence until it was done, and then they helped me carry the coffins to the
Old Man’s office. It seemed appropriate, somehow. We wouldn’t be using it much, and it was big enough that they could all be pushed against the wall and there would still be space if we needed it.
We went back to the engine room. This time I made myself go to the bodies; there had been more coffins than we needed to hold all the stuff on the Wall. We each took one end of a cot, carried them back out to the gardens, and placed our fallen comrades one by one into the boxes. Avery and I went back together for Josephine.
When we were done, there were six long silver coffins sitting out in the courtyard. Four of them were occupied, and I had Josef and J/O take the remaining two into storage. Then Avery went to each of the boxes in turn and placed a hand on them. One by one, they glowed green and vanished, and I didn’t bother to ask where he was sending them. The Old Man had touched the coffins and made them vanish, too, and as far as I knew no one had ever asked him where they went. Perhaps they took the bodies home, wherever that was. Maybe they took us to a world where we could be born again, or to a planet that counted as heaven. Maybe it was a graveyard or a black hole. I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. Death was death, and wherever we went afterward was something I would find out when my time came.
Avery paused by the fourth coffin, and he rested his hand on it for a moment longer than he had the other ones. I saw his lips move as he murmured something, too quietly for any of us to hear, and then he sent it off with the others. Luckily or not, I had been trained to read lips, and I echoed his words in a whisper as the final coffin glowed green and vanished.
“Good-bye, Josie,” I said so quietly that the words were carried away on the wind.
My team and I stayed up in shifts that night, each of us taking a turn keeping an eye on Avery and J/O. I knew I was probably being paranoid, but I couldn’t afford not to be.
Josef and a few of the Walkers he’d picked out slowly got the hallways cleared out, and it became easier to get from place to place without having to crawl over rubble and debris. Jo, as I’d predicted, made short work of getting the public rooms; by nightfall the next day, all twenty-five or so of us had usable dorm rooms and the mess hall was, if not clean enough to eat off of, at least well on its way there.
The jump-start of the ship had gotten all the basic functions working, so we were able to open the storm shutters and get the ventilation working all through the ship. Auxiliary power kicked in on the second day, and InterWorld became self-sustaining once again. Avery, true to his word, expanded the time parameters in the warp drive, and we made the jump back into our own timeline without so much as a bit of turbulence.
Joeb brought in one recruit that second day, a sharp-looking girl who wore her red hair in a pixie cut. She was shorter and leaner than most of us base-Earth versions, and her eyes matched her hair. There was nothing really special about her—not from a magic- or science-heavy world, though she did have an affinity for fixing things. Her name was Jorily, and within the first few moments of meeting her I was of half a mind to make her the temporary quartermaster. After all, we still had an equipment locker full of what currently amounted to junk; now that we had power, some of the things in there could be recharged and possibly fixed. I told Joeb to go ahead and set her up down there, in addition to whatever basic training programs he was starting up.
I was operating out of the Old Man’s office, which had not been my idea. Joeb and a few of the others had formed a team to clean it out and get it more or less organized, and they’d insisted I run communications out of there.
“It’s hooked up to all the main intercoms,” Joeb had pointed out. “It’s a secure location with more automatic shields and protocols than we can even catalog, and it’s automatic for most of us to go there in an emergency.”
He’d had a lot more to say than that, mostly about how they needed someone to look to, and it wasn’t so much about being in charge as it was seeming like I was in charge. I was a symbol, at least for the moment, and that meant I got to sit at a desk and divide our current numbers into teams and make lists of things that needed to be done. It meant, at least for a few days, that I had to stay put and recover, since I was still injured.
I was ready to go insane by the third day.
Joeb had brought three more recruits in, and I’d met them all. I’d given them the condensed version of what was happening, wished them luck, and sent them off to combat classes with Jakon and tactic lectures with Jo. I’d combed through any and all of the files that were still readable in the Old Man’s office, trying to find something—anything that would give me some sort of direction, and I’d been doing this for two days straight before it occurred to me that though this may have been the Old Man’s office in my time, I had no way of knowing who it had belonged to when the ship had been abandoned.
The thought stopped me dead. This whole time, I had been thinking of a new crew and a much older ship, of our same cause centuries in the future, and the same Captain.
This was, of course, impossible. But equally impossible was the image of someone else sitting at this desk, someone else giving us orders or sending out teams. The Old Man didn’t have a second-in-command. He didn’t have a lieutenant, or any officers aside from those he sent out on jobs or to recruit. It had always been just him. What would happen if he ever died?
The Old Man’s office was the first place we went in an emergency, the first place we gathered in the event of anything that wasn’t in the official handbook. It was where we went to get our missions and the first place we went—even before the infirmary, in some cases—after we returned. I couldn’t imagine walking into this room and seeing anyone else.
But I was here. There were four or five people on this ship now who’d never even met the Old Man. People who’d only ever seen me sitting at this desk.
The thought was terrifying.
It was terrifying enough that I half stood from my chair before I even knew where exactly I was intending to go. I wanted out, away from this desk and its weight. I wanted to be training the recruits myself, or going out and getting them. This room was too big and too silent.
I sighed, then gingerly touched the tips of my fingers to the smooth surface of the desk. It flashed, then words started to crawl across it—Josetta’s message to me, telling me to stay still and that she was sending someone to help. When I’d first come to this InterWorld, when TimeWatch had sent me here, I’d gone to the Old Man’s desk and found the message. It was preprogrammed to react to the tracer in my bloodstream, which meant it would eventually go away. For now, though, I was stuck with seeing the message every time I touched it. I was stuck with the reminder that I was just a normal recruit who’d gotten in over his head.
I was still standing in front of the desk when one of the intercom lights blinked on. It was the private link from the engine room, where I’d left J/O, Jai, and Avery. “Joey,” J/O’s voice came over the speaker. He sounded rushed and worried. “Several of the alarm systems blipped at once, and Avery took off. He bolted out the door. I sent Jai after him, but—”
“What kind of alarms?”
“The radar blipped, then the proximity sensors.”
“Activate any shields we have the power for—”
“There’s nothing on the screen,” J/O interrupted. “There’s nothing to hit. The radar blipped once, but it’s dark.”
I stood there for a moment, waiting for a solution to come to me. I wasn’t a captain, damn it, I didn’t know what this meant or what to do in this situation. “And you said Avery just bolted?”
“Yeah. He—”
Whatever else J/O was saying was lost in a sudden, shrill beep. There was a subtle rumble beneath my feet, small enough that I almost didn’t feel it.
InterWorld was big enough that a small impact on one end of the ship wouldn’t necessarily be felt on the other side, or even in the middle. The short, warning beep I’d heard from the engine room meant we’d hit something.
“Talk to me, J/O! What was that?”
&n
bsp; “The radar’s not— Wait, it’s blinking in and out. It’s too small to actually— Joey, it’s headed right toward you!”
The rush of adrenaline I felt was compounded by the sudden crash behind me. I whirled just in time to see something fly by me, a rush of black and green. It slammed against the back wall of the Old Man’s office with enough force that I felt the room shudder, and I coughed at the abrupt cloud of dust that welled up.
I’d insisted any weapons that had been scavenged or restored be given to the officers going out on the field; all I had on me was a switchblade I’d found in Josephine’s backpack. Making sure all the teams were equipped had seemed like a perfectly sound idea at the time, but maybe I was about to regret that decision.
The dust was slowly clearing, though it didn’t look like dust anymore. It was sort of pretty, like how the clouds would look on my world when the sun was setting. As if there was a light behind them, a purple light . . .
I ran over, skidding to my knees beside her. “Acacia!”
“Joey?” J/O’s voice came though the speaker again, urgent and worried.
“I’m fine,” I yelled, reaching down to clear some of the debris from her.
Acacia looked like she’d been through hell. Her clothing was marred by a hundred tiny cuts, dirty and singed in some places, like she’d fallen through a thornbush. (Or several. Some of them might have been on fire.) Her face and arms looked the same.
She was sprawled out on her back, a small indentation above her from where she’d obviously slammed into the wall and fallen. I risked a quick glance over my shoulder; part of the Old Man’s doorway, already not in the best shape from whatever had cleared out the ship, was made even wider from where she’d clipped the side of it. I felt my blood run cold as I realized; somehow, the thing we’d hit was Acacia. There was no way she could have survived that impact.
A mere thread of a sound came from her, something too quiet to even be a whisper. I put a hand to her neck, feeling for a pulse. Miraculously, there was one. Even more miraculously, she slowly turned her head to look up at me. Her lips moved.