by Neil Gaiman
Lady Indigo had said InterWorld would be the last, or one of the last. I assumed she meant the last thing left; I didn’t know for certain, but it seemed like an educated guess. Lord Dogknife had said they would “ascend.” What did that mean? FrostNight had to stop at some point, right? If it was going to reshape the Multiverse, there had to be a point where it would accomplish its goal and cease to be, right? Maybe if InterWorld went into a perpetual warp again, or something . . . maybe they could outrun it.
That was doubtful; Acacia had said she could run anywhere in the Multiverse, and she didn’t think there was anywhere that would be safe. If not even TimeWatch (and I had no idea where TimeWatch actually was, it just seemed likely that an organization existing for the sole purpose of protecting time would be pretty remote) would be safe, I couldn’t imagine InterWorld being able to outrun FrostNight.
Still, it was the only chance they had. Maybe if I could send Hue to them, tell them to warp . . . It was either that, or hope that TimeWatch would somehow come in and save the day.
As before, Hue was a dim presence in the back of my mind. He did that sometimes, seeming to sort of merge with me without giving me all the crazy vision-into-time-and-space stuff.
Hue, I thought, not sure if he’d be able to hear me at all. Hue, are you there?
I got the brief impression of a contracting pupil, or a deflating balloon, along with the connotation of fear.
I know, buddy. Me, too. I know you tried to warn me back there. You can go, okay? You can go where it might be safer, you just have to warn the others.
Not that I knew how he was going to warn them. Even I had trouble communicating with Hue, and I knew him better than any of the other Walkers.
“Sssssso sad . . . the Harker won’t speak. He dislikessss usss. . . .”
Lady Indigo’s voice drew my attention to her and Lord Dogknife. They were standing together at one of the pillars, watching me intently. They were watching me so intently that neither of them noticed the faint green glow sparking in the air behind them, like a lighthouse through a distant storm.
“‘Dislike’ is a pretty mild word for it,” I told her, feeling a smile curl at the corners of my mouth. “‘Hate’ would be closer. But you know what?”
She tilted her head to an angle that didn’t look possible, let alone comfortable.
“I don’t hate you nearly as much as he does.”
Her face registered confusion for a brief moment—then pain, as Avery’s circuitry blade cut through the air and sliced into one of the bones holding her up.
She screamed, staggering sideways as the limb buckled beneath her and the others shifted to compensate. She skittered around to face the dark-haired, violet-eyed boy, standing with sword at the ready.
“Hello, lovely,” he said. “I think we’re overdue for a conversation.”
She snarled, swiping at him with one of her limbs. It was long and razor sharp at the end, but Avery moved so fast he seemed to blur, slicing his sword out at the same time. Lord Dogknife moved as well, throwing out a hand in preparation for some kind of spell.
“Avery, watch out!” I called, at the same time a bolt of dark-looking energy was loosed from Lord Dogknife’s palm. Avery brought his sword up once again, deflecting whatever it had been, and then there was another green glow sparking through the air right in front of me.
“Hey, Joe,” Acacia whispered, appearing so close to me I felt her breath on my face. “Let’s get you out of here.”
I swallowed, suddenly unable to form words. Emotions and thoughts went rapidly through my mind. Relief first, relief that I wasn’t here alone anymore, that they had come to my rescue. Apathy again, because I wanted to tell her what had happened to my world but didn’t have the words, and finally anger. Anger, because she had said TimeWatch would help. She had made me let her go and she’d left me with the promise that she would do something to save my world, and she hadn’t.
“You’re a little late,” I said, unable to keep the edge from my voice.
She didn’t even glance up at me as she put both hands on the thick white chains that held me to the floor. “Not now, Joe.” The sounds of battle could be heard around us, as Avery continued to dodge Lady Indigo and deflect the magic from Lord Dogknife. “He can’t hold them off for long. We’ve got to get you out of here.”
“Why?” I watched her fingernails glow green on both hands, the little circuits pulsing with energy. “So we can all go back to InterWorld and pick up the pieces like some big, happy family?”
“Don’t do the bitter self-pity thing, Joe, it really doesn’t suit you.”
I glanced away, stung—in time to see Lord Dogknife, bleeding from a gash on his snout, turn and fire another bolt of energy toward us.
“Acacia!” Avery and I shouted out a warning at the same time, but the bolt crashed into her before she had time to move. She was knocked a few yards away from me, though she tucked and rolled to come up in a defensive crouch. Little lines of electricity crawled over her for a moment like the remnants of a static shock, and I remembered her using some kind of skin shield before. She seemed unhurt, which was good; it meant she was able to dodge the next thing Lord Dogknife sent at her, which looked like a flurry of bats with vapory, red bodies.
I focused inward again, intending to convince Hue to go tell InterWorld to punch it. When there was no response, I realized he was completely gone from my mind. I hadn’t even noticed him leave.
Good luck, little buddy, I thought, as I saw at least two doors on opposite sides of the room slide open, and the glassy-eyed clones Binary used as their grunt army started to pour through. The cavalry was here, and it wasn’t on our side.
Then a feeling as familiar to me as my own heartbeat tingled in the air, like a scent you’ve known your whole life coming to you on a sudden breeze. Lady Indigo whipped her head up in obvious joy, letting loose a wild howl.
“They come! Like moths to a flame, they come!”
And just like that, the room was filled with Walkers. I had no idea how they’d all gotten through the same portal—and then I saw Hue, bobbing above Jai’s head. He must have somehow expanded the gateway.
“To the Captain!” Joeb cried. I flinched.
The room burst into a flurry of motion. The huge screen on the far wall—the Professor, leader of Binary—flared to life once again, and so did the white cables that made up the star I was in the center of. The first Walker to me, someone I didn’t even recognize, tried to cross over one of the cables and was launched backward. The others slowed, one of them kneeling to check on our fallen comrade, the rest either breaking off to deal with the Binary clones or trying to find some way to bypass the wires.
J/O stopped at the edge of the star, talking to Jai, and I realized I couldn’t hear them. When the wires had flared to life, a shimmery, barely visible shield had sprung up around the edges of the star. It fed upward into the conductors and continued into the ceiling, and it was abruptly like I was in some kind of vacuum. I couldn’t hear a thing happening beyond it.
It was surreal, like watching an action movie on mute. Everything was chaos beyond the invisible walls, but I heard nothing.
Acacia was trading blows with Lord Dogknife, dodging and weaving around the various bits of equipment and Walkers, alternately shielding herself and firing various weapons and gadgets from her tool belt. She looked to be holding her own; unfortunately, so did Lord Dogknife.
Avery was doing much the same with Lady Indigo, now wielding the sword in one hand and what looked like a long tube in the other. As he brought the tube up to block one of the razor-sharp bones Lady Indigo was using as weapons, I realized it was his scabbard.
Lady Indigo wasn’t doing as well as Lord Dogknife seemed to be. Of her eight bonelike legs, two had been sliced cleanly off at the joints, and one was tucked up, wounded and useless, near her body. Still arguably less than sane, it looked like she was laughing and cackling at the Time Agent even as he cut close enough to sever a few stra
nds of what hair remained on her head.
The air was full of projectiles going back and forth between the Walkers and the clones, in some places flying so thickly I could hardly see. This wasn’t the entire base—that would have been nearly five hundred or so of us, and though the room was big enough to fit that many, there seemed to be about half that number here now. But the others were here, too—I could sense them, outside this room, keeping more of the clones from getting in.
They had come for me. Every single one of them, even the injured. Every Walker on Base Town had come here, to the end of the Multiverse, for me.
I glanced down at the chains Acacia had been working on, giving them an experimental tug; one of the links looked transparent, which I was hoping meant it was damaged. I wrapped it around my wrist (the broken one, of course . . . ) to get better leverage, and pulled with all my might.
I looked around as I strained, using what I saw as both distraction and encouragement. Jo was helping Acacia, flying around and taking shots at Lord Dogknife with a blaster she’d picked up from one of the Binary clones. J/O and Jai had both run over to the Professor itself and seemed to be having a heated argument, while some of the other Walkers—I recognized Josef and Jakon in particular—fought to protect them from the live wires that snapped through the air like whips.
I felt the searing pain in my wrist at the same time I felt the chain come free, and my own momentum sent me toppling over to one side. I had one hand free, though, and that meant I could use both hands to pull the other chain off.
I wrapped the chain around both hands and pulled again, bracing my feet against where it attached to the floor. After a long moment I had to give in, panting and sweating from the effort. It hadn’t even budged. Acacia hadn’t managed to damage this one. I had nothing on me but Josephine’s switchblade; it was a good knife, the blade about two and a half inches, the handle sturdy. Still, I didn’t think it would do much to damage these chains.
I looked around again. Hue was bobbing anxiously around the outside of the star, pulsing different shades of blue and silver. J/O and Jai were still arguing. Finally, J/O shouted something at Jai, who hung his head and nodded. As one, they turned and dodged through the mass of writhing, tentacle-like wires, moving right up to the giant machine. J/O flipped one of his fingers back to reveal the mini-USB, and Jai put both hands on either side of the cyborg’s head.
“NO!” I screamed, uselessly—they couldn’t hear me. Jai’s whole body glowed red. So did J/O, as the younger incarnation of me plugged the USB into one of the many panels on the giant machine.
There was a sound like the screeching of metal, something even I could hear. It seemed to be coming from the very walls, from every bit of equipment in the room, and from the wires that surrounded me.
The transparent walls caging me dropped. At the same time, every single Binary clone in the room froze, some of them dropping to the floor. Over by the sparking, smoking machine that had housed Binary’s leader, J/O and Jai as well.
Josef charged over to me, pulling at the chain with one massive hand. As he broke the remaining link, he grabbed me with his other hand, tucking me up under his arm like a football. Hue whirled around us, those strange equations flickering across his surface again, like he’d done back in the library.
“Get him out of here!” Acacia screamed, but I expertly wriggled free of Josef’s huge grasp. “Joe, go!”
I ignored her, running over to Jai and J/O. With a quick glance, I could see that Jai was breathing shallowly. The massive machine against the wall was still sparking, emitting a sickly red smoke. J/O was doing the same.
I pulled the cyborg to me, starting to check various different vitals and finding all of them useless. He was half robot, he had very few of the human life signals. I coughed, waving the smoke away, and passed a hand in front of his eyes. There was no reaction.
One of his eyes, like mine, was brown. The other was red, like it was sometimes when he was using it to project an image or searching internal memory banks. But this time it was different. It was a dull red, with a small black dot in the center. It looked like a powered-off machine. Lifeless.
Out of everyone at InterWorld, J/O looked the most like me. He looked like a younger me, and it was beyond awful to sit there and look at my face with no life in it.
It wasn’t the first time I’d had to do that. I also knew it wouldn’t be the last.
I looked up. The Binary clones that hadn’t fallen were moving again; there were fewer of them by about half, but they still outnumbered us. J/O and Jai might have managed to destroy the Professor’s mechanical vessel, but he had to exist elsewhere as well.
Right as that thought went through my mind, one of the clones near me shifted into the figure I remembered, with the unwrinkled pants and tweed jacket and bow tie. He still wore the Coke-bottle glasses, but one of the lenses was cracked and his hair was mussed. His eyes still contained nothing but static, and I could still tell he was looking at me.
“Very clever,” he said emotionlessly. “But an ultimately useless sacrifice. Our Silver Dream awakens. The Wave is coming.”
As before, it was like a shadow was passing over the sun. The room darkened, and I got the impression that the colors were all whipping away on the sudden wind.
“Joe!” Acacia screamed. “Get—” Whatever else she was saying was cut off. There was a sudden sound like rolling thunder, deafening and ominous, and a dark flash. Avery yelled incoherently, and through the mass combat of Walkers and Binary scouts, I caught a glimpse of Acacia curled up in a crumpled heap on the floor. There was some kind of dark rune circle pulsing a sickly purple beneath her. Avery slashed at Lady Indigo with his sword, trying to dodge around to get to his sister, but she wheeled around and caught him with one of her legs, knocking him into the far wall.
I started forward, but a sudden flare of dark mist rose up in front of me, and a strong hand grabbed me by the throat.
I felt my feet leave the ground as Lord Dogknife raised me to his eye level, black fog rising up off his skin like steam on a summer day. His breath smelled like carrion, and I felt a wave of nausea sweep over me as he growled in my face.
“You have been nothing but a thorn in my side since we met, little Harker,” he hissed, shaking me like a misbehaving pup.
I couldn’t help it; I laughed. He’d used almost the exact same phrasing I’d thought to myself, and for some reason in that moment, it was funny.
It was probably hysteria.
His red eyes narrowed to slits as he looked at me. What little peripheral vision I had told me my friends were trying to get to us, but most of them had their own problems; there were still several hundred Binary clones firing plasma blobs and wielding electroneural emitters to deal with. Hue was hovering nearby, alternating various colors of distressed, but he couldn’t help, either.
“You find something amusing, little Walker?” he hissed. “I would adorn my throne with your skin, were you not going directly into the heart of FrostNight himself. Do you see, little Walker? He comes for you.”
The equations were swirling around in the air again, numbers and letters and formulas, and I struggled against Lord Dogknife’s grip. I couldn’t see Avery or Acacia from here, but I could still hear Lady Indigo cackling. I didn’t have any kind of weapon on me at all, and FrostNight was swirling all around, ready to destroy this world with me on it, to feed off me. . . .
Then, abruptly, it all constricted. All the numbers and letters and everything, shrinking and forming into a beautiful, perfect sphere about five times the size of a beach ball, hovering above the five-pointed star. It looked almost like a miniature planet, flashes of silver and blue swirling around it like clouds. I’d seen it before, when it was first created. FrostNight.
Lord Dogknife shook me again, and I felt something shift in my pocket—right! Josephine’s switchblade . . .
I relaxed my grip on his hand, slowly going limp like I was losing consciousness, and let my arms fall to my si
des. He laughed in my face, and I smelled the awful scent of death again.
I felt my feet touch the floor again as he lowered me slightly, though it wasn’t enough to find purchase or stand. The tiles slid beneath my heels as he dragged me over to the star, to where FrostNight waited.
Wind rushed against my skin, and I heard the flapping of wings as Jo launched herself at Lord Dogknife. Through barely open eyes, I saw her wielding a long, thin piece of metal like a spear; she must have lost the blaster. Lord Dogknife ducked out of the way as she came at him, and I used his motion to disguise mine as I reached into my pocket for the little knife.
Jo rushed past him as he dodged, expertly wheeling around in the air and kicking off against the wall to come at him again. This time he was ready for her, and grabbed the bit of metal out of the air as she thrust it at him.
I drew in as much breath as I could—not easy, considering the viselike grip he had on my throat—and flipped the knife open, raising my arm to strike as he threw Jo back against the far wall.
The blade bit down into his outstretched arm, cutting deep. He howled, the fingers that had been curled around my neck snapping open reflexively as the weapon sliced through skin and tendons.
My feet touched the floor more firmly for a precious half second before his other arm snapped out, managing to grab the front of my shirt. I felt his claws scrape against the skin of my chest as he scrabbled for whatever hold on me he could get, and my back collided with the tile as he shoved me down.
“Insolent child!” he roared. Dark blood dripped sluggishly from the knife still stuck in his arm. “I’ll give you to FrostNight piece by piece!”
“Joey!” Jakon yelled from off to my left, but I was pinned to the ground by Lord Dogknife’s strong grip.
He slashed at my face with razor-sharp black claws, and all I could do was turn my head and shut my eyes. The pain went through me so quickly I didn’t even comprehend it at first; the adrenaline pumping through my system kept me from feeling it for a few precious seconds longer.