Jadie in Five Dimensions

by Dianne K. Salerni

  A talon swipes in front of my face. Steve is beyond reason—he’ll rip me to pieces whether he gets the journal or not. I grope desperately for an opening, but the stalks grow too close together here. The flaw in my plan to squeeze into a small place becomes clear. I have nowhere to go.

  Faces flash before my eyes. Mom and Dad. Marius. Dr. Lowell. Sam. A face from J.D.’s baby album—the birth mother I never got to meet. Why didn’t I let Sam introduce us when we had the chance?

  Steve slices through more stalks. Squeezing my eyes shut so I won’t see the end coming, I press myself against one of the fibrous shafts.

  It moves.

  I open my eyes. The rigid surface I was leaning against folds away from me, sinking into itself until I’m on the verge of falling into a gap wider than the original stalk. A stream of twinkling lights reaches out of the blackness and touches my face before retreating into the void. Beckoning me.

  I hesitate. For all I know, this 5-space thing wants to eat me.

  Steve screams in his unintelligible language. Stalks peel away to my left and right. Time has run out.

  I step into the starry void, expecting a drop, but my body is buoyed by a feathery-soft touch. Invisible tentacles tickle me with warmth and draw me away from the roaring danger. I feel tenderly cared for and safe—for about three seconds.

  The tickling becomes a tingle, and the tingle becomes a burn. I wriggle and thrash, but there’s no escape from my bindings. The lights bite like a hundred fire ants and pierce me with a thousand needles. Tiny worms crawl through my body, into my eyes and my fingers and the base of my brain.

  I open my mouth to scream, but by then, my body has been

  utterly

  and entirely

  conquered.

  35. TY

  It happens too fast for Ty to react. One second Dr. Lowell is supporting Jadie after an invisible attack. The next, Jadie pulls away, snatches the journal from Ty’s hand, and dives over the side of the platform.

  “J.D.!” Dr. Lowell hollers, running after her.

  A blow from an unseen hand knocks the physicist off his feet. The platform vibrates and bounces as one of the 4-space creatures launches himself into the fog. Pursuing Jadie.

  Ty grinds his teeth over the loss of the journal, although he knows why Jadie took it. She’s trying to save their lives. Which is infuriating. Ty doesn’t want to be saved by Jadie. This is all her fault!

  It isn’t her fault; it’s yours, says a mocking voice in the back of his mind, a voice disturbingly like his father’s. You swallowed their ridiculous Resister story like a fish gulping down a barbed worm.

  “Shut up, Dad,” Ty mutters, staring at Sam’s crappy computer and the attached tablet. He has messed up. The throbbing claw mark on his back won’t let him forget that, nor the sticky blood that makes Dr. Lowell’s shirt adhere to his skin. But what can he do to salvage the situation?

  Only one thing. He ducks his head and types furiously.

  On the other side of the platform, Dr. Lowell climbs to his feet. “Don’t hurt my daughter!” he shouts. “If I’m such a valuable commodity, start treating me that way—or you’ll never get what you want out of me!”

  Dave’s answer is chilling. “You do not understand my mission, Dr. Lowell. If I cannot get what I want expediently, I am supposed to destroy it so my enemies do not have it either. I have thirty seconds’ worth of patience left for the first option. What have you got for me?”

  Ty watches them while unplugging the tablet from Sam’s computer. Dr. Lowell’s face registers shock, his shoulders slumping. He read Marius’s warning over Ty’s shoulder and probably thought he had leverage over these creatures while the project remained unfinished. Ty knew better. As soon as he saw that message, he knew the three of them were dead meat unless…

  Lifting the tablet, Ty peers at the screen, briefly scanning the platform before angling the device toward those persistent lights overhead. Aha! Just as he thought!

  Meanwhile, Dave taunts Dr. Lowell. “Nothing?” Pointed teeth drip saliva.

  “We have a partially working program,” Ty announces, standing up and waving the tablet. “Without the journal, I can’t finish it. But if you want a glimpse of 5-space, here it is.”

  The tablet vanishes, ripped from his hands. “It is very small,” Dave complains.

  “I worked with what I had. Get me better equipment, and I’ll make something on your scale.”

  The hanging eyeball twists and disappears as Dave turns kata or ana. “There are holes and gaps.” More complaints, but his tone is less snappish.

  “Dr. Lowell can fix that, as long as you don’t hurt Jadie.” Dr. Lowell gives him a nod of gratitude. Then Ty asks, “It’s working, right? You’re looking into 5-space?”

  Dave’s silence is enough of an answer. He seems enthralled.

  “Look up, then.”

  The tablet, hanging in midair, swivels upward. Dave makes a startled hissing noise, and the visible parts of his body recoil.

  The lights they’ve been seeing aren’t individual creatures. They’re part of one creature, a life-form with a body that, as near as Ty can tell, exists primarily in the fifth dimension. Shaped like a tentacled jellyfish, it has an undulating sack of skin that is only thick enough in three dimensions to produce those twinkling lights.

  And it’s huge. In Ty’s brief glimpse via the tablet, it covered the entire sky.

  He grabs Dr. Lowell’s arm. “Now! Head for the wormhole!”

  But the scientist shakes free. “Not without my daughter!”

  Have it your way. Ty sprints for the spot on the platform he mentally marked as the way out upon their arrival. Dr. Lowell’s overlarge shirt flaps around him as he runs.

  The blow comes from ana or kata with a force that sends Ty flying. He skids across the platform, adding a bitten tongue and numerous contusions to his growing list of injuries. “You, stay put!” Dave snarls. “And you—” This is directed at the sky. “Do not touch me!”

  “Tyler, are you hurt?” Dr. Lowell calls out.

  Stop being nice to me. I was abandoning you! Ty flounders, trying to make his arms and legs obey. Before he can get to his feet or even his knees, Dave shouts something that sounds like alien curses and is answered in the same language by another voice. Not Steve—a smooth and silky familiar voice. “Miss Rose?”

  Suddenly there are twice as many body parts undulating on the platform, swelling into muscular limbs, shrinking into fingers and toes and unidentifiable knobs. Then three more figures appear out of the fog—humans this time.

  Marius Martin and his parents.

  At first Mr. and Mrs. Martin support Marius between them, but after a few steps, Marius—who looks as pale and sweaty as he did after reversing himself—shakes them off with some kind of reassurance. They split apart, the parents sprinting toward Dr. Lowell.

  Marius runs to Ty and offers him a hand up.

  Ty takes it. “You look awful.”

  “My alternate past sucked,” Marius replies.

  Nearby, Dave howls and is answered by an angry hissing from Rose. Something ropy swings past and narrowly misses Ty’s head—a tail? He and Marius step backward, which unfortunately puts Dave and Rose between them and the wormhole.

  Meanwhile, a hasty introduction is taking place between Jadie’s three parents. The inevitable question gets asked, and Dr. Lowell points over the side of the platform. With a grim expression, Mr. Martin uncoils a rope from his belt, while his wife directs Dr. Lowell’s attention to Ty and Marius. “My son will guide you and Ty back through the wormhole.”

  “I’m not leaving without my daughter,” Dr. Lowell protests.

  “She’s our daughter too. Trust us.”

  “C’mon!” Marius shouts, gesturing wildly at Dr. Lowell. “We need to get out of here before we get stepped on!”

  They do indeed. Ty only got a brief glimpse of Dave on the tablet, but he’s not likely to forget it. The barrel-shaped body. Six muscular limbs, each with
two appendages serving as hands or feet. An angular face with three eyes. And most horrifying—dual protruding jaws, each with a mouthful of sharp teeth.

  Now there are two of these elephant-sized monsters on the platform, locked in physical combat. Both Rose and Dave are screaming and flailing wildly in gravity weaker than they’re used to. They could roll over and squash a human at any time. Everyone needs to escape by the wormhole—or follow Jadie off the platform.

  But the adults are arguing. Dr. Lowell points at Mr. Martin, who’s trying to thread the rope through the platform grid. “You can’t make a knot with 3-D rope tied to a 4-D structure in 5-space!”

  Mr. Martin looks up. “He’s right, Becca. There’s more to this platform than I can see.”

  “Then I’ll be your anchor.” Mrs. Martin takes the rope from her husband and starts tying it around her own waist. “Go with the boys, Dr. Lowell.”

  “You don’t understand how this dimension works,” the scientist protests. “Three-dimensional knots won’t hold here!”

  It’s insane to keep arguing. Jadie’s lost, and that’s too bad, but none of the humans are physically equipped to find her. Ty scans the platform, trying to piece together the disjointed images of the fighting 4-space rivals. To reach the wormhole, they’ll have to dodge both Dave and Rose. It would really help if they could see properly.

  As if summoned by his wish, Ty’s tablet appears in midair and plummets toward the platform. Dave howls in anguish at the loss.

  Running toward gargantuan creatures he can barely see is not the smartest thing Ty Rivers has ever done, but he throws what little athletic skill he has into it, stretching out both arms to catch the tablet like it’s a football. He gets right underneath it, tracking its fall, and the tablet is within his grasp when his body abruptly drops—the metal platform curling away beneath his feet and into the fog.

  36. TY

  The strange thing about Ty’s fall is that it doesn’t feel like falling so much as having his shirt pulled inside out over his head. When the platform stops moving, what was once a flat surface curves in an upside-down parabola, the metal snapped in places like toothpicks. Ty finds himself standing beside Marius, who a moment ago was several feet behind him.

  “What happened?” Marius gapes at the devastation.

  Ty can think of one explanation. “We’ve been turned around in 5-space.”

  “You mean reversed?”

  Not reversed. Marius isn’t puking. Ty doesn’t have a migraine. Plus, this platform suffered a lot worse than being flipped over. Mr. Martin, who’d been lowering himself down the side, is now hanging from the grid above them. A rope anchors him to his wife, but Mrs. Martin holds the loop with astonishment because her knot has untied itself.

  Though the platform is all but destroyed, the people on it are untouched. That suggests intelligent agency.

  Howls and shrieks turn Ty’s attention to the fact that Dave and Rose are still locked in combat. “Where’s the wormhole?” Marius yells above the noise. “I’m supposed to rescue you, but the wormhole’s not where it used to be!”

  “I don’t need rescuing. I’m not a damsel in distress!” But Marius’s concern is valid. Ty has no idea where the wormhole is now. His reference points are unrecognizable.

  Where did the tablet go? Crushed beneath Dave and Rose? Or fallen through the broken platform into oblivion? He doesn’t see Sam’s computer with its oh-so-valuable program either.

  Ty wants to tip his head back like a dog and howl in frustration. This did not go as planned!

  Marius grabs his arm and points overhead. “What’s that?”

  A cloud of light streams through the twisted hole of the inside-out platform, spiraling around the humans and Rose and Dave. This 5-space creature is probably responsible for the damage done to the platform. What its intentions are, Ty has no idea.

  Dr. Lowell shouts, “J.D.!”

  Through the broken shaft of the platform, the creature lowers Jadie’s limp body. Ty sees no sign of injuries, but she doesn’t react to her parents shouting her name. She looks unconscious—or worse—until she descends to within a few feet of the platform. Then her eyes jerk open.

  “Cease hostilities!”

  Cease hostilities? That’s Jadie’s voice for sure, but Ty doesn’t think she’s the one using it.

  Rose and Dave pay no attention to Jadie’s order. Their flailing and pounding continue.

  Lights plunge toward the struggling creatures. Seconds later, their bodies hurtle in opposite directions. Ty and Marius scramble out of the way as something large with tubular whiskers skids toward them.

  Dr. Lowell stumbles backward too but doesn’t take his eyes off Jadie. “Please don’t hurt my daughter!”

  “Let her go!” Marius picks up a broken metal shaft like he’s going to launch into hand-to-hand combat to save his sister.

  “SHE needs Jadie-being to communicate,” Jadie’s voice states woodenly. “SHE has no other means to communicate with invading life.”

  Everyone falls silent in the wake of this strange statement. Rose recovers first, her voice emanating from the creature with the whiskers near Ty. “We are not invaders. We are explorers who discovered your world. We did not know there was intelligent life on this planet.”

  “World and planet are unknown.” The starry web suspending Jadie quivers. “Jadie-being pictures a rock for planet. SHE is not a rock. I am SHE. You are with SHE. SHE is here.”

  “What does that mean?” Marius mutters.

  Ty looks around and wishes he had that tablet again. He sees starry tentacles holding Jadie aloft and others surrounding the group, not to mention the spongy, knobbly surface beneath the broken Transporter platform. “I don’t think this is a planet,” he says as the revelation trickles into his mind. “This whole place is a living being, and the 4-space people tried to build on it.”

  “Yes,” the creature agrees. “Like lice. Jadie-being pictures lice as small beings that live on greater beings.”

  Whoa. Rose’s people traveled through the wormhole to what they thought was a planet in 5-space and started constructing a Transporter on this creature’s… what? Scalp? Elbow? Armpit? A five-dimensional body part there’s no name for? “No wonder there were accidents,” Ty says.

  “SHE did not know lice were alive,” the creature intones in Jadie’s voice. “Alive and then deceased. SHE understands knowing and being, but not other alive things that think and be—and cease to be.”

  “Is there a HE?” Marius wonders. “Or any other SHEs?”

  “There is only SHE.”

  Mrs. Martin puts a hand over her mouth. “How lonely!”

  “Please release Jadie!” her husband calls out.

  “What you’re doing could be hurting her,” Dr. Lowell adds.

  “Neurological pathways are unharmed,” SHE declares. “Jadie-being is not distressed.”

  Jadie gives them two thumbs up.

  Ty assumes this creature can fake Jadie’s gestures, if fooling them is her purpose. But why would SHE, if SHE can reach directly inside their minds? The thumbs-up is probably a signal from the real Jadie—which means she’s conscious. SHE’s not only pulling words and images out of Jadie’s head. They’re actively communicating.

  Something wriggles in Ty’s own mind. Not an alien being. Just plain old envy.

  “Lice came,” SHE says. “Lice died. SHE regrets that SHE did not understand life could become deceased.”

  “Yes,” Rose agrees. “Members of my clan died building this platform. We thought they were accidental deaths. But we are not lice!”

  “Lice are best made deceased. SHE is curious about life that knows things outside of SHE. SHE reaches through hole where lice appear, trying to learn, but cannot function in flat space. It is regrettable that lice must be deceased when they are so interesting.”

  Ty’s heart lurches as the words start to make sense. SHE is apologizing for the need to exterminate the beings who crawled out of the wormhole and onto her
body. Because no matter how interesting, lice are unwanted, and she got that idea from Jadie. “Not lice!” he shouts. “Jadie doesn’t mean lice! Lice are parasites. We’re more like, um… bees. Think bees and flowers, Jadie!”

  “Good save, Ty,” Mr. Martin says with a gulp.

  SHE is slow to respond, and the group gazes at each other uneasily. Five, six seconds crawl by before SHE says, “Ty-jerk is correct. SHE is a flower. A flower is delicate and beautiful. That is the same as SHE. Miss Rose-teacher is a bee with a hive. Bees are useful and productive.”

  Ty-jerk? When he just saved her parents and her brother from getting squished? Thanks for that. Ty simmers, realizing how much influence Jadie has over this being.

  Why is it always Jadie who comes out on top?

  “My people have a hive too,” Dave growls. “We want to come to 5-space.”

  There’s another long pause, as if SHE is consulting with Jadie, and—as Ty predicts—Jadie’s opinion prevails. “Darkness and Storm are not helpful. SHE does not like absence of light and atmospheric disturbance. SHE does not want them here.”

  Dave snarls, his muscles rippling.

  Ty’s brain jumps immediately to the only action Dave can take. “Dr. Lowell, look out!”

  Teeth flash—more teeth than should be possible for one creature to have. Dr. Lowell recoils and trips on the broken platform. Rose lurches to her feet, but sluggishly, leaving a pool of black ichor in her wake.

  Twinkling lights sweep over Dave. A horrible ripping sound follows, ending Dave’s snarl abruptly. When the lights withdraw, piles of red blobs appear. A pool of sticky goo trickles through the metal grating.

  “That was not intended,” says SHE, sounding startled. “It is regrettable that lesser beings cannot move in that direction.”

  Ty swallows a mouthful of bile and looks away from the bits of Dave that should be on the inside and are now regrettably on the outside. The fifth set of spatial dimensions is apparently detrimental to beings and objects that can’t be turned inside out.

  “It was unavoidable,” Rose says, though she sounds shaken. “Thank you for saving Dr. Lowell. There is another person here, every bit as violent and dangerous…”