by Neil Gaiman
“I can’t fly here,” she said. “I can glide, but—”
“Then do that! Find the nearest portal and get back to Base. Got it?”
Jakon nodded. Jo hesitated for a moment, obviously unsure about the idea of leaving us there, but gave a quiet “okay.”
We continued on through the vents in silence—and then came to something I hadn’t anticipated.
The vent split, going left and right.
“Which way?” Jakon whispered, and I took a deep breath, trying to picture J/O’s map on the wall. If we’d been facing that way, and the vents went up…But I’d been moving my finger sideways along the wall, which wasn’t the same thing as “up,” and it seemed like we were going another way now. Was it left?
I wasn’t sure.
“Joey! Which way?” Jakon’s voice was now a hiss, and I closed my eyes. I’d never been good at this sort of thing. Why could I walk between worlds and come up with elaborate plans that actually worked sometimes but couldn’t read a map?
Wait a minute—it was because I was also an idiot. I didn’t need maps. I was a Walker, and so was the person we were going to save.
I took a deep breath, casting about in my mind until I found the thing that enabled me to Walk, and expanded it.
And I felt him. It felt like when we were on the Malefic and we’d freed the spirits of our brothers and sisters, set them loose from the jars…. My brain felt like it was full of static, and there was a definite magnetic pull, linking me to the captive Walker. Our senses touched, and I knew him. His name was Joaquim.
“Right,” I whispered, and Jakon turned. I followed blindly, still buzzing from the adrenaline and the exhilaration of what I’d just done, and the memory of freeing those trapped spirits in our desperate flight from HEX, the first mission that made us a team.
I stopped. We were directly above them. I could feel it.
“Here.” I took out Jakon’s blaster and mine and braced myself against the side of the shaft with my knees pulled up to my chest.
Jai? Status?
J/O is attempting to bypass the firewall.
Let him trip the alarm, I thought. As long as he gets the information we need, the alarm will actually help us out.
There was a pause, then, Allow us to confer. Another pause. As you say. He is disabling the firewall….
“Ready?” The girls nodded, and I took a breath, waited for Jai’s voice in my head—“Now!”—and kicked the side of the vent open, activating my shield as I tumbled out in a controlled fall, guns held to either side like an action hero. There were advantages to all of the classes I took at InterWorld, but some of them were better than others.
There were eight to ten guards in the room, all rutabagas—three of them at the only door, a few standing around, and four clustered around the new Walker. I didn’t bother aiming for those; too much of a chance I’d hit him. An alarm went off, and I managed to take out one as I landed, and another before they started firing. I felt the blasts ping off my shield, automatically counting—One—two—
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the Walker get to his feet, swinging the chair he’d been sitting on like a weapon. It cracked into one of the clones, and I abruptly changed my strategy as two of the others went for him. I was a little surprised, honestly. I’d assumed he’d be terrified by all this. I was, when it had happened to me. Instead, he was drawing some of their fire—and he didn’t have a shield.
I zapped the one closest to him, counting off another two shots as they hit my chest and arm. I felt the shield weaken, and perfectly on cue, Jakon tumbled out of the vent with a sound somewhere between a howl and a bark. She landed on one of the clones, hopped off like he was a trampoline, and sank her teeth into a second one. I zapped another of the rutabagas closest to Joaquim, then figured if he was going to be proactive he may as well also be useful.
“The window!” I shouted, and he stared at me. No matter how many times it happened, it was always a shock seeing your own face looking back at you. I wondered, on some level, if twins ever felt that way. Joaquim was less like me than some; his hair and eyes were darker, though still noticeably red and brown, respectively. I saw the same shock and suspicion in his eyes we all feel when this happens, just for a moment—and then he did as I’d suggested, swinging the chair around in an arc to shatter the window.
The glass tumbled outward, along with the chair, and Jo shot out of the vent. Her wings snapped out to either side (along with a cloud of dust that would have been funny in any other situation), and she half flew, half fell over to Joaquim. His eyes went wide as she wrapped her arms around him, taking them both through the window and outside. They disappeared from sight for a moment as they fell, then Jo caught an updraft and soared back into view, the new Walker dangling from her arms. She pumped her wings once, twice, gained altitude—and a blaster went off behind me, the shot going wild as Jakon pounced on one of the clones. It zipped past me, taking what was left of my shield, and searing through Jo’s right wing.
She dropped, leaving only a few dusty feathers suspended in the sky.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I REMEMBER BEING IN a car accident once. Mom was driving, and the person in front of us slammed on his brakes to avoid a ball that had rolled out into the middle of the street. I hadn’t been paying attention, but I remember hearing Mom say “No—!” as our car skidded on the pavement, in this tone that was somewhere between the firm, no-nonsense Mommy voice and the pleading, “no-it’s-not-time-for-bed” voice my little sister would use. I remember how I knew something was very wrong a second before our car hit the other one. We hadn’t been going too fast, so the accident wasn’t bad—more than the crash itself, I’ve never forgotten hearing Mom say no that way, as though she could stop the car by will alone. She hadn’t remembered that she’d said it, afterward.
It’s human instinct to react to a bad situation, regardless of how effective that reaction is. Some people move, some freeze, some hold their breath or gasp or yell. Our combat teacher was always saying that everyone had instinct, it was just a matter of training it, honing it to do what would most benefit you and your teammates in any situation.
So when Jo disappeared from the sky, I didn’t waste time with words. Knowing Jakon would take care of the clone behind me, I reached down to the shield disk at my belt, activating the charger. A fully charged shield could take several plasma blasts, a few spells, and maybe twenty pounds of blunt force. They took ten seconds to fully charge. I had about as long as it would take me to get to the window.
I sprinted over, catching myself on the frame with one hand, watching as they fell through the air. Jo had spread both wings out, trying to slow their fall, her arms still wrapped around the new Walker. “Jo!” I yelled. It had been two seconds. Three. Four…
She folded one wing, turning as she fell so she could see me. I pulled the shield free of the charger and hurled it, Frisbee style, toward her. I saw her grit her teeth as she pumped her wings again, trying to delay the inevitable long enough for it to reach her. We both knew it wasn’t fully charged; at best, she and the Walker would come out of it with several broken bones. If it got to her before they hit the ground.
Joaquim had his arms wrapped around her waist. She managed to free a hand, and reached out toward the disk. I was glad my father had taught me how to throw; my aim was good, but she had too much of a head start. It wasn’t going to reach her in time—
A look of shock crossed her face. Her body seemed to ripple, just for an instant, as did the air around her—and then they vanished, the disk passing through the air where they’d been. It hit the ground a second later.
“She Walked,” Jakon said from beside me. “She’s okay. She Walked.”
I closed my eyes and cast about for the familiar tug of a portal, heart still pounding from the adrenaline.
“Are you sure? I don’t sense a portal anywhere—”
“When were you looking for one?”
“Just now—”
&
nbsp; “Then she used it, and you wouldn’t sense it now, because it’s gone. Just like we need to be. Come on!” She tugged at my shirt, pulling me back to the center of the room, though not before I caught a glimpse of clones filing out of the doors downstairs, trying to find the girl they’d just seen falling from the sky. Everyone in the building knew we were here—it was definitely time to go.
Jakon boosted me up into the vent, then leaped up herself. We scrambled back the way we came, not bothering to be quiet. I hoped J/O was done with his download.
Jai, we’re coming back.
I got no response, just a jumbled sense of worry and confusion.
Jai!
Hurry, Joey! His voice came back to me, strained. There’s a path here, but it’s faint. We need you three and the new one. J/O can’t Walk now.
We’re only two—Jo and the Walker are back at Base, I think—
Jai swore, not in a language I knew, but the meaning attached to it in his mind would have made me blush in any other circumstance. Just get here—
I tumbled out of the opening Jakon had first used to get into the room, interrupting Jai’s mental sentence as I practically landed on top of him. Jakon came down a second later, giving a low, throaty growl. I handed her back her blaster, taking a moment to stare in shock.
Jai and Josef were standing in the center of the room, J/O draped over Josef’s shoulder like a sack of bionic potatoes. Jai had his arms out to either side like Gandalf doing his “you-shall-not-pass” speech, and the entire room had come alive.
It was like being inside of a computer, if that computer was also one of those carnival houses where everything popped out at you unexpectedly. The normal things you were used to seeing in a room—light switches, electrical sockets, track lighting, ceiling fans—were all trying to kill us.
I pointed and fired, zapping through a tentacle-like wire that was extending from a wall socket, pulsing blue with electricity. “What happened to J/O?”
“He seemed to experience some kind of—”
“In English, Jai!”
“—He short-circuited! Focus on the path—we have to open a portal!”
I sidestepped to avoid a fan blade as it spun toward me like a psychotic boomerang, simultaneously shooting at one of the lights. This explained the one-way door—the Binary were all electronic entities, and there was a heavy-duty computer tucked up against the wall. Who needed doors when you could plug your consciousness into any electric station in the building? It could let the clones or lesser machines in, but nothing got through that door without it knowing…unless they happened to have a mini-scrambler and access to the air vents, like Jakon did.
Okay, one mystery solved. Now for the other—how to get out of here. I planted my feet, once again feeling that little tingle in my mind as I cast about for a portal. There wasn’t one here, but energy was strong; sort of like ley lines. In some universe close to this one, a portal existed. The path was there, we just had to walk it. Or, more specifically, Walk it.
“Josef, concentrate!” He was the only other one not entirely devoted to fighting, since he was holding the unconscious J/O. The bigger version of me steadied his blaster, holding it out in front of him and letting training take over as he focused his mind. I felt his power add to mine, the possibility of a portal becoming more of a probability.
“Jakon!”
She backed up against me with a growl, holstering her blaster and using her claws to block the wires and circuits coming for her. She preferred her claws over the blaster, anyway. Her awareness joined ours, the path becoming clear before us.
Now the hard part.
“Jai!”
The more spiritual version of me pulled his arms inward, then thrust them out again. Instead of dropping the shield he’d been sustaining, like I’d expected, he expanded it to include all of us, and joined his mind with ours.
Together, we found that little something that was our ticket home, the equation
{IW}:=Ω/∞
that told us where to go and how to get there.
And we Walked.
Well, some of us Walked. Some of us were carried, and some of us—like Jai and myself—remember nothing more than the chaotic garishness of the In-Between for a moment before we lost consciousness.
It wasn’t the first, second, or even third time I’d woken up in the infirmary. I knew where I was before I opened my eyes, before I really even knew I was awake. It smelled like medicine and cleaning agents, and I could sense others around me. I was fairly certain I knew who they were, and a glance around when I opened my eyes confirmed it—my teammates.
Jai was in the med-bed across from me, still either asleep or unconscious. J/O was on my left side, plugged in to both an IV and a computer, also still unconscious. To my right (and to my great relief) was Jo.
“Hey,” I said quietly, and my voice sounded relieved even to me. She glanced up and gave half a smile, which was all I usually got from her. I liked Jo; I had since that day on the cliff, when we’d come to something resembling an understanding about Jay’s death. I knew she was indifferent to me at best, but I was glad to have her on my team. “I’m sorry about your wing. How is it?”
She looked up at the damaged appendage, making a face. She was sitting on top of the bed rather than under the covers, leaning back against the pillows, and I could see bandages wrapped around her radius and ulna. Several of her secondary feathers were missing or singed. “Won’t be able to fly again for a few days…Probably won’t be able to fly straight for a few weeks, until they grow back.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, not sure what else to say. She glanced back over at me.
“Thanks for trying to throw me the shield. It might’ve worked.”
“Yeah. No problem. You didn’t need it, though—smart of you to Walk like that. Good job.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t. It was the new kid.”
I just stared for a moment, letting my brain process this. The new kid had Walked? With Jo? When none of us had sensed a portal? “How?”
“Instinct, I guess…. How did we all Walk, the first time?”
I inclined my head slightly, agreeing. I couldn’t really say for sure how it had happened—it had just happened, which I guess was her point. Thinking about the first time I Walked made me remember something else, and I may have smirked a little. “How’d he take to the In-Between?”
“Dunno…I passed out.” She looked a little uncomfortable at the admission, and I decided not to press it, but it actually just made me even more curious. The new kid had found his way through the In-Between, by himself, with a wounded Walker?
Okay, I’ll admit it. I was impressed.
“How’re J/O and Jai?”
“Jai just used too much energy with the shield and trying to Walk. I guess since you two were still linked…”
“…I passed out, too,” I finished, and she nodded. I made a face; that had been stupid of us—keeping the link up when we were right there and about to attempt something difficult—but to be fair, we hadn’t really had time to take it down. Still, I was going to have to include it in my report anyway, and I was sure the Old Man’d give me one of those looks when he read it.
Jo noticed my expression and nodded again—you deserved that—but kept talking. “J/O is…They think he just ran into some kind of security virus, and it triggered a hard shutdown. They’re monitoring him now, but the doctors don’t seem too worried.”
I nodded. So, all in all, we’d come out okay. Some injuries, some bruises, but we’d gotten the new Walker. And—
“Did he get the data?”
Jo nodded again. “Yeah. Captain Harker is looking it over.” Jo was the only one on my team who occasionally called him that instead of the Old Man. It always bothered me to hear, though. My dad had called me that sometimes when I was little. I’d gone through a Star Trek phase, and used to pretend I was captain of my own spaceship—the spaceship being the downstairs couch, my bed, the car, or any
thing else I could think of. I always heard my dad’s voice whenever someone said “Captain Harker,” and it always weirded me out. Still, it wasn’t Jo’s fault. She had no way of knowing, though I wondered if her dad had been similar to mine. Parallel worlds were funny that way.
“You file your report yet?” I asked instead, leaning back against the pillow. It wasn’t exactly comfortable, as beds went, but it sure beat being stuffed into an air vent.
“Yeah. Wasn’t much to do otherwise.”
“How long was I out?”
“Only about half an hour, but they put you under again to monitor your vitals and ease off your link with Jai. It’s been about two hours since we got back.”
“Okay.” I turned my head toward Jai slowly, so as not to aggravate the headache I felt threatening. Now that she mentioned it, I vaguely remembered waking up the first time, being brought through the halls into the infirmary. It was disjointed and hazy, since I’d still been linked with Jai—a little like being two places at once. “How is he?”
“Medics say he overextended himself, but he should be fine once he gets some rest.”
I nodded, taking a deep breath before easing my legs over the edge of the bed and pushing myself carefully up. I felt okay, if a little unsteady, but I knew I’d better get to that report as soon as possible. The sooner I turned that in, the sooner I could turn in, too.
“Go on,” Jo said, apparently reading my mind, “before he comes in here and tells you to report in person.”
“Good idea.” The last thing I needed was to have to try and remember all the details of our mission in the face of his unwavering disapproval.
I started for the door, then paused. Her voice had been a lot quieter than usual; kind of listless, and she’d seemed pale and exhausted. “You need anything?” I asked her. She looked surprised, then shook her head. “Just…more sleep. I’m fine.”