by Neil Gaiman
What actually happened was that I got shot by a laser.
I’ve mentioned the noise in the In-Between, so it won’t come as much of a shock that I didn’t hear the thing fire. It’s like when you brush your hand against something really hot when you aren’t looking—there’s a shock of pain and a sense of wrong, but for an instant you’re not even sure where it came from. It hurts so much that at first you can’t even tell where it hurts.
It took a moment for my brain to sort everything out, but even before that, I’d thrown myself to the right, off the little ledge of candy-striped sand I’d been standing on. I got a single glimpse of a humanoid figure before the psychedelic chaos of the In-Between surrounded me and I whooshed, in a more-or-less controlled fall, down to a patch of grass about the size of a Volkswagen. The left side of my chest and inside upper arm were burned, and there was a hole clear through the sling covering my shoulder.
I dropped into a defensive stance, keeping an eye out above me. Whatever or whoever had shot me had to come from the same direction. Basic teleportation didn’t work in the In-Between; it was too chaotic, had too many things interfering with it.
I heard it, this time—a kind of zwipp sound, but it was coming from behind me. And right before the sound, a nagging tug on my mind, something I recognized, a feeling as familiar as the beat of my heart…
Someone had just Walked nearby.
Hue had gotten behind me, and when the laser was fired again, he sort of turned into a giant, flat bit of reflective rubber. He caught the laser beam and flung it back out again, off in a different direction, snapping back into his usual sphere. It was like watching someone stretch a balloon way out, except it didn’t pop and just returned to its normal shape.
When he did, though, I could see past him. I could see the person standing there, arm still extended, laser still out. And it was not anyone I’d expected to see.
“What the hell are you doing?!”
“Exterminate target: Joey Harker,” said J/O, and fired again.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EVERYTHING ABOUT HIM LOOKED like the J/O I was used to except for the scrapes and injuries from the rockslide—and the laser pointed at me. I wasn’t used to seeing it from that angle. J/O and I had gotten off to a rocky start, but we’d been teammates for two years now. I’d gotten used to the snarky comments, even given most of them back to him, but now he was actually trying to kill me, which was several light-years beyond snarky any way you looked at it.
Hue did his laser-bouncing trick again, but I could tell it was hurting him. He turned a pained reddish green, seeming to huddle around himself. He couldn’t take much more—and here I was, on a bit of floating ground with the In-Between all around me, and no weapon.
Well, no weapon on me. The In-Between, however, was full of random things….
I leaped off the ground patch, jumping toward what looked like a metal trash can lid or manhole cover, except it was bright blue. I swung it around, using it as a shield just in time to deflect another laser blast as I landed on a beach ball–like sphere. It looked solid enough; unfortunately, what things look like in the In-Between isn’t always what they are. The globe popped like a soap bubble (bub-bell, whispered the memory of my little brother’s voice), and I fell about ten feet onto a path that smelled like too-sweet perfume and looked like the road to Oz.
J/O landed in front of me a moment later, and I used my makeshift shield to deflect another blast. A single look at him told me that trying to reason with him would be useless—he was in serious Terminator mode. His gaze locked on me as it would on a target, nothing more, and I knew he’d just keep coming.
“J/O, in accordance with InterWorld’s laws and code of conduct, I order you to cease fire!” Knowing it was futile didn’t really help. He was still my friend and teammate; what else could I do?
He ignored the command, as I’d assumed he would, and fired again. The shot was aimed for my head, and I brought the lid shield up again. There was a flare of red light all around it, and I could see tiny, veinlike cracks spreading across the surface. I was going to have to find a new shield.
I hurled the thing à la Captain America, silently thanking my Alternative Phys Ed teacher for training us in the dubiously useful art of discus throwing. J/O brought his arm up to block it, and I heard a crack as it made contact with his retractable laser. Hoping fervently that my improvised weapon had broken his built-in one, I jumped off the path and opened my senses for another portal. I could Walk around in the In-Between, so long as I was careful; doing it too much could get very disorienting, and if there was anywhere in the Altiverse you didn’t want to get lost, it was here. Well, here and the Nowhere-at-All.
There wasn’t a portal near enough for me to Walk through, so I couldn’t get back to Base, but I spotted some shafts of light filtering through a floating porthole. I snatched one of them out of the air, or what passed for air here. It was warm, and too bright to look at directly. I wasn’t sure if it was sharp, but I was hoping it would serve to distract him enough that I could…I wasn’t sure, exactly. I didn’t really want to hurt him.
He, on the other hand, obviously had no problem with hurting me….
There was a shimmer behind me and I turned, twirling the light beam around in a figure eight. His next laser blast (no such luck of its being broken, apparently) ricocheted off my makeshift sword and I felt, for a moment, like a Jedi. J/O had turned to the dark side and I was forced to fight him, whether I liked it or not.
“J/O,” I tried again, but I didn’t have time to do much else. His laser retracted and he strode forward, grabbing one of the light beams for himself. Something clicked in the back of my mind—he wasn’t just trying to kill me, he was trying to beat me. His laser was a better weapon than the light sword, but he wasn’t relying on the laser. He was accepting a challenge, taking an opportunity to beat me in an even fight. That meant he was motivated, at least in part, by his ego.
And that meant that, regardless of why he was fighting me, the J/O I’d known was still in there.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t going to get the chance to try reaching him. I’d seen J/O sword fight once before, in a duel to the death on the Malefic. He’d won, and it hadn’t been a close call. J/O was good, and the likelihood of my getting sliced into sushi was growing with every parry and riposte.
I sprang backward, swiping my sword through a floating blob of jellylike substance, sending bits and pieces of it splattering toward my former teammate. I let go of the light-beam sword at the same time, not waiting around to find out if I’d hit anything. My shoulder hurt, as did the areas that had been burned by his first laser blast, and I had to find a portal and Walk back to InterWorld. I had to tell them something was wrong with J/O.
There was an explosion behind me, and I didn’t even stop to see what it was. A blast of heat ruffled my hair as I jumped again. I had no idea where I was going, but with my shoulder as messed up as it was, climbing wasn’t really an option. The only place I could go was down. I wondered if the In-Between had a “ground” or anything like it.
I kept running, sometimes hurling things behind me, sometimes catching a glimpse of him right at my heels if I jumped or ran or fell past a reflective surface. I was just barely able to stay ahead of him, and I wasn’t going to be able to keep it up. He had the advantage of being a cyborg, never mind his not having a fractured shoulder and several bruised ribs. Which were all starting to ache abominably.
I’m not entirely sure what happened next. One instant, I was running through an upside-down forest with odd-looking giant flowers instead of trees, and the next I was sprawled flat on my back in a great amount of pain. I was too disoriented to even see what I’d run into, but in the In-Between it could have been anything. Instinct propelled me to my feet and I cast about for a portal, but no luck. J/O was closing in, and I had nowhere to go.
“J/O,” I tried again, one hand clutching my shoulder. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but quit it! Do a h
ard restart or something! Reprogram!”
“Target confirmed,” he said in our voice, which I’d long ago gotten used to but was still so odd sometimes, especially when it was saying something like this. “Joey Harker.” He raised his arm, laser engaging again, aimed—
“Call me Joe,” I said. As last words went, they were maybe not the best I could have come up with, but they seemed appropriate. A red light flared at the mouth of J/O’s built-in weapon, and I looked around in a last-ditch effort to find something I could use.
There was the sound of a laser firing, and I felt nothing. Literally, though it took me a moment to realize I hadn’t been hit.
“Unexpected variable,” said J/O, just as I saw the figure hovering about three yards from us. “Acacia Jones.”
“Acacia!” Her hair whipped around her face as she turned toward me, arm still extended and holding something that looked like it was more likely to unlock a car door than save my life, even though that’s exactly what it had just done. My relief at seeing her was quickly replaced by worry; she’d just made herself a target, and J/O was taking aim again.
She launched herself—I wasn’t sure how, but it seemed to have something to do with her shoes—across the In-Between in my direction, using the car-beeper thing to shoot at J/O. I was reminded of when Hue had saved my life from the agents of HEX by hurtling toward me at full speed and teleporting us both out. Acacia did much the same thing, colliding with me as a burst of purple light enveloped us. We fell through nothing, and pain exploded once again in my shoulder as I landed on my back. I gasped—and opened my eyes to Acacia, backlit by a brilliant blue sky.
She was half on top of me, the ends of her dark hair brushing against my cheeks and lips. I blinked as a few strands got in my eyes, and felt her get to her feet. By the time I’d rubbed my eyes to clear my vision, she was standing, looking off into the distance.
I sat up carefully, using one arm to push myself to my feet. The grass beneath me was green, the sky above me blue, and puffy white clouds made their way across it. The sun was just climbing higher in the sky; I guessed the time to be around eleven A.M. or so, assuming this world counted time similarly to my old one. The air was clean and crisp, a little cool, tinged with a slightly acrid smell.
“Close call,” Acacia said suddenly, turning to look amiably at me. “Hey, Joe. It’s been a while.”
Ordinarily, I would have waved that off and asked where we were, or how she’d known to find me. I would have just been glad to see her again, and forgotten all about Jay’s warning.
But now I knew she was a Time Agent, and that meant I had different questions.
“How long is ‘a while’?”
She paused, giving me a considering look. “Since the last time I had to jet. When we punched it.”
“I remember. How long ago was that for you?”
She turned fully toward me and put her hands on her hips. “I’m guessing you know, then.”
“Yeah.”
“That I’m a Time Agent.”
“Yep.”
“Okay. Good question. Would you believe me if I said it’s been a few years?”
I paused, considering that. I looked her over carefully, checking what I saw with what I remembered; she didn’t seem any older. She was wearing mostly the same clothing she’d worn before; her hair was the same length. She sounded the same.
“No,” I said finally, trying to sound certain. I was rewarded with a bright, mischievous grin.
“Good answer! It’s been, what, three days for you?” I shrugged; honestly, with the rockslide and Jerzy’s death, I wasn’t even sure how many days ago I’d seen her. It felt like both yesterday and forever.
“It’s been about a week for me. Your ship, ah, punching it was a little disorienting. It messed with me something major, actually. I was sick for two days, couldn’t eat a thing.” She stretched her arms over her head and clasped them behind her neck casually, turning this way and that to look over our new surroundings.
“Why?”
“Because you were flickering through multiple dimensions at warp speed. I’m a Time Agent, Joe. My grip on this plane is a little more tenuous than yours. I have to temporarily anchor anywhere I go.”
That made a certain amount of sense. “So we messed with your anchor.”
“More like I lost it completely. Have you ever been really, really seasick?”
I shook my head. “I went over a waterfall in a barrel once.”
She laughed. “Well, it was probably kind of like that.” She paused, tilting her head. “You hear that?”
I listened. Off in the distance, there was scattered percussion, faint pops and booms. “Yeah. What is it?”
“C’mon.” She took my hand.
“I remember learning about this in high school.” We were standing on a ridge just inside a copse of trees, watching the figures in their life-or-death chess match below. “The Battle of the Somme, 1916. Third period history, with Mr. Luru.”
“So do I,” Acacia said, though she grinned when I looked at her. “I remember learning it,” she clarified. “Not in your third period history class. I was here, though. Field trip. We watched from right over there.” She pointed.
“Is what they say in all the science fiction novels true? That you create a paradox by being in the same place at the same time, and it could destroy the world, or make more of you?”
“Nope. It’s not possible. When you enter a timestream, you anchor to it and stay anchored—once you’re there, you’re part of it. If you drop anchor, you can slip out of the timestream and come back, but you won’t run into yourself because you’re not there, you’re here.”
I tried to follow that, I really did. And I didn’t want to admit that she’d lost me, but…“So…you can actually affect anything, as many times as you want?”
“Not exactly. Since I’m anchored here, if I go fifty years into the future and stay there for a week, I can only come back a week from today. If I drop anchor and go somewhere else, and anchor in a different timestream, I can come back to this exact same day and not run into myself, but anything I affected while I was here is still affected. That’s where we have to be careful about paradox.”
“So why can’t you just do the same thing over and over?”
“For one, because it makes us really, really timesick.” She noticed my blank look and clarified. “Imagine every time in your life when you’ve been really sick to your stomach—every carnival ride, every storm at sea, every touch of flu, or—”
“Got the concept. Thanks.”
“Then imagine all those times overlaid, one on top of the other, so that you feel them both separately and all at—”
“Which part of ‘got the concept’ is giving you trouble?”
She grinned again.
You know those memories you have that seem frozen in time, like a snapshot? Even if you don’t have a picture to look at, you remember every detail. Oftentimes right after the moment’s passed, you know it’ll be one of those memories—everything seems to slow down, and that one picture stays stuck in your mind.
The second I felt someone Walk, the very instant I heard the vwip of the laser, I knew that second would be with me forever, the moment right before her smile turned into a gasp.
I turned, calculating the trajectory of the assault: It had come from behind me, slightly to the left. I dove forward, trying to get in close so J/O wouldn’t have time to use his laser again. He brought up an arm to block my first strike, and my second, but my third got through. I had to keep him on the defensive. I had to get him away from Acacia.
I couldn’t see her well, but the glimpses I caught when I was ducking or kicking told me she was still alive. More than that, she was doing something—her green circuitry nails were glowing and sparking, both of her hands pressed over where I was assuming her wound was, somewhere on her stomach. I wondered if she could regenerate. I hoped so.
“Target locked: Joey Harker,” said J/O, which w
as really more insult to injury as he said it just after catching me with an admittedly nice right hook. My back hit the ground again and I felt my ribs protest; I wasn’t going to be able to take much more of this, and I was getting a little tired of that being the case.
“How the hell did you follow us?” Acacia’s voice was remarkably steady for someone who had just been shot.
J/O glanced past me, to where Acacia was getting to her feet. He offered no answer, merely extending his laser arm once again.
“You can’t Walk through time,” she persisted, tracing the outline of a badge in the air. It glowed green for a moment, flashing an official-looking seal with her name on it before vanishing. “As an official Agent of the TimeWatch Organization, I order you to declare yourself.” I cast her an incredulous look as she limped over to stand beside me, the badge moving in front of her. Did she really think that was going to work? (Never mind that I’d tried the exact same thing, in my own way….)
J/O laughed. “We do not answer to your TimeWatch.”
“If you’ve stolen our technology, believe me, you will.”
“We do not need your technology, Time Agent. We know your very essence, and we will follow it anywhere.”
Acacia straightened up abruptly, putting a hand on my shoulder. Her circuit-board nails flashed, and I felt something a little like a static shock. “We’ll see.”
J/O vanished. At least, that’s what I thought had happened, in the first instant—then he was back, but the trees around him were different. The sun and moon were flickering like a strobe light; the ground beneath us was grass, sand, water, grass again. I clung to Acacia’s hand, watching the world around us change, watching J/O flicker in and out, sometimes solidly there, sometimes see-through, sometimes only a shadow or an impression, just for a second.