Interworld

He turned on me, and I hoped that he wasn’t going to hit me in front of Mr. Dimas. Ted Russell likes to hit people smaller than him, and that takes in a big chunk of the school population. He raised a hand—then he saw it was me.

He stopped, hand in the air, and said, plain as day, “Mother of God, it’s a judgment on me,” and started to cry. Then he ran out of the room. He ran like I had run earlier. It’s called running for your life, I thought.

I looked at Mr. Dimas. He looked back, then hooked one foot around a nearby chair leg and dragged the chair toward me. “Sit,” he told me. “Put your head down. Breathe slow.”

I did. Good thing, too, because the world—or at least his office—had gone kind of wobbly. After a minute things steadied, and I raised my head. Mr. Dimas was watching me.

He walked out of the room, returned a few seconds later with a paper cup. “Drink.”

I drank the water. It helped. A little. “I thought I was having a weird day before. Now it’s somewhere out beyond bizarre. Can you explain any of this to me?”

He nodded. “I can explain a little of it, certainly. At least, I can explain Edward’s reaction. And mine. You see, Joey Harker drowned last year in an accident down at Grand River Falls.”

I grabbed my sanity and held on with both hands. “I didn’t drown,” I told him. “I got pretty shaken up, and I had to have four stitches in my leg, and Dad said that would teach me a lesson I’d never forget, and that trying to go over the falls in a barrel was the single stupidest thing I’d ever tried, and I told him I wouldn’t have done it if Ted hadn’t said I was chicken. . . .”

“You drowned,” said Mr. Dimas flatly. “I helped pull your body out of the river. I spoke at your memorial service.”

“Oh . . .” We both were quiet then for a moment, until the quiet got to be too much and I had to say something. So I said, “What did you say?” Well, wouldn’t you have asked the same thing, if you were me?

“Nice things,” he said. “I told them you were a good-hearted kid, and I told them how you got lost all the time in your first semester here. How we’d have to send out search parties to get you safely to Phys. Ed. or the science trailers.”

My cheeks were burning. “Great,” I said with all the sarcasm I could muster. “That’s just how I’d want to be remembered.”

“Joey,” he asked gently, “what are you doing here?”

“Having a weird day—I told you.” And I was going to explain it all to him—and I bet he would have figured out some of it—but before I could say anything else, the room began to go dark. Not dark as in, the sun went behind a cloud dark, or dark as in, hey, that’s a mighty scary thunderstorm dark, or even dark as in, I’ll bet this is what a total eclipse of the sun looks like. This was dark like something you could touch, something solid and tangible and cold.

And there were eyes in the middle of the darkness.

The darkness formed itself into a shape. It was a woman. Her hair was long and black. She had big lips, like it had been fashionable for movie stars to have back when I was a kid; she was small and kind of thin, and her eyes were so green she had to have been wearing contacts, except she wasn’t.

They looked like a cat’s eyes. I don’t mean they were shaped like cat’s eyes. I mean they looked at me the way a cat looks at a bird.

“Joseph Harker,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. Which was probably not the smartest thing I could’ve said, because then she laid a spell on me.

That’s the best way I can explain it. She moved her finger in the air so that it traced a figure—a symbol that looked a little bit Chinese and a little bit Egyptian—that hung glowing in the air after her finger finished moving, and she said something at the same time; and the word she said hung and vibrated and swam through the room; and the whole of it, word and gesture, filled my head; and I knew I had to follow her for all my life, wherever she went. I would follow her or die in the attempt.

The door opened. Two men came in. One was wearing just a rag, like a diaper around his middle. He was bald—in fact, as near as I could tell, he was completely hairless, and that, with the diaper, made him look like a bad dream even without the tattoos. The tats just made it worse: They covered every inch of his skin from hairline to toenails; he was all faded blues and greens and reds and blacks, picture after picture. I couldn’t see what they were, even though he wasn’t more than five feet away.

The other man was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The T-shirt was a size too small, which was really too bad, because it left a big stretch of stomach exposed. And his stomach . . . well, it glistened. Like a jellyfish. I could see bones and nerves and things through his jelly skin. I looked at his face, and it was the same way. His skin was like an oil slick over his bones, muscles and tendons; you could see them, wavery and distorted, beneath it.

The woman looked at them as if she’d been expecting them. She gestured casually at me. “Got him,” she said. “Like taking ambrosia from an elemental. Easy. He’ll follow us anywhere now.”

Mr. Dimas stood up and said, “Now, listen here, young lady. You people can’t—” and then she made another gesture and he froze. Or kind of. I could see his muscles trembling, as if he were trying to move, trying with every cell of his being, and still failing.

“Where’s the pickup?” she asked. She had a kind of Valley Girl accent, which I found irritating, particularly since I knew I was going to have to spend the rest of my life following her around.

“Outside. There’s a blasted oak,” said the jellyfish man in a voice like belching mud. “They’ll take us from there.”

“Good,” she said. Then she looked at me. “Come along,” she told me in a voice that sounded like she was talking to a dog she didn’t particularly like. She turned and walked away.

Blindly, obediently, I followed her, hating myself with every step.

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From Jay’s Journal

I’d got back to Base Town late at night. Most of the folk in my dorm were asleep, except Jai, and he was meditating, suspended in midair with his legs crossed, so he might as well have been sleeping. I crept around, undressed and showered for twenty minutes, getting the mud and dried blood out of my hair. Then I filled out the damage & loss report, explaining how I’d lost my jacket and belt (I traded the jacket for information, and the belt had made a pretty effective tourniquet, if you must know). Then I crashed like a dead man and slept till I woke.

It’s a tradition. You don’t wake a guy when he gets back from a job. He gets a day to debrief, and then a day to himself. It’s kind of sacrosanct. But sacrosanct goes out the window when the Old Man calls, and there was a note beside my bunk when I awoke, on the Old Man’s orange paper, telling me to report to his office at my convenience, which is his way of saying immediately.

I pulled on my gear and I headed for the commander’s office.

There are five hundred of us on the base, and every single one of us would die for the Old Man. Not that he’d want us to. He needs us. We need us.

I knew he was in a foul mood when I reached the anteroom. His assistant waved me into his office as soon as she saw me coming. No “hello,” not even an offer of coffee. Just “He’s waiting. Go on in.”

The Old Man’s desk takes up most of the room, and it’s covered with piles of paper and dog-eared folders held together with rubber bands. Heaven only knows how he finds anything on there.

On the wall behind him there’s a huge picture of something that looks kind of like a whirlpool and kind of like a tornado and mostly like the shape the water makes as it goes down the drain. It’s an image of the Altiverse—the pattern that we all swore to protect and to guard and, if needed, to give our lives for.

He glared at me with his good eye. “Sit down, Jay.”

The Old Man looks to be in his fifties, but he could be much older than that. He’s pretty banged up. One of his eyes is artificial: it’s a Binary construct, made of metal and glass. Lights flicker inside it, green and violet and blue. When he looks at you through it, it can have you checking out your conscience and make you feel five years old every bit as well as his real eye can. His real eye is brown, just like mine.

“You’re late,” he growled.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I came as soon as I got your message.”

“We have a new Walker,” he told me. He picked up a file from his desk, riffled through it and pulled out a sheet of blue paper. He passed it to me. “Upstairs thinks he could be hot.”

“How hot?”

“Not sure. But he’s a wild card. Going to be setting off alarms and tripping snares everywhere he goes.”

I looked at the paper. Basic human-friendly planet design— one of the middle worlds, the thick part of the Arc—nothing too exotic. The coordinates were pretty straightforward as well. It looked like a fairly easy run.

“Reel him in?”

The Old Man nodded. “Yeah. And quickly. They’ll both be sending out grab teams to get him as soon as they know he’s out there.”

“I’m meant to be debriefing the Starlight job today.”

“Joliet and Joy are debriefing now. If I need any amplification I can get in touch with you. This takes priority. And you can have two days off when it’s done.”

I wondered if I’d actually get the two days off. It didn’t matter. “Got it. I’ll bring him in.”