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I wasn’t sure what to say, so I nodded. He patted his jacket to make sure he had his wallet, and moved toward the door. “If you can wait on the aspirin, I’ll pick up some extra-strength painkillers.”
“That’d be great,” I said, though the thought of waiting a few more minutes wasn’t awesome. Still, I’d live, and it would be better for me in the long run.
“I’ll be back,” he said. I nodded again, even though he wasn’t looking at me anymore, and listened as the front door opened and closed behind him. I heard the click of his key in the lock. I wasn’t sure if he was locking me in or making sure to keep everyone else out. Probably both.
I’ll admit it: I was nervous about going to anyone for help. Not only was it entirely possible he’d be coming back with some nice men in pristine white coats but there was no telling what kind of trouble I might have brought with me. My enemies had sent me here on purpose, which meant they probably wouldn’t be coming after me … probably. There was no way to know for sure. Even aside from that, I had already had one teammate turn on me in recent memory. I was having a few trust issues right now, not that I think anyone would blame me.
I tilted my head back against the covered couch, listening to the crinkle of plastic around my ears. I was dizzy. What I really needed was to sleep for about a decade, but I’d probably get about an hour. I’d been sent here to witness the destruction of everything. I didn’t know how soon they were planning on making that happen, but I probably couldn’t afford to rest for too long.
Despite that thought, I must have passed out on the couch while I was waiting for Mr. Dimas—Jack—to get back from the store. One moment I was sitting there, thinking about how I couldn’t rest for long, and the next I was hearing the key in the lock again and realizing I’d fallen asleep.
And I woke up with a headache, which is pretty much the worst thing ever.
“How long were you gone?” I asked, as he stepped into my line of sight.
He looked at his watch. “Twenty-three minutes,” he said, raising an eyebrow at me. “Are you okay?”
“Water and painkillers,” I said. “Please.”
He brought me a bottle of water and two maximum-strength aspirins. I swallowed them both at once, along with half the water. Mr. Dimas (I kept thinking of him that way, no matter what he’d said) was laying out supplies on the table: a wrist brace, an Ace bandage, medical tape, butterfly bandages, gauze, disinfectant, etc.
“Tell me what happened,” he said, sitting on the table across from me and dabbing the disinfectant on the gauze.
“It’s not going to make much sense to you,” I said apologetically.
“That’s fine. Just talk to me. This is going to hurt.”
Oh. I nodded, trying to figure out where to start. I had told him some the last time I’d been home, before I’d made the decision to fully commit my life to InterWorld. … “How much do you remember from what I told you before?”
“I’ve never forgotten it,” he said. “You went missing for a day and a half, and then you came to see me at school one evening with a story about how you’d discovered you could travel through dimensions.”
“We call it Walking,” I said. He was cleaning the cuts on my wrist left by Lord Dogknife’s claws, and they were starting to sting. A lot.
“Right. You were being chased by this magic organization. …”
“HEX,” I filled in. “They’re the bad guys. One of them, anyway.”
“And you were rescued by an older version of you, who was killed in the process.”
“Jay,” I said, the ache of the words and the memories nothing compared to the stinging of my wounds. Thinking of Jay no longer hurt as much as it used to; everything healed eventually. “And I brought his body back to InterWorld. That’s where I met the other versions of me.”
“Because you all have the same power,” he said.
“Right. See, since I have the power to Walk between dimensions, every other version of me in every other dimension has that same power. I don’t know why me—or, why us—but there it is. We can all do it, some better than others. Apparently, I’m … pretty good at it.”
“Which is how you did it by accident at first,” he said, pinching my skin together as he placed a butterfly bandage over the worst of the cuts. I continued to speak, watching him with a vague, detached fascination. “And then you went on a training mission, correct? The one that turned out to be a trap?”
“Yeah. Everyone got captured by HEX, except for me. I only escaped because of Hue.”
“Your little extraterrestrial friend. You called him an … MDLF?”
“Yeah, M-D-L-F, standing for multidimensional life-form, or mudluff. He’s not an extraterrestrial, exactly, he’s a … well, a multidimensional life-form. He looks kind of like a big soap bubble, and communicates by changing colors, so I call him Hue. Or her, I really don’t know. …” I stopped talking for a moment, taking slow, even breaths. Mr. Dimas was cleaning the scrape along my side. I didn’t even remember getting that one, but it was hurting quite a bit now that he’d found it. Fights were like that; half the time you didn’t feel your bruises until later.
“Your team was captured by HEX,” he prompted me, and I closed my eyes to concentrate.
“Yeah. Except for me, because of Hue. But it still seemed pretty suspicious, so the Old Man—he’s our leader, another version of me—wiped my memories and sent me back here. That’s when I showed up again after almost two days and came to talk to you.”
“Because you’d gotten your memories back.”
“Yeah. Hue came and found me, and seeing him, I just … remembered everything. I guess they couldn’t take that away from me, for some reason. …”
“So this mudluff creature came here,” Mr. Dimas said, looking interested, “to our Earth.”
“Yeah. I don’t know if they do that all the time, or if it was because I was here, or …”
“Where is Hue now?”
“I don’t know. He’s kind of like a stray cat. He hangs around when he wants attention or if I’m upset and he’s trying to help, and he’s saved my life more than once, but sometimes he disappears for days or weeks at a time.”
Mr. Dimas nodded, gesturing for me to sit up. I did so, gingerly, and he started to rub some sort of minty-smelling gel onto my ribs. “For the bruising,” he explained. “Tell me what happened after you went back to InterWorld.”
“Well, I thought I’d remembered everything at first, but I couldn’t quite grasp the way back to Base Town. So instead I tracked down where the rest of my team had been taken, and we all managed to escape.” It was an incredibly condensed, watered-down version of what had actually happened, but it was true enough. I had tracked my team through the Nowhere-at-All to a nightmarish HEX battleship, gotten myself recaptured, caused a ruckus in the prison cells, set hundreds of captive souls free, and more or less accidentally destroyed the entire ship. There had been some quick thinking and a few almost heroic moments, but most of it had been dumb luck.
“Go on,” Mr. Dimas urged. He was wrapping the tape around my ribs now, which hurt nine ways from Sunday.
“Uh, so, we escaped … and I was accepted back into InterWorld. It’s been about two years for me. I’ve been training, going on various missions, doing okay in my studies … business as usual. Nothing too weird happened until my team and I were sent to retrieve some data from a Binary world last … ugh, I don’t even know. A week ago? Two, maybe?” It was so hard to keep track. …
“Binary world?”
“Binary are like HEX: bad guys. They’re two different factions who both want the same thing, though the Binary are what they sound like: machines, mostly, run by a sentient computer who calls itself zero-one-one-zero-one, or ‘the Professor.’ They’re the science; HEX is the magic.”
He glanced up at me over his glasses. “Magic?”
I couldn’t help giving a small grin. “Yeah. I had the same reaction, but I’ve seen it. Magic. I could go into how it works and what it is and all that, but it doesn’t really matter. It works and it is, and HEX has the monopoly on it—except for the fringe worlds closer to the high end of the Arc, but—”
“You’re losing me,” he said, tying off the end of the tape now wrapped firmly around my torso.
“I’m losing myself, I think,” I said, trying to concentrate on breathing. I was starting to get tunnel vision.
“Sit back for a minute,” he advised, looking me over. “And drink more water.”
I nodded, following his advice. At least the pills were kicking in, and I could feel my headache starting to ebb. They weren’t doing too much for the rest of me, though.
“What’s this?” he asked suddenly. I turned my head; he’d found the small bruise and little puncture wound of an injection site on my arm.
“Ah, that. I got injected with a tracer for safety reasons, after the rockslide. It’s advanced technology, it’ll dissolve harmlessly within another week or so.”
“Nothing that needs my attention?” I shook my head. “All right. What’s a fringe world?” he asked, once I started to feel less like I was going to pass out.
“It’s … it was explained to me like this: the Multiverse is everything. Think of it kind of like the moon: a giant circle, partly in shadow. The shadowed part is the Altiverse. The bright part, like a crescent moon, is the Arc. The Arc has all the main versions of our universe, with our Earth, and they vary from high magic to high science, depending on where they are in the Arc. That’s mostly because HEX and Binary each rule over opposite sides, but they’re trying to rule over ALL of it. We call those worlds, closer to one side or the other, fringe worlds. Make sense?”
He was nodding, though he looked a bit dazed. I suppose I couldn’t blame him; I’d essentially just given him hard facts about our much-speculated cosmology. I’d probably rocked his world a bit. “Go on,” he said.
“Okay. Um …” I paused. I’d been explaining about fringe worlds, but why …? “Right, magic versus science, or HEX versus Binary. The Professor is the leader of the Binary; HEX’s leader is a … kind of like a demonic dog. They call him Lord Dogknife. He’s the one who did most of this damage.” I held up my wrist and indicated my ribs. “And sent me back here.”
“Okay. So, you said you were sent to retrieve some data from a Binary world?” He started to wrap the Ace bandage around my wrist.
“Right, yes. We weren’t able to get the data; there were too many rutabagas—that’s what we call Binary soldiers; they’re basically unintelligent clones—and it was looking like things were about to get bad. Then this girl appeared. Dark hair, violet eyes. I’d never seen her before, but she rescued us. Her name was—is—Acacia Jones. She’s a … an agent for another organization.” It occurred to me, sort of all at once, that perhaps telling him about TimeWatch wasn’t the best idea. I knew next to nothing about it, aside from the fact that it was called TimeWatch, they’d once sent me thousands of years into the future, and Acacia was something called a Time Agent. It seemed like the sort of thing that might be pretty classified.
Mr. Dimas looked like he might be about to ask a question, but I kept talking. “I showed her around InterWorld a bit, but then I had to go out on another mission. Another Walker—that’s what I am, a Walker—was found on the same Binary world we’d just been trying to get the information from. The Old Man sent us back to get the info and the Walker.” I remembered all of that quite vividly. Crawling through the air vents in the shut-down office building, finding the other version of me held captive, feeling an instant connection … “His name was Joaquim,” I said, feeling my stomach churn. There was a sour taste in my mouth, though whether from the remembered betrayal or the lingering pain of my injuries, I couldn’t be sure. I sat still for a moment, just breathing. Just remembering.
“Joseph?” Mr. Dimas asked, pausing as he reached over to pick up the wrist brace.
“I’m fine,” I lied, taking another drink of water. “Long story short, we thought Joaquim was one of us, but he wasn’t. He was a clone, like the rutabagas Binary makes, but infused with souls and powered by HEX’s magic. That was when we discovered HEX and Binary were working together.” I shook my head, the weight of it all descending upon me once again. The only thing that had given InterWorld a fighting chance was HEX and Binary’s war with each other. Now that they’d called a truce, however temporary it might be, they’d be turning all their focus on us.
“Infused with souls?” Mr. Dimas repeated, looking at me seriously.
“Yeah,” I said bleakly. “HEX and Binary keep the souls of any Walker they catch. Apparently, that’s the source of our power, the very essence of what we are. They use us to power their ships, so they can travel between dimensions as well.”
“So they made a clone of you.”
“Using Jay’s blood from where he’d died.”
“And powered him with …”
“The souls of dead Walkers.”
“Okay,” he said, looking grim. He shook his head. “So he wasn’t really one of you.”
“No. He was sabotaging InterWorld from within. He caused a rockslide during a training mission that injured a bunch of us”—I gestured to my shoulder—“and killed a friend of mine. His name was Jerzy.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Dimas. I nodded.
“Hex and Binary were using Joaquim to try and power a … HEX called it FrostNight. It … was basically created to restart the universe. So they could make it into whatever they wanted.”
Mr. Dimas looked like he was having trouble grasping this. I didn’t blame him. “Restart the universe?”
“Or the Multiverse, depending on how far they got. I … Acacia and I tried to stop it, but …”
“Did you?”
“I—I can’t assume we did.”
“I imagine we’d know if you hadn’t. Or, perhaps we wouldn’t know, but we also wouldn’t be here?”
“Maybe. I don’t know how fast it moves, or … It’s a soliton, which means it will maintain a continuous speed without losing momentum or energy … or, that’s what they told me. So it would still take a while to erase everything.”
“I see. How did you try to stop it, or is that too complicated?”
“They were trying to use Joaquim and me,” I admitted, holding up my other hand. The skin around my wrist was still chafed raw from where I’d gotten out of the restraints. “I got out, with Acacia’s help,” I added quickly, seeing he was about to ask. I didn’t want to tell him the truth: that while Acacia had helped me, it hadn’t been her who’d broken the machine. It had been me. Thousands of me, scattered through the air like fireflies …
I’d used the souls. I’d called them to me, added their power to mine, and directed them to do as I wished. I still wasn’t sure if the ends had justified the means, or if it made me just like the monsters I fought against.
“So you think, without you, it may not have been powered completely?”
“Maybe, but like I said, I can’t assume that.”
Mr. Dimas nodded again. “What happened after you got out?”
“We tried to go back to InterWorld, but we couldn’t get there. The Old Man had figured out Joaquim’s energy drain on the ship, and thrown the engines into overdrive to get away. We were waiting for our ship to pick us up when we saw it warp away, followed by a HEX ship. It’s … that HEX found InterWorld Base Town is …”
“Bad, I imagine?”
“Very bad.” I watched as he secured the wrist brace around my hand. It hurt, but I relaxed immediately now that I didn’t have to concentrate on trying not to move it too much. “InterWorld might be able to stay ahead of the HEX ship, but they’re gonna have to keep running, which means they’re essentially trapped. They can’t stop, not even for a second.”
“Let me see if I have anything for that burn on your wrist and the one on your side.” Mr. Dimas stood, leaving me in momentary confusion. What burn on my side? I shifted, finding the rough texture along my skin, and the pain that came with it. Right … It was from J/O’s laser. That was something I’d left out of the retelling. My teammate J/O, a cyborg version of me, had been turned against us by a Binary virus. Acacia had saved me from him, too, left him wandering through time looking for us. …
“He wasn’t on the ship,” I said suddenly, as Mr. Dimas sat back down across from me.
“Who wasn’t?”
“J/O. A teammate of mine, he’s a cyborg me,” I explained, only half listening to what I was saying. My brain was moving too fast for my mouth. “He’d been infected by a Binary virus and was working with Joaquim. He attacked me—that’s where I got the burn on my side from his laser cannon—but Acacia threw us through time and he couldn’t find us … but that means he wasn’t on Base Town when they had to punch it, he must have been left behind. He’s still out there somewhere—” I stopped, not wanting to alarm him, but the sentence continued on in my head. He could come find me. He could come here.
“I have to go,” I said, but Mr. Dimas was shaking his head.
“Not with your injuries,” he said firmly, putting a hand on my fractured shoulder when I tried to stand up. I winced, and he gave me a look that said see? “You can barely walk, and what little medical attention I’ve given you won’t help much unless you sleep and heal.”
“You might be in danger,” I tried.
“You are in danger, and you’re not going to get out of it without dying unless you rest, not to mention eat.” He fixed me with a stern look over the top of his glasses, the look I remembered from sitting in his classroom.
My stomach gave a loud growl just then, as if to punctuate his sentence. I glanced down, betrayed, and felt heat rise to my face. “Okay,” I said quietly, making the decision to leave as soon as I’d eaten. I wasn’t going to put him in more danger than I already had, and besides, I had things to do. My army wasn’t going to gather itself.
“Good,” he said, straightening up. “Now. Important question: What do you want to eat?”
“I—” I stopped, it suddenly occurring to me that I could have anything I wanted. InterWorld kept us fed, of course; protein bars and enhanced vitamin water, very nutritious and not at all delicious. But I was home now, back on my world, and I could have anything. “Pizza,” I said. I know it’s cliché, but cut me some slack—I’m a teenage boy. What would you have asked for? Broccoli?
“I’m not surprised. What do you want on it?”
“Pepperoni and broccoli,” I said. Shut up, it actually sounded good.
Mr. Dimas left to get the pizza (“I’ll go pick it up,” he’d said, “and you’d better be here when I get back, Joseph. I mean it.”) and I relaxed back on the couch again, seriously considering passing out. Instead I forced my mind into some semblance of meditation. It was the best I could do right then; I was still exhausted and hurting and worried, and every passing car or creak of the house settling made me jump.
Even with all my injuries and fears and concerns, I couldn’t stop thinking about Acacia. I hadn’t gotten to that part of the story in my retelling to Mr. Dimas, of how we’d been standing together watching the HEX ship stalk its InterWorld prey, and Lord Dogknife had attacked from out of nowhere. … She hadn’t even seen him coming. I didn’t know what he’d done to her, except that the second time he’d knocked her down, his claws were slick with blood and she hadn’t gotten back up.
I remembered her expression just before we’d been attacked. Most of my memories of her were like that, actually, moments of action frozen in time. I remembered her grinning at me a second before the sound of laser fire filled the air when J/O had found us; I remembered the way her face had been tilted toward mine before Lord Dogknife had attacked. I leaned back against the couch, remembering how she and I had sat back-to-back in a moment of respite, both of us injured, talking strategy and keeping each other going. I wondered if our friendship (relationship?) would be any different if we hadn’t formed the majority of it while running for our lives.
Most of all, I wondered where she was now. I didn’t know if she’d vanished of her own volition or if Lord Dogknife had sent her away or if she’d been rescued. I didn’t know what the chances of seeing her again were, and I wondered if I ever would at all.
