Eternity's Wheel (11 page)

“What's the point of being able to Walk?” I shot back, and a few of them looked thoughtful. There was no point, really. It was just something we could do, and we were lucky enough (or unlucky enough, depending on your perspective) to be able to use it to our advantage in a war.

“Once we get to InterWorld Beta,” I moved on, “there will still be a lot to do. I've got the basic functions running on solar power for now, but we still have to charge the transducers. Once we get the soliton array working, the engines will
be able to move us forward and backward again. Then we can get the ship back to
our
timeline, and we won't have to rely on Hue to get us back to base.”

“How are we powering the transducers?” J'r'ohoho asked. It always amused me to hear the centaur version of me talk about technology; though he'd come from a tribal society that had practically just invented the wheel, he'd taken very quickly to all his science lessons and was usually top of the class.

It was so like him to ask the hard questions.

“We'll find a way when we get there,” Joeb cut in, probably sensing that my answer was about to be another version of
I don't know
. I was, again, immensely grateful. “Let's worry about one thing at a time.”

I had only just finished speaking when I once more had the sense of a door opening nearby, which fortunately meant we had one
less
thing to worry about. Josephine stepped back through thin air a few feet from where she'd been previously, looking quite pleased with herself. Hue (again seeming smaller than he should be) was perched on her shoulder.

“Welcome back,” I said, over the small round of cheering that bubbled up as she reappeared. “Everything go okay?”

“No problems,” she said. “I dropped them off in the courtyard.” She paused, her pride at a job well done fading. “Some of them were pretty upset to see it like that.”

I nodded, glancing at the others. I had explained about
how I'd been sent to future InterWorld and found it destroyed, but knowing it wasn't the same as seeing it. InterWorld Base Town was home as much as the places we'd all come from had been, and seeing it like that was more than hard. It was hopeless. It felt like we'd already lost. “We'll get it fixed up again,” I told her, though I was saying it for everyone. “It'll be better than new, and then we'll get back to
our
InterWorld and rescue the rest of us. It'll feel like home again.”

I held out both hands, one to Josephine and one to Joeb, and nodded at the former. “Let's go. Why don't you do the honors?”

“Oh? I figured you'd want to do it yourself, you're such a mother hen,” she shot at me, but she looked pleased. “Okay, Hue. One more time.”

Hue (who seemed to be a shade or two paler than his usual neutral color; this probably
was
tiring him out) flowed over her once again, barely brushing over my fingers where Josephine was carefully holding my injured hand. Then she Walked, and so did Joeb, myself, the twins, and the nine others with us.

It felt different this time. It was like stepping through a door, as usual, but we found nothing on the other side. No path. Darkness closed around us as we went over the threshold, so quickly that none of us had time to warn one another. I felt Josephine stumble and fall, and I followed her, pitching headlong into a void.

Joeb's hand slipped from mine, and my mouth opened and my vocal cords vibrated with a shout, but there was no sound. There was nothing at all.

I clutched tight to Josephine's hand, but I wasn't even sure I could still feel it in mine. I thought I smelled perfume, something sweet, like roses. I heard something, too, an echo that might have been a breathy laugh, and then the darkness swallowed me whole.

I
T'S NOT THAT
I
passed out, exactly. When you pass out (which, as I'm sure you know, I've done a few times in my life), there's a sort of white-hot feeling around your forehead when you regain consciousness. Waking up isn't even the right term for it. It's like coming back to yourself after you've been gone, except you're not really sure where you've been.

That's what it felt like at first, but I knew I hadn't actually passed out because I didn't have that white-hot headache. It was more like when you walk into a room for a specific reason, but then can't remember why, so you just stand there and feel lost.

I opened my eyes to complete and total blackness, and my first thought was
Why did I come here?
Then I remembered Josephine, and trying to Walk through time, and my second thought was
Where is everyone?

I was starting to see things in my field of vision that
made me worry I
was
about to pass out, little bright motes of light that were there and gone when I tried to look at them. They swirled and wove around me dizzyingly, so I stopped trying to focus on them. There was a weird feeling in the air and that sweet smell that reminded me of spring and the color pink.

I had to find my friends. I didn't even care where
I
was, as long as I found Josephine and everyone else.

I tried to sit up and realized that I had nothing to brace myself against. I was floating, weightless, suspended in midair. The white lights dancing around me were stars, or at least they looked like stars. I'd never been sure, but seeing them cemented my reality. I knew where I was.

This was the Nowhere-at-All.

I'd been here before, twice. I'd hoped to never come back. It was kind of like the In-Between, except where the In-Between was
everything,
the Nowhere-at-All was nothing. It was entirely dark, not dark like you couldn't see anything but more like there was nothing but dark
to
see. There was nothing here, aside from little lights that may have been far-off stars or tiny, close sparks, and yet you always felt like you weren't alone.

It was HEX's domain.

I couldn't move my arms or my legs. I shoved down a surge of panic and lifted my head to look around. My wrists and ankles were restrained by an invisible force, and I
realized that some of the little white lights I'd thought were big and far away were actually close and very small. They were spread out around me in a pattern that I first mistook for an unfamiliar constellation. It was symmetrical and, honestly, beautiful, arcing out above and below me to either side. Horizontal lines looped back and forth over diagonal ones pulled taut, strings of tiny white sparks like you'd see around a Christmas tree or like morning dew on a spiderweb.

A spiderweb
. . .

I still couldn't move my arms and legs. Adrenaline surged through me (I was calling it that, but with the realization that I was trapped in a giant spiderweb, it was probably just panic), and I wiggled with all my might, but I couldn't see anything but those little white lights that might have been stars.

“
Josephine!
” I yelled and heard my voice echo back to me. “
Joeb!
”

“I'm here,” Joeb's voice called from somewhere to the left of me. I couldn't see him.

“Joeb!” a female voice called, also from the left, though it sounded farther away. “Jarl and I are here!”

“Most of us are, I think,” Joeb said. “Everyone, sound off. One!”

“Two!” someone else's voice called, then it was “three,” then, after a slight pause, “four!”

The interesting thing about a group of people—any
people, from any world—is that they often develop a sense of cohesion, a flow, a pattern. Back on my world, they'd done numerous studies on the flow of pedestrian traffic in big, densely populated cities like New York. The way people wove through crowds and around sidewalks while looking down at their cell phones is miraculous, and has something to do with social instinct. It's the thing that's
not
working when you run into someone in a hallway and then do a little dance trying to get around them.

It's also the same instinct that lets a roomful of people have a conversation; you develop a sense for when it's your turn to speak, or when someone else is going to. Like I said, some people are better at it than others. But we were all different versions of one another, which meant we had roughly the same instincts and social patterns.

“Five!” came a distant call from behind me, then “six” and “seven” in voices that sounded the same—probably the twins.

“Eight!” rang out to my right, and then I felt like it was my turn. “Nine!” I called, and the numbers went on. Sure, once or twice two people would start to say the same number, but one of them would always stop and go directly after. When no more voices rang out, we were at thirteen. We were missing one.

And I hadn't heard Josephine.

“We're missing one,” Joeb called.

“It's Josephine,” I said, and then someone screamed.

It was a startled sound, involuntary, loud and shrill. I knew it was one of us.

It came from behind me, and I craned my neck to the point of pain. I couldn't see anything but blackness and more stars. My heart pounded against my chest. I held my breath, racking my mind for something, anything to do or say.

“Jenna!” another voice from behind me yelled. “What's wrong?” There were two different girls named Jenna on base; the middle-Arc Greenvilles like the one I'd come from were more common than the fringe ones, so some of us had the same names. I knew both of them in passing; one had shared my Alchemical History class, and reminded me of my little sister. The other was a new recruit, shy and sweet, and I don't think she'd ever been out on a mission before. I thought I'd remembered seeing her in the crowd when we were preparing to leave, but I wasn't sure now. My mind had been elsewhere.

“Jirho, can you see her?” one of us shrilled, and I recognized in the voice the same panic that was threatening to bubble up inside me. I struggled against the light web, only succeeding in causing myself pain as I twisted my shoulder and wrist.

“No, I can't see anyone!” Both voices came from behind me. No one, yet, had called out from above or below me. It was like we were suspended in a line, or several lines.

Jenna screamed again, a long, thin sound that trailed off
into a wail and ended in a sputtering choke. It sounded . . . final.

“Everyone stay calm,” Joeb called from my left, though I could hear the undercurrent of tension in his voice. “Focus and try to—”

“Demon spawn!” a thick, rich voice yelled. The gravely tenor was unmistakable; it held a slightly higher note in its fear, like a horse's neigh. J'r'ohoho. “You will not take—
eeeeaaaaggghhh!
”

Another scream cut through the blackness. The little white stars around me blurred as my eyes watered, but I was too stunned to cry. How could this be happening?
What
was happening?

The part of my mind that wasn't frozen in shock somehow made my mouth work. I ignored the gibbering voice in my head that was screaming
Don't draw its attention or you'll be next you idiot oh lord ohgodohgod
, and managed to put some amount of authority into my words. “Show yourself, coward! Or do you only stalk the helpless?” Archaic and dramatic, I know, but J'r'ohoho's last words were ringing in my mind. He'd always had a formality to his tone, and I'd always enjoyed hearing him talk science with his somewhat medieval speech.

I desperately hoped I'd get to hear it again.

We waited in horrible, horrible silence for an eternity that spanned a few seconds. It was horrible because I expected to
hear another one of us die—
please oh please don't let them have died—
any moment,
any moment
, and the mix of waiting and praying made me feel sick.

“Little Harker,” a voice said. It was a woman's voice, sweet and honeyed and revolting. I sagged with relief, letting out the breath I didn't know I'd been holding. I'd gotten its attention, whatever “it” was. That meant, for a moment at least, it wouldn't be hurting anyone else.

“Sweet little Harker,” the voice said again, and something brushed flower-petal light against my cheek. There was a tingle of magic in the air. “I've been waiting so long.”

I listened, but the voice fell silent. The sense of magic faded.

And someone else screamed, to my left.

“Waiting for what?”
I screamed as well, before the other sound had even died. The words ripped themselves from my throat.
“What were you waiting for?”
I had to keep talking. I had to keep her attention.

“To thank you, little butterfly,” she whispered. At least, it had the quality of a whisper, but it was loud and it echoed in the stillness. I could hear someone crying to my right, soft sobs that rubbed my nerves raw.

“For
what
?” The question came out like a growl. It may have made me sound fierce; it was actually just me trying to get words out through a throat made tight with the threat of tears.

“For showing me to my cocoon, wildfire,” she said. I was confused at first, but then I realized the way she'd said that last word sounded like something she was calling me, like a nickname. “And for bringing all these little candles to feed me.”

“Who are you?” I demanded, though I already had a nagging suspicion. It was more that I was terrified of losing her attention. I had to keep her talking.

“Mother Moth,” she said, and some of the maybe stars in front of me started to fade. It was only some of them, though, and I squinted—and realized it wasn't that they were fading, it was that something was materializing in front of them. “Though that is not the name you knew me as.”

“Lady Indigo,” I whispered, as she appeared fully in front of me.

Now, I'd been prepared for something terrifying. I was trapped in something like a spiderweb, and the awful sounds I'd just heard had conjured images in my mind of monsters beyond comparison, anything from giant demons to Lord Dogknife himself.

I wasn't prepared for this.

When I'd first met Lady Indigo, before I'd ever come to InterWorld, she'd been human. Beautiful, in fact, with long dark hair and emerald-green eyes. She still had the eyes, starkly prominent in the hollow gauntness of her face. Her skin wasn't any kind of normal human flesh color now, not
pinkish or tan or brown or black. It was red, crimson specifically, and see-through. I could see her skeleton beneath it, though that was all. There were no muscles, no organs.

I could see other bones as well, ones that didn't belong in a human. The most prominent were the ones that arched upward from her back, like . . . well, they looked a little like wings and a little like spider legs. There were eight of them in all, four on either side. They were huge, and stretched between them was webbing that looked to be fused together from the skins of a dozen different creatures. I recognized some of them from my zoology and paleozoology classes at InterWorld. Some of them probably hadn't ever been cataloged because no one who'd seen them could have possibly lived long enough to give them any other name than
oh lord, it's gonna eat me
.

The effect was sort of like an angry moth that was also a spider and a person, except it was a lot scarier than that. Especially combined with the look she was giving me. It was a sick sort of attraction, like I was the flame to her moth, prey to her spider, and a mate to her human, all at once. Like she wanted to nest in my skin.

I was shivering as she moved closer, the scent of death and roses overpowering me. “You . . . what happened to you?”

The last time I'd seen Lady Indigo had been two years ago, when my team and I were escaping from the HEX ship
Malefic
. I'd had a pouch of some kind of powder I'd picked
up from the rendering room, that awful place where Walkers were dropped still alive into a cauldron and boiled down to their essence. I'd grabbed it in desperation, thrown it at her, and she'd been enveloped in red mist. I hadn't ever found out what happened to her.

I wished that was still the case.

“You stole my flesh,” she whispered, one of those bone spider-leg wings reaching out to stroke my hair. “You reduced me to nothing, little Harker, nothing but magic and desire. But I survived, oh yes, I did. You are never truly alone in the Nowhere-at-All, and I proved stronger than any of them. I feasted, I did, and I learned. I learned . . .”

Her voice trailed off as something else caught her attention, something to the right of me. It was hard to tell on her transparent, red skin, but there might have been blood on her mouth. I wasn't sure.

Her eyes narrowed, and she shifted as though to move. “What did you learn?” I asked quickly, catching her attention again.