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}:=O/8