“How’d the retrieval go?” I asked him. The officer team had arrived with the other Walker midmorning, and everyone was dying to get a glimpse of him or her. No such luck—the new one had been taken to the infirmary for a checkup, and then straight to the Old Man’s office. No one had heard from him or her since.
“It was awesome!” Jerzy said, glancing briefly at Acacia. His bright red hair feathers were ruffed up, like a peacock trying to attract a mate. “Pretty crazy, actually.”
“Yeah?” I prompted.
“Yeah. Josy lost a braid.”
“Oooh.” I winced. Josy was vain about her hair. “How dead’s the thing that did it?”
“All the way dead.” Jerzy laughed. “It was some kind of plant thing. We were in really lush jungle area with lots of weird, carnivorous vines. Got the Walkers out okay; was mostly a lot of hiding. HEX had a fix on them like nothin’ else.”
Something was nagging at me. After a moment, I had it. “Walkers?”
Jerzy’s feathers ruffled in excitement. “Yeah. It’s not released officially yet, so if I hear it spread I’ll know where it came from.” He paused to look at Acacia (who mimed zipping her mouth closed) and Joaquim, who nodded. “But the new Walker are Walkers. Two of them. Fraternal twins.”
My jaw dropped. “Has that ever happened before?”
“Don’t think so! And then the Old Man sending you off after a third Walker…” He nodded to Joaquim. “Three at once is totally unheard of. Not impossible, of course. But to get two fringers and a third at one time…Joeb said it was a good day.” Jerzy raised his glass to Joaquim in a toast.
“Wow,” I managed, still stymied. “And, hey, look at you, off with an officer team!” I clinked my own glass against his, after Joaquim did. “You gonna get promoted?”
He turned a little red. “Not for a while, if it even happens. But it was awesome getting to see them in action,” he admitted. “Joeb’s a great leader. The new ones trusted him immediately. I would’ve, too.”
“That’s how it was when I saw Joey,” Joaquim agreed, and I was glad enough for the praise that I didn’t bother asking him to call me Joe. “I mean, after I realized I wasn’t looking at a mirror.” He smiled at me. I returned it, remembering my earlier thought about whether or not twins ever had that same problem. Well, now I’d be able to ask some!
“Twins from a fringe world, huh?” I said, still marveling at the odds. “What are they like?”
“Right now, pretty confused! They’re handling it all right, though. They’ve got each other, that’s grounding them in some reality. Names’re Jari and Jarl, girl and boy. Old Man’s gonna release an announcement about them.”
As if on cue, the loudspeaker pinged above us.
“Nice,” I told Jerzy, as though he’d planned it. He preened a little, and Acacia giggled. The second the Old Man came on the loudspeaker, though, our mirth faded. His voice was serious, the kind of tone that wasn’t at all loud but made everyone stop and listen.
“Walkers, sit tight. One of our security systems has picked up an anomaly on the graph, and we’re taking no chances of being discovered. We’re punching it. I know most of you are in the middle of breakfast, so hold on to your plates. Punching in five.”
The speaker crackled, then pinged off. A low murmur went through the crowd, some of the voices amused or complaining, a select few who hadn’t been through a punch expressing confusion—Acacia included.
“What does he mean, ‘we’re punching it’?”
“You’ll see,” I told her, pleased I finally knew something she didn’t. “You don’t get airsick, do you?”
She fixed me with a withering look, but held on to both her tray and drink, as Jerzy and I were doing. Joaquim did the same, looking confused.
A second later, reality exploded.
That was the best way to describe it, really. “Punching it” basically meant throwing the engines and the interdimensional relocator into overdrive simultaneously. We were traveling through worlds, realities, and possibilities at a few light-years per hour, while sitting still. It would be kind of like taking all the remakes you could find of the same movie, overlaying them on the same projector, and playing them all on fast-forward. The ship around us flickered in and out—it was day and night thirty times in a single second; a flock of birds appeared in the middle of the room and were gone almost too quickly to see; trees appeared and vanished. We were all underwater and none of us were wet. It was like being on the fastest, craziest 3-D roller coaster ever invented. I glanced over to Acacia to see if she was enjoying the ride.
She wasn’t. Her eyes were wide and she had her hands to her head, as though trying to block out the world’s worst headache. Her odd, circuit-board nails were pulsing with little charges, and she seemed to be flickering out of time with the rest of us. I could see her through the scenery, then I could see the ship through her, which wasn’t right.
She was out of sync.
“Hey,” I yelled, trying to be heard over the dull roar of the wind, the engines, and the beeping of the alarm.
She turned toward me, dark hair whipping around her face. She started to reach out, then pulled back at the same time I did. We both knew it was a bad idea. If she was off sync, we weren’t phasing together—and if we phased into the same space at the same time, things could get pretty messy. “What’s wrong?” I yelled.
Her mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear her. She frowned, took in a sharp breath, eyes squeezing shut. The ship lurched, I lost my grip on my tray, and the lights dimmed into blackness for a moment as the engines powered down.
The lights came back a second later, bringing with them the usual reaction from the room full of Walkers. Relief or disappointment that it was over, some laughter at those who had lost their breakfast (figuratively or literally; some of us had stronger stomachs than others). Everything was back to normal.