olors. It’s like being invited to a royal banquet and then only being allowed to pick the crumbs off one plate.
So, take everything I just told you, and then try to imagine it all at once. Things moving at angles you didn’t even know existed, inverting and reverting and transforming, all painted with colors and textures and noises, and mash it all together. Then picture it reflected in two cracked mirrors, facing each other. That’s kind of what the In-Between is like.
That’s where the girl took us, though it was by far the most wrenching transition I’d ever experienced. I’d traveled to the In-Between more times than I could count by now, and the jump had never once made me feel as queasy as it did when she brought us there.
That’s where we were, though; I could tell before I even opened my eyes. All my senses, both internal and external, were verifying it. I could tell by the incredible and ever-changing sounds: mostly wind chimes but occasionally faraway noises like car horns, rumblings, birdsongs, water flowing, and every now and then the strains of an old instrumental from the 1930s that my dad was fond of, “Powerhouse,” by Raymond Scott. If you’ve ever watched an old Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoon, you’ve probably heard it. I could smell paprika; chocolate; and an astringent, medicinal smell that I couldn’t identify. The breeze felt now like feathers, now like fine-grain sandpaper. All this before I even opened my eyes.
So I opened my eyes.
I was standing on what looked like a Rand McNally globe of a terrestrial planet. It was maybe twenty feet in diameter and I was sticking out from it at a forty-five-degree angle, halfway between the equator and the South Pole, just like the Little Prince on his asteroid (assuming the South Pole was on the “bottom” relative to me and the rest of my team, who were standing or floating upon or nearby a whole slew of various other improbabilities).
And something wasn’t right.
That probably seems like a pretty ridiculous statement; after all, when is anything ever right about the In-Between? It’s the essence of wrongness, entropy’s landfill. Saying there was something not right about it was like saying there was something a little scary about Lord Dogknife.
But the feeling was unmistakable. Furthermore, it wasn’t going away.
Jo opened her eyes then, and by the look on her face, I could tell she felt the same way.
J/O looked accusingly at me. “Where did you take us?”
“Hey, I didn’t take us anywhere! It was that girl,” I said. Technically, Jai was our senior officer, but after a training mission had gone awry and I’d rescued them from the clutches of HEX, most of them tended to look to me in a pinch. There are drawbacks to being even an unofficial team leader, the biggest of which is getting blamed for everything.
“Fine, then where’d your girlfriend take us?” Jo’s voice was as accusing as J/O’s glare, and it probably didn’t help my case that I was crimson again, but I tried to protest anyway. “She’s not my—”
Before I could finish, several members of my team gave little reactions of surprise, looking past me. I whirled as the unfamiliar voice sounded from behind me, my hands coming up in a defensive position. I know it sounds like cheesy kung fu movie stuff, but you learn to think fast in the In-Between.
“Yes, I’d say that is rather premature,” said the mysterious girl, giving me another wink, “since we’ve only just met.”
“Who are you?” The question was clear and strong, the voice of someone not at all intimidated—unfortunately, it was Jakon’s voice, not mine. All I’d managed to do was stutter. My tongue felt like it was tied in a Gordian knot.
“A friend,” she answered easily, giving a little shrug of one shoulder. When I’d still been home—before my life became cluttered with Multiverses, Altiverses, and versions of me sporting fur, fangs, wings, and bionic implants—I had a wild, passionate, undying crush on a girl named Rowena. Rowena had sometimes done that artless little shrug when she was being silly or coy. I’d come to covet it, to take it as proof that I could amuse her in some way, even if all I’d said to prompt it was “That test was murder, huh?” or “Do they really expect us to run a mile in eight minutes?”
“Not good enough,” I said. I stepped off the miniature world and onto a bright red cube the size of a steamer trunk that was busily engaged in turning itself inside out. It stabilized as soon as my shoe touched it. Gravity shifted to accommodate, and behind me the “planet” collapsed into a point and vanished. I hardly noticed. Oddly, the memory of Rowena had strengthened my resolve a bit. I’d never been able to talk to her because, really, what do you say to a girl like that when you’re just one guy in a school of hundreds? There had been nothing special about me then.
Now, however, I was more than just a high school kid—I was a Walker. (Although, when you get right down to it, now I was essentially one guy in an army of a few hundred different versions of me, but thinking of it like that wasn’t conducive to my self-esteem right then.) “Tell me who you are, where you’ve taken us, and—”
She looked at me with what might have been something akin to respect but was more likely just surprise that the blushing idiot was able to form sentences. Probably the latter, because instead of actually answering me, she said, “You honestly don’t recognize the In-Between?”
“Of course I recognize—” I began, only to have her talk over me again.
“Then that renders your second question a little superfluous, doesn’t it?”
I kept talking, going right over her as she finished. “—but it’s not our In-Between.” As I said it, it became clearer to me that whatever was wrong about the In-Between was her doing. She was an unknown, and quite possibly an agent of either HEX or the Binary. But even so, I was inclined to trust her—and that really scared me. I couldn’t risk her finding out the way back to Base. The notion wasn’t likely; it took a specific formula to get back to InterWorld, and only Walkers knew it. She was clearly not a Walker. Yet, she’d traversed the In-Between….
She gave me a considering glance. “You’re right. And wrong, but mostly you’re right. I’m sorry about that; I needed to make sure the Binary were off your trail.” She gave that same one-shouldered shrug and a wink. “Not to worry; it’s fixed.”
Then that purple light enveloped us again, before we could react, and that same sense of severe dislocation, worse than anything I’d ever experienced before—
And then we were home, back on the base that we all recognized. Everything was as it should be. We’d made it back to InterWorld.
Only…
She was with us.
CHAPTER THREE
THE OLD MAN IS…