“No,” I said, a little too forcefully. She raised an eyebrow; I took a breath. “No, I don’t think so. He’s been on my team for so many missions; he was captured by HEX once—he’s just like me. He’s one of me. I think…” I fell silent, and Acacia nudged me with a shoulder.
“You think what?”
“I think this happened recently. Like when we got Joaquim. We were on a Binary world, and J/O had to hack into the mainframe to get some information for the Old Man. Something backfired, and…he was unconscious when I rejoined the team. He was out for a few days.”
“They infected him,” murmured Acacia, confirming what I’d just realized myself.
“Doesn’t he have antispyware or something?” I wondered aloud. “Even my world has that, and we’re not half as advanced!”
Acacia snorted, but I was too upset to find it even faintly funny. My friend was a member of the Binary now. No wonder he’d been trying to kill me. I put my head in my hands.
“Hey, it’s okay, Joe. We can fix him.” She paused, then went on, though seemingly reluctant to do so. “I…this doesn’t solve how he followed us, though. The Binary can’t time travel, either. The only ones I know who can are the Techmaturges, but even their ability is limited. That’s how we stay on top.”
“If they can time travel, couldn’t one of them have come back and given him the power?”
“They can’t transfer it like that. It’s much more complicated than that. Every time someone tries to change the time line, alternate worlds are created. And I’d know if one was here, or had been here.”
“How?”
“Because it’s my job to know. We keep close track of these guys. There aren’t many, but—”
“But their power can destroy worlds with a single glance, I know.” I ran my hands through my hair, grabbing two fistfuls of it in frustration. “I have to get back. I don’t know if he’s just after me, or everything—but InterWorld might be in danger.”
I felt her sigh, felt her hair brush against the back of my neck as she looked away. “I don’t think you should go back yet, Joe.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not safe.”
My response was a laugh that came out a whole lot more bitter than I intended it to. “Nowhere’s safe right now, Acacia. My team and most of another just barely made it back alive from a simple capture-the-flag mission. One of us didn’t. And we were just followed through time by a Walker, someone who’s supposed to be on my team—” I stopped, but not because Acacia was talking. I wasn’t even sure what she was saying—telling me to calm down, maybe, or explaining why she thought it wasn’t safe. I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about the rockslide and J/O’s virus and the shield disk. I was thinking about how he’d been on standby for a while, and I hadn’t seen him until we went on our training mission. I was thinking about how he’d still been unconscious in the infirmary when I’d signed out to go off Base.
Someone had to have gone back to F?986 to get the shield disk—but it hadn’t been him. He’d been plugged in right up until the capture-the-flag game, and the Base Town sensors automatically filed it if someone Walked off world. I’d seen the sign-outs before I left; J/O hadn’t left Base.
He’d been plugged in, though. To the infirmary. Could he have gotten access to the sheets, scrambled it so that his name wasn’t there? No, he couldn’t have done both, not in that amount of time….
The more I thought about it, the more certain I was: Someone else had gone back to Earth F?986. Someone else had picked up the lost disk, recharged it, and brought it on a simple training mission instead of turning it in. Someone who’d been in the rockslide and survived.
“There’s someone else.” I cut Acacia off midsentence, gaze locked on the silhouette of J/O as he Walked, trying to find us. “There’s another traitor in InterWorld. He’s there right now. I have to—”
I never saw her move. All I knew was that I felt an abrupt prick at the base of my neck, like something had stung or bitten me, and then my entire body grew uncomfortably warm. I couldn’t move. The shapes around me were growing fuzzier, my vision was suddenly filled with a faint purple glow, and static crackled in my ears.
I didn’t even feel myself falling, but I definitely knew it when I hit the ground. Still, the pain seemed far away, held just outside my body by that shining purple light. I tried to get up, or at least roll over and look at Acacia, but my limbs weren’t responding to my brain. For one brief, horrified moment, I remembered when Lady Indigo of HEX had laid a spell on me. There had been a little voice of reason inside me, screaming at me to run, but I’d simply stayed at her side and obeyed her every command. For an instant, I was terrified that Acacia had done the same. Then she stepped into my line of vision, knelt, and put a hand to my head. She looked sad.
The ground beneath us vanished, and once again we fell through time.
The TimeWatch headquarters—what li
ttle I could see of it—seemed a lot like InterWorld. It wasn’t that Acacia had put a spell on me, exactly, but she’d somehow disabled my motor functions. I was only half conscious when I felt ground beneath me again. It was white tile, shining with the reflection of the bright lights above us. Voices rang out around me, one of them Acacia’s, but I couldn’t make out the words.
She had me in some kind of antigravity grip. I occasionally saw sparks of purple and green around me, saw her nails glowing as she took me through the corridors. I couldn’t tell if I was walking or not, or if my feet were even touching the ground. Everything was bright and clean and shining, the colors all soft and muted, beautifully luminescent. After only a few rooms we stopped, and I was moved to some kind of gurney. Now I could see everything above me, and I forgot about worrying where I was going or what was happening as I gazed up into the domed sky.
I couldn’t tell if it was an open roof or a window or if it was painted on—but it was beautiful. It looked like the night sky except white instead of dark blue, with a thousand sunsets swirling behind the misty clouds. The “stars” were all blues and greens and peaches, lavenders and rosy hues; and there was no single sun or moon but rather thousands of them, small and large and all sharing the sky. Some parts grew darker, others lighter, then they’d switch, giving the impression of a pulse or faint heartbeat. It wasn’t just in that one room, either. It was everywhere we went, down hallways and through corridors, with Acacia pushing me along like a patient on the way to surgery.
That was an unsettling comparison.
Gradually, I became aware of hushed voices around me. I tried to turn my head to either side, and couldn’t. I could just barely see figures out of the corner of my vision, hazy and indistinct, like those we’d just left at the time vortex. They were whispering. The static in my ears had died down a little, and I could make out someone saying “Is that him?”
Acacia took me through several halls and rooms, and into something resembling an elevator. I couldn’t tell if we were going up or down, but I assumed down because when we got out, the sky was gone. It wasn’t as bright anymore. The walls were gray instead of white.