There was a structure up ahead, an entrance, just where I knew it would be. Where I’d walked in alongside Jo after Jerzy’s funeral, berating myself for not having taken her hand.
The door didn’t slide open as I approached—there wasn’t one, just a twisted scrap of metal half blocking the entryway. I climbed over it, waiting for that maddeningly calm voice to recognize and greet me. I was met with silence.
The halls didn’t look familiar, yet I knew exactly where to go. Some of the doors were still sealed, but it took no strength at all to pry them open. The computer was off-line, the mechanisms just ordinary gears and wheels with nothing to lock them down. No power. There was no power in the entire base—I could see only by the light filtering in shafts from the holes in the walls and roof, motes of ash and dust stirring frantically as I passed. When the sun went down, I’d be left in darkness.
I found a blaster halfway down a hall, and took it; I was immensely grateful for the feel of it in my hand, until it fell apart. Literally. It broke in two. The metal at the grip was rusted almost through. I stood there for a few moments in the hallway, the noise seeming impossibly loud in the silence, but nothing stirred. Nothing at all.
I ran faster, bolting through the hallways and leaping over debris, through doors and around corners. Even though everything looked different, things were still naggingly similar; I knew where everything was. I found the Old Man’s office with not a single wrong turn.
The scorch marks were the worst, here. The furniture was overturned, obviously having been used as a barricade at some point. The huge silver desk Josetta always sat behind was on its side, laser burns marring the smooth finish. The plush chairs and patterned oval rug were nothing but ash and dust. The door to the Old Man’s office was caved in, rusted and splattered with a dried, flaky substance I didn’t want to inspect more closely.
Everyone was gone.
InterWorld was destroyed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I WAS REMINDED OF the time I’d sat upon the surface of an unknown planet, Jay’s body at my side, and wept. I’d cried for the loss of someone I’d just met, someone who’d nevertheless saved my life a dozen times by then. I’d cried for myself, for the loneliness of knowing I was changed forever. For the family I doubted I’d ever see again. For how everything was different. I’d cried until a shadow passed over me, and InterWorld came to pick me up and take Jay home.
This time, I cried for the loss of my home, the second one I’d had to say good-bye to. For the loss of my second family, even the ones I hadn’t known as well. For the fact that I’d been too late.
For how Acacia had betrayed me.
After a while I stood, brushing the ash off my hands so I could wipe the tears from my face. I climbed over the door, into the Old Man’s office. It was ransacked: his desk overturned, papers scattered everywhere. I gave a thought to going through them, then decided I didn’t care. It was too dim in here to read, probably even too dim to find what I wanted, but I looked anyway. I looked for the picture I’d seen before, of him and Acacia. I wanted it to tell me why I’d trusted her, why he’d trusted her.
The picture didn’t tell me anything—I never found it. Instead, when I put a hand on the Old Man’s desk, it flashed a bright blue, so bright I had to look away. A jolt of adrenaline went through me; it was the first thing that had reacted to my presence since I arrived. I was on my feet and back against the wall in a second, racking my mind for any memory of the Old Man’s security systems.
The light was condensing, forming into sections, then squiggles, then letters, then words.
Joey Harker, they said. Do not panic.
The Old Man’s desk was talking to me.
Traced your signal, it said. Same world, same plane—in the future. Thousands of years.
I felt my knees go weak with relief. I was in the future—it still wasn’t ideal, I didn’t want this to be InterWorld’s future, this crumbling ruin housing nothing but ashes and echoes, but it was better than it happening in my lifetime. For me, anyway. I kept reading.
Placing a trigger on this message—if you are reading it, you’ve found Captain Harker’s office. Don’t know what IW will be like in the future. Get to the port room if you can. Sending something to help. Can only guess your location in time. Don’t touch anything else!
Good luck,
Josetta
I took a breath, waiting, but nothing else happened. After a moment, the letters faded; I touched the desk again, with the exact same result, the exact same words. So it wasn’t “real time,” as it were—it was literally a prerecorded script. Josetta must have used the tracer when I didn’t come back, and set up the message and trigger for me. My only real concern was how long it had been until she decided to look for me….
I looked down at the papers again, still tempted to try finding that picture…but Josetta had said not to touch anything, and I wasn’t entirely sure she’d have a way of knowing whether I had or not. I left the room the way it was.
The port room was, as mentioned, all the way to the left of InterWorld. The Old Man’s office was at the center, just about; I could make it there in ten minutes, four if I ran. I wondered what she was sending me. Walkers couldn’t time travel, and neither could InterWorld itself—and even if it could, it certainly couldn’t travel to itself in the future. I couldn’t use the port room to warp back from here to there, could I?
“Even if I could, the ship is powered down,” I muttered to myself, feeling a little better as the silence was broken. I wasn’t too worr
ied about anything finding me; the entire base was silent and still, and I’d been trained nine ways from Sunday on the importance of heightened senses and being aware of your surroundings. I was alone on a dead world, one that used to be my home.
I couldn’t help wondering if there were other messages for me, scattered throughout the world or on the other ships. Probably not, now that I thought of it. Josetta would have known the first place I’d go was the Old Man’s office. Not only was it instinct, it was protocol. Still, I was curious about what had happened here—and as an agent of InterWorld, wasn’t it my duty to find out? Maybe we could put precautions in place, something to stop this…
“But she said not to touch anything.” I was picking my way through a hall that must have been used as a choke point for whatever had attacked them—us—though there were no bodies of any kind. Despite all the signs of struggle and Josetta’s message, I hadn’t encountered a single piece of evidence that anything living had ever been here. I didn’t know how to feel about that.
I thought of all the coffins outside, all those silver boxes that carried us home when we died, wherever home was. Maybe I should have looked inside. The thought gave me chills.