“How did you know it would?”
“I’ve been here before. The ship can’t phase without the engines, and the engines don’t run without power. I knew it’d be in the same place.”
“So we can phase again if we get power?”
“Maybe. I know power makes the ship run, but I don’t know exactly how we make it phase. I know how HEX and Binary do it with their ships, but . . .” I shook my head. That wasn’t on the table.
“How?” I should have seen that question coming.
“They use us,” I said as bluntly as I could to keep from discussing it further. “They take our ability to Walk and use it for their own ships.”
She pressed her lips together, looking away. Even as new to this as she was, she’d felt what it was like to Walk, and I think she already couldn’t imagine having that taken away. I knew how she felt.
“Come on,” I said, flipping one final switch. “It’s time for a lesson.”
I hadn’t really bothered looking out any windows, the last time I was here. I’d been in too much of a hurry, too desperate to get back to where I belonged. Back then, I’d assumed the ship was still floating above the ground, cruising along at about five thousand feet as usual.
I’d realized it slowly as we made our way through the ship this time, but we were actually docked: completely and utterly still. We were sitting on the ground in a wide-open field, nothing but grassy plains visible as far as the eye could see. There might have been a sparkle of water in the distance, but it could just as easily have been a trick of the light.
“Are we alone on the planet, too?” Josephine asked, once she’d taken in the size of InterWorld itself. We weren’t talking the size of New York or anything, but it certainly would have taken a while to walk all the way around it.
“Depends on your definition,” I said, pointing to a group of butterflies collecting around some flowers. “We’re the only people. This is a prehistoric world.”
“But I thought we were in the future.”
I paused. Oh, boy. This is about to get complicated. “We are. But InterWorld operates on a broad spectrum of locations. Not just back and forth”—I moved my hand from side to side—“but forward and backward. There are thousands of different dimensions programmed into the soliton array engines, but only three basic Earths. The ship moves—or moved—forward and backward in time over a certain period, as well as sideways into different dimensions on those three Earths. Even though the ship can move further into the future, we tend to stay in prehistoric times and move sideways. Less chance of startling the locals that way.”
She was glaring at me. “Did you actually answer my question, or did you just spout a bunch of bull—”
“Sorry, sorry. I got carried away. Basically, we are not in the future. We’re in the past, because that was the last place this InterWorld docked. But this InterWorld came here, to the past of this world, from the future.”
She frowned, considering. “But . . . we went into the future. Sort of. I mean, that’s what it felt like. It was like taking a giant step forward, when your bubble thing—”
“Hue.”
“—was wrapped around us.”
“Yes, but we went forward into InterWorld’s future, which took us to the past,” I explained. “So the ship is from the future, but the planet is in the past. Make sense?”
She hesitated, looking like she had a question that she thought might be considered stupid. After a moment, she asked “Are there dinosaurs here?”
I didn’t laugh. I kind of wanted to, but I understood why she was asking. I mean, wouldn’t you have? I know I would have. “I honestly don’t know,” I told her, and she glanced around as though she might see one. “On some planets, yes, there are. And, yes,” I said, unable to help a grin. “I’ve seen them. But I don’t know if it’s this one. I don’t know which planet we parked on.”
“Okay,” she said, still looking up at the sky, which was brightening to a blinding blue. It was chilly out here in the early morning, but we both had our jackets on, and the sun was warm where it was rising over the horizon. “So what now?”
“Now I teach you to Walk,” I said, gesturing for her to follow me. “You want to be away from everything for your first try. It’s really difficult to Walk into something that’s already there, but it’s not impossible.”
“You mean, I could get stuck in a rock, or something . . . ?”
“Like I said, it’s unlikely, but it is possible. We’ve basically got built-in subliminal algorithms for that kind of thing, like an instinctive navigational system. Reflex, kinda. But when you’re first learning, it’s better not to take any chances.”
“Okay,” she said, watching me closely. She had a familiar look of determination on her face; familiar, because she looked so much like me. “Teach me.”
>
I spent the better part of the afternoon teaching her how to Walk, and discovered that not only was she a fantastic student, she had a particular ability for it. Not that it came easier to her than to any of the rest of us (in fact, it took her the better part of an hour to follow my instructions correctly), but that once she learned it, she slipped through the dimensions like a cat burglar on an easy heist. I even lost her once, which was a frightening moment, considering she was my only recruit. I wound up having to sidestep through four different dimensions and cast my senses about for her every time, which was more than a little tiring.
“And you’ve never Walked before?” I asked once I’d found her, sitting in the middle of the field, blowing tufts of dandelions into the wind.