“Okay, Hue,” I said, and the little mudluff floated up from where he’d been in the hood of my sweatshirt. It was weird; while I rarely ever saw him shrink or grow, he always seemed to fit wherever he needed to. He was now bigger than the hood he’d been resting in, about the balloon size he usually was. I hadn’t even noticed him there, so he must have made himself smaller. I supposed that was one benefit of being multidimensional.
“C’mere, Hue,” Josephine called. He floated over, settling on her outstretched hand. I was worried that he wasn’t going to cooperate with her, or would bond with her for long enough to let her get back to InterWorld Beta and then wander off. I was hoping, if that did happen, that he would come back to me; the last thing we needed was to be stranded here until Hue decided to meander back. The little guy hadn’t let me down yet, though. He’d wandered off for weeks at a time, but he’d always come back.
“Do what you did with us before,” I urged, when Hue perched on Josephine’s hand. He flickered from blue to white, then flashed silver for a second. “Yeah, like that. Help her get back to the ship.” I wasn’t sure why silver reminded me of the way he’d flowed over me, but it did. . . . After a moment, though, I had it. The silver encounter suit I’d worn once had flowed over me in the same way. Hue had a very specific way of communicating with me, mostly seeming to rely on my visual memory. I’d always sort of wondered about that.
Hue bobbed up and down a few times, seeming to bounce against Josephine’s hand. Then he moved sideways, except part of him stayed on the tips of her fingers. He started to move around her like that, covering her slowly, like he had before. I suddenly felt anxious, like the first time my mom had let my little sister walk to the corner store by herself. I’d been certain she’d inherited my horrible sense of direction and would get hopelessly lost on the way there.
“Remember to center yourself,” I told her. “You’re not making a path, you’re—”
“Finding one that’s already there,” she said, standing still as Hue spread to her feet and up her torso. “I know. I’ve Walked several times over the past few days, remember?”
“Okay, okay. As for the rest of you”—I tilted my head to address the dozen or so Walkers behind her—“Josephine is Walking, you’re following. Don’t lose her. You won’t be able to find the path on your own; you can’t see the ones that weave through time.” I wondered if Acacia saw things the same way we did; if the timestream was like a bunch of paths that she could follow forward or backward.
“You guys ready?” Josephine asked, and was rewarded with silence; we were all trained well enough to know that if there was a chorus of yeses, we wouldn’t hear the one person who was saying no. She glanced at me and I nodded, so she took Jo’s hand and inhaled—
and vanished, which was what it looked like when someone Walked. They were gone in the blink of an eye, like they’d disappeared into thin air, midstep. I could feel them leave, because of my own ability to Walk; it was like sensing a door opening and closing when you’re alone in a room. You know it happened, even if you weren’t looking.
“Okay,” I said, turning to my group. There were a few faces I recognized; Joeb, of course, and the twins, who had asked to stay with him. Jarl was no longer a bird, and his resemblance to his sister was striking. The one hope I had of telling them apart was the neatly trimmed beard on his face; his hair was just as short as Jari’s and he had her same red hair and bright green eyes.
I put a few more names to faces, like Jirho and Jijoo, and one or two others I saw around the back. They were all people I was used to seeing here and there, but there weren’t many of them (aside from J’r’ohoho) I had regular classes or training sessions with. “It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes for Josephine to get back.” Assuming everything goes according to plan, please oh please, just this once let everything go according to plan. . . . “So we’d better get ready.”
“If she’s traveling through time,” Jirho piped up from the front of the group, “shouldn’t she be able to come back immediately? Just a few seconds after she left?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” I said. Conversations with a Time Agent had given me a basic grasp of this stuff, and I hoped I sounded sure enough that they wouldn’t question me. “She’s still anchored to her personal timeline. She can stay in the past for as long as she likes, but time will keep moving. If she stays for five minutes, she’ll return five minutes from when she left.”
“That’s disappointing,” someone else said. “What’s the point in time traveling if you can’t go back to fix mistakes?”
“What’s the point of being able to Walk?” I shot back, and a few of them looked thoughtful. There was no point, really. It was just something we could do, and we were lucky enough (or unlucky enough, depending on your perspective) to be able to use it to our advantage in a war.
“Once we get to InterWorld Beta,” I moved on, “there will still be a lot to do. I’ve got the basic functions running on solar
power for now, but we still have to charge the transducers. Once we get the soliton array working, the engines will be able to move us forward and backward again. Then we can get the ship back to our timeline, and we won’t have to rely on Hue to get us back to base.”
“How are we powering the transducers?” J’r’ohoho asked. It always amused me to hear the centaur version of me talk about technology; though he’d come from a tribal society that had practically just invented the wheel, he’d taken very quickly to all his science lessons and was usually top of the class.
It was so like him to ask the hard questions.
“We’ll find a way when we get there,” Joeb cut in, probably sensing that my answer was about to be another version of I don’t know. I was, again, immensely grateful. “Let’s worry about one thing at a time.”
I had only just finished speaking when I once more had the sense of a door opening nearby, which fortunately meant we had one less thing to worry about. Josephine stepped back through thin air a few feet from where she’d been previously, looking quite pleased with herself. Hue (again seeming smaller than he should be) was perched on her shoulder.
“Welcome back,” I said, over the small round of cheering that bubbled up as she reappeared. “Everything go okay?”
“No problems,” she said. “I dropped them off in the courtyard.” She paused, her pride at a job well done fading. “Some of them were pretty upset to see it like that.”
I nodded, glancing at the others. I had explained about how I’d been sent to future InterWorld and found it destroyed, but knowing it wasn’t the same as seeing it. InterWorld Base Town was home as much as the places we’d all come from had been, and seeing it like that was more than hard. It was hopeless. It felt like we’d already lost. “We’ll get it fixed up again,” I told her, though I was saying it for everyone. “It’ll be better than new, and then we’ll get back to our InterWorld and rescue the rest of us. It’ll feel like home again.”
I held out both hands, one to Josephine and one to Joeb, and nodded at the former. “Let’s go. Why don’t you do the honors again?”
“Oh? I figured you’d want to do it yourself, you’re such a mother hen,” she shot at me, but she looked pleased. “Okay, Hue. One more time.”
Hue (who seemed to be a shade or two paler than his usual neutral color; this probably was tiring him out) flowed over her once again, barely brushing over my fingers where Josephine was carefully holding my injured hand. Then she Walked, and so did Joeb, myself, the twins, and the nine others with us.
It felt different this time. It was like stepping through a door, as usual, but we found nothing on the other side. No path. Darkness closed around us as we went over the threshold, so quickly that none of us had time to warn one another. I felt Josephine stumble and fall, and I followed her, pitching headlong into a void.
Joeb’s hand slipped from mine, and my mouth opened and my vocal cords vibrated with a shout, but there was no sound. There was nothing at all.
I clutched tight to Josephine’s hand, but I wasn’t even sure I could still feel it in mine. I thought I smelled perfume, something sweet, like roses. I heard something, too, an echo that might have been a breathy laugh, and then the darkness swallowed me whole.