“I’m sorry, Joey,” he started, but I shook my head.
“It wasn’t your fault. You’re you again, that’s all that matters.” I saw a weight visibly lift from him as I spoke. I let that sink in for a moment, then added, “But you should really get some kind of antivirus or something.”
“Ha-ha.” He made a face, but I could see a small smile tug at the corner of his mouth.
“Seriously, even my world has that. Norton or something, y’know?”
“Fff. Right. Norton.”
We sat in silence for a moment. Though I’d enjoyed teasing him, my thoughts drifted back to Acacia and Avery, and Josephine. Had Avery meant it when he’d said he taught her to use a grav-board? Had they really spent enough time together, in the five minutes it was to me in the Nowhere-at-All, to fall in love? How long had it been for them? I knew that time flowed differently on some worlds. . . . Had he taken her to a place where time moved slower? If he truly had loved her, how had he been able to let her die—no, to strike the killing blow himself? He’d said severing the tie with Lady Indigo would kill Josephine, yet he’d been willing to do it anyway. Was the alternative horrible enough that killing her had been the only option?
I hadn’t liked Avery’s attitude from the beginning, but if he’d really spent all that time with Josephine, if he’d brought her back to save us knowing she’d be in danger and then lost her, I supposed I could understand his being less than friendly.
Was that what it would be like for Acacia and me, if we ever got together? Don’t get me wrong, I knew I was thinking ahead here. I still barely knew the girl, but there was enough of a something between us that I couldn’t help putting myself in Josephine’s shoes. Had she loved Avery, too? Had she known during those moments they’d spent together that loving a Time Agent was impossible?
J/O interrupted my train of thought. “I think I found it, Joey.”
I stood, going to stand behind J/O. A menu with a few different options was visible on the screen, hard to read through the dust and small cracks. It seemed to be what I’d been looking for, but . . . “Can you tell it to dictate?”
“The voice algorithms are corrupted,” he said. “The system’s been sitting so long that only half of it works.”
“Doesn’t matter. I want a list of all Earth-classified planets from F delta ninety-eight to the sixth through F epsilon ninety-eight to the seventh.”
He paused, clearly recognizing the first classification. I wasn’t surprised. It was the Binary world he’d been corrupted on, where we’d first retrieved Joaquim, the Walker who’d turned out to not be a Walker at all. . . .
Frankly speaking, it was the world where everything had first gone to hell in the proverbial handbasket.
“Okay,” J/O said. “It’s indexing.” He paused again, obviously scanning the results. “It’s . . . that’s a lot of planets, Joey.”
“I know.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Just project the list for me.”
He looked around to find a flat surface, finally settling on the wall to my left. His cybernetic eye grew brighter, the little circuits visible in the iris flaring to life. A blank square appeared on the wall, like when a projector first turns on before the movie starts, then words started to appear and scroll like the end credits, almost faster than I could read.
&nb
sp; Earth F?986
Earth F?986+1
Earth F?986+2
Earth F?986+3
Earth F?986+4
Earth F?986+5
“Go ahead and collapse subcategories,” I said quickly.
“One moment.” The classifications vanished, then started again.
Earth F?986
Earth F?985