deck. I couldn’t even begin to imagine not doing so. (The Joey buried deep inside me could—he kept on yelling and screaming that I should resist, run, anything. I kept walking. His words meant nothing.)
Above us star fields spun and blinked and whorled. Neville the jelly man hurried over as soon as he spotted us.
“I’ve checked all the instruments and portents,” he said self-importantly, in his sucking-mud voice, “and consulted the astrolabe, and they are all quite certain. We are carrying a stowaway. Some presence arrived on the Lacrimae Mundi about an hour ago. Just when I said I felt something in the pit of my stomach.”
“And a mighty stomach it is, too,” said the mirror man pretending to be Scarabus in Scarabus’s voice. I was wrong, then; the suit could do voices, too.
“I shall ignore that comment,” said the jelly man to Scarabus.
“What kind of stowaway, Neville?” asked Lady Indigo.
“Could be one of Graceful Zelda’s people trying to grab the Harker, so they can take all the credit,” said Scarabus. “You know how much she hates you. If she took your Harker back to HEX, it would make her look very good.”
“Zelda.” Lady Indigo made a face, as if she’d bitten into something that had turned out to be mostly maggots.
Neville hugged himself with his jellyfish hands and looked miserable. “She wants my skin,” he said. “Has for years. Wants a coat, Zelda does, one that’ll let her show off and still be warm.”
Before he could continue, Scarabus—Jay pretending to be Scarabus—looked at me and squinted. “My lady,” he said, “how do you know this is still your Harker? What if it’s some kind of changeling? They could have already stolen the boy away and left something behind that only looks like him. Some kind of spell creature, perhaps. Easy enough to do, even here.”
Lady Indigo frowned and looked at me. Then she gestured in the air with one hand while she sang three clear notes. “Now,” she said, “any spell that is on or around you is removed. Let us see what you truly are.”
I realized that I could speak again if I wanted to.
I could do anything I wanted to now.
I was back in charge, and, boy, did it feel good to be back.
“Right, Joey,” said the Scarabus imposter, his face and body flowing back into silver.
“Jay? Is that you?”
“Of course it’s me! Come on!” He picked me up in a fireman’s carry and ran.
We made it almost to the rail when there was a small green explosion, like a firecracker going off, and Jay made a noise of pain. I shifted my head, stared at his opposite shoulder. The mirror stuff covering it was seared and gone, exposing a mass of circuitry and skin, and most of the skin was bleeding. I could see the bizarre, distorted images of Lady Indigo, Neville and Scarabus reflected from his back.
He dropped me.
We were up against the edge of the ship. On the other side of the bulwark was . . . nothing. Just stars and moons and galaxies, going on forever.
Lady Indigo raised her hand. A small bead of green fire hung in her palm.
Neville had a huge, nasty-looking sword in one hand. I don’t know where it came from, but it glistened and jiggled just like his skin. He started walking toward us.
I heard something above us and looked up. The rigging was filled with sailors, and the sailors all had knives.
Things were definitely not looking good.
I heard a clattering on the deck. “Don’t shoot them, my lady! Hold your fire!” The real Scarabus stumbled up from below.
He seemed like an unlikely saviour.
“Please,” he said. “Let me. This calls for something special.” He extended one tattoo-covered arm at us and moved his other hand toward his bicep. There was a blurry image of a huge serpent curled around his upper arm. I was pretty sure that if he touched that tattoo, the snake would be real, and big—and undoubtedly hungry.
There was only one thing left to do, so we did it.
We jumped.
From Jay’s Journal
Looking back on it, I made a couple of seriously wrong calls. The wrongest was deciding to meet the new kid outside his parents’ house in the new world that he’d slipped into.
I was hoping that he wouldn’t start Walking before I got to him. But hope pays no dividends, as the Old Man says. (“Hope when you’ve got nothing else,” he once told us. “But if you’ve got anything else, then for Heaven’s sake, DO it!”) And Joey had already started Walking.
Not far. He’d done what most new Walkers do—slipped into a world he wasn’t in. It’s harder to Walk into a world in which “you” exist already: It’s like identical magnetic poles repelling. He needed an out, and so he slipped into a world in which he wasn’t.
Which meant that it took me an extra forty minutes to locate him, Walking from plane to plane. Finally I tracked him—he was on a crosstown bus, headed home. Or what he thought was home.
And I waited outside his home. I suppose I figured that he’d be more amenable to reason once he saw what was waiting for him in there.
But, as the Old Man pointed out that morning, he must have tripped every alarm in creation when he started Walking.
And he was in no state to be talked to when he came out of that house. Which meant we were sitting ducks for the Binary retiarii on their Gravitrons, waving their nets around.
Given the alternatives, I don’t know which I hate worse: the Binary or the HEX folk.
HEX boils young Walkers down to their essences. I mean that literally—they put us in huge pots, like in those cannibal cartoons you used to see in the back of newspapers, and surround it with a web of spells and wards. Then they boil us down to nothing but our essence—our souls, if you will—which they force into glass pots. And they use those glass pots to power their ships and any multiworld traveling they do.
The Binary treat Walkers differently, but no better. They chill us to negative 273º, a hair above absolute zero, hang us from meat hooks, then seal us in these huge hangars on their homeworld, with pipes and wires going into the back of our heads, and keep us there, not quite dead but a long, long way from alive, while they drain our energy and use it to power their interplane travel.
If it’s possible to hate two organizations exactly the same, then that’s how much I hate them.
So Joey did the smart thing—unconsciously, but it was still smart—when the Binary goons showed up. He Walked between worlds again.
I took out the three retiarii without any trouble.
Then
