I can get in touch with you. This takes priority. And you can have two days off when it’s done.”
I wondered if I’d actually get the two days off. It didn’t matter. “Got it. I’ll bring him in.”
“Dismissed,” said the Old Man. I stood up, figuring on a quick trip to the armory and then out into the field and into the In-Between. Before I reached the door, though, he spoke again. He was still growling at me, but it was a friendly growl. “Remember, Jay, I need you back here in one piece, and I need you back here soon. One more Walker, more or less, isn’t going to mean the end of the worlds. One less field officer might. Stay out of trouble. You’ll be back and debriefing by oh seven hundred hours tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and closed the door.
The Old Man’s assistant handed me my armory requisition slip. Then she smiled at me. Her name’s Josetta. “Goes for me, too, Jay,” she said. “Come back safe. We need all the field ops we can get.”
The quartermaster is from one of the heavier Earths—places where you feel like you weigh five hundred pounds, and often do. He’s shaped like a barrel, ten inches taller than I am. Looking at him is like looking into a distorting mirror at a carnival, the kind that squashes you as it magnifies you.
I requisitioned an encounter suit, watched him toss it down to me like it didn’t weigh anything at all. I caught it, and it almost knocked me over. It must have weighed seventy-five pounds. I figured he was mad at me for losing the combat jacket and the belt.
I signed for the encounter suit. I stripped down to my T-shirt and boxers, draped it over me and activated it, feeling it cover my body from head to toe; and then I set my mind on the new kid. I got a bead on him and began to Walk toward him. . . .
The In-Between was cold, and it tasted like vanilla and woodsmoke in my mouth. I found him without a hitch. And then it all went wrong.
I WAS WALKING AFTER the witch, with Mr. Jellyfish and the tattooed man just behind me.
It was like two people were living in my head. One of them was ME, a big huge me, who had somehow decided that the most important thing there ever was or would be was the witch woman he was following out of the high school. The other person in my head was me, too, but a tiny little me who was screaming silently, who was terrified of the witch and the tattooed man and Mr. Jellyfish, who wanted to run, to save himself.
Trouble was, the little me was having no effect whatsoever. We crossed the football field, heading toward the old oak tree, which had been struck by lightning a couple of years back and now just stuck up into the sky like a rotten tooth. The sun had just gone down, but the sky was still light. I was shivering.
The witch turned to the tattooed man. “Scarabus, contact the transport.”
He bowed his head. I could see goose bumps on his skin under one of those not-quite-clear images. He raised a finger and touched it to one of the tattoos on his neck, and suddenly I could see that one clearly. It was a ship under sail. He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the pupils were glowing gently.
“The ship Lacrimae Mundi at your bidding, lady,” he said in a distant voice like a radio broadcast.
“I have our quarry safely here. Bring her in, captain.”
“As you wish,” said the tattooed man, in the distant voice. Then he closed his eyes and took his hand off his tattoo; and when he opened his eyes, they were normal once more. “What’s the word?” he asked in his normal voice.
“They’re bringing her in now,” said the jellyfish man. “Look!”
I raised my head.
The ship—it seemed as big as the auditorium—that was materializing in the air in front of us looked like every pirate ship you’ve ever seen in old movies: stained wooden planks, big billowing sails, and a figurehead of a man with the head of a shark. It was gliding toward us about five feet above the ground, and the green grass of the football field tossed back and forth like the surface of the sea as it passed.
The big me couldn’t have cared less about ghost ships sailing through the air, as long as the witch lady and I were together. The little me that was trapped in the back of my head was sort of hoping that all this was just a bad reaction to some new medication the nice doctors were trying on me in whatever mental hospital they had me locked up in.
A rope ladder was thrown over the side of the ship.
“Climb!” said the witch woman, and I climbed.
When I was up over the side of the ship, huge hands grabbed me and dropped me on the deck like a sack of potatoes. I looked up to see men the size of wrestlers dressed like sailors in pirate movies. They had scarves tied around their heads and worn old sweaters and battered jeans, and were barefoot. They were more careful with the witch woman, lifting her carefully over the side of the ship. They all backed away then. I guessed that they didn’t want to touch the jellyfish man or Scarabus, the tattooed guy, and I couldn’t really blame them.
One of the sailors looked down at me. “Is that what all the fuss is about?” he asked. “That shrimp?”
“Yes,” said the witch woman coldly. “That shrimp is what all the fuss is about.”
“Lumme,” said the sailor. “Are we going to drop him overboard, then? Once we’re under way?”
“Hurt him before we get back to HEX and every warlock in the Tarn will want a little piece of your hide,” she told him. “He dies our way. What do you think powers this ship of yours, anyway? Take him down to my quarters.”
She turned to me. “Joseph, you need to go with this man. Stay where he tells you to stay. To do otherwise would make me very unhappy.”
The idea of hurting her made my heart ache. Literally— there was a stabbing pain inside me. I knew that I could never do anything to make her unhappy in any way. I would wait for her until the world ended if I had to.
The sailor showed me down a flight of steps into a narrow corridor that smelled like floor polish and fish. At the end of the corridor there was a door, and we opened it.
“Here we are, my fine shrimp,” he said. “The Lady Indigo’s quarters for the voyage back to HEX. You stand here and wait for her. If you need to relieve yourself, there’s a lavatory back there, through that door. Use it; don’t befoul yourself. She’ll be down when she’s ready. Got to chart our course back now, she does, with the captain.”
He was talking to me like you’d talk to a pet or a farm animal, just to hear the sound of his own voice.
He went out.
There was a lurching, then, and through the round cabin window I could see the evening sky dissolve into stars, thousands of them, floating in a violet blackness. We were moving.
I must have stood there for hours, waiting beside the door.
At one point I realized I needed to pee, and I went through the door that the sailor had pointed to. I suppose I expected something cramped and old-fashioned,
