in.”
“That’s okay. Is there a kitchen around here? I’m starving.”
“Yes,” I hedged a little. Kitchen meant mess hall, and mess hall meant people, and people meant awkward. At least in this situation. “But it’ll probably be pretty full . . .”
“I don’t mind. Which way?” She smiled cheerfully at me, and I felt my heart and stomach collide. I was pretty nervous about having to introduce her to everyone who’d been calling her my girlfriend.
“Uh, back the way we came.” I turned to go, offering a hand to Hue as he met us at the door. Hue didn’t like the Hazard Zone. He’d popped in to see me once in the middle of a simulation, and I thought he was going to have a coronary—if mudluffs even have hearts. He’d turned a confused grayish, then a few different shades of red or pink, all of which seemed to mean alarmed, then he’d basically turned into a multi-colored disco ball. If anyone in the room had been prone to seizures, Hue would have done them in right then. Then he’d vanished, and I hadn’t seen him for almost a whole week. To tell the truth, I’d been getting worried by the time he finally showed up again.
I’d tried to ask him about it, but hadn’t gotten much of a response. He seemed confused any time I’d brought it up. The one time I’d been sort of “linked” with him, I’d gotten an impression of the In-Between making perfect sense, from his point of view. I suspected that, for Hue, being in the Hazard Zone was like how my mom used to get sick on virtual reality rides at theme parks; she’d say that because her body wasn’t doing what the world around her was telling her it was doing, it caused a weird dislocation. I guess being a multidimensional life-form in a room full of 3-D special effects and things that weren’t actually what they looked like must have been a little bizarre.
Walking through the halls with a girl on one side and a mudluff on the other was, as I’d mentioned before, a little weird. I mean, I knew I was the odd one out as far as many things went—and let me tell you how much fun it was living with a bunch of people who are as similar to you as people could get and still being the odd one out—but this only served to reinforce it. I was the one who’d gotten Jay killed. I was the one who’d been captured by HEX. I was the one who’d made friends with a mudluff. I’d stumbled into a HEX trap a second time, lost my entire team, been kicked off Inter-World, and somehow regained my memories and found my team again. And I was the first redheaded J-named person to bring someone new to the base. No one else here could say any one of those things, let alone all of them . . . and here I was again, standing out, with my girl friend (not “girlfriend,” mind you) and my mudluff friend, wandering through the halls like I hadn’t a care in the world.
Really, it was no wonder some of my para-incarnations still disliked me.
“Deep thoughts?” asked Acacia, and I realized I was neglecting my duties as tour guide. We’d passed through several hallways without my saying a word, not that there’d been anything interesting to say about them. They were hallways. Some of them had doors that led to other hallways.
“No, sorry. Just thinking about . . . the mess hall. You’re gonna get swarmed,” I warned her, unsurprised when she merely assured me she’d be fine.
“I can handle it,” she said—and then I opened the door.
Okay, so I’d like to say a mob of redheaded, freckle-faced Walkers surged forward like paparazzi, asking questions and clamoring for our attention. It’s what I was expecting, honestly. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure Acacia would have been able to handle that, no problem. What actually happened was like something out of one of those old horror movies, or teen chick flicks where there’s the dreaded embarrassing school scene.
I opened the door, and all noise stopped.
Just stopped. Everyone stopped talking. One after the other, everyone trailed off in the middle of a sentence, all eyes turning to Acacia and me.
Then, like a wave rolling slowly over the shore, the chatter started up again—muted, hushed—from one end of the room to the other. Slowly, most of them turned back to what they were doing—eating or chatting or reading or enjoying some kind of handheld media—and the noise level rose again, though nowhere near to what it had been before.
It was probably one of the most unnerving things I’d ever experienced, and that’s saying a lot.
Acacia seemed to be of much the same opinion. I didn’t think anyone could tell from inside the room, but she was leaning slightly toward me. Hue was practically settled on my shoulder like a parrot, but he tended to do that when we were around a bunch of people.
“This is the mess,” I said to Acacia, not bothering to raise or lower my voice. I was just giving her a tour; it didn’t need to be a big deal. “Kitchen’s open. It’s not gourmet, but most of the stuff tastes okay when you get used to it.”
“Let me guess: vitamin-enriched condensed protein?” Acacia walked casually over to the buffet table with me.
“Yep. Just like Mom used to make,” I joked, noting that the mention of Mom only brought a slight pang of homesickness instead of the crippling, gut-wrenching sadness it used to cause. I didn’t know how to feel about that, or about Acacia’s knowing look.
“Yeah,” she agreed, her expression contrasting with something a little softer in her voice. “If Mom was an army chef.”
I watched her pile food onto her tray with reckless abandon, apparently not needing any help to figure out what was what. Or she just didn’t care. She was hard to read, and I didn’t want it to look like I was trying. A sudden instinct for chivalry bubbled up from somewhere inside me, and I carried her water glass and protein shake to a table for her. She hadn’t asked, and didn’t do anything other than look faintly surprised as I took them, but she gave me a nod of thanks as I set them down. I still wasn’t sure where the instinct had come from, but the simple nod—not sarcastic, not teasing, not anything but grateful—made me glad I’d done it.
“I actually love these,” she commented as she bit into a grainberry, one of the few Earth-grown things on the menu.
I couldn’t stand them, but I kept that to myself. “So, where are you from?” I’d refrained from asking thus far, certain I wouldn’t get a real answer, but I was dying of curiosity. How did she know so much about InterWorld and every other world?
“Around,” she answered, with a mysterious smile and that little shrug. The smile was kind of enticing, like she was daring me to ask more.
“Well, how old are you?”
“That’s so rude. Do they not teach you manners on this boat?”
“Several cultures’ worth,” I informed her, for once thinking fast enough to keep up. “And in some places, direct questions are a sign of respect.”
She took a drink from her shake, giving me that faintly appraising up-and-down look. “I’m not from one of them,” she said finally, but she still sounded playful.
“Okay. That narrows it down to a few million different possibilities.” Despite her continued lack of real answers to any of my questions, I was enjoying the game. I didn’t actually mind that she wasn’t telling me anything. I just wanted to learn more about her, and even though I wasn’t getting any facts, I was learning what she was like. It was something.
I wasn’t the only interested party, though, and after keeping a respectful distance for a while, people
