science and magic to remake the universe,” she said, pulling me from my thoughts.
“That’s essentially it, yeah.”
“And you’re saying there are hundreds of us, spread out over every dimension.”
“The number is probably incalculable,” I said, recalling when I searched for my name in InterWorld’s dimensional database. I’d come up with a few thousand matches on my name alone; who knew how many versions of the rest of there were, all with names like Josephine and Jo and Jakon and Josef.
Those last three were teammates of mine. I missed them.
“It’s hard to say how many of us there actually are,” I continued, pushing aside my sudden melancholy. “Since there are more dimensions being created and destroyed every day. Every second, even. But that’s too much to get into right now,” I said quickly, seeing her open her mouth to ask. She shut it irritably, her expression heated. “What matters is getting back to the base we’ve got, getting you and whatever others we can find trained, and stopping FrostNight.”
She was staring at me, and I was starting to realize how crazy I sounded. Not just in terms of “You expect me to believe things that sound crazy.”
But it was also my only option.
“Okay,” she said abruptly. “Let’s do it.”
I just looked at her.
“What?” she said finally, her tone and posture ratcheting up a notch. “Isn’t that the answer you wanted to hear?”
No, I thought unwillingly. To tell the truth, I’d never really thought about whether she’d agree or not. There was never an option in my mind. The plan had been to find Josephine, convince her to help me, take her back to base, then go find all the others and do the same. The fact that she’d agreed to fight in a war she hadn’t even known about until five minutes ago made me feel sick, like I was knowingly sending her into a minefield without a map.
In a way, that’s exactly what I was doing.
“Yeah,” I said, but I don’t think she believed me. I know I didn’t.
Getting Josephine to agree to let Hue take us into the future was easier than I thought it would it be. Getting her to actually do it, however, was harder.
“No way,” she said adamantly, watching the way Hue rippled over my body like a suit of Silly Putty.
“It just feels a little weird,” I insisted. “It doesn’t hurt.”
“I don’t care if it feels weird, I don’t want that thing that close to me.”
“His name is Hue,” I said, pushing down my temper. “And he’s a friend of mine, and he’s helping us. You don’t have to do anything except trust me, okay?”
She fell silent, a muscle twitching in her jaw. She was only willing to trust me so far.
“Look,” I said, taking a step closer. Josephine drew back but didn’t step away. I held out my hand. After a hesitation that started to grind on my nerves—we didn’t have time for this—she took it.
Go to her, Hue, I said silently. Slowly. She’s scared. With Hue wrapped around me like a second skin, I’d found we could communicate without speaking. At least, inasmuch as I could ever communicate with Hue; he seemed to understand basic language (several different ones, in fact), but sometimes there were concepts or nuances that confused him. Or he just ignored me; it was hard to tell.
The Hue putty began to flow down over my arm, toward our hands. I felt her fingers tighten in mine and a resistance like she wanted to pull away, but I held her firmly. Hue moved over our fingers, slowly covering her hand to the wrist. There he stopped, waiting.
“It does feel weird,” she said, though she didn’t seem as spooked.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Like Silly Putty, right?”
“Like what?”
“Never mind.” I sighed. This was a common cultural difference with para-incarnations of myself. Even though both our worlds had McDonald’s, there was nothing saying that whoever had invented something like Silly Putty in my world had also done it in hers.
“It’s kind of like Putty Dough, I guess,” she said.
Close enough. “Sure,” I agreed, still holding her hand. “Now, trust me, okay? We’re going to do exactly what I said. You have to get closer to me so that Hue can cover us both; he’s not that big. Then I’m going to Walk. You’ll understand it when you feel it.”
“Fine,” she said shortly, like she was agreeing before she could change her mind. I stepped forward, putting my arms around her shoulders, while hers settled somewhat hesitantly around my waist.
Honestly, I wasn’t really sure how this was going to work. I didn’t know if Hue needed to be covering Josephine as well, or if I just needed to be touching her. All I knew was that the chances of something going wrong if she panicked were pretty high, which is why I was holding on to her.
Hue stretched paper-thin over us both, and I felt Josephine press closer against me. It was like being in a sensory-deprivation tank, I would imagine, at least at first. I ceased to feel the air on me, to hear the birds, to see the brightness of the rising blue sun.
And then, as I opened my eyes, I could see and hear and feel everything.
Hue was like the universe’s best looking glass, like the missing element that made everything fall into place. That made everything make sense. Walking was no longer about finding the door, it was about suddenly realizing you were surrounded by doors and you knew exactly where every single one of them went. It was like sitting down at a test you’d never studied for and finding you knew all the answers anyway.
I could feel everything. I could feel Josephine’s wonder and terror, her slow understanding and her deep yearning. She was experiencing what she’d been born to do, and I could already feel her fear giving in to eagerness, to the desire to learn.
Even though I theoretically knew where all the doors would take me, it’s always easiest to go someplace you’ve already been. I followed the path to future InterWorld flawlessly, and all too soon we were standing there in the purple dawn light, there on that crumbling base.
Josephine let go of me as soon as Hue receded, taking a few steps back, though she didn’t look afraid. She looked like she understood.
She walked slowly down the gravel
