down the street and the warm, sweet smell of the doughnut shop in the opposite direction. The shop opened at five A.M., so the owner, Mr. Lee, started baking at around three. The doughnuts were almost always gone by seven thirty, but if you stopped by on the way to school and he had one left, he’d give it to you for free.
I breathed carefully in and carefully out, committing everything to memory once again. Then I Walked, whispering a quiet good-bye to that sleepy little town.
Walking between dimensions, once you get used to it, is like walking normally—except easier, if that makes sense. Better. It feels right, like a good, satisfying stretch. It feels like doing what you were born to do.
I felt cold mist on my skin and heard a few tinkling notes, like from a music box. Random sensations are common when Walking, since you have to pass through the In-Between in order to get anywhere, and the In-Between is … well, it’s pretty much everything. At once. It’s the place we pass through when we Walk, sort of like its own pocket dimension. Or, more accurately, the dimension between all dimensions.
The park was spread out before me, looking almost the same as it had a moment ago. There was a tree about a hundred yards in front of me that hadn’t been there before, but that was the only notable difference, at least at first. I started moving through the park, glancing around with fascination as the tiny changes became more noticeable.
I didn’t smell the doughnut shop anymore; instead, the scent of freshly brewed coffee wafted over me from a twenty-four-hour diner across the street. I had to admit I was jealous. My Greenville didn’t have a twenty-four-hour anything.
I walked to the corner, crossing the street at the protected crosswalk. The little light-up man was blue, not white as I was used to. I’d missed that the last time I’d been here. I passed by a McDonald’s with arches that were green instead of yellow. I had to smile; that was the first thing I’d noticed when I first wound up in this version of my town.
I hurried as I went down my street. My injuries weren’t bothering me as much as they had been (aspirin for the win!), and I needed to get this done as quickly as possible. The first time I’d come here, I’d run into the first other version of me I’d ever met. A girl. Josephine.
I remembered her name like I remembered my own, because in a way, it sort of was. I’d gone into my house, lost and confused, and there she’d been. She’d lived in my house with my mom, who’d looked at me like she’d never seen me before and called her daughter Josephine. Her daughter, not her son. A female version of me, living a life parallel to mine.
She would be my first recruit.
I was about halfway to my house when I stopped to cast out for her. We can sense each other, sort of, like when you’re alone in a room but you can tell when someone walks in without turning around. I paused for a second and closed my eyes, expanding my senses, and that’s probably what saved my life.
They’d been waiting for me.
I threw myself to the side as a netlike thing hurtled over where I’d been standing. They started to come up out of the shadows, or maybe they were the shadows themselves. It was hard to tell. All I knew for sure was that they were agents of HEX, and they had found me.
There were maybe four or five of them. I was trained in thirteen different styles of martial arts and immediately recognized six nearby objects that could be used as improvised weapons.
I also had no defensive gadgets on me whatsoever, and I was injured in five different places. Not to mention these were HEX agents, not Binary. The Binary at least were predictable; they had their plasma guns, their sheer numbers and one-shot shields, their grav disks. Basic stuff. HEX agents? Those were unpredictable. I’d taken three different Magic Study courses on InterWorld Prime, and I probably knew about a quarter of what they could do.
I was more than a little outgunned.
They were slowly surrounding me, moving like liquid, fanning out in a semicircle. The moonless night and scattered streetlamps made some of them all but invisible in the dark. I did the sensible thing: I ran.
Well, I Walked.
I heard the music box again and a sound like bowling pins toppling over. I smelled something salty and saw a splash of bright pink as I slipped through the In-Between and into yet another version of Greenville.
The street was empty again, but I kept moving anyway, back the way I had come. There was no point in going to Josephine’s house, not in that dimension and not in this one. I couldn’t sense another version of me here; I didn’t know if that was because that version had died, or been captured by Binary or HEX, or if this was the home world of one of my fellow students back on Base. I didn’t spend too much time thinking about it.
When I’d expanded my senses to look for Josephine, right before I’d felt HEX’s attack, I’d felt her—and she hadn’t been home.
What was a version of me, not even seventeen years old, doing away from home at three A.M.? It wasn’t like Greenville had an active nightlife (although I suppose this one had a twenty-four-hour diner, at least …) and I had never been the most popular of kids. I certainly hadn’t been cool enough to hang out with anyone who’d stay out all night. Maybe this version of me was different, but I doubted it.
I kept moving, occasionally hopping into a different dimension to throw off any pursuers. When I’d first started Walking, I’d done it instinctively—and, apparently, badly. One of my teachers had explained that I’d basically punched a hole in the wall instead of finding the door. I’d gotten better at it since then, and it was easier to slip between the worlds without causing as many ripples. I could Walk as many times as there was a portal around; HEX and Binary were operating on borrowed power, so my hope was that being a moving target would discourage them from chasing me too far.
I eventually made my way back to Josephine’s Greenville, a few blocks over from where I’d started. The HEX agents didn’t seem to be following me anymore; I couldn’t sense them when I tried.
I could sense her. She was a couple of streets away from where I was now, out of the residential area. I could see the brighter lights of the business district off in the distance, which was definitely where the familiar tug was leading me.
I sighed. Nothing was ever easy. …
With my senses on high alert and my ribs aching again from all the movement, I started down the street.
It didn’t take me long to track her down, though I was still at a loss as to why she was apparently in an abandoned office building. The hair on the back of my neck was standing on end. The last time I’d been in a place like this, I had found Joaquim, the Walker who’d turned out to not be a Walker at all, who’d betrayed my team and caused Jerzy’s death. He’d been pretending to be a captive of Binary so we’d “rescue” him. … Had Josephine been taken captive, too?
It was seeming more and more likely. The HEX scouts outside her house … maybe they hadn’t been waiting for me, after all. Maybe they had found her.
This was bad. I was still running on borrowed time, dealing with several injuries, and had no weapons. I had no one I could call for backup. Josephine was supposed to become my backup.
The smart thing to do would be to cut my losses and go—head to another version of Greenville and find another me. Like I said, as long as there were portals, I never had to stop Walking. I could go anywhere I wanted, as long as I got there before FrostNight destroyed
