She didn’t have a quarter of the training I did. I had her in a hold immediately, despite her struggling.
She may not have had my training, but she was definitely used to fighting for her life. She brought a knee up, though not into my groin as I would have expected. Instead, she tried to bring her foot down hard on my instep. I barely avoided it, tightening my grip on her as I looked for Hue.
The little mudluff was bobbing up and down in the air, alternating between a spooked shade of white and a confused blue-gray.
“Hue, are you okay?” I asked, more than a little anxious. I’d once seen him take a laser bolt and come out mostly unscathed, but …
“I knew you were one of them,” Josephine spat, still struggling.
“I’m not, and neither is Hue. He’s a friend of mine, and you almost shot him.” The mudluff was spinning slowly, as though to prove to me that he hadn’t been hit. I didn’t see any marks or discolorations on his surface, which was a small blessing.
“He looks like a demented balloon,” she said. “And I’ve seen weirder from those … other things. How was I supposed to know he was a friend of yours? I’m still not sure you’re a friend of mine.”
“Well, you’d better get sure,” I told her. The slow wail of a siren started up in the distance. I didn’t know if someone had called in the gunshot or if it was a coincidence, but I wasn’t willing to chance it.
I said as much, letting her go (though I picked up the gun before she could). She stood there uncertainly, alternately watching me and Hue.
“Hue showing up doesn’t change anything,” I told her, holding the gun nonthreateningly at my side. “You looked like you were about to come with me. If you stay here alone, they will catch you. If you come with me—and Hue—they won’t. It’s that simple.” It was too simple, really; I couldn’t promise that HEX or Binary would never catch her, or that something else wouldn’t happen to her, but it was better than leaving her here. I needed her, and she needed me. Us J names had to stick together.
“Come on,” I said, and she finally capitulated with poor grace. She growled something that sounded like “fine,” and turned to stalk back in through the door she’d surprised me from. I followed.
Through the door was another wide room and an elevator. There was a broom and dustpan leaning up against the wall near the up/down buttons. As I watched, she jabbed the thin part of the dustpan into the slit where the elevator doors met, then pushed until she had enough room to wedge the broom in. Then she pried the doors open, revealing what appeared to be her temporary living area.
She had a ratty-looking sleeping bag and pillow, two beat-up backpacks, and three or four books piled up in the corner of the elevator car. The emergency exit in the roof was propped open, and there was a rope hanging down from it. Honestly, it wasn’t a bad setup; all she had to do was take the broom with her when she went out or in, and open the doors barely wide enough for her to slip through so she could get them closed again. She had an emergency exit if anyone did try to come find her, which she could use to get to any floor of the building.
It was exactly what I might have done, if I’d been in her shoes.
She finished stuffing the books into one of the backpacks, and rolled up the sleeping bag before turning to glare at me. The siren was getting louder.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Now,” I said, “we go for a Walk.”
What I really wanted to do was go straight to InterWorld—the future InterWorld, that is. I haven’t explained about that yet, have I? I hadn’t said anything about it to Mr. Dimas; there wasn’t much point, and I really hadn’t wanted to get into the whole time-travel thing. It was messy at best, which was why I’d skimmed over Acacia. I hadn’t told him about how I’d been a prisoner of TimeWatch, or how they’d sent me thousands of years into the future to InterWorld. A broken, run-down, destroyed version of InterWorld.
It had been the saddest thing I’d ever seen, and that was saying a lot.
Still, I couldn’t get to my InterWorld, not now. It was lost in some kind of dimension shift, pursued by a HEX ship. But that other InterWorld, thousands of years in the future … I could get back there. Or, more specifically, Hue could.
See, Walkers can’t time travel, really. But Hue is, as I’ve said, a multidimensional life-form—and time, in its own way, is a dimension. TimeWatch had sent me into the future, and Hue had brought me back to the past. That meant he could take me there, again. Me, and Josephine.
That was the part that would take some convincing.
I was explaining all this to her as we sat on a bench in the middle of a park that bore only the slightest resemblance to the one I’d been standing in before; I’d taken a chance and Walked to a farther dimension. If the experience of Walking itself hadn’t convinced her, sitting on a bench of green wood under a purple sky watching the blue sunrise probably would. Walking so far had a higher potential to call attention to us, but it also helped to prove my point.
I’d mentioned punching through a wall instead of using a door before, right? Walking without going through the In-Between was kind of like that. The In-Between was the door; but it was also crazy, and I wasn’t sure she was ready for it yet. There were some stories among the older Walkers at InterWorld about new recruits who’d gone insane and needed to have their memories wiped after their first trip through the In-Between. I wasn’t sure I believed those stories, but why take chances?
“So you can travel through time,” she said, watching me like the jury was still out on my sanity.
“I can’t,” I clarified. “Hue can.”
“And he can take us with him.”
“Yes.”
“To the future.”
“Yeah.”
“To this ‘home base’ of yours that was completely destroyed.” I nodded. “Why can’t he take us back in time, to before it got messed up? Or forward to some other time when everyone is okay?”
“It doesn’t exactly work like that,” I said, but she clearly wanted more explanation. “I think he needs to have something to anchor on,” I said, trying to recall everything Acacia had told me about timestreams and anchoring and all that. “Like, he’s kind of fixed on me, so he can follow me wherever, even through time. And I’m fixed in my personal timestream, so I can only go back and forth within that one.”
“That’s inconvenient.” She looked like she was trying to figure out whether I was making excuses or not.
“Maybe, but it also stops regular people from messing with time, which could cause all sorts of problems,” I said, but an idea was nagging at me. If I could go anywhere, if Hue could take me anywhere, would the Time Agents come pick me up? Jay had said they were kind of like law enforcement for the timestreams. … If I started messing things up, would that get their attention? Could I get them to help me?
Too risky, I decided, remembering how I’d been treated at the TimeWatch headquarters. They’d kept me in a jail cell and ejected me into the future without a word; I wasn’t going to risk letting them do it again. There was too much
