Hero (Gone 9)

“And you don’t think I’m really necessary for the strategizing part, either?” Cruz asked him archly, before nodding and admitting, “Actually, you may have a point.”

With Armo and Cruz gone, Dekka and Shade both looked to Malik. Shade said, “Okay, Francis tried to look at bug man’s victims Over There. There may be something to what she described, some kind of strange laser link or whatever.”

Malik shook his head. “Over There is a jumbled world I can’t make sense of with 3-D eyes and a 3-D brain, so whatever Francis saw we can’t understand it. The truth is, it might all just be some kind of sensory distortion, an illusion.”

“Great,” Dekka muttered, still pacing in her slow, deliberate way, like she’d thought carefully about each step.

“But,” Malik said with a sigh and a significant look to Francis, “I still want to explore more, if Francis is willing.”

Francis had been momentarily distracted by a crow that had landed on the garden wall, but snapped back to awareness on hearing her name. “I’ll do whatever you guys think I should do.”

Dekka stopped, turned, and made a sideways karate chopping motion. “No, no, no, Francis. We each have to decide what our limits are. You have to stand up for yourself.”

“Okay,” Francis said doubtfully. “But I want to help.”

“You have something in mind, Malik?” Shade asked.

He nodded. “Yeah. I want to go Over There while one of you is in morph. I want to see what that looks like from Over There. I saw Francis there, but she’s some kind of outlier, an exception.”

Shade shrugged. “No problem.”

“Not yet.” Malik took Francis’s hand. “Once we disappear, morph.”

Francis was more prepared for the sensory weirdness this time, but still it was like stepping inside a kaleidoscope filled with the contents of a hardware store instead of colored stones. Malik had some kind of theory, she knew, but to her it was like what she’d heard some of the bikers say about LSD: jumbled shapes and colors and things that made no sense.

But now she saw Shade in the disturbing 4-D way, a series of bits and pieces, sometimes forming a whole, sometimes a tangle of floating, inverted body parts.

“I should not have to see a deconstructed version of my ex-girlfriend’s liver,” Malik muttered in paisley balloons, while Francis wondered at the prefix “ex.”

Back in the normal world Shade began to morph. The parts began to shift and move in no discernible pattern. Then, suddenly, like a Transformers toy snapping into place, Shade appeared as a coherent whole. But a very different whole—a human, yes, but wreathed in a kind of glowing field of fireflies or charged particles. Fr

ancis saw her chitin armor and her human flesh all as the same thing.

And then . . .

“Ah!” Malik cried.

Because out of nowhere, black cables shot into Shade’s head.

Each was as thick as a thumb; there were dozens, and as Francis gazed along the length of the cables, she saw that they branched and split, like a bush, a tangled mass disappearing into distant haze.

“Take us out,” Malik said, and a moment later Francis had moved them back to regular space. They appeared before a startled Dekka and a vibrating, morphed Shade.

“Shade!” Malik yelped in excitement. “Count to ten and run back and forth real fast.” Then he reconsidered. “Wait, have Dekka count to ten, not you; your seconds are too short.”

Francis once again moved them into the Over There.

Malik waited, and then Shade moved, as fast as she could within the confines of the backyard.

Malik held his arm out. The cables passed through his arm.

“Wow,” Malik said, and asked Francis to bring them back.

Shade de-morphed and said, “So?”

“I saw them,” Malik said. “I mean, not them them, but their connection. It manifests as a series of cables that go straight into your brain. And when you move, no matter how fast you move, they stay attached.”

Shade unconsciously smoothed her hands over her head. “Cables?”