“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 at stake.
“So you and I are going to go into the future and start recruiting more of us, before the bad guys can use a combination of
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.” Even if you bought everything I was saying about HEX and Binary and time travel and multiple dimensions, even if you decided that was all completely real and sane, I still sounded crazy. My plan was to pick up as many untrained recruits as I could and go head-to-head with the worst baddies in the universe—both of them—with no backup or plan B. No matter which way you looked at it, it was both insane and suicidal.
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.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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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.”