Eternity's Wheel (InterWorld 3)

“Never before today,” she said, looking pleased with herself. “Why?”

“Well, you’re pretty good at it.” I said, readjusting the brace strapped around my wrist. I’d had an itch there I’d been trying to ignore for the past fifteen minutes.

“I thought it was taking me a while to learn.”

“It took you a while to get it, maybe, but once you did . . . You’re almost undetectable, you know that?”

“Yeah?” she asked, looking up at me. She didn’t look guarded anymore or angry or like she was about to run. She looked happy, the way I remembered my sister looking when she was having nice dreams. Content. Peaceful.

“Yeah. It’s like when you step into the water, you don’t make any ripples. You just sort of slip in.”

She smiled and shrugged, though I could tell she was pleased to be good at something in particular. I know I would have been.

“Will that be helpful?” she asked.

“Yes,” I told her honestly, offering my noninjured left hand. She took it, allowing me to pull her to her feet. “If you do the Walking, we’ll be able to gather up the others without being detected. Gives us a lot more breathing room. Why don’t you give it a try now? Walk back to the world we parked on.”

Usually, when teaching a new Walker how to get back to base, they’re taught a formula. It’s an address, an equation that tells us exactly how to get home, wherever home happened to be. It tells us that no matter where the base was, we were connected to it, and we could find it anywhere.

This future InterWorld—InterWorld Beta, as I’d come to think of it—might or might not have the same address, when it was powered on. Since it wasn’t currently on, I had no way of knowing; I just knew that the address I knew, the one for what would be InterWorld Alpha, was a dead end. Maybe it wouldn’t be if the ship ever stopped, or if it turned out the address could be used for InterWorld Beta when the ship powered up again. Either way, it was useless; there was no reason to teach it to her now.

Josephine kept hold of my hand, closing her eyes and focusing. I kept mine open; it was easier to Walk when you weren’t watching your surroundings change around you, but I was just along for the ride this time.

The scenery shifted; we were standing in shadows one moment, then again in sunlight.

A flock of birds passed above our heads. . . .

The ground trembled beneath us for a moment, as though a herd of something large was stampeding nearby. . . .

The brief, salty scent of the ocean and the cry of a seagull from over the mountains . . .

And then InterWorld Beta rested in front of us, sad and majestic, like a ship run aground. An abandoned city lost to time.

Josephine kept hold of my hand this time, as the world settled back around us. It was lonely, somehow. It was our salvation and our hope; it was part of what let us witness the extraordinary things we’d seen and experience the amazing things we’d done. It was the wind in our hair and the travel dust on our boots, and it wasn’t right for it to be stuck here, dead and lifeless.

She looked at me, subdued and determined, and let go of my hand. We had an understanding, then, and I think she finally knew why I was willing to risk everything. I think she was willing to, as well.

It was a small comfort, at least.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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WE RAIDED THE STOREROOM, gathering anything and everything that might be helpful. We brought cleaning supplies as well as thick gloves and kneepads into the hallways, and we spent the rest of the morning clearing out the debris and making sure there were easy paths to get to the main places we needed to go.

From the control room to the storeroom, down to the lower decks where we could get out onto our temporary home planet, to the living quarters, the mess hall, and back up to the control room. It took until well into the afternoon, and we were starving despite the few snacks and energy bars we’d taken from our backpacks.

The mess hall hadn’t yielded much in the way of food, not even the protein packs or MREs I was used to. The only thing I found of any use was a few gallons of water stored away in still-sealed containers, which were admittedly very useful. We poured several of them into the septic filtration system, which was completely empty. I didn’t know if any remaining liquid had simply dried up, or if it had been emptied on purpose. For all I knew, this could have been a base-wide evacuation.

“I can Walk somewhere and get food,” Josephine suggested, as we were sorting through a stack of discarded electronics in an attempt to find anything helpful. I hesitated. On the one hand, she had already demonstrated her ability to Walk without causing so much as a ripple and would most likely be able to go get us supplies without incident.

On the other hand, she was all I had.

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” I said, and was rewarded with a disgusted look.

“What are we going to eat, then?”