“Are you and your brother—” I began.
“Telepathic?” she interrupted, then smiled. “In a sense. What we have is known as kinesthetic telepathy. When he found you earlier, he sent me an image of what he was seeing. When I caught up with you, I sent him a feeling of triumph, so he knew to join us.”
“And you knew I was about to ask, because you sensed I was curious?”
“No.” Her smiled widened. “We have been asked that several times since we met all of you. I assumed it would be your question, as well. I can utilize telepathy with my brother but no one else.”
“Fair enough,” I said, though something she’d said was nagging at me. “You were looking for us, specifically?”
“Yes. Joeb sent us out to find you.”
I let out a quiet breath. Joeb was also a name I recognized. He was a senior officer on the InterWorld, and someone I thought of as a friend. As far as I knew, he had been on InterWorld when the HEX ship had found it. He should be stuck in the warp field like everyone else. If he wasn’t, and he had the twins with him . . . maybe there were more of us here than I thought.
Maybe we had more of a chance than I’d realized.
“How did he know we were here? Did he sense us Walk?”
“You will have to ask him,” she said, and gestured for us to follow her.
“Who’s Joeb?” Josephine asked as we walked through the thick red clouds, safe in our bubble of oxygen.
“Another one of us. A senior officer at InterWorld, from an Earth pretty close to ours. He’s a lot like me, I guess. Older, maybe.” Joeb was, in fact, a lot like me—but if I had to be honest, he was even more like Jay. He had a sort of big brother aura to him, and tended to look after all the new recruits; that was probably how he’d wound up on this world with the twins. “He’s a good guy,” I said. He’d been one of the few people to start talking to me after I first came to InterWorld. We’d talked about family, since in his world, his youngest sibling was a girl instead of a boy, and her nickname was Mouse instead of Squid. There were always little similarities like that among all of us.
“He is,” Jari agreed, navigating her way around the terrain. There were rocks here, sometimes, and gnarled little black things that might have once been trees. The only time I could see them was when the circle of clear air brushed past them, allowing us a glimpse of things here and there as we walked; otherwise they were faint shapes distorted by smoke. “He and four others came for us—my brother and me—on our world. There were other things, too, dangerous things we were running from.”
“I know what that’s like,” Josephine said, shooting me a dark look.
“So do I,” I reminded her, and Jari kept talking as we walked. I paced myself carefully; even though we hadn’t gone far, I was already feeling a strain in my calves. And my shoulder, after all that activity—as we walked, I pulled a roll of bandages out of my backpack and tied them into a makeshift sling to take some of the weight off it.
“Yes, Joeb said they come to capture us when we first realize our Walking power,” Jari continued. “Jarl and I did not think we would have any other abilities beyond our gifts, but . . . .” She trailed off, remembering.
“But then you figured out how to Walk,” I guessed.
“Yes. It was amazing . . . at first. But then the bad ones came for us, and we ran. We made it back to our world, but they pursued us. That was when Joeb and the others came. They were all very brave, and took injuries helping us . . . but Joeb made s
ure to talk to us after we came back to the sky dome, and make certain we were all right. Then the Captain sent us out—”
“The Old Man did?” I interrupted. “Why?”
“Old Man,” she repeated, sounding amused. “Joeb said that some people call him that.”
“Most of us do, honestly. Why did he send you off? And when?”
“I do not know why,” she said, looking briefly irritated at the interruptions. “You will have to ask Joeb.”
“Where are we even going?” Josephine asked. “Is there any part of this world that isn’t completely messed up, or does everyone just hold their breath all the time? Or do you have another ship?”
“We do not have a ship,” she said, “but the dust only reaches so far.”
It was at that moment that I realized the strain I was feeling in my legs wasn’t because of how far we’d walked, it was because of we were going uphill. I ignored the sudden thud of my heart against my chest. The thought of going anywhere near another mountain was daunting, at the least. . . .
I heard a hawk cry out above me, and looked up. Habit, really; I hadn’t expected to see anything. To my surprise, though, I did. Barely visible, so faint I thought I’d imagined it, there was the soft glow of sunlight and the shadow of a bird passing over us. The miasma was thinning.
“It’s a little farther,” Jari said.
“So you and your brother can send each other emotions?”
“Yes, and we are often aware of the other’s general location.”