Eternity's Wheel (InterWorld 3)

“Come sit,” he said, gesturing to a few travel cots that were set up around a portable heater. It was warmer now that we could actually feel the sunlight, but I imagined it got cold up here.

Joeb and I sat down on a cot. All the others followed, some also sitting on cots and others on the ground, leaning against one another and otherwise getting comfortable. Apparently, it was story time.

“The Old Man pulled me into his office six days ago,” Joeb began, his brown eyes serious. “He said there had been a security breach, a leak he’d just discovered.”

“It was Joaquim,” I said. A murmur went through those listening.

“It can’t have been,” someone said.

“We’d’ve known,” someone else insisted, and a few other voices rose up in agreement.

“It was Joaquim,” Joeb said clearly, his voice rising once again above the chatter. He let that sink in for a moment, glancing out over the faces of those assembled. “Captain Harker confirmed it before we left.”

I looked out at them, too, seeing the same disbelief I had felt, the same betrayal that had been twisting at me for days. “He’s dead,” I said, and Joeb looked at me. “He was a creation of Binary . . . and HEX,” I said, and another murmur went through the crowd. “They’re working together now. They used a combination of science and magic to create what they call FrostNight, and they used me and Joaquim to power it. Acacia helped me escape, but Joaquim was . . .”

“Killed?” asked Jo, when I faltered.

“Used up,” I said, unable to look at her. I couldn’t look at anyone; I kept remembering Joaquim’s face, still contorted into a mask of fear and anger, no emotion or depth or life left in his eyes at all. “He was powered by magic. And us, of the essences that are stolen when we’re caught by HEX.” Now I did look at her, and all of them, my gaze roaming over the faces of these comrades who were just like me. They all looked as sick as I felt.

“FrostNight,” Joeb said, after a moment of silence. “What is it?”

I took a breath. “Basically? A self-perpetuating supercontinuum that rearranges all of time and space in its path.”

A short silence followed my statement. Those who’d had any manner of basic classes at InterWorld Prime looked appropriately concerned. Others, such as Jari and Josephine, looked like they had absolutely no clue what the hell I’d just said.

“Okay,” said Joeb, who was one of the ones looking concerned. “What is its path, exactly?”

“Everywhere. It’s a self-aware manifold; it can reach into any dimension.”

“It has to disperse eventually,” someone ventured from the crowd. “Doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” I snapped, then put a hand to my forehead. I hadn’t meant to be short, I was just frustrated; I didn’t know nearly as much about this as I needed to. I’d seen it creat

ed, but I still knew next to nothing. “It was powered by us, by me and Joaquim and all the souls they’d infused him with. They got all of . . . them, of all him, but I escaped.”

“How?” someone else asked, and I wasn’t sure if I was imagining the hint of suspicion or not.

“Acacia,” I said, and Joeb held up a hand.

“Hold on,” he said, looking at me sympathetically. “Why don’t I tell you our side of the story, and then you can fill in the gaps for us.”

I nodded, grateful, and he continued. “The Old Man called me into his office two days after we extracted the twins.” He nodded to Jari and the hawk. “He said there was a leak in InterWorld, and that everyone was in danger. He instructed me and several other officers to take small groups of people off base for training, and not to return until we heard from him. He also gave me an ADT”—he pulled an advanced dimensional tracker, a small, circular device, from his pocket—“and told me to keep an eye out for you.”

“For me?” I accepted the tracker as he handed it to me, staring down the screen. It had exactly one blip, a little red dot in the center. Me. “I’ll be damned,” I muttered, staring at the dot. I remembered sitting in the stark white infirmary, barely feeling the shot as it stabbed into my arm, still numb from my injuries and Jerzy’s funeral the day before. “He had me injected with a tracer the same day he sent you off Base. Hours before, I’ll bet. He said it was for my own safety, but now I’m not so sure.” After all, this wasn’t the first time the tracer had come in handy. The Old Man had to have known it would, but how?

Acacia, I realized, my hand clenching around the ADT. She was a Time Agent. She must have known this was going to happen, must have warned the Old Man.

I did my best to fight down a surge of anger, and instead handed the ADT back to Joeb and tried to concentrate on what he was saying. Why couldn’t she have warned him about any of the other horrible things that had happened in the last week? Jerzy’s death? Binary and HEX working together? The Professor sacrificing his “son” to create a self-aware soliton that will erase everything in the Multiverse, for God’s sake! She didn’t find any of that to be half as important as having me injected with a tracer?

“Joey?” Joeb’s voice pulled me out of my thoughts, and I realized I’d completely lost track of the conversation.

“Sorry. What?”

“I asked if you knew why Captain Harker hadn’t contacted us yet. I mean, I assumed I was waiting for you, but I imagine you haven’t brought us orders to go back to base.”

I shook my head. “No. They’re . . . InterWorld is compromised,” I said, hating the words as they left my lips. There was the sound of a collective intake of breath from everyone sitting around me. “It’s been locked onto by a HEX ship. They’re running, I don’t know where to and I don’t know for how long. I think they’re stuck in a perpetual temporal warp, at least for now.”

“I was afraid of that,” Joeb said. At my look, he shrugged. “The InterWorld formula is . . . it feels like a broken link right now. Like it wouldn’t take me anywhere if I tried to use it.” He sighed, reaching up to rub the back of his neck, turning his head this way and that to stretch muscles made tense by worry and stress. I knew the feeling. “So that’s my side of it. We’ve been sitting on this mountain for the better part of a week now, running some rudimentary training and waiting to either hear from the Old Man or see your little dot show up on the ADT.”