Eternity's Wheel (InterWorld 3)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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IT’S NOT THAT I passed out, exactly. When you pass out (which, as I’m sure you know, I’ve done a few times in my life), there’s a sort of white-hot feeling around your forehead when you regain consciousness. Waking up isn’t even the right term for it. It’s like coming back to yourself after you’ve been gone, except you’re not really sure where you’ve been.

That’s what it felt like at first, but I knew I hadn’t actually passed out because I didn’t have that white-hot headache. It was more like when you walk into a room for a specific reason, but then can’t remember why, so you just stand there and feel lost.

I opened my eyes to complete and total blackness, and my first thought was Why did I come here? Then I remembered Josephine, and trying to Walk through time, and my second thought was Where is everyone?

I was starting to see things in my field of vision that made me worry I was about to pass out, little bright motes of light that were there and gone when I tried to look at them. They swirled and wove around me dizzyingly, so I stopped trying to focus on them. There was a weird feeling in the air and that sweet smell that reminded me of spring and the color pink.

I had to find my friends. I didn’t even care where I was, as long as I found Josephine and everyone else.

I tried to sit up and realized that I had nothing to brace myself against. I was floating, weightless, suspended in midair. The white lights dancing around me were stars, or at least they looked like stars. I’d never been sure, but seeing them cemented my reality. I knew where I was.

This was the Nowhere-at-All.

I’d been here before, twice. I’d hoped to never come back. It was kind of like the In-Between, except where the In-Between was everything, the Nowhere-at-All was nothing. It was entirely dark, not dark like you couldn’t see anything but more like there was nothing but dark to see. There was nothing here, aside from little lights that may have been far-off stars or tiny, close sparks, and yet you always felt like you weren’t alone.

It was HEX’s domain.

I couldn’t move my arms or my legs. I shoved down a surge of panic and lifted my head to look around. My wrists and ankles were restrained by an invisible force, and I realized that some of the little white lights I’d thought were big and far away were actually close and very small. They were spread out around me in a pattern that I first mistook for an unfamiliar constellation. It was symmetrical and, honestly, beautiful, arcing out above and below me to either side. Horizontal lines looped back and forth over diagonal ones pulled taut, strings of tiny white sparks like you’d see around a Christmas tree or like morning dew on a spiderweb.

A spiderweb . . .

I still couldn’t move my arms and legs. Adrenaline surged through me (I was calling it that, but with the realization that I was trapped in a giant spiderweb, it was probably just panic), and I wiggled with all my might, but I couldn’t see anything but those little white lights that might have been stars.

“Josephine!” I yelled and heard my voice echo back to me. “Joeb!”

“I’m here,” Joeb’s voice called from somewhere to the left of me. I couldn’t see him.

“Joeb!” a female voice called, also from the left, though it sounded farther away. “Jarl and I are here!”

“Most of us are, I think,” Joeb said. “Everyone, sound off. One!”

“Two!” someone else’s voice called, then it was “three,” then, after a slight pause, “four!”

The interesting thing about a group of people—any people, from any world—is that they often develop a sense of cohesion, a flow, a pattern. Back on my world, they’d done numerous studies on the flow of pedestrian traffic in big, densely populated cities like New York. The way people wove through crowds and around sidewalks while looking down at their cell phones is miraculous, and has something to do with social instinct. It’s the thing that’s not working when you run into someone in a hallway and then do a little dance trying to get around them.

It’s also the same instinct that lets a roomful of people have a conversation; you develop a sense for when it’s your turn to speak, or when someone else is going to. Like I said, some people are better at it than others. But we were all different versions of one another, which meant we had roughly the same instincts and social patterns.

“Five!” came a distant call from behind me, then “six” and “seven” in voices that sounded the same—probably the twins.

“Eight!” rang out to my right, and then I felt like it was my turn. “Nine!” I called, and the numbers went on. Sure, once or twice two people would start to say the same n

umber, but one of them would always stop and go directly after. When no more voices rang out, we were at fourteen. We were missing one.

And I hadn’t heard Josephine.

“We’re missing one,” Joeb called.

“It’s Josephine,” I said, and then someone screamed.

It was a startled sound, involuntary, loud and shrill. I knew it was one of us.

It came from behind me, and I craned my neck to the point of pain. I couldn’t see anything but blackness and more stars. My heart pounded against my chest. I held my breath, racking my mind for something, anything to do or say.