Eternity's Wheel (InterWorld 3)

“Jenna!” another voice from behind me yelled. “What’s wrong?” There were two different girls named Jenna on base; the middle-Arc Greenvilles like the one I’d come from were more common than the fringe ones, so some of us had the same names. I knew both of them in passing; one had shared my Alchemical History class, and reminded me of my little sister. The other was a new recruit, shy and sweet, and I don’t think she’d ever been out on a mission before. I thought I’d remembered seeing her in the crowd when we were preparing to leave, but I wasn’t sure now. My mind had been elsewhere.

“Jirho, can you see her?” one of us shrilled, and I recognized in their voices the same panic that was threatening to bubble up inside me. I struggled against the light web, only succeeding in causing myself pain as I twisted my shoulder and wrist.

“No, I can’t see anyone!” Both voices came from behind me. No one, yet, had called out from above or below me. It was like we were suspended in a line, or several lines.

Jenna screamed again, a long, thin sound that trailed off into a wail and ended in a sputtering choke. It sounded . . . final.

“Everyone stay calm,” Joeb called from my left, though I could hear the undercurrent of tension in his voice. “Focus and try to—”

“Demon spawn!” a thick, rich voice yelled. The gravely tenor was unmistakable; it held a slightly higher note in its fear, like a horse’s neigh. J’r’ohoho. “You will not take—eeeeaaaaggghhh!”

Another scream cut through the blackness around me. The little white stars around me blurred as my eyes watered, but I was too stunned to cry. How could this be happening? What was happening?

The part of my mind that wasn’t frozen in shock somehow made my mouth work. I ignored the gibbering voice in my head that was screaming Don’t draw its attention or you’ll be next you idiot oh lord ohgodohgod, and managed to put some amount of authority into my words. “Show yourself, coward! Or do you only stalk the helpless?” Archaic and dramatic, I know, but J’r’ohoho’s last words were ringing in my mind. He’d always had a formality to his tone, and I’d always enjoyed hearing him talk science with his somewhat medieval speech.

I desperately hoped I’d get to hear it again.

We waited in horrible, horrible silence for an eternity that spanned a few seconds. It was horrible because I expected to hear another one of us die—please oh please don’t let them have died—any moment, any moment, and the mix of waiting and praying made me feel sick.

“Little Harker,” a voice said. It was a woman’s voice, sweet and honeyed and revolting. I sagged with relief, letting out the breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. I’d gotten its attention, whatever “it” was. That meant, for a moment at least, it wouldn’t be hurting anyone else.

“Sweet little Harker,” the voice said again, and something brushed flower-petal light against my cheek. There was a tingle of magic in the air. “I’ve been waiting so long.”

I listened, but the voice fell silent. The sense of magic faded.

And someone else screamed, to my left.

“Waiting for what?” I screamed as well, before the other sound had even died. The words ripped themselves from my throat. “What were you waiting for?” I had to keep talking. I had to keep her attention.

“To thank you, little butterfly,” she whispered. At least, it had the quality of a whisper, but it was loud and it echoed in the stillness. I could hear someone crying to my right, soft sobs that rubbed my nerves raw.

“For what?” The question came out like a growl. It may have made me sound fierce; it was actually just me trying to get words out through a throat made tight with the threat of tears.

“For showing me to my cocoon, wildfire,” she said. I was confused at first, but then I realized the way she’d said that last word sounded like something she was calling me, like a nickname. “And for bringing all these little candles to feed me.”

“Who are you?” I demanded, though I already had a nagging suspicion. It was more that I was terrified of losing her attention. I had to keep her talking.

“Mother Moth,” she said, and some of the maybe stars in front of me started to fade. It was only some of them, though, and I squinted—and realized it wasn’t that they were fading, it was that something was materializing in front of them. “Though that is not the name you knew me as.”

“Lady Indigo,” I whispered, as she appeared fully in front of me.

Now, I’d been prepared for something terrifying. I was trapped in something like a spiderweb, and the awful sounds I’d just heard had conjured images in my mind of monsters beyond comparison, anything from giant demons to Lord Dogknife himself.

I wasn’t prepared for this.

When I’d first met Lady Indigo, before I’d ever come to InterWorld, she’d been human. Beautiful, in fact, with long dark hair and emerald-green eyes. She still had the eyes, starkly prominent in the hollow gauntness of her face. Her skin wasn’t any kind of normal human flesh color now, not pinkish or tan or brown or black. It was red, crimson specifically, and see-through. I could see her skeleton beneath it, though that was all. There were no muscles, no organs.

I could see other bones as well, ones that didn’t belong in a human. The most prominent were the ones that arched upward from her back, like . . . well, they looked a little like wings and a little like spider legs. There were eight of them in all, four on either side. They were huge, and stretched between them was webbing that looked to be fused together from the skins of a dozen different creatures. I recognized some of them from my zoology and paleozoology classes at InterWorld. Some of them probably hadn’t ever been cataloged because no one who’d seen them could have possibly lived long enough to give them any other name than oh lord, it’s gonna eat me.

The effect was sort of like an angry moth that was also a spider and a person, except it was a lot scarier than that. Especially combined with the look she was giving me. It was a sick sort of attraction, like I was the flame to her moth, prey to her spider, and a mate to her human, all at once. Like she wanted to nest in my skin.

I was shivering as she moved closer, the scent of death and roses overpowering me. “You . . . what happened to you?”

The last time I’d seen Lady Indigo had been two years ago, when my team and I were escaping from the HEX ship Malefic. I’d had a pouch of some kind of powder I’d picked up from the rendering room, that awful place where Walkers were dropped still alive into a cauldron and boiled down to their essence. I’d grabbed it in desperation, thrown it at her, and she’d been enveloped in red mist. I hadn’t ever found out what happened to her.

I wished that was still the case.

“You stole my flesh,” she whispered, one of those bone spider-leg/wings reaching out to stroke my hair. “You reduced me to nothing, little Harker, nothing but magic and desire. But I survived, oh yes, I did. You are never truly alone in the Nowhere-at-All, and I proved stronger than any of them. I feasted, I did, and I learned. I learned. . . .”