Her voice trailed off as something else caught her attention, something to the right of me. It was hard to tell on her transparent, red skin, but there might have been blood on her mouth. I wasn’t sure.
Her eyes narrowed, and she shifted as though to move. “What did you learn?” I asked quickly, catching her attention again.
She looked back down at me, her face less than a foot away from mine and those spider-leg wings stretching out and over us both. “I learned how to feel your fire, little Walkersssss . . .” She trailed off into a hiss, twitching once or twice, and suddenly turned her head to the side. She popped some of the vertebrae in her neck with a sound like cracking knuckles, one that set my teeth on edge. “And how,” she continued, “to sssssssuck it all up . . .”
She smiled at me, a perfect, beautiful, human smile, except for the fact that I could see through her face. “Flames,” she muttered. “Such beautiful flames. Beautiful butterflies. Mother Moth has all she needs, now.”
It became obvious right then, as it really should have been before, that she was completely mad. Whatever had happened to her—if I’d gotten the powder from the rendering room, had it been part of the process used to boil us down to our essences? Is that what I’d somehow done?—it had clearly stolen her sanity. Although, that could have been attributed solely to being trapped in the Nowhere-at-All for a few years . . .
“What do you mean, all you need?” I asked, but she wasn’t looking at me anymore. “Indigo!” I shouted, and that got her attention.
She moved suddenly, all the points of her bone-wing-legs digging into my sides. She was on top of me, hovering over me, and I could feel our skin touching. Hers felt slick and rubbery, and I tried to shrink back, but there was nowhere to go.
“You will address me as Lady,” she hissed, right in my face. “I remember a time when you would have done anything I asked, little Harker, and I can make that time come again.”
“Try it,” I spat, though in truth I was terrified of her enchanting me again. The last time she’d cast a spell on me, I would have walked happily off a cliff if she’d asked me to. I couldn’t bear the thought of being under that kind of control again, but I wasn’t about to let her know that.
“And so I shall, wildfire,” she murmured, her lips close to my ear. “I’m going to eat all your friends and then make you love me for it.”
I opened my mouth, but all that came out was a shocked, strangled sound. I was furious
, and terrified. I had to do something. There had to be something I could do, but I couldn’t Walk and I had no equipment on me, nothing to help me out of this web thing.
“I’ll go with you,” I said desperately. “Take me wherever you want, just—”
“Let them go? Such a noble Harker,” she said, pushing against me and the web. She floated backward, the bone-legs that had been digging into my sides arcing up behind her, looking more like wings again. “A valiant hero, defeating the evil sorceress, leaving her to wither and fester in the dark . . . Which little light should I drink from first?”
She was hovering about three feet from me now, impressive and terrible as she lifted a hand to point at me. “Duck,” she said, and I was further confused. Then she smiled, pointing to my left. “Duck . . .”
She moved her hand further, pointing at someone else I couldn’t see. She stayed in front of me, so I could see her expression as she chose who was to die next. “Duck . . .”
Then, with no warning whatsoever, I couldn’t quite see her anymore. Someone was blocking my view, their back to me, but I recognized the ratty backpack she wore. Josephine. She was suddenly there, between me and Lady Indigo, and then I heard a loud crack as she fired her .45.
Now, InterWorld didn’t tend to use standard guns for two reasons. Mostly because we had access to things far more advanced, like plasma blasters. The other reason was most agents of Binary and HEX either were immune to pesky things like bullets or had ways of getting around them, like skin shields or magic. I wouldn’t have expected a standard gun to do much damage to something that looked like that.
A short, startled scream ripped through the air, but this time it was Lady Indigo. Bullets, it seemed, would work.
Crack. The gun fired again, and Lady Indigo recoiled. Then another figure appeared, in a shimmer of violet light that made my heart leap into my throat. “Acacia!” I yelled, and then I got a haphazard impression of familiar violet eyes set in an unfamiliar face, and a glare that would wither stone. It wasn’t Acacia. It was a boy about my age, wielding a katana-style sword that sported a blade of something other than steel, maybe jade. He raised the weapon over his head, facing me, and I had another instant to realize it was patterned gold and green, like a circuit board. Like Acacia’s fingernails.
Then he struck, slicing the circuitry blade down toward me. Despite the fact that this seemed like a rescue, I couldn’t help a surge of adrenaline as he brought the weapon down. He was cutting it close—
I felt a sudden sting against my ear, but the web fell away behind me. I grabbed at the remaining bits of it, remembering that the Nowhere-at-All had its own gravity, and I could fall if I wasn’t careful.
This new person who wasn’t Acacia didn’t seem to be having that problem; he cut me free of the web, then sped away toward the other ones. It was like he was gliding on nothing, skating on air. I remembered Acacia having done the same thing once, in the In-Between.
Crack. Josephine was still firing. I turned to look; she seemed to be standing on nothing, Hue hovering next to her. A second later I realized she was standing on a grav-board. I had no idea where she might have gotten it, or where she’d been for the past few minutes, not that it was important right now; she was still shooting, and I’d counted at least three shots. Those plus the one she’d fired at Hue meant she was at least halfway to empty on a standard .45, and Lady Indigo was still moving.
“Joey!” Joeb was free now, too, also clinging to his web. I turned to face him, seeing what was behind me for the first time. I’d been right in my estimation; we’d been suspended in separate webs, in a giant circle, facing outward.
“Get everyone out of here!” I yelled. “Walk!”
“Where?” he shouted back, as two more shots rang out and Lady Indigo let out a high-pitched sound that was half wail, half hiss.
“Anywhere, just Walk! I’ll find—”
“Stay,” the boy with the circuitry sword commanded, his voice carrying easily over the commotion. “I’ll take you!” He was gathering up the threads of white light that had made up the spiderwebs, somehow weaving them together and drawing us all inward. I hadn’t noticed it until now, but I was moving. The spiderweb I was clutching was being drawn into the center, with all the others. I was moving further away from Josephine and Lady Indigo.
Click, went Josephine’s .45, and she shoved it back into her makeshift holster as Lady Indigo lunged for her. One of Lady Indigo’s skeletal wings drooped slightly to one side, though she was still flying; she swooped down toward Josephine, who kicked off with her grav-disk, the two beginning a grotesque aerial dance as Lady Indigo attacked and Josephine dodged. I hadn’t had any disks to train her with back at InterWorld Beta, but she seemed to have gotten the hang of it. I recalled the older kid next door when I was growing up; he’d given me some skateboard training before I’d skinned both elbows and lost interest. Maybe Josephine had been better at it than I had. She certainly looked like she knew what she was doing, weaving in and out of the webs still hanging in the air and expertly avoiding Lady Indigo’s attacks. They were spiraling higher and higher, farther from the webs as the mysterious newcomer drew us all closer together.