“What should I tell him?”
“Tell him to watch over the bodies.” Jai was smart; he’d get it.
“Okay. Joey,” she said, as we started to go down different corridors. She paused. “Don’t screw up,” she warned, the ghost of a smile passing over her face.
I nodded, and we went our separate ways. It may have seemed harsh, but that was Jo’s style—and her telling me not to mess up was more than a warning. It was a declaration. It meant she would follow me, and so would everyone else. It meant I couldn’t mess up, because everyone was depending on me now.
It was something I was already painfully aware of.
“Hey,” I called, as I rounded another corner to see Avery. He was standing in front of the Wall, our memorial to the fallen. It had started outside the infirmary, no one knew when or by whom, and back on InterWorld Alpha I was used to it spanning one side of a long hallway. Here, on this InterWorld so far in the future, it extended out into three different halls at least.
He shifted slightly at my voice, though he didn’t turn. He didn’t seem to be looking at anything in particular, just the Wall in general, which had everything from bits of seashells to silly doodles to jewelry or feathers and teeth from species I’d never heard of. There was a lot to look at, and each thing held personal significance for a Walker long dead.
“Come to interrogate me?” he asked as I drew closer.
“Give me a reason not to,” I said. “Tell me exactly why you’re here.” He turned his head to look at me, his violet eyes cold.
“I was returning your cyborg.”
“What else?”
He lifted his chin slightly, considering me. After a moment, he said “I am fulfilling the mission of another Agent who is currently LAS.”
“LAS?”
He glanced away for a moment, as though I were trying his patience. “Lost at sea. An equivalent term for you, I suppose, would be MIA.”
“Acacia,” I said. I’d been through so much in the last twenty minutes that the thought of her being missing didn’t upset me as much as it maybe should have. “You don’t know where she is?”
“I had hoped that you would,” he said, looking at me coolly, “since you’re the last person on record to see her.”
“What do you mean, ‘on record’?”
“That is classified and none of your business, and I won’t explain it.”
“Fine,” I said, matching his tone. “Then, since you’re here in her place, and I’m here in the Old—in Captain Harker’s place, I’m going to tell you the same thing he told her: You have prime clearance, as long as you’re escorted at all times. That escort will be me. You spend one second out of my sight, and I will consider you a threat to this ship and the people on it.”
“Fine,” was all I got in response. I should have expected it.
I turned to leave again, assuming he’d follow me. He did, though not without another lingering glance back to the Wall. I paused, curiosity getting the better of me.
“You called her ‘Josie,’ like you knew her. Why?”
If I’d thought he was cold before, the look he gave me now almost froze me where I stood. “That,” he said, his fingers brushing over the hilt of his sword, “is also none of your business.”
We looked at each other for a long moment, and then I turned my back on him and started for the mess hall.
There were twenty-five of us total in the mess hall, since Jai and J/O were still in the engine room, and we’d lost four of us since the last time I’d done a head count.
Four of us, in the last twenty minutes.
I stood on a table, facing the room at large, the gathered Walkers standing or sitting around me. The room was a wreck; it looked like it had been used as a choke point for whatever it was that had attacked InterWorld. Tables were overturned and had been used as barricades; chairs were discarded and broken; various bits of metal and machinery that had probably once been weapons were scattered about the floor. I took it all in, trying to recapture what those last moments would have been like, and trying not to let the hopelessness of the situation overtake me. If this was to be InterWorld’s end, what point was there in what I was doing now?
It was quite simple, really. This was what I knew. It was what I’d been trained for—hell, for all I could tell, it was what I’d been born for. Me, and every other version of me there was. I couldn’t not do it.
But, God, that was so hard to remember when I was standing there, looking at their faces. Most of them were tear streaked, dirty, and tired. Some were bruised or scratched, and they all looked as beaten down as I felt. I wondered if this was how the Old Man felt when he spoke to us after a failed mission. I wonder if he’d trained himself not to feel anything at all.
“I’m sure a lot of you are wondering what the hell happened,” I started, deciding to get right to the point. “Near as I can tell, after the first group we sent with Josephine and Hue—my mudluff friend—arrived safely here, the large expenditure of Walker energy caught the attention of a HEX agent known as Lady Indigo. She was ready for the second group when we tried to Walk, and pulled us into the Nowhere-at-All. Three of us were killed.