Eternity's Wheel (InterWorld 3)

I turned and left the Old Man’s office. I could hear Avery’s footsteps echoing hollowly behind mine as he followed.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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I HAD MISSED THE way the working ship felt beneath my feet. It wasn’t something I’d noticed until it was gone, but you could feel the hum of the engines through the floor no matter where you were. It was like standing next to a washer or dryer when it was on—a vibration against your feet so faint you barely felt it. I hadn’t realized it until I’d stood on an InterWorld with no power, the floor cold and hard and dead beneath me.

Now it was thrumming again, alive and itching to fly. I felt it the moment I stepped into the engine room; the console was on, all the lights and dials and digital readouts blinking and humming and waiting. Still, I stayed there only for a moment after I escorted Avery back to J/O. I couldn’t make myself look at the cots lining the back, the still forms occupying them all covered in sheets.

Instead, I went to the Wall.

Our monument to the fallen stood silent and still, not even a breeze sweeping through the hall to rustle the scraps of paper and feathers and fur. It extended a full three sectors past what I was used to; the InterWorld of the future had seen the deaths of thousands more of us.

I walked it for a time, up and down, memorizing the bits and pieces of people’s lives, the scraps of feelings and hopes and dreams. They were all that remained of the comrades I’d never known, of those who’d fought and died long after whatever my end had been. I went back and forth, twice, from the infirmary to the remains of the automatic double doors that led out to what had once been the gardens. The long silver boxes that served as our coffins were still sitting out there, silent shapes in pools of sun, lined up in neat rows. I stepped out into the bright daylight and made myself open one.

Despite my fears, it was empty. I didn’t know if the thin layer of dust that coated the bottom was all that remained of a person, if the boxes themselves transported the body within to somewhere else, or if these had never been filled in the first place. It had been so long since anyone had been here, it didn’t matter. This place was all just ashes and dust.

The box was light enough to move, so I pulled it inside, to the hallway. I stared at the Wall for a long moment, thinking, and then I started taking it down.

Feathers, bits of glass, paper made thin and brittle with age. Jewelry, faded pictographs and drawings, dusty and yellowed books, drawings so faint you could no longer tell what they were. I put them all into the long silver box carefully, and when that box was full, I pulled it back outside and got another one.

Some of the papers crumbled to dust in my hands, particularly when I got further down the line, to the things that had been put up even longer ago. I cried for those papers, and the lost memories of people they had represented. Several times I stopped entirely, horrified at what I was doing, before I was filled once again with renewed determination. If ashes and dust and memories were all that remained of this InterWorld, it was our duty to fill it again with purpose. With hope.

The new recruits wouldn’t see hope when they looked at this Wall. They wouldn’t see hope when they saw the coffins outside, or how many of us had already died. These deaths weren’t personal to them. They were a nightmare, a horror story, a holocaust long past. They were legends and myths, shoes too big to ever possibly fill. They were my ghosts now, mine alone.

Microchips and nanochips, pottery, threads and scraps of clothing and candy wrappers, a long red braid and bits of foreign currency. Everything went carefully into a long silver coffin, and when I finally finished hours later, long after the sun had dipped behind the distant horizon, I was tired and hungry and blessedly not alone.

My team had joined me slowly, over the course of the day. Jakon, Josef, Jo, Jai, and J/O all came to help me put the memories to rest. Avery stood and watched, though he never said a word. He followed us silently, seeming to feel his help wouldn’t be appreciated, though he looked like he understood. He even looked sympathetic as I took down my own monument to Jay, the dirt and rocks from the planet he’d died on that had spelled out “I’m sorry.”

We worked in silence until it was done, and then they helped me carry the coffins to the

Old Man’s office. It seemed appropriate, somehow. We wouldn’t be using it much, and it was big enough that they could all be pushed against the wall and there would still be space if we needed it.

We went back to the engine room. This time I made myself go to the bodies; there had been more coffins than we needed to hold all the stuff on the Wall. We each took one end of a cot, carried them back out to the gardens, and placed our fallen comrades one by one into the boxes. Avery and I went back together for Josephine.

When we were done, there were six long silver coffins sitting out in the courtyard. Four of them were occupied, and I had Josef and J/O take the remaining two into storage. Then Avery went to each of the boxes in turn and placed a hand on them. One by one, they glowed green and vanished, and I didn’t bother to ask where he was sending them. The Old Man had touched the coffins and made them vanish, too, and as far as I knew no one had ever asked him where they went. Perhaps they took the bodies home, wherever that was. Maybe they took us to a world where we could be born again, or to a planet that counted as heaven. Maybe it was a graveyard or a black hole. I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. Death was death, and wherever we went afterward was something I would find out when my time came.

Avery paused by the fourth coffin, and he rested his hand on it for a moment longer than he had the other ones. I saw his lips move as he murmured something, too quietly for any of us to hear, and then he sent it off with the others. Luckily or not, I had been trained to read lips, and I echoed his words in a whisper as the final coffin glowed green and vanished.

“Good-bye, Josie,” I said so quietly that the words were carried away on the wind.

My team and I stayed up in shifts that night, each of us taking a turn keeping an eye on Avery and J/O. I knew I was probably being paranoid, but I couldn’t afford not to be.

Josef and a few of the Walkers he’d picked out slowly got the hallways cleared out, and it became easier to get from place to place without having to crawl over rubble and debris. Jo, as I’d predicted, made short work of getting the public rooms; by nightfall the next day, all twenty-five or so of us had usable dorm rooms and the mess hall was, if not clean enough to eat off of, at least well on its way there.

The jump-start of the ship had gotten all the basic functions working, so we were able to open the storm shutters and get the ventilation working all through the ship. Auxiliary power kicked in on the second day, and InterWorld became self-sustaining once again. Avery, true to his word, expanded the time parameters in the warp drive, and we made the jump back into our own timeline without so much as a bit of turbulence.

Joeb brought in one recruit that second day, a sharp-looking girl who wore her red hair in a pixie cut. She was shorter and leaner than most of us base-Earth versions, and her eyes matched her hair. There was nothing really special about her—not from a magic- or science-heavy world, though she did have an affinity for fixing things. Her name was Jorily, and within the first few moments of meeting her I was of half a mind to make her the temporary quartermaster. After all, we still had an equipment locker full of what currently amounted to junk; now that we had power, some of the things in there could be recharged and possibly fixed. I told Joeb to go ahead and set her up down there, in addition to whatever basic training programs he was starting up.

I was operating out of the Old Man’s office, which had not been my idea. Joeb and a few of the others had formed a team to clean it out and get it more or less organized, and they’d insisted I run communications out of there.

“It’s hooked up to all the main intercoms,” Joeb had pointed out. “It’s a secure location with more automatic shields and protocols than we can even catalog, and it’s automatic for most of us to go there in an emergency.”

He’d had a lot more to say than that, mostly about how they needed someone to look to, and it wasn’t so much about being in charge as it was seeming like I was in charge. I was a symbol, at least for the moment, and that meant I got to sit at a desk and divide our current numbers into teams and make lists of things that needed to be done. It meant, at least for a few days, that I had to stay put and recover, since I was still injured.

I was ready to go insane by the third day.