Eternity's Wheel (InterWorld 3)

Joeb had brought three more recruits in, and I’d met them all. I’d given them the condensed version of what was happening, wished them luck, and sent them off to combat classes with Jakon and tactic lectures with Jo. I’d combed through any and all of the files that were still readable in the Old Man’s office, trying to find something—anything that would give me some sort of direction, and I’d been doing this for two days straight before it occurred to me that though this may have been the Old Man’s office in my time, I had no way of knowing who it had belonged to when the ship had been abandoned.

The thought stopped me dead. This whole time, I had been thinking of a new crew and a much older ship, of our same cause centuries in the future, and the same Captain.

This was, of course, impossible. But equally impossible was the image of someone else sitting at this desk, someone else giving us orders or sending out teams. The Old Man didn’t have a second-in-command. He didn’t have a lieutenant, or any officers aside from those he sent out on jobs or to recruit. It had always been just him. What would happen if he ever died?

The Old Man’s office was the first place we went in an emergency, the first place we gathered in the event of anything that wasn’t in the official handbook. It was where we went to get our missions and the first place we went—even before the infirmary, in some cases—after we returned. I couldn’t imagine walking into this room and seeing anyone else.

But I was here. There were four or five people on this ship now who’d never even met the Old Man. People who’d only ever seen me sitting at this desk.

The thought was terrifying.

It was terrifying enough that I half stood from my chair before I even knew where exactly I was intending to go. I wanted out, away from this desk and its weight. I wanted to be training the recruits myself, or going out and getting them. This room was too big and too silent.

I sighed, then gingerly touched the tips of my fingers to the smooth surface of the desk. It flashed, then words started to crawl across it—Josetta’s message to me, telling me to stay still and that she was sending someone to help. When I’d first come to this InterWorld, when TimeWatch had sent me here, I’d gone to the Old Man’s desk and found the message. It was preprogrammed to react to the tracer in my bloodstream, which meant it would eventually go away. For now, though, I was stuck with seeing the message every time I touched it. I was stuck with the reminder that I was just a normal recruit who’d gotten in over his head.

I was still standing in front of the desk when one of the intercom lights blinked on. It was the private link from the engine room, where I’d left J/O, Jai, and Avery. “Joey,” J/O’s voice came over the speaker. He sounded rushed and worried. “Several of the alarm systems blipped at once, and Avery took off. He bolted out the door. I sent Jai after him, but—”

“What kind of alarms?”

“The radar blipped, then the proximity sensors.”

“Activate any shields we have the power for—”

“There’s nothing on the screen,” J/O interrupted. “There’s nothing to hit. The radar blipped once, but it’s dark.”

I stood there for a moment, waiting for a solution to come to me. I wasn’t a captain, damn it, I didn’t know what this meant or what to do in this situation. “And you said Avery just bolted?”

“Yeah. He—”

Whatever else J/O was saying was lost in a sudden, shrill beep. There was a subtle rumble beneath my feet, small enough that I almost didn’t feel it.

InterWorld was big enough that a small impact on one end of the ship wouldn’t necessarily be felt on the other side, or even in the middle. The short, warning beep I’d heard from the engine room meant we’d hit something.

“Talk to me, J/O! What was that?”

&n

bsp; “The radar’s not— Wait, it’s blinking in and out. It’s too small to actually— Joey, it’s headed right toward you!”

The rush of adrenaline I felt was compounded by the sudden crash behind me. I whirled just in time to see something fly by me, a rush of black and green. It slammed against the back wall of the Old Man’s office with enough force that I felt the room shudder, and I coughed at the abrupt cloud of dust that welled up.

I’d insisted any weapons that had been scavenged or restored be given to the officers going out on the field; all I had on me was a switchblade I’d found in Josephine’s backpack. Making sure all the teams were equipped had seemed like a perfectly sound idea at the time, but maybe I was about to regret that decision.

The dust was slowly clearing, though it didn’t look like dust anymore. It was sort of pretty, like how the clouds would look on my world when the sun was setting. As if there was a light behind them, a purple light . . .

I ran over, skidding to my knees beside her. “Acacia!”

“Joey?” J/O’s voice came though the speaker again, urgent and worried.

“I’m fine,” I yelled, reaching down to clear some of the debris from her.

Acacia looked like she’d been through hell. Her clothing was marred by a hundred tiny cuts, dirty and singed in some places, like she’d fallen through a thornbush. (Or several. Some of them might have been on fire.) Her face and arms looked the same.

She was sprawled out on her back, a small indentation above her from where she’d obviously slammed into the wall and fallen. I risked a quick glance over my shoulder; part of the Old Man’s doorway, already not in the best shape from whatever had cleared out the ship, was made even wider from where she’d clipped the side of it. I felt my blood run cold as I realized; somehow, the thing we’d hit was Acacia. There was no way she could have survived that impact.

A mere thread of a sound came from her, something too quiet to even be a whisper. I put a hand to her neck, feeling for a pulse. Miraculously, there was one. Even more miraculously, she slowly turned her head to look up at me. Her lips moved.

“What?” I leaned down, so close I could feel her breath against my ear.