“Yes, I do. I have to try.”
This time he brightened, which confused me. He agreed that I had to try, but he wouldn’t let me go?
Confused or not, it wasn’t like I hadn’t played this game before. I knew my mudluff friend pretty well, and we’d worked out a pretty accurate system of communication.
“I have to try, but you won’t let me go?” I asked.
He turned an agitated shade of purple, floating forward. He shifted colors a bit, making a dark spot in his center, with lines of blue circuits moving out from the center. He looked like a giant eye—like the Old Man’s binary eye.
“The Old Man?” I asked. He brightened. “What about him?”
This time he turned blue and green, with little patches of white. The colors reminded me of home. “Earth?”
He brightened.
I didn’t know what to say to that. How could he possibly be on Earth somewhere? And which Earth?
“Can you take me to him?”
Hue hesitated. He flickered uncertainly, a few random numbers and equations flickering across his surface. It was the first time I’d seen him use anything other than colors to communicate, but I wasn’t sure what he was trying to say.
“Look, just do it,” I said, frustrated. Hue seemed to be implying that the Old Man was moving around freely, that he wasn’t a prisoner of HEX as I had thought, but I was still worried about him. I needed to find him, and Hue had never steered me wrong before. Plus, the Old Man’s message had said to keep him with me. . . . “Do it however you think is best, but help me find the Old Man. Please.”
He seemed to sigh, a faint gray washing over his spherical body. Then, with no warning at all, he launched himself at me.
I didn’t panic, mostly because he’d done this kind of thing before. In fact, he’d done this exact thing before, when he’d once rescued me from HEX. We collided and I felt his presence in the back of my mind, faint and intangible. Together, we Walked.
The place between dimensions was known to us as the In-Between; I know I’ve mentioned it before. What I haven’t really done is explain it, and that’s partially because it’s more than a little hard to explain. The In-Between is like looking through a kaleidoscope that shows you images from a hundred other kaleidoscopes, all of which have pictures of things instead of colors and shapes. There are also thousands, if not millions, of sounds and smells and textures. There are legends about Walkers going insane after their first trip through, and I was more than willing to believe those stories were real.
The benefit of going through it with Hue, though, was that the In-Between is a multidimensional place—and as a multidimensional creature, Hue was a local. Looking through my eyes with Hue in the back of my head acting as a perception filter, all the chaos of the In-Between made perfect sense.
I stood on what looked like a pile of discarded paper cups, though they were all fused together and felt like a trampoline beneath my feet. I looked off into the distance, ignoring the flock of origami birds, the sudden smell of fried eggs, and the abrupt understanding of the color blue. I expanded my senses and looked with more than my eyes.
I was aware of InterWorld, the beautiful bubble-dome city I’d called my home for the past two years. It felt like when you put drops of food coloring into clear water, how the color slowly permeates the liquid. InterWorld was the water, and the ink was HEX.
I wrenched my mind away from that knowledge, focusing instead on the Old Man.
And I found him.
The equation came immediately to mind: Earth FS314. My world.
And beyond it was . . . nothing. The organized chaos of the In-Between stretched into pure, oppressive nothing, the complete absence of everything and anything. It wasn’t even a void, it was more complete than that. More final.
It was a world on the edge of a precipice, an abyss, a yawning chasm of infinite nothingness. A world clinging tightly to its universe, still turning, holding on to the end.
I focused on the Old Man, on that world, on the edge of nothing. And I Walked as fast as I could.
There were hundreds of portals to Walk through in my town alone, but the one I was most familiar with was the one in the park. It wasn’t always in the same place, but it had been there every time I’d needed it.
This park was where I’d first been captured by HEX, before I’d ever been to InterWorld. It was where I’d landed when Lord Dogknife had thrown me through the dimensions. It was where I’d said a final farewell to my world a few short days ago, and it was where I landed now.
It was the middle of the afternoon. There were families picnicking, children climbing on the modestly sized play set, people walking their dogs and playing catch and throwing Frisbees. There were birds chirping. And somewhere, nearby, was the Old Man.
I could sense him. I could sense him here, and I could sense the ever-present nothing looming on the horizon.
I bolted through the park, not caring if anyone saw me. I ran past a couple out for a stroll, a man pushing a double-wide stroller, and a woman strutting down the street on heels that could probably be used as a weapon. I dodged through a group of kids playing tag, ignoring the faint twinge in my ribs as my foot came down hard in a dip in the ground, jarring my entire body.
Within moments, I was across the street and running down the same sidewalks I used to ride my bike on every day after school. The kid next door, twenty-something now and home from college, was riding his skateboard directly toward me. “Hey—” he started, recognizing me as I jumped off the sidewalk, running down the middle of the street. The dotted yellow lines moved beneath me, one by one. The sky seemed darker than it had a moment ago. A shadow was moving across the sun.