I focused inward again, intending to convince Hue to go tell InterWorld to punch it. When there was no response, I realized he was completely gone from my mind. I hadn’t even noticed him leave.
Good luck, little buddy, I thought, as I saw at least two doors on opposite sides of the room slide open, and the glassy-eyed clones Binary used as their grunt army started to pour through. The cavalry was here, and it wasn’t on our side.
Then a feeling as familiar to me as my own heartbeat tingled in the air, like a scent you’ve known your whole life coming to you on a sudden breeze. Lady Indigo whipped her head up in obvious joy, letting loose a wild howl.
“They come! Like moths to a flame, they come!”
And just like that, the room was filled with Walkers. I had no idea how they’d all gotten through the same portal—and then I saw Hue, bobbing above Jai’s head. He must have somehow expanded the gateway.
“To the Captain!” Joeb cried. I flinched.
The room burst into a flurry of motion. The huge screen on the far wall—the Professor, leader of Binary—flared to life once again, and so did the white cables that made up the star I was in the center of. The first Walker to me, someone I didn’t even recognize, tried to cross over one of the cables and was launched backward. The others slowed, one of them kneeling to check on our fallen comrade, the rest either breaking off to deal with the Binary clones or trying to find some way to bypass the wires.
J/O stopped at the edge of the star, talking to Jai, and I realized I couldn’t hear them. When the wires had flared to life, a shimmery, barely visible shield had sprung up around the edges of the star. It fed upward into the conductors and continued into the ceiling, and it was abruptly like I was in some kind of vacuum. I couldn’t hear a thing happening beyond it.
It was surreal, like watching an action movie on mute. Everything was chaos beyond the invisible walls, but I heard nothing.
Acacia was trading blows with Lord Dogknife, dodging and weaving around the various bits of equipment and Walkers, alternately shielding herself and firing various weapons and gadgets from her tool belt. She looked to be holding her own; unfortunately, so did Lord Dogknife.
Avery was doing much the same with Lady Indigo, now wielding the sword in one hand and what looked like a long tube in the other. As he brought the tube up to block one of the razor-sharp bones Lady Indigo was using as weapons, I realized it was his scabbard.
Lady Indigo wasn’t doing as well as Lord Dogknife seemed to be. Of her eight bonelike legs, two had been sliced cleanly off at the joints, and one was tucked up, wounded and useless, near her body. Still arguably less than sane, it looked like she was laughing and cackling at the Time Agent even as he cut close enough to sever a few stra
nds of what hair remained on her head.
The air was full of projectiles going back and forth between the Walkers and the clones, in some places flying so thickly I could hardly see. This wasn’t the entire base—that would have been nearly five hundred or so of us, and though the room was big enough to fit that many, there seemed to be about half that number here now. But the others were here, too—I could sense them, outside this room, keeping more of the clones from getting in.
They had come for me. Every single one of them, even the injured. Every Walker on Base Town had come here, to the end of the Multiverse, for me.
I glanced down at the chains Acacia had been working on, giving them an experimental tug; one of the links looked transparent, which I was hoping meant it was damaged. I wrapped it around my wrist (the broken one, of course . . . ) to get better leverage, and pulled with all my might.
I looked around as I strained, using what I saw as both distraction and encouragement. Jo was helping Acacia, flying around and taking shots at Lord Dogknife with a blaster she’d picked up from one of the Binary clones. J/O and Jai had both run over to the Professor itself and seemed to be having a heated argument, while some of the other Walkers—I recognized Josef and Jakon in particular—fought to protect them from the live wires that snapped through the air like whips.
I felt the searing pain in my wrist at the same time I felt the chain come free, and my own momentum sent me toppling over to one side. I had one hand free, though, and that meant I could use both hands to pull the other chain off.
I wrapped the chain around both hands and pulled again, bracing my feet against where it attached to the floor. After a long moment I had to give in, panting and sweating from the effort. It hadn’t even budged. Acacia hadn’t managed to damage this one. I had nothing on me but Josephine’s switchblade; it was a good knife, the blade about two and a half inches, the handle sturdy. Still, I didn’t think it would do much to damage these chains.
I looked around again. Hue was bobbing anxiously around the outside of the star, pulsing different shades of blue and silver. J/O and Jai were still arguing. Finally, J/O shouted something at Jai, who hung his head and nodded. As one, they turned and dodged through the mass of writhing, tentacle-like wires, moving right up to the giant machine. J/O flipped one of his fingers back to reveal the mini-USB, and Jai put both hands on either side of the cyborg’s head.
“NO!” I screamed, uselessly—they couldn’t hear me. Jai’s whole body glowed red. So did J/O, as the younger incarnation of me plugged the USB into one of the many panels on the giant machine.
There was a sound like the screeching of metal, something even I could hear. It seemed to be coming from the very walls, from every bit of equipment in the room, and from the wires that surrounded me.
The transparent walls caging me dropped. At the same time, every single Binary clone in the room froze, some of them dropping to the floor. Over by the sparking, smoking machine that had housed Binary’s leader, J/O and Jai as well.
Josef charged over to me, pulling at the chain with one massive hand. As he broke the remaining link, he grabbed me with his other hand, tucking me up under his arm like a football. Hue whirled around us, those strange equations flickering across his surface again, like he’d done back in the library.
“Get him out of here!” Acacia screamed, but I expertly wriggled free of Josef’s huge grasp. “Joe, go!”
I ignored her, running over to Jai and J/O. With a quick glance, I could see that Jai was breathing shallowly. The massive machine against the wall was still sparking, emitting a sickly red smoke. J/O was doing the same.
I pulled the cyborg to me, starting to check various different vitals and finding all of them useless. He was half robot, he had very few of the human life signals. I coughed, waving the smoke away, and passed a hand in front of his eyes. There was no reaction.
One of his eyes, like mine, was brown. The other was red, like it was sometimes when he was using it to project an image or searching internal memory banks. But this time it was different. It was a dull red, with a small black dot in the center. It looked like a powered-off machine. Lifeless.
Out of everyone at InterWorld, J/O looked the most like me. He looked like a younger me, and it was beyond awful to sit there and look at my face with no life in it.
It wasn’t the first time I’d had to do that. I also knew it wouldn’t be the last.