“They’re not coming,” I said. My voice sounded strange in my own ears.
“I?
??m sorry, Joe.”
I kept silent, just standing there, holding her hands. There wasn’t anything I could say.
{IW}:=O/8
had brought me home, but home was beyond my reach.
“Come to TimeWatch with me,” she said, giving a light squeeze of my hands that brought my gaze back to her, however unwillingly. “As a guest. As a friend.”
I stared at her for a moment, reading the earnest hope on her face, the desire to make me understand. “No cells?”
She smiled, brilliantly. “No cells. No holding fields, no Sentry.”
“Oh, is that what they’re called? The hulking men in the suits that look like secret service on steroids?”
She laughed, eyes sparkling. “The Sentry. He’s our main guard.”
“Your main guard? For all of TimeWatch?”
“He has more than one form.”
“Do any of them speak with their mouths, or is that part of the intimidation factor?”
She laughed again. The idea of going with her was becoming more and more appealing.
She looked up at me and I looked down at her, and we were both smiling. “I like you better when you don’t have to have the last word all the time,” I told her, and she didn’t even blink.
“I like you better when you aren’t trying to impress me.”
“Nah, I gave up on that when you stood up to the Old Man.”
“He’s not that scary.”
I thought of the picture in the Old Man’s desk, of him and the older her, of the way they’d been smiling. I wondered if she was going to be his someday, or if she already had been. I wondered if this technically counted as making moves on my boss’s girl, but it was mattering less and less because she was tilting her face up toward me and our arms were around each other now, and I didn’t know if I’d ever see the Old Man or InterWorld again.
I shouldn’t have been surprised when something huge blocked out the sun right then, right when our faces were so close I could feel her breath. I shouldn’t have been surprised when the ship blinked into existence right above us, but I was, and I was further surprised when I looked up and it wasn’t InterWorld.
It was worse than the Malefic and that horrible FrostNight machine combined. It was bigger and darker than anything I’d ever seen, surrounded by a halo—no, a miasma—of tiny particles like Saturn’s rings, except they were swirling and pivoting like a cloud of wasps around a disturbed nest. Worst of all, it was completely silent, like an animal stalking its prey.
I pulled Acacia back beneath a tree as the particles shifted and swirled, still absolutely silent, streams of them shooting out in all directions. In less than a minute they’d completely blanketed the sky, like storm clouds in winter.
We were afraid to even whisper, afraid to breathe. The miasma grew denser and denser, until it was as dark as a moonless night, and the sky churned and roiled like a thing alive.
Then, high up and slightly to the side of us, there was an outline of something, a flicker, a shadow—then it was gone, and back, and gone again, but I’d seen the shape of it and it was one I knew as well as my own heart.
The black ship began to flicker as well, out of time with the other shape, and the particles were swirling faster and faster in the sky, shifting and whirling and writhing, twisting around the other. Slowly, they began to flicker in tandem.
HEX had found InterWorld—and something else had found us.
I whirled, my arms still wrapped around Acacia—but I couldn’t protect her from the air, the miasma that permeated this entire area. I wasn’t even sure what had struck her, but she gasped and went limp in my arms. I tried to hold on to her, as I had when we’d been separated by Binary, but something lashed out and hit me in my injured side. I doubled over; the only way I could save myself from a broken rib was to roll with it. The darkness grew thicker, more pronounced, and I lost sight of Acacia.
Shadows swept up in front of me, coalescing, forming strong hands that grabbed me by the throat. I felt my feet leave the ground as the darkness continued to take shape, forming into a figure from my nightmares.
Lord Dogknife.