The Old Man’s desk takes up most of the room, and it’s covered with piles of paper and dog-eared folders held together with rubber bands. Heaven only knows how he finds anything on there.
On the wall behind him there’s a huge picture of something that looks kind of like a whirlpool and kind of like a tornado and mostly like the shape the water makes as it goes down the drain. It’s an image of the Altiverse—the pattern that we all swore to protect and to guard and, if needed, to give our lives for.
He glared at me with his good eye. “Sit down, Jay.”
The Old Man looks to be in his fifties, but he could be much older than that. He’s pretty banged up. One of his eyes is artificial: it’s a Binary construct, made of metal and glass. Lights flicker inside it, green and violet and blue. When he looks at you through it, it can have you checking out your conscience and make you feel five years old every bit as well as his real eye can. His real eye is brown, just like mine.
“You’re late,” he growled.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I came as soon as I got your message.”
“We have a new Walker,” he told me. He picked up a file from his desk, riffled through it and pulled out a sheet of blue paper. He passed it to me. “Upstairs thinks he could be hot.”
“How hot?”
“Not sure. But he’s a wild card. Going to be setting off alarms and tripping snares everywhere he goes.”
I looked at the paper. Basic human-friendly planet design—one of the middle worlds, the thick part of the Arc—nothing too exotic. The coordinates were pretty straightforward as well. It looked like a fairly easy run.
“Reel him in?”
The Old Man nodded. “Yeah. And quickly. They’ll both be sending out grab teams to get him as soon as they know he’s out there.”
“I’m meant to be debriefing the Starlight job today.”
“Joliet and Joy are debriefing now. If I need any amplification I can get in touch with you. This takes priority. And you can have two days off when it’s done.”
I wondered if I’d actually get the two days off. It didn’t matter. “Got it. I’ll bring him in.”
“Dismissed,” said the Old Man. I stood up, figuring on a quick trip to the armory and then out into the field and into the In-Between. Before I reached the door, though, he spoke again. He was still growling at me, but it was a friendly growl. “Remember, Jay, I need you back here in one piece, and I need you back here soon. One more Walker, more or less, isn’t going to mean the end of the worlds. One less field officer might. Stay out of trouble. You’ll be back and debriefing by oh seven hundred hours tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and closed the door.
The Old Man’s assistant handed me my armory requisition slip. Then she smiled at me. Her name’s Josetta. “Goes for me, too, Jay,” she said. “Come back safe. We need all the field ops we can get.”
The quartermaster is from one of the heavier Earths—places where you feel like you weigh five hundred pounds, and often do. He’s shaped like a barrel, ten inches taller than I am. Looking at him is like looking into a distorting mirror at a carnival, the kind that squashes you as it magnifies you.
I requisitioned an encounter suit, watched him toss it down to me like it didn’t weigh anything at all. I caught it, and it almost knocked me over. It must have weighed seventy-five pounds. I figured he was mad at me for losing the combat jacket and the belt.
I signed for the encounter suit. I stripped down to my T-shirt and boxers, draped it over me and activated it, feeling it cover my body from head to toe; and then I set my m
ind on the new kid. I got a bead on him and began to Walk toward him. . . .
The In-Between was cold, and it tasted like vanilla and woodsmoke in my mouth. I found him without a hitch. And then it all went wrong.
CHAPTER FIVE
I WAS WALKING AFTER the witch, with Mr. Jellyfish and the tattooed man just behind me.
It was like two people were living in my head. One of them was ME, a big huge me, who had somehow decided that the most important thing there ever was or would be was the witch woman he was following out of the high school. The other person in my head was me, too, but a tiny little me who was screaming silently, who was terrified of the witch and the tattooed man and Mr. Jellyfish, who wanted to run, to save himself.
Trouble was, the little me was having no effect whatsoever. We crossed the football field, heading toward the old oak tree, which had been struck by lightning a couple of years back and now just stuck up into the sky like a rotten tooth. The sun had just gone down, but the sky was still light. I was shivering.
The witch turned to the tattooed man. “Scarabus, contact the transport.”
He bowed his head. I could see goose bumps on his skin under one of those not-quite-clear images. He raised a finger and touched it to one of the tattoos on his neck, and suddenly I could see that one clearly. It was a ship under sail. He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the pupils were glowing gently.
“The ship Lacrimae Mundi at your bidding, lady,” he said in a distant voice like a radio broadcast.