InterWorld (InterWorld 1)

It could have been worse. No one spat in my food, no one dragged me off behind the barracks to beat the hell out of me, no one put my head into the toilet and flushed it. But no one spoke to me, unless they had to. They wouldn’t help me. If I was going the wrong way to class, no one would mention it; and when they saw me jogging around the parade ground, sweating and breathless, because I’d turned up five minutes late . . . well, that was the only time I’d see my fellow recruits smile when they looked in my direction.

If I was accidentally knocked over in rope climbing; if I got the weakest gravity repulsor disk in disk riding; if I got the oldest, grubbiest, most underpowered wand in Magic 101; if I ate at a table on my own, in the middle of a crowded mess hall . . . well, that was what happened.

I didn’t mind.

No, more than that: I was glad. They weren’t punishing me any more than I felt I ought to be punished. Jay had saved my life; he’d rescued me from that ship in the middle of the Nowhere-at-All; he’d saved me from my own stupidity more than once. And I’d paid him back by getting him killed.

So everybody got in line to hate me, and I was right at the front of the line.

A spray of sleet hit me in the face, and I clipped the cup back to my belt and I turned back to the rock face. “Okay,” I said. “Time to head back up.”

Jo said nothing. She flapped her wings to shake off the icy water and turned back to the rock face. She climbed, and, after a few minutes, so did I.

I was shivering. It was eas

ier now, though: Jo seemed to have an instinct for the handholds and footholds, and I followed her. Which went fine until the rain grew harder.

I looked up. The rock that Jo was standing on was crumbling beneath her foot.

“Hey!” I yelled, frantically signaling her to move.

But she ignored me. Then the rock gave way, and Jo slipped back down in a shower of pebbles. She fell directly onto me, knocking both of us down the cliff face.

It was a long way down, and we were tumbling fast together.

I grabbed her by the waist and pushed away from the cliff with my legs. She got the idea at once and flapped hard with her wings. Maybe she couldn’t keep both of us up for long, but we didn’t need to be up for long.

She landed back on the ledge where I’d eaten my soup.

“I tried to tell you,” I told her.

“Yeah,” she said. “I knew you were trying to get my attention. I just wasn’t going to look at you.”

I stood in the rain and shivered. “How did you know Jay?” I asked her.

“The same way all of us did. One day we started Walking. He came and got us and brought us back here. Mostly he got us out of trouble on the way.”

“Well, that’s how he found me. And he saved my life on the way, three or four times. And he gave up his own life getting me here. But I don’t think he would have treated me like this. And I don’t think he would have let me treat myself like this.”

There was a pause. Then she looked me straight in the eyes, with brown eyes that were like looking into a mirror. “You’re right. I don’t think he would either. I’ll spread the word.”

We climbed back to the top of the cliff in silence then, but it was an okay silence.

After that, things got better. Not much better. And not all the way. But they improved.

CHAPTER TEN

AND I’D THOUGHT MR. Dimas’s tests were hard.

Exams on InterWorld would make a Mensa chapter gulp with disbelief. It would have smoke coming out of the ears of our best brain trusts. How do you answer a question like: “Is the improbability factor of a time-reversed world solipsistic or phenomenological?” Or: “Describe six uses for the anti-element pandemonium.” Or how about: “Explicate the gnosis available from Qlippothic Beings of the Seventh Order.”

Try wrestling with stuff like that when you barely passed Home Ec.

I’d been at InterWorld’s boot camp for about twenty weeks now. Twenty weeks of round-the-clock exercises, classes in martial arts I’d never heard of (one of our instructors was from a world where Japan had united with Indochina to produce, among other things, fighting styles that made Tae Kwon Do look like drawing room dancing), survival skills, diplomacy, applied magic, applied science and a host of other things not likely to be found in the curricula of most high schools—or M.I.T., for that matter.

After twenty weeks of InterWorld food and intensive exercise, intensive study—heck, intensive everything—I was as lean as a stick of beef jerky and was working toward the kind of musculature and reflexes I’d seen advertised in the back of old comic books and had always dreamed of sending away for. I also had a head full of facts, customs and other esoterica that would allow me (theoretically) to pass as a native on a good number of the Earths where humanity looked like me.

Of course, my newfound skills at subterfuge and blending in wouldn’t do me much good on some of the other Earths we knew about, such as the one Jakon Haarkanen hailed from. Jakon looked like an example of what might happen if there was a wolf in the family tree maybe thirty thousand years back. She was sleek and feral and weighed about eighty pounds, most of it lean, sinewy muscle covered with short dark fur. She was a real practical joker—she liked to crouch on one of the rafters in the dormitory’s upstairs hall and then surprise you as you walked underneath by dropping down and knocking you to the floor. She had sharp teeth and bright green eyes, and she still looked kind of like me.