InterWorld (InterWorld 1)

“Bub-bells,” said the squid sadly. His real name is Kevin. He looked so dejected.

“Will you wear a coat?” I asked. “And your mittens?”

“Okay,” he said. So I went down to the kitchen and made a bucket of bubble mixture, using liquid dishwashing soap, a jigger of glycerin and a dash of cooking oil. Then we put our coats on and went into the yard.

The squid has a couple of giant plastic bubble-blowing wands, most of which he hadn’t used since September, which meant that I had to find them, and then I had to wash them, as they were caked with mud. By the time we were ready to start blowing bubbles, it was snowing gently, big flakes that spun down from the gray sky.

“Hee,” said the squid. “Bub-bells. Ho.”

So I dipped the bubble wand into the bucket, and I waved it in the air; and huge multicolored soap bubbles came out from the plastic circle and floated off into the air; and the squid made happy noises which weren’t quite words and weren’t quite not; and the snowflakes touched the bubbles and popped the little ones, and sometimes the flakes landed on the bigger bubbles and slid down the sides of them; and every soap bubble as it floated away made me think of . . .

. . . something . . .

It was driving me crazy that I couldn’t quite tell what.

And then the squid laughed and pointed at a bobbing bubble and said, “Hyoo!”

“You’re right,” I said. “It does look like Hue.” And it did. They’d taken everything from my head, but they couldn’t take Hue. That balloon looked just like the . . .

. . . just like the mudluff that was . . .

“. . . It’s a multidimensional life-form . . .”

I could hear his voice saying it, under that swimming, finger-painted sky . . .

Jay.

I remembered him, lying bloody on the red earth after the monster attacked. . . .

And then it came back. It all came back, hard and fast, while I was standing out in the snow with my baby brother, blowing bubbles.

I remembered it. I remembered it all.

PART III

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I COULD WALK AGAIN.

Don’t ask me how. Maybe there was a glitch in whatever brain-scrubbing gizmo they used on me. Maybe Hue was some kind of unanticipated variable they hadn’t programmed (or deprogrammed) for. . . . Whatever. All I know is, standing there in our backyard, shivering in that light dusting of snow, watching my little brother happily chasing those bubbles around, a series of firecrackers was going off in my head, each one illuminating a memory that hadn’t been there before.

I remembered everything: the grueling days and nights of study and exercise; the infinite diversity of my classmates, all variations on a theme that was Joey Harker; the tiny supernovae going off apparently at random in the Old Man’s artificial eye; the seething Technicolor madness that was the In-Between . . .

And the milk-run mission that had gone wrong, being captured once again by Lady Indigo and my rescue—mine and only mine—by Hue.

I stood there, shivering from a chill that had nothing to do with the weather, mechanically dipping that bubble wand into the soapy solution and creating bubbles, and wondered what I should do now.

I remembered the shame and helplessness I felt when I came back without my teammates. What had happened to them? What had Lady Indigo and Lord Dogknife done with them? To them? I desperately wanted to find out. And I knew I could. I knew I could Walk again, could go back through the In-Between. The formula for finding Base Town burned clear and bright in my mind. I could get there, oh yeah.

But did I want to go?

If I left my Earth again, I could never come back. Every time I opened a portal it was like sending up a signal flare to HEX and the Binary. I would be taking a chance of luring the bad guys here. Each Walker, I’d been told, had a unique psychic signature that could be traced. I guessed that the Binary had thousands of sequenced mainframes on the lookout for my configuration, just as HEX kept a phalanx of sorcerers on twenty-four-hour duty for the same reason. I couldn’t put my family and my friends in that kind of danger.

If I never Walked again, the chances were trillions to one against either side ever deciding to conquer this particular world. It was virtually certain that I could grow up, get married, have kids, get old and die without ever having to hear about the Altiverse again.

But to never Walk again . . .

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned yet that Walking is like any skill you’re good at, in that I enjoyed it. It felt good, it felt right, to use my mind to open the In-Between, to pass from world to world to world. Chess masters don’t play for money, or even for competition—they play for love of the game. Mathematical savants don’t get their kicks from gardening—they juggle set theories in their heads or daydream pi to umpty-ump places. Like a trained gymnast, now that I remembered my ability, I itched to use it.