InterWorld (InterWorld 1)

A section of the floor started to crumble beneath us. J/O, Jakon, Jai and Jo made it across to the nearby staircase. Josef and I didn’t. Now there was a gap, easily ten feet wide, with flames erupting from it. Flames were spreading along the floor behind us.

“We’re never going to get out of here alive,” said someone. I think it was me.

The planks beneath me started tumbling away. I stepped back onto what I hoped was more solid footing. It wasn’t.

There was nothing but fire beneath me. But before I could fall into it, somebody picked me up, grabbing me by the belt as the deck vanished completely. “Hey,” said Jo. “Relax, or I might drop you.”

I relaxed. Her wings flapping, she rose above the hole and put me down on an untouched part of the deck. Then she turned back, dropping again to rescue Josef, who was hanging from a spar.

“You okay?” asked Jakon. I nodded. Then I opened my hand, where the prism had been. There was nothing there.

“He tricked me,” I said. “He lied.”

Jakon grinned. “I don’t think so.” She pointed above me.

I looked up. Hue hung in the air above me. He was faint and gray, but there nonetheless. I felt relief wash over me. “Hue! You’re back! Are you okay?”

A faint blush of pink spread along the mudluff’s bubble surface.

“I think she may have been hurt,” said Jakon.

I wondered about the “she” part, but there was no time to get into something as potentially complicated as that. “The quickest route’s through here,” I said, pointing at the wall. J/O stepped up and aimed his blaster arm. I didn’t see what he did; the smoke had become so thick that I couldn’t see, or breathe very well either. “Hurry,” I said, coughing. Then I saw a flash of scarlet light through my closed eyelids, heard something like ffzzzhhsstt!! and suddenly there was fresh air in my face. Someone pushed me forward, and I stumbled out onto the Malefic’s forward deck.

“There’s the gate,” said Josef. “Look.” You could see it almost a hundred yards away to one side of the ship, glimmering against the strangeness of the Nowhere-at-All. “How do we get there?”

Jai said, “Jo, can you navigate the ether?”

“Can I fly over there?” She hesitated. “I don’t know. Probably not.”

“This is crazy,” growled Jakon. “We’re going to die on this stupid ship within sight of a gate.”

I looked again at the “hole” in the “sky.” It looked smaller, as if we’d drifted farther away. No. We weren’t drifting.

The gate was shrinking.

I looked up at Hue. “Hue! Could you get us out of here?”

He pulsed a sad gray. He had obviously been hurt by his time in the prism.

“Okay. Could you get us over to the portal?”

Again, a gloomy gray pulse. No. He couldn’t even do that.

“Well, then, could you get one of us over to the portal?”

A pause. Than a positive blue spread across Hue’s surface.

“Great,” said J/O. “So you get to live, and we get to die. That’s great. That’s just great, by which I mean, it really sucks, in case you were wondering.”

“You know,” I told him, “I was just starting to like you, after that sword fight. All of us are getting out. And the one I want Hue to carry over is Josef.”

“Me?” said Josef, his brow creasing.

“That’s right,” I told him. There was another explosion from below us, and another chunk of the ship dissolved into splinters.

“Quick,” I told them, looking around, “we need that rigging over there, and—yes! There’s a segment of mast down there. We need it over here.”

Jakon grabbed the rigging—it was the size of a couple of bedsheets, a netlike tangle of thumb-thick line—and Jai, with a little effort, levitated one end of the broken mast from under the pile of broken spars and timbers. Jo pulled up with the other, flapping her wings as she did so, and Josef and I pushed it up and over to the spot I had indicated.