InterWorld (InterWorld 1)

And then Scarabus was gone, and in his place, huge and hissing, was a dragon, complete with wings and clawed limbs on a nightmarish pythonlike body. It flew up and wound itself around the rafters, moving at blinding speed toward Jo. She fluttered back against the wall, terrified.

Almost lazily it looped around her, then it slammed her against the wall and retreated to the floor, carrying her unconscious body with it.

When it was curled back on the floor again it shook itself, and once more it was Scarabus. Jo lay on the floor beside him.

It became very quiet.

I wanted to do something, but what could I do? I had no special abilities or powers, like the others, and I wasn’t carrying any weapons; none us were, except J/O, whose weapons were built-in. It was only a training mission, after all.

“What sweet friends you have,” said Lady Indigo. “And all of them are Walkers, too, of a kind. None of them as powerful or able a Walker as you, but when cooked down and bottled they’ll each power a ship or two. Eh?”

Now all this took a while to tell, but it merely took a handful of seconds to occur. So now it was just me and J/O. I may have had my problems with the little brat—I guess I was a brat, too, when I was his age, but right now it was him and me—and Hue, who had shrunk to the size of a bowling ball and turned a terrified shade of translucent gray.

“I don’t think so,” J/O said in response to Lady Indigo’s question. He aimed his laser arm at her. There was a gentle ruby glow at the tip but nothing else. I decided this wasn’t the time to point out that technology won’t work beyond a certain point in a solidly magic world.

J/O said a word that he must have gotten from one of his dictionary programs, because he didn’t get it from me.

And then Lady Indigo said a word herself that you wouldn’t have found in any dictionary, and she moved her hand just so, and J/O stood very still. He had a goofy expression on his face.

“Take them to the dungeon,” she told the soldiers. “Each of them should be prisoned in a different cell. And chain them down.” She walked over to J/O. “Go with these nice men to the cell they’ll have ready for you and help them chain you up. I’ll come and see you when you’re all settled in.”

He looked up at her like a spaniel looking at God. It made me feel sick, because I knew that must have been what I’d looked like back when Jay rescued me from the pirate ship.

You know what made me feel sickest, though? I’ll tell you. It was this: They’d left me for last, because they didn’t care about me. Everyone else was a problem to be solved or a nuisance to be batted away. I was a triviality. I wasn’t important.

“What about me?” I asked.

“Ah yes. Little Joey Harker.” She walked over to me. A little too close. I could smell her perfume, which seemed to be a sort of mixture of roses and rot. “What perfect timing. I was hoping to catch a top-class Walker in our little snare, but you are more than I could have hoped for. You’re needed back at HEX. Very urgently. There’s a big push just about to start. And you—you could power a fleet of battleships. There’s a courier schooner leaving in an hour, and you’ll be on it. You’ll be paralyzed, of course. Scarabus?”

The tattooed man nodded. “It’s all ready, my lady.”

“Good,” she said. And she flung some kind of spell at me.

I suppose it must have been the paralysis spell, but I couldn’t say for sure. Because before it reached me, Hue bobbed down and intercepted it, and the spell hit him with a spray of golden sparkles and evaporated into nothing.

Hue turned the exact color of the fluffy pink towels in Lady Indigo’s bathroom. I wondered if it was some kind of mudluff joke.

Lady Indigo was not amused. She looked at her henchmen. “What is that creature? Neville?”

“Never seen one before,” said the jelly man. He threw a large green canopic jar at Hue. It hesitated when it touched Hue’s surface, frozen for a moment in space and time, and then it vanished completely. Green and gold and pink swirled around Hue’s translucent soap-bubble skin, and then it went a solid white.

Hue hung there bobbing gently in space for a moment. It seemed to be looking at the people in the room, trying to decide what to do next.

And then it swooped down toward me.

For a moment, I was touching Hue’s surface, cold and slippery and, strangely, not disgusting—and then the world exploded.

I saw a lot of things at once, as if they were superimposed over one another: I saw Lady Indigo and the cellar; I saw the scientific glamour world; I saw my fallen teammates—only I could see them all from every angle, up and down and sideways and inside out. And it was as if I could see them through time, as well—all the intersections that put them into this place.

And from there I slipped into a world that made utter sense. It was in focus and sane and entirely logical. And I knew, on some level, that this was now the In-Between. But it was the In-Between from the point of view of a multidimensional life-form. It was the place the way that Hue saw it.

Our minds were touching. And I started to have a tiny, growing sense of what Hue actually was . . .

. . . and . . .

I fell to what passes for the ground in the In-Between. In this case it was a gentle film of copper spray which seemed to be held together by surface tension. A flock of tiny incongruent whorls devolved across the heavens.

The place made no sense anymore, which was an enormous relief to me. Hue was hanging solicitously in the air beside me. Or maybe a Hue the size of Vermont was a thousand miles away from me, glowing a warm and reassuring shade of blue. It extruded a pseudopod and gently spread it into a fan of finger shapes, moved them in a regretful arc and then absorbed them back into the bubble body.