Eternity's Wheel (InterWorld 3)

“What about the other officers with their teams? Do you know where they are?”

“I don’t know if any of them actually made it off base,” he admitted. “I grabbed my recruits pretty quickly—my teams, and what I could of yours.” He nodded to where Jo, Jakon, Josef, and Jai were sitting nearby, listening.

“Most of mine were injured in the rockslide,” I murmured, more or less to myself. Why had the Old Man had him take the injured Walkers off base?

Joeb grinned at me. I blinked at the expression; for obvious reasons, his smile seemed kind of out of place. “They wouldn’t take no for an answer when they found out we were going off Base,” he explained. Jakon bared her teeth at me in her signature fierce smile, and Josef shot me a thumbs-up.

I hung my head, giving a quiet laugh. That was my team, all right.

“Okay,” I said, the word coming out as a sigh. “Ready to hear my side of it?”

It didn’t take me long to tell Joeb and the others everything that had happened to me. I had told it so many times, to Mr. Dimas and to Josephine, that I did so mechanically now, letting my brain detach from what I was saying and think about other things. Like how to get them all back to InterWorld Beta.

I hadn’t expected to run into so many Walkers at once. Honestly, I was concerned that having so many of them here would draw unwanted attention from our enemies, especially if we tried to Walk. Walking, if you weren’t careful about it, tended to alert the capture agents of either HEX or Binary. Not always, but they did have specific sensors for it. That’s how they’d find us, when we first discovered our power, before we even knew what was happening. . . .

Would Hue be able to take all of us at once? Or, if he was covering me, would I be able to Walk all of us through time? Though that many of us Walking at once would still have to blip some sensors, somewhere.

But, assuming FrostNight had been released, would they even care about what we were doing? You will not be able to Walk far enough away, Lord Dogknife had gloated to me. He’d left me alive on my home world; he obviously wasn’t too concerned with what I would or wouldn’t do. Would they even be paying attention enough to notice if that many of us Walked at once?

Damn it. There was too much I didn’t know.

“So, when Acacia sent me into the future to keep me safe,” I continued, “she sent me to a future version of InterWorld. I was able to get back, thanks to the tracer the Old Man injected me with, and Hue. Hue can act like an encounter suit and form himself to me. When he does, I can Walk to any timeline. It’s like . . . like I become multidimensional, myself.”

“Is it safe?” someone asked.

“Yes.” Surprisingly, it was Josephine who spoke up. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m still not sure I trust that little balloon, but we Walked through time easily enough. And we found you.”

I nodded. “So, we do have a ship. It’s just a matter of getting to it, and powering it once we’re there. Once we get the warp engines up and running, we can take the ship to our own timeline.”

“Then what?” Joeb asked, watching me carefully.

I took a breath. “Then we split into two groups. One group is responsible for extracting new Walkers, and the other will be training. Hard.”

“Okay,” Joeb said, holding up a hand. “I know why we’re getting new Walkers; it’s what we’ve always done, and it ensures HEX and Binary won’t find them first. But what, specifically, are we training for?”

“To stop FrostNight.”

A moment of silence followed, then Joeb asked “How?”

“I don’t know. But, if we can get InterWorld Beta up and running, we can use the library to research possible solutions.” That was met with more silence, and I sighed. “I know it’s not much of a plan. If any of you can think of anything better, believe me, I am all ears.”

“How long do we have?” Joeb said, after the silence had stretched for a moment more.

“I don’t know. It’s been days since I was dropped on my world. We have to act now. It may already be too late, but it’s either we do anything and everything we can, or we roll over and give up.”

“No one’s suggesting we do nothing,” Jo spoke up, a little sharply. I took a breath—I’d been starting to get frustrated, and Jo’s tone was a warning, a reminder that getting upset wouldn’t fix anything.

“I know,” I said, glancing briefly at her in thanks. “And I know you’re all willing to do whatever is needed.”

“One thing at a time,” Joeb said. “The first thing we have to figure out is how to get back Joey’s In

terWorld.”

“InterWorld Beta,” I corrected under my breath. I wasn’t comfortable with it being referred to as mine.

“How many of us do you think your mudluff could take at once?”

“I don’t know. He took me with no problem, and he managed to take me and Josephine, but I don’t know if he could take all of us. I don’t know what would happen if we tried and something went wrong.”