Eternity's Wheel (4 page)

I'd rather die right now—rather let all the worlds be
destroyed—than allow that to happen to even one more of us.

I stepped through the door, stopping to let my eyes adjust. It had been dark outside, but it was darker in here; the only light that found its way in was through the windows, and most of those were covered with signs saying
RENT THIS SPACE
.

The floor was marble, one of those nice-looking entryways that made you forget you were probably here to see a therapist or dentist. There were doors on either side of me, both closed and sporting tinted-glass windows, and the lobby stretched out into darkness ahead of me.

Everything was silent as I moved, walking carefully across the pristine floor. I listened hard, alert for any sign that I wasn't alone, and a subtle change in air pressure warned me a second before I heard a distinct
click
behind me.

I whirled, going immediately into a crouch, only to discover the figure behind me doing the same.

“Don't move,” she hissed, and in her hands was a gun. It was pointed directly at me.

N
OW,
I
'D SEEN ALL
kinds of guns since I started training at InterWorld, from all worlds and times. Blasters, emitters, ray guns, laser guns with detachable Bluetooth scopes, plasma guns, you name it. This was a modern handgun, a Colt .45. Basic, easy, and still able to kill me twice before I hit the ground.

“Whoa,” I said, holding my hands out in front of me.

“Don't move,” she repeated. The gun was leveled at me unwaveringly, and from the look on the face behind it, this wouldn't be its maiden voyage. I wondered if that's how I looked in my weapons training classes. I imagined it wasn't far off, since we shared the same face.

“Josephine,” I said, trying to make my voice as soothing as possible. “It's okay. My name is Joe, I'm—”

My words didn't have the calming effect I was hoping for. “It's
you,
” she snarled, and her hands began to shake. “You're
the one who was in my house that day!”

“Yes,” I said, but didn't get any further. She started to stand. So did I, but she gestured me back down with an angry jerk of the gun.

“You ruined my life,” she spat, edging closer. I was well versed enough in weapons to know what a bullet from that gun would do to my head if she fired. She was still shaking, though it was obviously from anger rather than fear.

“You don't want to fire that,” I said, trying to be reasonable. I hoped she couldn't hear the panic that was threatening to shatter my calm. “The police station isn't too far from here, they'll hear the shots.” That was a guess, actually; I remembered that the police station was on a street of the same name as this one, but I had no idea how close or far it was from here.

“I don't care,” she said, standing just out of my reach. She was about my height, dressed in loose jeans and a baggy hoodie, both of which looked like they'd seen better days. Her frizzy red hair was short, barely touching her cheeks, and looked like it hadn't been brushed in a while. Despite the baggy clothes, I could see that she was thinner than was healthy. All this added up to a desperation that made me believe her next words. “It'll be worth it. Even if I go to jail, it'll be worth it. They'll finally stop coming after me.”

I didn't bother pointing out that if she killed me, it wouldn't matter if she went to jail or not; she'd likely be dead
either way when FrostNight destroyed everything. There was something else I could use to make a far better point.

“No, they won't. They aren't after me! Well, they aren't
just
after me. They're after you.” The pieces had all fallen together. The HEX agents outside her house had been waiting for
her
to come home. The bad guys had found her because I'd Walked there unknowingly. I'd led them to her.

Simply put, I
had
ruined her life.

“Shut up! You're lying. Why would they be after me? They started coming after you showed up in my house that day. They must be after you!”

“They were, but now they're after
us
. You have to trust me. Look, look at me! We could be twins!”

“You're just one of them, trying to . . . to do whatever weird magic crap they do, to take my place!”

“No, Josephine, listen!” I told her my full name, my birthday, my mother's and father's names and birthdays. I told her where I went to elementary school and what my favorite dessert was. From the look on her face, I could tell everything I said was true for her, too. “If I was trying to take your place, first of all, why would I be a
boy
, and second, why wouldn't I be living your life right now? You're obviously not. You haven't even been home, have you?”

“Not in months,” she admitted, though the gun was still pointed at me.

“So why would I come find you?”

“To lead them to me,” she said, but she sounded less certain.

“No,” I said, as forcefully as I dared. “I'm trying to help you. I
am
you, you from a different world. And you are me, from
this
world.”

“And those things?” she asked.

“Those are the bad guys,” I said. “I know it's a simple explanation, but we don't have time to get into it. I promise I'll explain on the way, but we can't stay here. They can sense us, and they'll find us eventually. You have to trust me.”

She just looked at me, indecision plain on her face. I could almost read every thought as it went through her mind; after all, I knew what I'd be thinking, if I were in her shoes. I knew what I
had
thought, when all of this had first happened to me.

“The alternative is staying here, on your own,” I said. “Not being able to go home, not being able to trust
anyone
. I promise, you can trust me.”

Her lips twitched, twisting into something halfway between a snarl and a grimace. Her chin trembled, just for a second, and she started to lower the gun.

I heard a faint, cheerful pop behind me, and Josephine's eyes widened. So did mine, as I realized what was going to happen. I shouted, “No, wait!” as she raised her gun and fired, the sound loud enough to temporarily deafen us both.

I darted forward, not even turning to see if Hue was okay.
Josephine was taking aim again. I grabbed her wrist, turning it and jabbing my thumb into the soft tissue below her scaphoid. She dropped the gun, her other hand clenching to a fist, which she swung clumsily at me. She didn't have a quarter of the training I did. I had her in a hold immediately, despite her struggling.

She may not have had my training, but she was definitely used to fighting for her life. She brought a knee up, though not into my groin as I would have expected. Instead, she tried to bring her foot down hard on my instep. I barely avoided it, tightening my grip on her as I looked for Hue.

The little mudluff was bobbing up and down in the air, alternating between a spooked shade of white and a confused blue-gray.

“Hue, are you okay?” I asked, more than a little anxious. I'd once seen him take a laser bolt and come out mostly unscathed, but . . .

“I knew you were one of them,” Josephine spat, still struggling.

“I'm not, and neither is Hue. He's a friend of mine, and you almost shot him.” The mudluff was spinning slowly, as though to prove to me that he hadn't been hit. I didn't see any marks or discolorations on his surface, which was a small blessing.

“He looks like a demented balloon,” she said. “And I've seen weirder from those . . . other things. How was I supposed
to know he was a friend of yours? I'm still not sure
you're
a friend of
mine
.”

“Well, you'd better get sure,” I told her. The slow wail of a siren started up in the distance. I didn't know if someone had called in the gunshot or if it was a coincidence, but I wasn't willing to chance it.

I said as much, letting her go (though I picked up the gun before she could). She stood there uncertainly, alternately watching me and Hue.

“Hue showing up doesn't change anything,” I told her, holding the gun nonthreateningly at my side. “You looked like you were about to come with me. If you stay here alone, they
will
catch you. If you come with me—and Hue—they won't. It's that simple.” It was too simple, really; I couldn't promise that HEX or Binary would
never
catch her, or that something else wouldn't happen to her, but it was better than leaving her here. I needed her, and she needed me. Us J names had to stick together.

“Come on,” I said, and she finally capitulated with poor grace. She growled something that sounded like “fine,” and turned to stalk back in through the door she'd surprised me from. I followed.

Through the door was another wide room and an elevator. There was a broom and dustpan leaning up against the wall near the up/down buttons. As I watched, she jabbed the thin part of the dustpan into the slit where the elevator doors
met, then pushed until she had enough room to wedge the broom in. Then she pried the doors open, revealing what appeared to be her temporary living area.

She had a ratty-looking sleeping bag and pillow, two beat-up backpacks, and three or four books piled up in the corner of the elevator car. The emergency exit in the roof was propped open, and there was a rope hanging down from it. Honestly, it wasn't a bad setup; all she had to do was take the broom with her when she went out or in, and open the doors barely wide enough for her to slip through so she could get them closed again. She had an emergency exit if anyone did try to come find her, which she could use to get to any floor of the building.

It was exactly what I might have done, if I'd been in her shoes.

She finished stuffing the books into one of the backpacks, and rolled up the sleeping bag before turning to glare at me. The siren was getting louder.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Now,” I said, “we go for a Walk.”

What I really wanted to do was go straight to InterWorld—the future InterWorld, that is. I haven't explained about that yet, have I? I hadn't said anything about it to Mr. Dimas; there wasn't much point, and I really hadn't wanted to get into the whole time-travel thing. It was messy at best, which
was why I'd skimmed over Acacia. I hadn't told him about how I'd been a prisoner of TimeWatch, or how they'd sent me thousands of years into the future to InterWorld. A broken, run-down, destroyed version of InterWorld.

It had been the saddest thing I'd ever seen, and that was saying a lot.

Still, I couldn't get to
my
InterWorld, not now. It was lost in some kind of dimension shift, pursued by a HEX ship. But that other InterWorld, thousands of years in the future . . . I could get back there. Or, more specifically, Hue could.

See, Walkers can't time travel, really. But Hue is, as I've said, a multidimensional life-form—and time, in its own way, is a dimension. TimeWatch had sent me into the future, and Hue had brought me back to the past. That meant he could take me there, again. Me, and Josephine.

That was the part that would take some convincing.

I was explaining all this to her as we sat on a bench in the middle of a park that bore only the slightest resemblance to the one I'd been standing in before; I'd taken a chance and Walked to a farther dimension. If the experience of Walking itself hadn't convinced her, sitting on a bench of green wood under a purple sky watching the blue sunrise probably would. Walking so far had a higher potential to call attention to us, but it also helped to prove my point.

I'd mentioned punching through a wall instead of using a door before, right? Walking without going through the
In-Between was kind of like that. The In-Between was the door; but it was also
crazy
, and I wasn't sure she was ready for it yet. There were some stories among the older Walkers at InterWorld about new recruits who'd gone insane and needed to have their memories wiped after their first trip through the In-Between. I wasn't sure I believed those stories, but why take chances?

“So you can travel through time,” she said, watching me like the jury was still out on my sanity.

“I can't,” I clarified. “Hue can.”

“And he can take us with him.”

“Yes.”

“To the future.”

“Yeah.”

“To this ‘home base' of yours that was completely destroyed.” I nodded. “Why can't he take us
back
in time, to before it got messed up? Or forward to some other time when everyone is okay?”

“It doesn't exactly work like that,” I said, but she clearly wanted more explanation. “I think he needs to have something to anchor on,” I said, trying to recall everything Acacia had told me about timestreams and anchoring and all that. “Like, he's kind of fixed on me, so he can follow me wherever, even through time. And
I'm
fixed in my personal timestream, so I can only go back and forth within that one.”

“That's inconvenient.” She looked like she was trying to
figure out whether I was making excuses or not.

“Maybe, but it also stops regular people from messing with time, which could cause all sorts of problems,” I said, but an idea was nagging at me. If I
could
go anywhere, if Hue could take me anywhere, would the Time Agents come pick me up? Jay had said they were kind of like law enforcement for the timestreams. . . . If I started messing things up, would that get their attention? Could I get them to help me?

Too risky
, I decided, remembering how I'd been treated at the TimeWatch headquarters. They'd kept me in a jail cell and ejected me into the future without a word; I wasn't going to risk letting them do it again. There was too much at stake.

“So you and I are going to go into the future and start recruiting more of us, before the bad guys can use a combination of science and magic to remake the universe,” she said, pulling me from my thoughts.