“I can handle it,” she said—and then I opened the door.
Okay, so I’d like to say a mob of redheaded, freckle-faced Walkers surged forward like paparazzi, asking questions and clamoring for our attention. It’s what I was expecting, honestly. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure Acacia would have been able to handle that, no problem. What actually happened was like something out of one of those old horror movies, or teen chick flicks where there’s the dreaded embarrassing school scene.
I opened the door, and all noise stopped.
Just stopped. Everyone stopped talking. One after the other, everyone trailed off in the middle of a sentence, all eyes turning to Acacia and me.
Then, like a wave rolling slowly over the shore, the chatter started up again—muted, hushed—from one end of the room to the other. Slowly, most of them turned back to what they were doing—eating or chatting or reading or enjoying some kind of handheld media—and the noise level rose again, though nowhere near to what it had been before.
It was probably one of the most unnerving things I’d ever experienced, and that’s saying a lot.
Acacia seemed to be of much the same opinion. I didn’t think anyone could tell from inside the room, but she was leaning slightly toward me. Hue was practically settled on my shoulder like a parrot, but he tended to do that when we were around a bunch of people.
“This is the mess,” I said to Acacia, not bothering to raise or lower my voice. I was just giving her a tour; it didn’t need to be a big deal. “Kitchen’s open. It’s not gourmet, but most of the stuff tastes okay when you get used to it.”
“Let me guess: vitamin-enriched condensed protein?” Acacia walked casually over to the buffet table with me.
“Yep. Just like Mom used to make,” I joked, noting that the mention of Mom only brought a slight pang of homesickness instead of the crippling, gut-wrenching sadness it used to cause. I didn’t know how to feel about that, or about Acacia’s knowing look.
“Yeah,” she agreed, her expression contrasting with something a little softer in her voice. “If Mom was an army chef.”
I watched her pile food onto her tray with reckless abandon, apparently not needing any help to figure out what was what. Or she just didn’t care. She was hard to read, and I didn’t want it to look like I was trying. A sudden instinct for chivalry bubbled up from somewhere inside me, and I carried her water glass and protein shake to a table for her. She hadn’t asked, and didn’t do anything other than look faintly surprised as I took them, but she gave me a nod of thanks as I set them down. I still wasn’t sure where the instinct had come from, but the simple nod—not sarcastic, not teasing, not anything but grateful—made me glad I’d done it.
“I actually love these,” she commented as she bit into a grainberry, one of the few Earth-grown things on the menu.
I couldn’t stand them, but I kept that to myself. “So, where are you from?” I’d refrained from asking thus far, certain I wouldn’t get a real answer, but I was dying of curiosity. How did she know so much about InterWorld and every other world?
“Around,” she answered, with a mysterious smile and that little shrug. The smile was kind of enticing, like she was daring me to ask more.
“Well, how old are you?”
“That’s so rude. Do they not teach you manners on this boat?”
“Several cultures’ worth,” I informed her, for once thinking fast enough to keep up. “And in some places, direct questions are a sign of respect.”
She took a drink from her shake, giving me that faintly appraising up-and-down look. “I’m not from one of them,” she said finally, but she still sounded playful.
“Okay. That narrows it down to a few million different possibilities.” Despite her continued lack of real answers to any of my questions, I was enjoying the game. I didn’t actually mind that she wasn’t telling me anything. I just wanted to learn more about her, and even though I wasn’t getting any facts, I was learning what she was like. It was something.
I wasn’t the only interested party, though, and after keeping a respectful distance for a while, people started trickling over. The crippling social anxiety I suddenly felt was alleviated by the fact that not one person used the word “girlfriend” in front of Acacia, which made me feel both profoundly grateful and incredibly confused. They’d teased me to no end without her there; wouldn’t it be more fun to tease me in front of her?
Maybe not, on second thought. Despite the fact that we all came from very different places, we were all basically the same person, and I know I’d been humiliated enough times in school that I wouldn’t do the same to my worst enemy, let alone to one of my para-incarnations. It was actually kind of comforting, and I found that now that I wasn’t wrestling with social paranoia, I was enjoying seeing Acacia give the other versions of me the same kind of runaround I’d been getting.
“How long are you going to be here?” someone finally asked: Jirho, a smallish version of me who came from a darker, colder version of Earth. He had big, pale eyes and a light coating of fur all along his skin, which basically made him look like me if I were a stuffed animal. He also had claws and pointed canines, and hadn’t taken well to the nickname “Plushie.”
“Until I’m called back.”
“To where?”
“Where I came from.”
Hue (who had shrunk to the size of a baseball and settled himself in the hood of my jacket for most of this time) suddenly floated up beside my left ear and disappeared with a faint pop. I blinked, automatically turning my head toward the noise—and the familiar sound of the alarm went off, pinging twice to silence us. Then the Old Man’s voice came over the PA system.
“Walkers, we have a Code Mercury.”
All noise in the room, which had already lowered to a few murmurs, stopped completely. In the entire time I’d been at InterWorld, we’d never had a Code Mercury. I knew what it was, of course, as I was versed in all technical terms and alerts and procedures.
They’d found a Walker—undiscovered by Binary or HEX—on one of the fringe worlds.
(#ulink_2f831d50-39e3-56d0-9f92-462f172a127d)
JUST SO YOU UNDERSTAND exactly what a huge deal this was, let me explain some things. The Multi-verse is everything, all the infinite possibilities and worlds that ever have existed, or might, or will exist. The Altiverse is a comparatively small part of that, a swirling maelstrom that contains all the infinite possible Earths that have existed, or might, or will exist.
Then, there’s the Arc. Think of it like a crescent moon— you can only see part of it, but the rest of the moon is still there, shadowed. The Arc is the bright part: a slice of the whole picture, the visible worlds that exist on the spectrum. The dark part is where all the possibilities and probabilities exist, those little alternate realities that get split off every time a major decision is made.
One side of the Arc is heavy with magic, the other with technology. The Earths existing around either side of the Arc are known as the fringe worlds. Fringe worlders are all the more valuable because the worlds they come from are so heavily influenced with science or magic that the Walkers tend to be more powerful than us middle worlders. The ones who come from the magic side can do anything from fly to cast spells, and I’m not talking like Jo can fly, with wings if there’s enough magic in the air. I mean just fly, because they will it to be so. Because they’re magic enough to manage it even without the atmosphere they’re used to. Ones from the science spectrum are more like J/O—from what I’ve heard, he’s the closest to a fringer we’ve gotten in a few decades.
The fringe worlds almost never yield Walkers anymore; HEX and Binary hold sway on opposite ends of the spectrum, and they grab up all the Walkers they can find. Sometimes we get a blip here and there, but we’ve never been able to get out there before they get snatched up.
The giant screen at the back of the mess hall was alight, and every eye was on it. Would the new Walker be from the magic end or the science? How long before Binary or HEX would find them?
“We don’t know their status yet, but Upstairs leads me to believe it has the potential to be disastrous if we don’t get them. Joeb, Jerzy, Jonha, Jorisine, and Josy—suit up.”
A low murmur went through the room. Four of those names were senior field ops, and no one had ever heard of the Old Man sending that many at once on any mission. If this failed, four teams would be off the grid until they could be split and reassigned.
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