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Neville had a huge, nasty-looking sword in one hand. I don’t know where it came from, but it glistened and jiggled just like his skin. He started walking toward us.
I heard something above us and looked up. The rigging was filled with sailors, and the sailors all had knives.
Things were definitely not looking good.
I heard a clattering on the deck. “Don’t shoot them, my lady! Hold your fire!” The real Scarabus stumbled up from below.
He seemed like an unlikely saviour.
“Please,” he said. “Let me. This calls for something special.” He extended one tattoo-covered arm at us and moved his other hand toward his bicep. There was a blurry image of a huge serpent curled around his upper arm. I was pretty sure that if he touched that tattoo, the snake would be real, and big—and undoubtedly hungry.
There was only one thing left to do, so we did it.
We jumped.
INTERLOG 2
From Jay’s Journal
Looking back on it, I made a couple of seriously wrong calls. The wrongest was deciding to meet the new kid outside his parents’ house in the new world that he’d slipped into.
I was hoping that he wouldn’t start Walking before I got to him. But hope pays no dividends, as the Old Man says. (“Hope when you’ve got nothing else,” he once told us. “But if you’ve got anything else, then for Heaven’s sake, DO it!”) And Joey had already started Walking.
Not far. He’d done what most new Walkers do—slipped into a world he wasn’t in. It’s harder to Walk into a world in which “you” exist already: It’s like identical magnetic poles repelling. He needed an out, and so he slipped into a world in which he wasn’t.
Which meant that it took me an extra forty minutes to locate him, Walking from plane to plane. Finally I tracked him—he was on a crosstown bus, headed home. Or what he thought was home.
And I waited outside his home. I suppose I figured that he’d be more amenable to reason once he saw what was waiting for him in there.
But, as the Old Man pointed out that morning, he must have tripped every alarm in creation when he started Walking.
And he was in no state to be talked to when he came out of that house. Which meant we were sitting ducks for the Binary retiarii on their Gravitrons, waving their nets around.
Given the alternatives, I don’t know which I hate worse: the Binary or the HEX folk.
HEX boils young Walkers down to their essences. I mean that literally—they put us in huge pots, like in those cannibal cartoons you used to see in the back of newspapers, and surround it with a web of spells and wards. Then they boil us down to nothing but our essence—our souls, if you will—which they force into glass pots. And they use those glass pots to power their ships and any multiworld traveling they do.
The Binary treat Walkers differently, but no better. They chill us to negat
ive 273º, a hair above absolute zero, hang us from meat hooks, then seal us in these huge hangars on their homeworld, with pipes and wires going into the back of our heads, and keep us there, not quite dead but a long, long way from alive, while they drain our energy and use it to power their interplane travel.
If it’s possible to hate two organizations exactly the same, then that’s how much I hate them.
So Joey did the smart thing—unconsciously, but it was still smart—when the Binary goons showed up. He Walked between worlds again.
I took out the three retiarii without any trouble.
Then I had to find him again. And if I’d thought it hard the first time . . . well, this time he’d charged blindly through the Altiverse, ripping his way through hundreds of probability layers as if they were tissue paper. Like a bull going through a china shop—or a couple of thousand identical china shops.
So I started after him. Again.
It’s strange. I’d forgotten how much I hated these newer Greenvilles. The Greenville I grew up in still had drive-in burger bars with waitresses on roller skates, black-and-white TV and the Green Hornet on the radio. These Greenvilles had mini satellite dishes on the roofs of the houses and people driving cars that looked like giant eggs or like jeeps on steroids. No fins among the lot of them. They had color TVs and video games and home theaters and the Internet. What they didn’t have any more was a town. And they hadn’t even noticed its passing.
I hit a fairly distant Greenville, and finally I felt him like a flare in my mind. I Walked toward him. And saw a HEX ship, all billowing sails and hokey rigging, fading out into the Nowhere-at-All.
I’d lost him. Again. Probably for good this time.
I sat down on the football field and thought hard.
