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“Through there.” I pointed at the tartan doughnut. Jai leaped forward and dived feetfirst through it. One by one the others followed, until I was the only one left in the In-Between.
I turned to Hue. The bubble creature hovered beside me, undulating with hopeful shades of blue and green.
“Sorry, little guy, but I got business in the real world. Maybe we’ll see you on the way back.” Although frankly I doubted it. What were the odds, after all, of running into him again in the unknowable, unmappable immensity of the In-Between? Virtually zero . . .
Which meant he had tracked me somehow.
I felt both touched and apprehensive at the thought. I’d never read anything in my studies that indicated mudluffs could sense out people and find them, much less become fond of them—but since the aggregate of what we knew about them would rattle around in a flu germ’s navel, that wasn’t surprising.
Still, I felt kindly toward the little guy. I found myself hoping he’d stay behind and wait for us.
“Bye, Hue,” I said. I dropped through the doughnut . . .
And slid through a portal that shrank down to a pinprick and vanished behind me. Just before it did, however, a tiny, dense soap bubble squeezed out. It quickly expanded to Hue size and fell toward me.
I didn’t notice him at first because, as sometimes still happened, my stomach had led the rest of my viscera in an attempted mutiny that took me a minute or so to quell. Then my inner ears negotiated a separate treaty and I was able to stand, albeit a bit shakily, and look around.
I noticed the expressions on my teammates’ faces an instant before I saw Hue. “You said he wouldn’t come out of the In-Between,” Jo said accusingly.
I shrugged as Hue took up what was becoming his customary position just behind my left shoulder. “What can I say? I don’t know how to get rid of him. If anyone has any suggestions, I’m open to them.”
Nobody did. Jai decided that it was probably better to concentrate on the task at hand, which was finding the first beacon. I started to caution Hue to mind his p’s and q’s, but let the words die as I looked around us.
It was an impressive sight. We were on a rooftop looking out over a cityscape that resembled nothing so much as the cover of an old science fiction pulp magazine. Tall slender towers, graceful as mosques, rose in Manhattanesque majesty all around us, connected by sweeping ramps and glassine tubes. Air cars—shiny two-person teardrop shapes—flitted from landing platforms through the clean air.
None of us could spend much time admiring the view, though—this world didn’t look particularly dangerous, but neither does a coral snake, banded with vivid enamel colors, until i
t bites you. A rounded kiosk made of gleaming metal and graced with Art Deco vanes stood about three feet away. A sign on it said it was a “lift shaft”—this Earth used a recognizable form of English, thank God. The sliding door was locked, though there was no sign of a locking mechanism.
“Allow me,” J/O said. He pointed his arm laser at the intersection of door and kiosk. “Watch me blast this baby out.”
“Are you terminally unsociable?” asked Jai. “We are guests in this locality. Wanton destruction of personal property would be nothing more than causeless vandalism.” He closed his eyes and touched the door, which slid open. There was no sign of an elevator. But there were metal rungs set into the wall on the far side, and, one by one, we began to climb down, floor by floor by floor, J/O grumbling that he was never allowed to use his laser arm. Hue stayed with us, hovering above our heads. He drifted too close to Jakon once, and her warning wolf growl made him skitter back up the shaft a good twenty feet. I found myself wondering how anything so defenseless had ever survived in the In-Between.
While we descended, Jai took out a device the size and shape of a thimble and held it in his hand. After a moment, it began to float in the air. A tiny LED twinkled on it, and then a pattern of blinks, pointing straight ahead.
“Locator activated,” he said. “Object of acquisition resides on the antepenultimate story of this residence.”
“Would it kill you to cut back on a few syllables every time you make an announcement?” Jo asked him, her wing feathers fluffing with irritation.
“Yeah,” J/O said. “I’ve got the latest Merriam-Webster chip—twenty teras’ worth of dictionaries, thesauri, syllabi, you name it, cross-indexed over sixty reality planes, and some of your lines are still coming up ‘no sale.’”
Jai merely smiled. “What good is a vocabulary that isn’t used?”
The door opened then, and, one by one, we stepped out into a laboratory that was so gleaming and polished and high-tech that it would have made Dr. Frankenstein weep with envy. As with the city itself, this place looked like it had started in the 1950s and then skipped over several decades to land squarely in the late twenty-first century. Banks of lights mounted on the high ceiling illuminated everything in a crisp glare. Gleaming banks of computers, their front panels holding huge reels of magnetic tape, lined one wall. There were capacitors, electrode terminals that occasionally crackled with power, ponderous refrigeration units and other pieces of equipment that I didn’t recognize.
Oddly enough, though much of the equipment was up and running, there were no people present. Jakon pointed this out. Jai shrugged. “All the more good fortune for us.” He aimed his finger around the room, following the thimble’s twinkling light pattern until it narrowed to a straight line.
“Up there.” He pointed.
“Up there” was a series of shelves maybe twenty feet up, about two-thirds of the way from the ceiling.
“I’ll get it,” said Jo. She stepped forward, spread her wings—carefully avoiding the crackling current of a Van de Graaff generator—and lifted off. She rose gently upward on those angelic five-foot spans of white feathers, and, watching her, I found myself thinking that the Earth she came from must look like the closest thing to Heaven in the Altiverse.
Jo stopped, hovered near the shelf and reached in behind some articles. Hue seemed fascinated by her ability to fly, but his curiosity was tempered with caution, so he just floated a few feet away and watched. Jo pulled out a small gizmo that seemed to be blinking, though you couldn’t be sure—the flashes seemed almost to be in the ultraviolet, right on the high end of visible light. It was disturbing in some low-key way, and so I looked away, peering past a control console and monitor screen to look through a window.
Something was bothering me, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. . . .
The lab was three stories down from the top of the tower, and through the window you could see most of the city. I heard the rustle of Jo’s wings as she landed behind me, and that faintly disturbing feeling that was stirring around in the back of my head started moving a bit more energetically as she handed the beacon to Jai.
