LITMIR.BIZ

      eat courses through my veins, my body flooding with fire, my fingertips and toes tingling with the sensation. But as soon as it starts, it’s already over, and I’m lying on my side, cold and wincing at the way my left arm and hip throb from how hard I just hit the ground.

      The earth underneath me is cold, and I can smell the wet grass as if it rained recently. The air is still and unmoving, and all I can hear above me is the sound of Barclay’s breathing. The grass I’m lying in is long and overgrown; huge trees shoot up to the sky and block out the sunlight; and everything I see is green and brown.

      This doesn’t look like the Prima I remember. We’re more likely in a jungle than we are in a capital city. “Where are we?”

      “This is Earth 06382,” Barclay says. “It’s been uninhabited for the past two hundred years or so. Don’t worry, we’re not staying here.” He looks down at his quantum charger and begins typing things in.

      I can’t help but groan a little when I stand up. If I’m going to make portaling into different worlds a habit, I really need to figure out how to land. Barclay is standing casually next to me, quantum charger in hand, so there must be a less traumatic way to do this.

      I take a deep breath, and it’s like I can smell the earth. It’s that deep, woodsy smell sweetened with pollen. But there’s something not right about this place. In the distance there’s a cabin. The overgrowth has sprung up around it, and it’s slumped on its foundation. I can’t picture anyone ever living here. Not even two hundred years ago.

      Because even though it’s green everywhere and I can hear the rustling of the leaves as the wind moves, there’s a creepy stillness around us.

      I can’t hear anything. No birds, no animals, nothing. That’s what’s wrong with this place.

      “What happened?” I ask.

      Barclay looks at me, his eyebrows raised, his lips pursed together. It’s an expression that says, You don’t really want to know.

      “No explanation, that’s shocking.” He should know by now how much I hate secrets.

      He sighs. “They were actually the first world, we think, to discover interverse travel. We’re not exactly sure what happened, but the scientists who’ve studied this world think no one controlled the portals. People opened them and started going in and out, without any kind of regulation. Maybe they had too many portals opening and closing. Maybe they didn’t have the technology to keep the portals stable. Whatever it was, a radiation virus swept through this world and killed everyone.”

      Everyone. If IA doesn’t know what caused this, there’s nothing to say it couldn’t happen again.

      “So why are we here?”

      “We can’t just portal into New Prima directly because I don’t want anyone in IA to know we’re there. So we certainly can’t just portal into my apartment, like we did last time. We need to muddy our trail a little just to make sure there’s no energy signature that will trace us back to your world. Then we need to enter Prima through a soft spot in a remote location.”

      I know he’s trying to keep things under wraps, but I didn’t expect all this secrecy.

      “Tenner, the situation is a little worse than I let on,” he says. He looks guilty, which is a bad sign. “What we’re doing is directly against IA orders. I was actually sent on a completely different mission, and I’m ignoring those orders.”

      “What mission?”

      He shrugs it off. “It’s stupid and I’m not doing it, so it doesn’t matter.”

      “Couldn’t you, I don’t know, get fired or something for ignoring orders?” If he loves anything, it’s his job. I’m surprised he’d be careless like that.

      “Worse,” he says. “This is why we’re running low on time. I could be tried and thrown in jail, even executed for treason, if they find out, which means we have to do everything under the radar.”

      I let that sink in. For a second, I’m glad the stakes are high for him, too. Not only are we on the same team, but this is about more than just glory for him. It’s personal. Then reality sets in. What am I doing on some unnamed, unoccupied world just now finding out about this? “What else is worse than you’ve let on?”

      His jaw clenches, and I know there’s something. So I wait.

      Barclay’s voice is quiet but firm. “Government officials in Prima have put out bulletins to all the worlds that are part of the Interverse Alliance. If Ben doesn’t turn himself in by nine a.m. on the thirty-first, they’re going to execute people he cares about.”

      The

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