LITMIR.BIZ

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points of space-time have to be congruent, and these come and go. It’s like catching a cab—if you’re lucky one might stop for you outside your house, but it’s more likely you’ll have to hike a bit, maybe even as far as the nearest hotel or restaurant where there’s a taxi stand. There are places where you’re more likely to find potential portals. Unfortunately, they’re not always near restaurants or hotels.

      It may sound strange, but I didn’t let myself think about that conversation with Mom. There were just too many surprises to deal with—I could feel the fuses in my mind threatening to blow every time I came close to thinking of it. I concentrated instead on finding a portal.

      I didn’t feel the faint tingle in my head that usually indicates there’s one nearby, so I started trotting down the street, my breathing puffing out in clouds as I went. I found myself wondering what the soap bubbles I’d been blowing earlier for the squid would do in subzero weather.

      A moment later I found out—sort of.

      Hue came swooping out of the night and hovered before me. He pulsed an urgent spectrum at me: green, orange, yellow, pearl. It occurred to me that maybe his patterning was even more complex than I had assumed it was—that instead of being a symptom of basic emotional states it was actually a language. Because he certainly seemed to be trying to tell me something now.

      When he was sure he had my attention, he scooted off, pausing now and then to make sure I was following. Which I was. We stopped in a tiny park—practically nothing more than a lawn without a house behind it—about six blocks from my house. Hue seemed to be waiting for me.

      I knew what he wanted. I cast about for the nascent portal I knew would be here. And found it.

      I looked up at Hue, floating there patiently. “Thanks, buddy,” I said. And I fitted my mind into that transdimensional congruency like a key into a lock, and opened that lock and swung the door wide.

      Beyond was a shifting, rickety landscape that looked like a Doctor Strange comic book. I squared my shoulders, took a last look around, drew a deep breath—

      and went for a Walk.

      HUE WAS NOWHERE TO be seen when I got into the In-Between, which made me feel kind of relieved, to be honest.

      Don’t get me wrong; I was grateful to the little guy. But if I’d never met him … well, my life would sure have been a heck of a lot simpler. Jay would still be alive, for one thing. And maybe I’d still be happy and at home with my family and not off trying to save the Multiverse, or whatever it was that I was trying to do.

      I stood on a rock that felt the way that fresh oregano smells and that tumbled through the madness of the In-Between in a crashing arpeggio of double-bass music. I rode it like a surfer rides a board, and I thought about where I should go from here.

      I said I remembered everything, but that wasn’t quite true. I remembered almost everything. But, rummage around in my head as much as I wanted, I couldn’t find the key that would let me go back to Base Town. (There was something … some way … but it was as elusive as the shape of a hole in your tooth after it had been filled or the name of a man you knew that definitely began with S—if it didn’t begin with L or V or W. It was gone. Which makes sense, I guess—of all my memories, the key to InterWorld Prime would be the biggest secret to keep.)

      Meanwhile, in the back of my head, a voice like gas wheezing through honey was saying, “We are ready to begin the assault on the Lorimare worlds. The phantom gateways we will be creating will make a counterattack or rescue impossible. When they are empowered, the usual Lorimare coordinates will then open notional shadow realms under our control. Now, with another fine Harker at our disposal, we will have all the power we need to send in the fleet. The Imperator of the Lorimare worlds is already one of ours.…”

      Lord Dogknife’s words had meant nothing when I had heard them originally, coming from the mouth of Scarabus—they had just been one more thing among entirely too many things that I didn’t understand. But now, in the light of everything that had occurred, they made perfect—and horrifying—sense.

      Phantom gateways, leading to notional shadow realms. Yes.

      Shadow realms, like the one that six kids, heading out to find three beacons on a training mission, wound up in. We thought we were going to one of the Lorimare worlds, and instead we wound up in a shadow dimension. The concept had been touched on as a theoretical possibility in one of the classes at Base Town: They were also known as “oxbow worlds,” named after the oddly shaped lakes that were sometimes left when a meandering river cuts off a section of itself. Think of the river as a time stream and the oxbow lake as a slice of reality that’s somehow been pinched off, doomed to run an endless loop of existence, over and over. It might be anywhere from a few seconds to years, even centuries. The point is that it’s sealed off from the rest of the Altiverse, no more detectable or accessible than the theoretical universe inside a black hole.

      If Lord Dogknife’s sorcerers had somehow managed to open a way to one of these shadow dimensions, they could put a seeming spell on it, make it look like whatever they wanted it to—and then drop us out of it and into one of the HEX worlds. Which was exactly what they’d done. There had been no way for us to detect the trick, either by instrumentation or by Walking. The perfect trap.

      But, once opened, that shadow realm was no longer inaccessible. I still remembered how to get there.

      I couldn’t go back to InterWorld. I didn’t have that knowledge. Okay, fine.

      It didn’t mean I couldn’t start looking for my friends.

      I envisioned the coordinates that had taken us into the trap, and, gently, I nudged them open with my mind.

      A huge, egglike door dilated several yards in front of me with a low bitter-chocolate-scented screech.

      I didn’t go through it. I just watched and waited. After a moment, the door closed once more, and then it shrank to nothing and vanished. Where the door had been, however, was a dark place like a shadow that rippled and flapped like a flag in a thunderstorm.

      That was the trapdoor. That was the portal that led to the shadow dimension where they’d taken my team.

      That was where I was going.

      I Walked toward the shadow door. Before I could enter, however, something was suddenly in the way, bobbing and hanging in space. It was a balloon the size of a large cat, and it was blocking my way.

      “Hue,” I said.

      Bottle green and neon pink flickered across its surface, as if in warning.

      “Hue, I have to go through there.”

      Hue’s surface changed, pushed and pulled, and I was looking at something that resembled a balloon caricature of Lady Indigo. Then the image sproinged back into a balloon.

      “I couldn’t get back there before because you were stopping me, weren’t you?”

      A deep affirmative vermilion.

      “Look, I have to get back there. They may have died a long time ago, or they may have only been put into chains five minutes ago—you know how screwy time can get when you go from world to world—especially these shadow dimensions. But they were my people. And I took them there. The least I can do is get them out—or die trying.”

      He contracted, as if he were thinking. Then he drifted upward and out of my way. He looked a little sad.

      “But, hey, if you want to come with me—well, a friend is always good to have around.”

      Hue ran through a set of bright colors I don’t think you can see outside of the In-Between and purposefully bounced down to me. He hovered over my left shoulder.

      Together we stepped into the shadow.

      I

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