LITMIR.BIZ

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exactly work. She just looked at me, and the expectant way she raised her eyebrows made me elaborate further. “We’re traveling on a randomly set path, on parallel dimensions of the same three worlds. The ship goes backward and forward, but—”

      “But it can’t anchor at will,” she said authoritatively, giving a knowing nod. “You phase to destinations set by a random variable on those three worlds, but you’re still anchored to the alphastream.”

      I didn’t have any clue what she was talking about, but that was more or less par for the course at this point. She seemed satisfied at my nod; what she’d said sounded right, anyway, and I knew we never time traveled beyond going back and forth on our base worlds. I turned to lead her out of the upper deck, down to the class halls. The windows around us were still coated with a thick layer of dust and ash.

      “Hey, Jayarre,” I said as we passed through one of the open doors. Unlike the school I was used to, we never called teachers by their last names and “Mr.” or “Ms.”—after all, some of them didn’t even have last names.

      Jayarre focused on me—I thought he’d been looking at me anyway, which was why I’d said hello, but it was hard to tell with the monocle—and gave a cheerful smile accompanied by an exuberant wave. Jayarre was the Culture and Improvisation teacher. He hailed from an Earth more toward the magic side of things, where he’d once explained that all the world was, literally, a stage. I didn’t really understand it beyond that, but he had the look of a circus ringmaster and the disposition of your favorite uncle. “Hello, hello! Showing the lady around, are we?”

      He also, like most of the other teachers, often seemed to just know things.

      “Yeah,” I said, pausing in the doorway. “This is Acacia Jones.”

      “Well met, my dear, well met!” He rose and crossed the room in three giant steps to shake her hand. She didn’t seem at all rattled. “Are you enjoying your tour du jour, madame?”

      “Vachement, monsieur!” she responded, which I recognized from Basic Language Studies as an emphatic agreement.

      Jayarre’s eyebrows rose almost to the brim of his top hat, mustache lifting with his grin. “Merveilleuse, ma bichette!”

      “I was going to show her the Hazard Zone,” I interrupted, only to have those eyebrows turned toward me next.

      “Were you, now? Well, why not, why not? If she has prime clearance, I see no way at all in which this could go even remotely wrong!” Jayarre was kind of like Jai sometimes, except that instead of using words with lots of syllables, he just used a lot of words. “Perhaps I shall join you on your wondrous journey!”

      I hadn’t anticipated that, but before I could come up with any possible reason he shouldn’t, someone else passed by the door.

      “Office. Meeting,” she said shortly, turning to glance at me. Jirathe was the Alchemy teacher, and never used two words if one would do. She looked as human as me, save the minor quibble that her cells were made from ectoplasm instead of protoplasm. As a result, her body was sort of a uniform translucent gray when she wasn’t moving. But when she was . . . well, the human body is made of more than six trillion cells, each one mostly water. Whenever Jirathe moved, it was like six trillion prisms catching whatever light there was. Or, to put it another way, it was like a rainbow exploding.

      “Should I head back to the briefing room?” I hadn’t heard anything over the speakers, but maybe something important was happening.

      “No.” Jirathe gave Jayarre a significant glance, then continued down the deck, through a shaft of crimson sunlight that made her bare arms and shoulders ripple like a fireworks display.

      Jayarre murmured, “Sorry about that, my boy. Sounds like senior staff only.” He turned back to Acacia, taking her hand and pressing a kiss to her knuckles. “Lovely to meet you, my dear. Perhaps we can exchange pleasantries another time, but now I’ve got to dash. à bientôt.”

      “Enchanté!” Acacia called over her shoulder as we parted ways, and I noticed several of the other teachers filing out of their classrooms and heading in the direction of the Old Man’s office. What was the meeting about? Acacia, probably. Was he going to revoke her clearance? No, he’d have no reason to. . . . He wouldn’t have given it to her in the first place if he didn’t trust her.

      “It’s about me, I bet,” she said cheerfully. If she was sharing any of the same thoughts as I, she seemed completely at peace with them.

      “Probably. That doesn’t bother you?”

      “It’d bother me if they weren’t having a meeting,” she said, and I paused to glance at her. “You’re fighting a war here, and you’ve suddenly got a stowaway on your boat. Wouldn’t you call a meeting to make sure everyone knew about a potential threat?”

      “The Old Man didn’t think you were a threat.”

      She tilted her head at me. “You sure? He gave me clearance, but do you really think he’s not making sure everyone knows it, just in case?”

      I thought about that for a moment, going over what she’d said and the way she’d said it. “Are you?”

      “Am I what?”

      “A potential threat.”

      “You’re a Walker, aren’t you? You move between dimensions. You know that ‘potential’ is a heavy word.”

      I couldn’t help it; I smiled, just a little. “True. So you are a potential threat.”

      “Sure I am,” she said, looking at me seriously. Her eyes, as I noticed before, were unmistakably violet, not that she looked anything other than human. Aside from her circuit-board nails, that is. “Or I’m an ally. You think that’s only up to me?”

      Behind us, reality shimmered, twisted, and re-formed into a completely different, though no less extreme, environment. I tore my gaze from Acacia’s to find that we were hovering over an equatorial glacier. Welcome to Snowball Earth, where for millions of years even the oceans were frozen solid. I glanced back at Acacia to see if she’d noticed the small time jump. She was looking out the window as well, with an odd, peaceful smile.

      “No,” I said in response to her last statement, and she smiled at me. The heating elements kicked in as I turned toward the physical training section of the ship, but I was pretty sure that smile could have warmed me up by itself.

      THE HAZARD ZONE IS like the best virtual reality game ever, except that on occasion—or even most of the time, really—it will try to kill you. It’s the Holodeck and the Danger Room combined, with five stages of different variables and conditioning. It’s not that stage 1 is entirely harmless and stage 5 is real danger—the different levels merely indicate how badly things will hurt you. Some of the challenges are real, some of them are illusory, and all of them are programmed with random or hidden variables: A rock appears under your foot as you’re trying to dodge a series of spears, or a swarm of hornets is stirred up by the particle blast you’ve just diverted into a tree.

      Getting hurt in the Hazard Zone is like a rite of passage. Everyone does it at least once. You’re not really one of us until you’ve been sent to the infirmary with a third-degree burn because there was the tiniest bit of doubt in your mind that the fire-breathing salamander that just leaped out of the cave could really hurt you.

      You learn fast. I did.

      My first Hazard Zone injury was better than some (J/O had broken a servo when part of the ground had actually caved under his weight) and worse than others (Jerzy Harhkar’s only injury had literally been a paper cut during an “attack on the school” scenario). I’d stumbled onto a spinedog variable while training in a jungle simulation. If you’ve never met a spinedog, don’t feel bad; I hadn’t,

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