LITMIR.BIZ

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by doors and you knew exactly where every single one of them went. It was like sitting down at a test you’d never studied for and finding you knew all the answers anyway.

      I could feel everything. I could feel Josephine’s wonder and terror, her slow understanding and her deep yearning. She was experiencing what she’d been born to do, and I could already feel her fear giving in to eagerness, to the desire to learn.

      Even though I theoretically knew where all the doors would take me, it’s always easiest to go someplace you’ve already been. I followed the path to future InterWorld flawlessly, and all too soon we were standing there in the purple dawn light, there on that crumbling base.

      Josephine let go of me as soon as Hue receded, taking a few steps back, though she didn’t look afraid. She looked like she understood.

      She walked slowly down the gravel path, alternately staring at the smoke-blackened trees and the scorched ground. I still didn’t know what had happened here; perhaps at some point, when I had time, I could have Hue show me.

      All I knew was that sometime in InterWorld’s future, the base must have been attacked. There were burns all over the place, areas where the ground was dark, rust red with the memory of violence. There was nothing here, not even a breeze. We were alone on a dead world.

      “This is the future,” Josephine asked, though it didn’t sound much like a question.

      “Several thousand years from where we were, yeah. I don’t know how far exactly,” I said, catching sight of something glinting in the morning sun. I knelt to inspect it, finding a twisted scrap of metal that could have been anything from a blaster shell to a piece of jewelry. It wasn’t recognizable as anything but junk now.

      “So why keep fighting?” she asked.

      “What?”

      “Why even bother? You said you have to get back to your InterWorld, but it’ll just be this eventually. Even if you save it back then, it’ll wind up like this.” She gestured at the area around us, the shattered glass and dead trees and broken doorways. “You’ll lose anyway.”

      I was silent for a moment, watching Hue float off toward one of the rooftops. He settled there, perched on the edge of it like a balloon-shaped gargoyle, and turned the same color as the metal. I’d never really seen him camouflage before, but the guy had a hundred little tricks I wasn’t aware of.

      “Yeah, maybe,” I said, shoving my hands into the pockets of my sweatshirt. “Eventually.”

      “So why are you even bothering?”

      “Because if I don’t, all this”—I shrugged, indicating the devastation around me—“will happen everywhere a lot sooner. There won’t even be this left. There won’t be anything.”

      She scuffed her foot against the gravel path, watching the pebbles scatter this way and that. “But doesn’t the existence of this ship in the future, even if it’s deserted, mean that there is a future? That the world doesn’t get destroyed?”

      “It doesn’t work like that,” I told her. “FrostNight will erase everything, past, present, and future, all at once. If it’s released, this entire dimension, this entire timestream, will all be gone.”

      She seemed to accept that, though she folded her arms and huddled in on herself, as though she didn’t like what she was about to say. “Okay. But, still—let’s say you do gather us all up, and we go stop this FrostNight thing. Let’s say we save the world, or all the worlds. Why not just let us go home, then?”

      I took in a breath, held it for a moment, let it out slowly. “Because InterWorld guards against HEX and Binary. That’s what we do. We track their movement, and we thwart them. We make sure they don’t get more of us, don’t get more weapons. Don’t hurt innocent people or take over entire worlds and use the inhabitants for cannon fodder. We’re the thorn in their sides, and that’s all we can manage. We may not be much, but we’re the first line of defense. We’re the only line of defense. We’ve gotta keep being that, no matter what. It’s all we’ve got, even if in the end, this is all that’s left.”

      To be honest, I hadn’t really been sure what I was going to say when I opened my mouth. The words had just come to me, based on a bunch of different things, mostly stuff I’d heard the Old Man say. He wasn’t a man of many words, but the ones he did use tended to be pretty effective.

      Josephine was looking at me with her eyes narrowed, like she still wasn’t sure what my game was. “I still think you’re crazy,” she said, “but now it’s for different reasons.”

      “Yeah,” I said, and turned to walk into the base. After a moment, I heard her follow me.

      “First order of business is to get to the control room,” I told her as we picked our way through the debris in the hallways. “There might still be some auxiliary power cores laying around. I have no idea when this happened, so I don’t know if they’ll still be good.”

      “What if they’re not?”

      “Then we hope they can be recharged.”

      “Recharged? How?”

      “That depends on how old they are,” I explained, shoving down my rising impatience. I had nothing to do but explain things as we made our way to the control room, and she really didn’t know any of this. I imagine I was much the same when Jay had first picked me up. “They can be charged a few different ways, if the transducers are still working. Thermal energy, chemical, electromagnetic, etc. The ship mostly runs on kinetic energy, as I understand it.” I glanced back to see if she was following all this, then elaborated. “Meaning, once it gets started, it’ll work up its own momentum and charge itself.”

      “I see,” she said, climbing her way over a pile of rubble. “So how do you get it started?”

      “Well, some kind of pulse. A shock, or—”

      “Like a static shock?”

      “It’d have to be more powerful than that, but that’s the right idea.”

      “So if the trans … ducers aren’t working?”

      “We fix them somehow.”

      “How?”

      “I don’t know how,” I admitted. “So let’s hope they’re working.”

      “Okay,” she said, sounding dubious. I could practically hear her second-guessing her decision to come with me, as I obviously didn’t know what I was doing.

      She was pretty much right.

      It didn’t take long for us to make our way to the control room. I was anxious every step of the way; I kept expecting to run into bad guys, or worse—what was left of the good guys. There was nothing, though, no bodies of any kind or evidence of anything living. On the one hand, I was glad. On the other, I wanted to know what had happened here. I wanted to know how to stop it.

      We did find some used-up power cores, and some of them still had juice. Not enough to get the ship up and running but enough to give us a boost for the mechanisms that still worked. Such as activating the solar panels.

      “At least we’ll have some power once the sun rises overhead,” I said, flipping a long line of switches that activated the panels all over the roof of the main building.

      “So this is both a ship and a town, sort of,” Josephine observed, carefully watching what I was doing.

      “Yeah. The whole thing is a ship—it just doesn’t look like one. It doesn’t look enclosed, but it is. At least, it is when the shields are working, so we can phase to worlds that don’t have the right kind of air for us.”

      “But this world does, right?”

      “Obviously, or we wouldn’t be breathing.”

      “How did you know it would?”

      “I’ve

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