The Complete Interworld Trilogy: Interworld; The Silver Dream; Eternity’s Wheel

I spun around and faced the others, managed to say “It’s a trap!” But that was all, because then everything— changed.

It was like watching a ripple that started in the beacon Jo held—a ripple that spread outward in all directions, washing over everything in its path—including us. I felt nothing except a momentary coldness and disorientation. None of my teammates seemed to be affected either.

But everything else was. That ever-expanding ripple turned into a transparent wave that passed over the equipment and scientific paraphernalia, transforming everything as it went. That merciless fluorescent glare gave way to the flickering yellow light of tapers. A long-range surveillance monitor screen wavered and changed into a crystal ball. A rack of chemicals and solutions held in glass retorts and test tubes became an oaken cabinet housing earthen pots and vials full of various powders, salts and elixirs. A radiation and toxic materials containment chamber became a circle of gold bricks inlaid in the floor and stamped with protective cabalistic signs. The wave—actually an expanding bubble, with us at its center—accelerated as it grew larger, and within seconds the futuristic laboratory had been transformed into a sorcerer’s sanctum.

And it didn’t stop there. Looking out the window, I could see the wave spreading across the city in all directions like the radiating blast front of a nuclear bomb. The Art Deco skyscrapers and spires rippled, wavered, became Gothic towers of mortared stone. The aerial ramps and tubes vanished, while the darting airships metamorphosed into winged dragonlike creatures who carried human passengers on their backs.

In a matter of a minute or less, the gleaming science fiction city had been turned into a medieval town complete with a castle at its center, with us in its tallest tower. Even the window I was watching through was now an unglazed opening with crosshatching iron bars. Everything had changed.

No, I thought then—not changed. You couldn’t change what had always been, and this had always been a world ruled by magic, not science. My subconscious had realized that when Jo had flown up to get the beacon. Her wings were far too small to support her purely in terms of lift and air pressure. Jo’s people had evolved on a world where magic was in the very air they flew in, and she could fly only when such transmundane power was present.

Like here.

“Back to the roof!” I shouted, and turned toward the elevator shaft, only to find instead a narrow enclosed stairwell, crowded with guards holding spears, swords and crossbows pointed at us.

I called myself six different kinds of a moron. No wonder there had been no people visible save for the far-off ones flying the airships. No wonder the whole city had looked so spic-and-span. A glamour had been laid over the whole shebang, just for our benefit—a spell of seeing that mesmerized the eyes and brain into visualizing and experiencing a false front. Our taking the first beacon— probably a talisman disguised as the beacon—had triggered the spell’s dissolution and signaled HEX that we were safely in the net.

No wonder everything had been so easy!

Hue hovered anxiously over me and my companions as the armed guards stepped apart to make way for two people I hoped I’d never see again—Scarabus, the original Illustrated Man, and Neville, that walking, talking, glutinous, life-sized version of the Visible Man model kit I’d gotten once for Christmas. They came down the stairs and stopped, each flanking the stairwell entrance. They seemed to be waiting for someone, and I had no trouble guessing who it was.

There was a rustle of silken robes, and a cloaked figure materialized from the darkness within the stairwell tower. She stepped into the wavering light of the sconces, threw back her hood and surveyed us. Her gaze stopped on me and she smiled.

“Well met again, Joey Harker,” said the Lady Indigo. “What a pleasant surprise. And look! This time you’ve brought your friends.”

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“GET BEHIND ME!” SHOUTED Jai, proving again that he could say exactly what he meant when he had to.

He was floating about six inches above the floor. He raised both hands, and something like a huge translucent umbrella took shape in front of us. Jai’s psychokinetic abilities depended neither on magic nor on science, he told me once, although they were stronger on magical worlds. They were, he said, spiritual. Whatever. I just hoped that they could keep Lady Indigo at bay.

A shower of crossbow bolts struck the umbrella shield, slowed in the air and fell to the floor, drained of all forward movement.

Lady Indigo gestured, and a bead of vermilion fire hung above her palm. She put it up to her lips and blew. It hurtled toward Jai’s umbrella shield. When it hit the shield, it exploded into a sort of syrupy crimson flame. Jai looked like he was gritting his teeth. He began to sweat and then, slowly, to tremble. The effort of holding the shield in place was taking its toll on him.

Then there was a pop! and the shield vanished in a blaze of crimson fire. Jai collapsed to the floor.

I heard snarling. Josef had picked up Jakon, the wolf girl, and threw her, almost bowled her, up the stairwell. It was like one of the games we’d play back on Prime Base, but this one was for real. She knocked a dozen archers down as she rolled like a gymnast. Then she sprang from the stairs down onto Neville. I think she expected to knock him to the floor, but she hit his jelly flesh, and she froze, like someone paralyzed by a jellyfish’s sting. He picked her up like a child’s toy, shook her once violently and dropped her. She didn’t move again.

Josef grunted and charged Neville. It must have been like being charged by a tank, but it barely seemed to faze the jelly man. Josef plunged his fist deeply into Neville’s vast stomach, which simply distended like something in slow motion without apparently troubling Neville at all.

The jelly man laughed, a vast, muddy, bubbling laugh. “They send children against us!” he said. Then he held his hands out: The jelly flesh shot forward, covering Josef’s face. I could see him struggling to breathe, his eyes distended. Then he collapsed as well.

Jo fluttered upward until she was in the rafters of the room. She was up in the top corner, out of range of the arrows.

Lady Indigo snapped her fingers, and Scarabus knelt at her feet. She touched one of her fingers to a picture that writhed its way up his spine. It was a picture of a dragon.

And then Scarabus was gone, and in his place, huge and hissing, was a dragon, complete with wings and clawed limbs on a nightmarish pythonlike body. It flew up and wound itself around the rafters, moving at blinding speed toward Jo. She fluttered back against the wall, terrified.

Almost lazily it looped around her, then it slammed her against the wall and retreated to the floor, carrying her unconscious body with it.

When it was curled back on the floor again it shook itself, and once more it was Scarabus. Jo lay on the floor beside him.

It became very quiet.

I wanted to do something, but what could I do? I had no special abilities or powers, like the others, and I wasn’t carrying any weapons; none us were, except J/O, whose weapons were built-in. It was only a training mission, after all.

“What sweet friends you have,” said Lady Indigo. “And all of them are Walkers, too, of a kind. None of them as powerful or able a Walker as you, but when cooked down and bottled they’ll each power a ship or two. Eh?”

Now all this took a while to tell, but it merely took a handful of seconds to occur. So now it was just me and J/O. I may have had my problems with the little brat—I guess I was a brat, too, when I was his age, but right now it was him and me—and Hue, who had shrunk to the size of a bowling ball and turned a terrified shade of translucent gray.

“I don’t think so,” J/O said in response to Lady Indigo’s question. He aimed his laser arm at her. There was a gentle ruby glow at the tip but nothing else. I decided this wasn’t the time to point out that technology won’t work beyond a certain point in a solidly magic world.

J/O said a word that he must have gotten from one of his dictionary programs, because he didn’t get it from me.

And then Lady Indigo said a word herself that you wouldn’t have found in any dictionary, and she moved her hand just so, and J/O stood very still. He had a goofy expression on his face.

“Take them to the dungeon,” she told the soldiers. “Each of them should be prisoned in a different cell. And chain them down.” She walked over to J/O. “Go with these nice men to the cell they’ll have ready for you and help them chain you up. I’ll come and see you when you’re all settled in.”

He looked up at her like a spaniel looking at God. It made me feel sick, because I knew that must have been what I’d looked like back when Jay rescued me from the pirate ship.

You know what made me feel sickest, though? I’ll tell you. It was this: They’d left me for last, because they didn’t care about me. Everyone else was a problem to be solved or a nuisance to be batted away. I was a triviality. I wasn’t important.

“What about me?” I asked.

“Ah yes. Little Joey Harker.” She walked over to me. A little too close. I could smell her perfume, which seemed to be a sort of mixture of roses and rot. “What perfect timing. I was hoping to catch a top-class Walker in our little snare, but you are more than I could have hoped for. You’re needed back at HEX. Very urgently. There’s a big push just about to start. And you—you could power a fleet of battleships. There’s a courier schooner leaving in an hour, and you’ll be on it. You’ll be paralyzed, of course. Scarabus?”

The tattooed man nodded. “It’s all ready, my lady.”

“Good,” she said. And she flung some kind of spell at me.

I suppose it must have been the paralysis spell, but I couldn’t say for sure. Because before it reached me, Hue bobbed down and intercepted it, and the spell hit him with a spray of golden sparkles and evaporated into nothing.

Hue turned the exact color of the fluffy pink towels in Lady Indigo’s bathroom. I wondered if it was some kind of mudluff joke.

Lady Indigo was not amused. She looked at her henchmen. “What is that creature? Neville?”

“Never seen one before,” said the jelly man. He threw a large green canopic jar at Hue. It hesitated when it touched Hue’s surface, frozen for a moment in space and time, and then it vanished completely. Green and gold and pink swirled around Hue’s translucent soap-bubble skin, and then it went a solid white.

Hue hung there bobbing gently in space for a moment. It seemed to be looking at the people in the room, trying to decide what to do next.

And then it swooped down toward me.

For a moment, I was touching Hue’s surface, cold and slippery and, strangely, not disgusting—and then the world exploded.

I saw a lot of things at once, as if they were superimposed over one another: I saw Lady Indigo and the cellar; I saw the scientific glamour world; I saw my fallen teammates—only I could see them all from every angle, up and down and sideways and inside out. And it was as if I could see them through time, as well—all the intersections that put them into this place.

And from there I slipped into a world that made utter sense. It was in focus and sane and entirely logical. And I knew, on some level, that this was now the In-Between. But it was the In-Between from the point of view of a multidimensional life-form. It was the place the way that Hue saw it.