Eternity’s Wheel

I wasn’t sure what to say, so I nodded. He patted his jacket to make sure he had his wallet, and moved toward the door. “If you can wait on the aspirin, I’ll pick up some extra-strength painkillers.”

“That’d be great,” I said, though the thought of waiting a few more minutes wasn’t awesome. Still, I’d live, and it would be better for me in the long run.

“I’ll be back,” he said. I nodded again, even though he wasn’t looking at me anymore, and listened as the front door opened and closed behind him. I heard the click of his key in the lock. I wasn’t sure if he was locking me in or making sure to keep everyone else out. Probably both.

I’ll admit it: I was nervous about going to anyone for help. Not only was it entirely possible he’d be coming back with some nice men in pristine white coats but there was no telling what kind of trouble I might have brought with me. My enemies had sent me here on purpose, which meant they probably wouldn’t be coming after me … probably. There was no way to know for sure. Even aside from that, I had already had one teammate turn on me in recent memory. I was having a few trust issues right now, not that I think anyone would blame me.

I tilted my head back against the covered couch, listening to the crinkle of plastic around my ears. I was dizzy. What I really needed was to sleep for about a decade, but I’d probably get about an hour. I’d been sent here to witness the destruction of everything. I didn’t know how soon they were planning on making that happen, but I probably couldn’t afford to rest for too long.

Despite that thought, I must have passed out on the couch while I was waiting for Mr. Dimas—Jack—to get back from the store. One moment I was sitting there, thinking about how I couldn’t rest for long, and the next I was hearing the key in the lock again and realizing I’d fallen asleep.

And I woke up with a headache, which is pretty much the worst thing ever.

“How long were you gone?” I asked, as he stepped into my line of sight.

He looked at his watch. “Twenty-three minutes,” he said, raising an eyebrow at me. “Are you okay?”

“Water and painkillers,” I said. “Please.”

He brought me a bottle of water and two maximum-strength aspirins. I swallowed them both at once, along with half the water. Mr. Dimas (I kept thinking of him that way, no matter what he’d said) was laying out supplies on the table: a wrist brace, an Ace bandage, medical tape, butterfly bandages, gauze, disinfectant, etc.

“Tell me what happened,” he said, sitting on the table across from me and dabbing the disinfectant on the gauze.

“It’s not going to make much sense to you,” I said apologetically.

“That’s fine. Just talk to me. This is going to hurt.”

Oh. I nodded, trying to figure out where to start. I had told him some the last time I’d been home, before I’d made the decision to fully commit my life to InterWorld. … “How much do you remember from what I told you before?”

“I’ve never forgotten it,” he said. “You went missing for a day and a half, and then you came to see me at school one evening with a story about how you’d discovered you could travel through dimensions.”

“We call it Walking,” I said. He was cleaning the cuts on my wrist left by Lord Dogknife’s claws, and they were starting to sting. A lot.

“Right. You were being chased by this magic organization. …”

“HEX,” I filled in. “They’re the bad guys. One of them, anyway.”

“And you were rescued by an older version of you, who was killed in the process.”

“Jay,” I said, the ache of the words and the memories nothing compared to the stinging of my wounds. Thinking of Jay no longer hurt as much as it used to; everything healed eventually. “And I brought his body back to InterWorld. That’s where I met the other versions of me.”

“Because you all have the same power,” he said.

“Right. See, since I have the power to Walk between dimensions, every other version of me in every other dimension has that same power. I don’t know why me—or, why us—but there it is. We can all do it, some better than others. Apparently, I’m … pretty good at it.”

“Which is how you did it by accident at first,” he said, pinching my skin together as he placed a butterfly bandage over the worst of the cuts. I continued to speak, watching him with a vague, detached fascination. “And then you went on a training mission, correct? The one that turned out to be a trap?”

“Yeah. Everyone got captured by HEX, except for me. I only escaped because of Hue.”

“Your little extraterrestrial friend. You called him an … MDLF?”

“Yeah, M-D-L-F, standing for multidimensional life-form, or mudluff. He’s not an extraterrestrial, exactly, he’s a … well, a multidimensional life-form. He looks kind of like a big soap bubble, and communicates by changing colors, so I call him Hue. Or her, I really don’t know. …” I stopped talking for a moment, taking slow, even breaths. Mr. Dimas was cleaning the scrape along my side. I didn’t even remember getting that one, but it was hurting quite a bit now that he’d found it. Fights were like that; half the time you didn’t feel your bruises until later.

“Your team was captured by HEX,” he prompted me, and I closed my eyes to concentrate.

“Yeah. Except for me, because of Hue. But it still seemed pretty suspicious, so the Old Man—he’s our leader, another version of me—wiped my memories and sent me back here. That’s when I showed up again after almost two days and came to talk to you.”

“Because you’d gotten your memories back.”

“Yeah. Hue came and found me, and seeing him, I just … remembered everything. I guess they couldn’t take that away from me, for some reason. …”

“So this mudluff creature came here,” Mr. Dimas said, looking interested, “to our Earth.”

“Yeah. I don’t know if they do that all the time, or if it was because I was here, or …”

“Where is Hue now?”

“I don’t know. He’s kind of like a stray cat. He hangs around when he wants attention or if I’m upset and he’s trying to help, and he’s saved my life more than once, but sometimes he disappears for days or weeks at a time.”

Mr. Dimas nodded, gesturing for me to sit up. I did so, gingerly, and he started to rub some sort of minty-smelling gel onto my ribs. “For the bruising,” he explained. “Tell me what happened after you went back to InterWorld.”

“Well, I thought I’d remembered everything at first, but I couldn’t quite grasp the way back to Base Town. So instead I tracked down where the rest of my team had been taken, and we all managed to escape.” It was an incredibly condensed, watered-down version of what had actually happened, but it was true enough. I had tracked my team through the Nowhere-at-All to a nightmarish HEX battleship, gotten myself recaptured, caused a ruckus in the prison cells, set hundreds of captive souls free, and more or less accidentally destroyed the entire ship. There had been some quick thinking and a few almost heroic moments, but most of it had been dumb luck.

“Go on,” Mr. Dimas urged. He was wrapping the tape around my ribs now, which hurt nine ways from Sunday.

“Uh, so, we escaped … and I was accepted back into InterWorld. It’s been about two years for me. I’ve been training, going on various missions, doing okay in my studies … business as usual. Nothing too weird happened until my team and I were sent to retrieve some data from a Binary world last … ugh, I don’t even know. A week ago? Two, maybe?” It was so hard to keep track. …

“Binary world?”

“Binary are like HEX: bad guys. They’re two different factions who both want the same thing, though the Binary are what they sound like: machines, mostly, run by a sentient computer who calls itself zero-one-one-zero-one, or ‘the Professor.’ They’re the science; HEX is the magic.”

He glanced up at me over his glasses. “Magic?”

I couldn’t help giving a small grin. “Yeah. I had the same reaction, but I’ve seen it. Magic. I could go into how it works and what it is and all that, but it doesn’t really matter. It works and it is, and HEX has the monopoly on it—except for the fringe worlds closer to the high end of the Arc, but—”

“You’re losing me,” he said, tying off the end of the tape now wrapped firmly around my torso.

“I’m losing myself, I think,” I said, trying to concentrate on breathing. I was starting to get tunnel vision.

“Sit back for a minute,” he advised, looking me over. “And drink more water.”

I nodded, following his advice. At least the pills were kicking in, and I could feel my headache starting to ebb. They weren’t doing too much for the rest of me, though.

“What’s this?” he asked suddenly. I turned my head; he’d found the small bruise and little puncture wound of an injection site on my arm.

“Ah, that. I got injected with a tracer for safety reasons, after the rockslide. It’s advanced technology, it’ll dissolve harmlessly within another week or so.”

“Nothing that needs my attention?” I shook my head. “All right. What’s a fringe world?” he asked, once I started to feel less like I was going to pass out.