InterWorld

CHAPTER EIGHT

I couldn’t leave him there.

You’re going to laugh at me, but I couldn’t. It might have been the sensible thing to do—maybe if I could have dug a grave or something, I would have felt okay about leaving Jay in the desert at the borders of the edge of the In-Between. But the ground was baked, hard red mud with a thin layer of sand over it.

So I tried to pull him. He didn’t budge. I knew that he outweighed me, but even so, I’d helped him drag himself away from the chasm’s edge not ten minutes ago—and probably used up every ounce of adrenaline in my system doing it, I now realized. Now that the danger was over, I had about as much chance of moving him as I had of raising the Titanic with my teeth.

I wondered if it was the metal suit that weighed him down so. I examined it, looking for a catch or a zipper or something.

Nothing.

There was a hushing noise beside me and I turned. It was the little In-Betweener. The mudluff creature was hovering in the air beside me, floating in space like an amoeba the size of a cat, glittering with all the colors of a rainbow.

“Hey,” I said. “Well, at least you’re okay. But Jay’s dead. Maybe I ought to have left you there with that tyrannosaurus thing after all.”

The soap bubble color changed to a rather miserable shade of purple.

“I didn’t mean it,” I said. “But he was…my friend. He was me, kind of. And now he’s dead, and I can’t even get him back to his home. He’s too heavy.”

The purple color warmed up until the thing glowed a gentle shade of gold. It extended something that wasn’t quite a limb and wasn’t really a tentacle—a pseudopod, I suppose, if that means what I think it does—and it touched the metal suit just above the heart.

“Yes,” I said. “He’s dead.”

It pulsed gold—a sort of frustrated gold—and tapped exactly the same place on the suit.

“You want me to touch it there?”

It changed color once more, to a serene blue, a pleased sort of blue. I put my finger where the pseudopod had been, and the suit opened to me like a flower to the sun. Jay had been wearing gray boxer shorts and a green T-shirt underneath it. His body seemed so pale. I dragged the suit out from underneath him.

It weighed a ton. Well, maybe a hundred pounds. The amoeba was still hanging around, as if it were trying to tell me something. It extended a scarlet-tipped pseudopod toward the silver mass of the suit, which lay crumpled on the red earth. Then it pointed at me, and twinkling silver veins appeared across its balloon body.

“What?” I asked, frustrated. “I wish you could talk.”

It pointed at the silver suit, now faded to a dull, battleship gray, and then back at me once more.

“You think I should put it on?”

It glowed blue, the same shade of blue it had gone before. Yes. I should put it on. “I’ve heard of speaking in tongues,” I said. “I’ve never heard of speaking in colors.”

Then I picked up the suit—now something like a starfish-shaped overcoat—and draped it over me. It hung there heavily and made my back hurt. It felt like a lead-lined blanket. It was cold and dead. There was no way I could walk more than a dozen steps in any direction wearing this.

“Now what?” I asked the amoeba. It turned a puzzled shade of green, and yellows and crimsons chased across its surface in rapid succession. Then it pointed, hesitantly, to a spot on the middle of the suit, over my chest. I touched it.

Nothing happened.

I touched it again. I banged it. I rubbed it. I squeezed it between finger and thumb as tightly as I could—and suddenly the lead blanket that was covering me came to life. It flowed and oozed and ran over my body, covering me from legs to head. My vision went dark when it flowed across my face. I felt a moment of pure, suffocating panic—and then I could see once more, better than before, and breathe as well.

Looking down at my body, I could see the silver covering, but I could also see inside it. It was a little like the heads-up displays fighter pilots use in their cockpits. I could see the golden bottle and what looked like a gun of sorts and several objects I didn’t recognize. They seemed to be in pockets of some kind. And I could see my own body.

I was warm now, except my left shoulder, where the suit had been damaged by Lady Indigo’s spell, and the places where it had been punctured.

Seen through the mirror mask, the amoeba thing looked even stranger. It was like looking at something huge through binoculars held the wrong way. It was only the size of a cat—I knew that. But somehow I could not shake the idea that it was truly the size of a skyscraper, only it was ten miles away. Does that make any sense?

“Do you have a name?” I asked it.

It glowed a hundred colors. I took that as a yes. Trouble is, I don’t speak colors. “I’m going to call you Hue,” I told him. “It’s a joke. Not a funny one, the other kind.” It glowed gold, which I took as it not minding.

I bent down, picked Jay up and put him over my shoulders. I could still feel the bulk of him, but it felt like the suit was taking most of the weight. It felt like he weighed about thirty pounds.

And then I thought:

{IW}:=

—and I made for the base, carrying Jay’s body over my shoulders like a Sioux hunter carrying a deer back to camp.

Hue bobbed along in the air beside me for a little way, until I came to a path that I could feel would lead me into the Earth with the InterWorld base in it.

I wish I could explain it better than that. I could feel it there, in the same way you can feel with your tongue a place in your tooth where a filling has fallen out. I could feel it.

It was time to Walk. And I did.

The last thing I saw of that place was Hue, bobbing maybe a bit sadly in the air behind me. And then the scene was replaced by…

Nothing…

A riverbank…

A glimpse of a city…

A thousand eyes, each closing and opening independently, each looking for me…

A grassy plain and, in the distance, purplish mountains.

And suddenly I was there, wherever “there” was. I knew it. I could feel it in my head.

{IW}:=

wasn’t going to take me any farther.

But there wasn’t anything around. I was in the middle of a deserted pampas, all on my own. I put Jay’s body down on the grassy ground. I figured that either the people from Jay’s base—from InterWorld, whatever that was—would come and find me or they wouldn’t, and suddenly and honestly I didn’t care one way or the other.

I put my finger to the soft place under my chin and felt the suit retract from my face, leaving it naked to the warm air. And then, all alone, a million million miles from everywhere, I started to cry—for Jay, and for my parents, and for Jenny and the squid, and for Rowena and Ted Russell and Mr. Dimas and all of us.

But mostly I cried for me.

I cried and sobbed until there wasn’t anything left inside me to cry with, and then I sat there, with the tears drying on my face, feeling empty and wrung out until the sun went down, and a city in a glass dome came over the pampas, levitating silently about six feet above the ground. It stopped fifty feet away from Jay and me, and a party of people who looked kind of like me came over and picked us up and took us away.