by Dakota Rusk
“What?” she asked, drawing in closer to look at it again.
“Remember how I told you that before we met Eddie, we knew of him as this famous hacker on campus? Well, he called himself Daimon Seed, and he always signed his handiwork with a little red devil’s head.” I pointed to the button. “That’s what this is—vastly simplified, because it’s so small; but I’m sure of it. He meant that to be his avatar. His signature, really.”
Fabia looked me in the face. Again, the mirroring effect was momentarily disorienting. “What do you think it does?”
“There’s only one way to find out,” I said, and I could hear the excitement creep into my voice.
She obviously heard it too; but I also saw something in her hesitate—draw back. And I realized that this was a simpler Fabia—one who hadn’t spent more than a year throwing herself bodily into the unknown. I couldn’t expect her to keep up with me.
“You don’t have to take the risk,” I said. “This is your home parallel. If you’re careful, you can possibly sneak out of here and find your way home—be with your family for Sol Invictus. It’s where you belong.”
She scowled at me. “I’m not afraid,” she said, obviously insulted by the implication. “It’s just—as I said, I came here straight from the train. My trunk’s over there. If people find it alongside a dead body, there’ll be questions…”
I smiled. She was already thinking like a strategist—already becoming what I became.
We moved her trunk to her locker, which we both knew was a safe spot; no one would have any cause to search it. While we were there I retrieved a bandage from her first aid kit.
As I wound it around my wounded shoulder, Fabia went to say goodbye to Nike and Nikos. I tried to give her privacy—they were, after all, her cats, not mine—but I couldn’t help eavesdropping…listening to the words this Fabia Terentia said to her beloved cats, whom she might not ever see again…words I myself never got a chance to say to mine.
“Sweethearts,” she said, “I’ll come back to you, I promise; I’ll move heaven and earth to make it so. Please be good and be safe and wait for me. I love you. I’ll always love you.”
Then she came and stood by me, tears streaming down her face and completely unashamed of them; and why should she be? Who was to see them? Just me—the only other person she would ever meet who entirely understood what those tears meant.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“Possibly turn into a shower of molecules,” I said, trying to hide my fear behind a show of humor. “But first, take hold of me—just like I described to you, the way Eddie had us do.”
She put her arms around my waist; then she kissed me on the cheek.
“For luck,” she said.
“We may need it,” I replied.
I pressed the key with the red devil icon.In hindsight, of course, I can see how foolhardy this was—what a stupid and inexcusable risk. Worse, I wasn’t just putting my own life in jeopardy, I was doing the same to my other self. Yes, she volunteered, she chose to embrace the danger—she was me, after all—but I had a far better idea of what that danger entailed than she ever could.
And yet despite how wrong it was to make that choice, in the moment that I made it—the moment I pressed the button on the Hopper and set in motion whatever irreversible thing would then happen—I felt, for the first time in months, like I was myself again; like I was the Fabia Terentia who made decisions and never looked back…the Fabia Terentia who believed in her ability to fight her way out of any trouble that threw itself her path; the Fabia Terentia who was, in a very real way, clinging to my waist even now.
But a few moments later, when we slammed into a new parallel (almost literally; when I was able to organize my thoughts again, I found myself with my face pressed into the dirt), I discovered that I wasn’t just that old Fabia; I was also the new one, who was accustomed to the unknown, and quicker to recover from its surprises.
The other Fabia was still sprawled out on the ground, groaning like she’d been thrown from an unruly horse, while I was already back on my feet (though admittedly a bit wobbly).
“Are you all right?” I asked.
She managed to push herself up to her knees. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
I pitied her; and knowing how much I’d hate for anyone to see me at less than my best, I decided to give her the dignity of privacy. “I’m going to look around,” I told her. “I’ll be back.”
I left her as she dealt with the first dry heave.
We seemed to have materialized in some kind of lightly wooded area; there were a lot of trees, but none very big, and a quantity of shrubbery and scrub, though not arranged in any way that would suggest landscaping. It was the kind of terrain that suggested a human population, though very sparse.
And sure enough, a moment later I pushed through a wall of foliage and came upon a small concrete structure, too industrial for a house and yet situated all by its lonesome on the landscape.
There was a window facing me, and a light shone from it, though it wasn’t quite dark yet. I crept up and peered through the panes; what I saw was something like a combination of a laboratory and a small factory; to one side there was a desk, on which sat the lamp that was throwing off the light I’d noticed. And seated at the desk was a figure, hunched over so that I couldn’t make out any distinguishing features.
But there was only one person it could be; I felt it in my bones. Another hunch.
I followed the perimeter of the building until I came across a big metal door. I pulled it open—it scraped and screamed with enough noise to wake the dead—and when I stepped through it into the lab, the person at the desk was looking up at me, an expression of barely suppressed impatience on his young face.
“About time you got here,” Eddie said.
19
I ran behind the desk and grabbed him around the neck, before he could even get out of his chair. “Oh, Eddie! It is you! It’s really, really you!”
“Yes, and you’re really, really killing me,” he blurted. “Ease up, all right?”
I loosened my grip and my forearm brushed against his face. I felt something soft and bristly.
“Eddie, you have whiskers!” I cried, and I ran my hand over his downy cheek. “You have a real grown-up beard!”
His faced turned crimson. “I always had a beard.”
“Maybe so, but now I can actually see it!”
He cleared his throat and shrugged off my lingering embrace—I had to remind myself that he wasn’t even sixteen yet; still an awkward, prickly proud adolescent—and said, “Anyway, I’m glad to see you.” He looked past me, towards the door, which still hung open. “Is anyone else here, or is it just you?”
I opened my mouth, but didn’t know to answer. “I guess you could say it’s just me,” I muttered. “But, Eddie—where are we?”
“In my laboratory-slash-manufactory,” he said, gesturing around him. “I’ve gone into the Hopper-making business.”
I took in the cramped, squalid little hut, filled with wires and tubing and machinery, and scowled. “It’s…very nice. But…I’m sorry, I would’ve thought you could do a little better.”
“Actually, I could’ve done significantly better. But as it happens I only have a single client, who is also holding me hostage. So I work with what I’ve got.”
I blinked. “Maybe you’d better start at the beginning.”
“Have a seat,” he said, nodding in the direction of a nearby stool. “This may take a while.” As I pulled it over to the desk, he began. “You remember how my mom was pretty badly shot up at that confrontation over the Terminus Engine?” he said.
“Of course I remember,” I said, settling onto the stool. “How is she doing?”
“It’s been a long recuperation, but it’s going well.” His face darkened. “At least, it was last time I saw her. Which was several months ago.”
I felt my pulse quicken. “What happened?”
He lea
ned back in his chair and pushed aside the small console he’d been working on—the interior, I now realized, of a new Hopper. “I got bored hanging around her sick room,” he said; “and also—well, the better she got, the more she got on my nerves. She is my mom, after all.” He shrugged. “ ‘Eddie, get me this. Eddie, get me that. Eddie, rub my feet.’ ” He gave a horrified shudder. “I had to get out of there. But I knew she’d object to me going unless I could make a good case for it.”
“What did you come up with?”
“Well, it occurred to me that when you and the others shut down the Terminus Engine, that cut off all the various parallels from the Veil. But they wouldn’t know why. All they’d know was that their Terminus Chambers had stopped working. And all those families who had students at Parallel U. would understandably be freaking out a little, with no idea whether they’d ever see their kids again, and no one they could even ask.”
I frowned. “I hadn’t thought about that. It’s awful.”
“Right? So I decided use my Hopper to jump to all the eighty-whatever known parallels, and let them know what was going on. Tell them the Terminus Engine had been shut down, but that travels across the Veil would begin again via a new technology very soon. Because I figured once Mom recovered, we’d come back and I’d offer the university the patent on my Hopper, which I could then begin producing for them, at a profit, which would give them financial independence from the Terminus Institute. Clever, right?”
It was clever; but also, of course, very risky. “You went to all the parallels,” I said, “and just told them what was happening?” I didn’t want to say so, but it seemed unlikely that a lot of the institutions on such worlds would take the word of a fifteen-year-old boy.
“I did it anonymously,” he said, as if he’d been reading my mind. “In fact, I did it as Daimon Seed. I’d jump to a new parallel, figure out which computer network was the best suited to my needs—whether it was government or mass media or whatever—and I’d hack into it; flood the system with my message; wait a few days to make sure it was received, reported, and understood; then I’d move on. It was working really well,” he said with a sigh. “But then I got to Parallel 17.”
“Oh,” I said grimly, sensing what was coming.
“Right? There are no computer networks there—no electronic media or mass communications system of any kind. It’s all hocus-pocus, ooga-booga,” he said, fluttering his fingers in the air derisively. “So I didn’t have any choice. I had to deliver the news in person. I went into the first village I came to, found the cutest guy available, and said, ‘Take me to your leader.’ Which he did.”
“And that turned out to be Jocasta Foxglove.”
“You’ve met her? I guessed you would. I could tell she was up to something. What’s her game, exactly? I’ve been busting my brain trying to figure it out. She’s been to Parallel U.? Did she try to turn the entire faculty into toads, or something? Because from what I remember—too late.”
“Something a bit more impressive than that. She took over. She’s the President now. She’s changing the curriculum and everything.”
I thought Eddie was going to fall out of his chair. “President? But—that’s my mom’s job!”
“Ancient history,” I said sadly. “You’ve missed a lot.”
He dropped his head into his hands and sat quietly for a moment; then looked up and said, “This is my fault, you know. I was a complete idiot.”
“You?” I said. “Boy genius?”
“Genius in some things; total screw-up in others. Jocasta Foxglove played me like a violin. She flattered me—gave me the visiting royalty treatment—reacted to everything I said like it was just the most astonishing thing she’d ever heard. And I took the bait, hook, line, and sinker. Puffed out my chest and told her all about how the Hopper works—the principles, the technologies—and she acted like she could barely understand; but she’s waaaay sharper than she pretends. Got a first-rate mind, that one, and she was filing away every single thing I said for later use. She even coaxed me into telling her my plans to mass-produce the Hopper, as a free-market replacement for the Terminus Engine.”
He looked down at his hands, lost for a moment in his shame.
“So what happened?” I asked.
He gave a little jump at the sound of my voice, like he’d forgotten I was there. “Simple,” he said. “Someone spiked my herbal tea and when I woke up I was here, confined to this bunker, and told to start making Hoppers in quantity. Jocasta had all the equipment I’d specified brought in.”
“So we’re on Parallel 17?” I asked, looking out the window again with renewed interest.
He shook his head. “Somewhere else; I don’t know where. I couldn’t run this place without an industrial power source, and there’s nothing like that on Parallel 17. That’s what I mean about Jocasta being smarter than I ever dreamed. While I was unconscious, she programmed my Hopper to bring us here—some parallel where there’s both a power grid and a minimal population; who the hell even knows how she found it. I’d only shown her how to use the Hopper once; I gave her maybe a thirty-second rundown. But she remembered it, and made it work for her.” He half-laughed. “It’s actually pretty impressive.”
I shifted on my stool; it was satisfying to have all these questions answered—and especially to know why Eddie had never returned to Parallel U.—but the knowledge wasn’t necessarily easing my mind. “I don’t understand,” I said. “If you’re making Hoppers here, why didn’t you just use the first one you finished to jump to another parallel?”
He winked and gave me a big grin. “Excellent question, Warrior Nun! You’re smarter than you let on, too. But the answer is simple: I don’t know where I am. It’s like when you leave your house to go somewhere; you don’t just need the destination, you need a route. I can’t program a trajectory into a Hopper without a starting point.”
“Couldn’t you just jump blind?”
He emphatically shook his head. “Suicide. I could end up in the middle of an ocean, or something.”
“But—that’s happened to you before, remember? Back in freshman year, after my parallel went ‘offline.’ You tried to jump to it, and ended up diverted somewhere else—into an ocean.”
“And in that case, I was able to reverse the jump and return to where I started—soaking wet, as you’ll recall.” He raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “But I can’t reverse a jump if it’s blind; I can’t go back to my starting point if I haven’t entered a starting point.”
I was starting to realize how completely Eddie had been trapped. I looked around the place. “So you’ve been here all these months? Where do you sleep? Where do you—you know—relieve yourself?”
He nodded towards a screen against the wall. “There’s a cot and a bed pan just behind there. Every few days a couple of witchy people come to see if there are any new Hoppers, and while they’re here they change the linen and empty the pan. Fortunately that was just last night, or you’d find the fragrance in here a tad unwelcoming.” He laughed.
I shook my head. “But I know you, Eddie; I know you. You had a plan. You always have a plan.”
He beamed a brilliant smile at me. “Thank you, sweetheart! That’s maybe the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me! Of course I had a plan. And it worked. You’re here, aren’t you?”
Suddenly I realized what he meant. “The red-devil button,” I said, lifting my wrist and looking at the Hopper strapped to it. “You put that there for us?”
“Who else? I told the witches it was a self-destruct key that would vaporize the Hopper if it was ever in danger of falling into the wrong hands. I figured that way, they’d never be tempted to use it. But I was counting on you lot eventually getting your hands on one, and I was pretty confident you’d eventually recognize my little trademark, and take the risk.”
“You put it there to bring us to you?”
He nodded. “On every new one I made, I programmed that key to return the Hopper—and i
ts passengers—to its point of origin. Which the witches would have to enter before they could jump out of here. Clever, huh?”
“And since they entered the point of origin,” I said, unbuckling the Hopper, “it’s now logged in here. So you can finally learn where we are.” I handed it to him.
He took it from me with a little courtly bow. “Egggg-zactly. Again, a big gold star for our newest girl brainiac.” He fiddled a bit with the Hopper’s keypad, then looked up and said, “We are—drumroll please—on Parallel 39.”
I thought for a moment, but had to admit: “I don’t know anything about that one.”
“Well, you’re not staying long enough to need to.” He strapped the Hopper to his wrist. “We’re bustin’ outta here, toots.”
“Don’t call me that. Where are we going? Back to Parallel U.?”
“Not right away.” Once again, his fingers flew across the keypad. “First, make a stop at Parallel 17.”
“What? Where the witches come from? Are you crazy?”
“Not at all.” He finished the calculations and looked up. “I’ve learned a bit about them in the time I’ve been here. They’re not exactly a chatty bunch, but things slip out, and I’m pretty good at coaxing things out of people. Anyway it turns out that there’s no central government anywhere on Witch World; Jocasta Foxglove is only one of thousands of local leaders—called priestesses. Or priests.”
“Men can be rule the witches?” I asked.
“Seems so. At least in Britain, which is where all this went down—and where I first encountered Jocasta and her coven. From what I understand, on Parallel 17, Rome collapsed in the third century—couple hundred years earlier than it did in my parallel. The Christian church wasn’t yet powerful enough to step into the void, so instead paganism came roaring back. And in Britain that included a resurfacing of the male-dominated Druids, who after some centuries of competing with mainstream witches formally joined forces with them. Jocasta’s own coven branched off of a larger one ruled by a High Priest named Peragon.”
