by P. S. Power
The next trip was to see Brian Yi, on his military base thing. This time they both stood out, and it seemed to be early morning, rather than whatever time it was back home, which Zack had no clue about now. His guess would be something around two in the afternoon, but that was a guess.
Gwen looked around, and smiled, seeing buildings that she pointed at.
"Now that's better. This looks almost like home. I mean no houses, but I could imagine this being where I came from, you know?"
He nodded, "where I come from, too. I think that building is the one we want."
It was off to the side, and not the one that he'd been to before, but he could feel Brian inside of it, his shadow a bit worried over something. That didn't come through very easily, but had to do with a woman, or girl, which was normal enough. Not in a standard fashion, however. He wasn't worried about not getting a date, or what to do in bed, so Zack just walked in.
Inside there was a lobby, but no elevator, just stairs on two sides of the building.
"Three floors up?" He thought that was correct, anyway.
The man was there, being busy talking through a door. On the outside, thankfully, since that meant he could see them walking up. He spun, but smiled when he got it.
"Hey! I... Is this important? There's a bit of an issue here. Sara is afraid to come out, which is silly, since we're all friends here."
Zack looked at the door, and nodded.
"That's true. May I speak to her?" He didn't really know that he was going to be able to help, since the shadow inside was tiny, and young, but he'd run into the sense of this being before, once or twice.
Basically, whoever this girl was here, she was also Chris. Ginger the vampire, too.
Brian looked at him funny, not certain that Zack was a good choice for the job, meaning the man was pretty bright, but stepped away, not wanting to be rude.
It was probably a bad plan, and the man with him, dressed in military tan fatigues with a pattern all over them, and his name over the left breast pocket, seemed to think that he was just going to announce that Brian had to leave now.
As if the most important thing at the moment wasn't the girl inside the room.
"Sara? You don't know me yet. I'm Zack. Zack Hartley? Basically I'm your friend Brian, but from a different world and not as good looking. We have Gwen Farris with us, who is also him from a different world. Anyway, we need to have a meeting, and I think that you need to be there, too. Is that all right? It might mean going to a different world."
The door opened almost instantly, and a nice seeming dark haired girl, who had tan skin looked out. Her face was very suspicious. Untrusting even, as if he wanted to trick her. She was dressed up in a small version of the military uniform, which was kind of funny, but opened the door more when she noticed that he wasn't. That let her see the nicely dressed Gwen, who stood there trying to smile. She really wasn't good at it.
Yi was looking at Farris, shocked to find out that she was him too.
Sara noticed that part, but spoke to Zack.
"Is any of that real? Other worlds and all? I mean, I know that they exist, but are you from one for reals?" It was kind of clear that she thought he was helping Brian lie to her, just to get her out of the room in the stupid looking outfit. She was seven, but technically in the IPB, her shadow told him.
That meant that sometimes she had to wear the stupid thing she had on. It wasn't bad when she was big, but seemed like a joke on her tiny form.
Zack tilted his head as she told him that, her inner self exasperated.
"Yes? You look fine by the way. I wouldn't have thought anything of it, except that you were thinking about it now." He was about to explain the idea that he could kind of do things like that, when she nodded, understanding without asking about it.
Some people read minds.
"Thanks. I guess. It's Ms. Turner. She made me do it." Then she pointed at Gwen. "You're her? I thought you were Brian?"
Yi looked at Gwen and nodded, "that seems right. Anyway, there's a meet up?"
Zack took a deep breath and let it out, then waved for them to follow, not knowing where they were going.
"Can we find her, too? We should at least tell the people involved."
There were more of them than he would have figured, and he didn't recognize all of them at all, since that made sense. Here they had an organization, so some of the people that could be called in weren't really the ones he would have listed off himself.
A few of them were people that he did know however. Gwen too, since she gave a dark skinned woman named Penny a hug, almost instantly.
"Beth? Or, I mean, other world Beth?"
The woman, who had blond hair, and tan skin, didn't get it as they moved into the main office. She'd been behind the front counter, but had come around, to look at Sara when she was ambushed.
"Penny Cooper. Um..." She stopped, and looked at Gwen. "You look familiar though. I take it we're closer there than here?" She was still being hugged, but didn't push the other woman away, returning the move instead.
There was a smile from both of them, but a slightly different version of Gwen's body coming in distracted the rest of them from the meeting.
"What fresh hell?" The woman, Turner, Zack guessed, seemed youthful, fresh faced and tired, without her body being that way in the slightest.
There was just a sense of her being sick of things.
Brian made a noise that was a bit strange, and choked off.
"She's, actually me, from a different reality?"
The whole explanation came then, and after a while, they were settled in a meeting room. The same one that Brian used as an office most of the time. It had a nice big table in it and fairly decent soft chairs. Like the meeting with Gwen, he handled this situation carefully, like he was dealing with kids. He also needed to take Brian around it turned out, so he could find things. That meant redoing a lot of them, and taking them to meet with Glenda last, in case she was being attacked or dead.
Sara had wanted to come along on all of it, but Zack realized that it would make more sense for him to bring Chris there, to meet her. Later. They were both cogs in the wheel, but Sara was so young that it felt wrong to involve her yet. She could, in theory, learn to line walk, but doing that would functionally end her childhood. It might be needed, but it wasn't kind to think about. So he didn't.
Instead he retraced everything, did introductions, and then was surprised to find Glenda, who looked like a younger version of Heather, sitting in a room alone, meditating. That was an improvement on the last time, and he was happy to see she was still alive.
"Hello? I brought friends. Gwen and Brian." He spoke gently, and wasn't surprised to find that the woman stood instantly, spinning to face them, with a weapon in her hand. That got Brian to go for a gun, which was in a holster on his back, and Gwen to point her finger, which looked funny, but was just as deadly in its own way.
Only Zack was able to stay calm, holding his open palm up much more slowly than the others had done it. Not that he couldn't have done the same, reflex wise. It was just that adding a fourth sudden movement to the volatile mix seemed like a poor plan.
"Friends. We're all the same person, so... Yeah. Put the weapons, and uh, fingers, down." He looked over at Glenda and then Gwen. "Don't underestimate the finger. She's at least as well armed as you two are."
On the good side they were all fairly reasonable, and not scared, just reactive. Zack could see that, knowing that he too, was sort of like that. Instead, as soon as things were smoothed, he ran over the whole thing, which had its first very different answer. The others had all been either already fighting the darkness, or willing to help.
Glenda simply shook her head.
"I'm right in the middle of a war here. We all are. This... I don't know how to explain it, but things have gotten bad. There are about a thousand of us, trying to stop the combined governments from enslaving us all. I don't know if I can help, really."
That
made sense to him, but it was kind of clear that Riley was going to have a problem with that, if she didn't do her bit.
"There's some part for you in this, but don't lose your focus here, on our account. We... What are you facing? That robot swarm?"
The Heather looking blonde woman stared at him directly, her blue, not green, eyes locking with his. There was a sense of focus and connection, coming off of her. Her inner self was calm, and nearly under total control, for a regular person. It was a part of her world.
Looking around Zack noticed that the place they were in had a primitive feeling to it. Like a log cabin, with an uneven stone floor, set in concrete. It looked good, but it wasn't the kind of place that you would have expected to find robots, or whatever the woman was fighting.
The story took a while, and Zack was a bit shocked to find out that only about half of the things that Glenda and her people had to face regularly were machines.
"Most are armored troops. We can't really beat them, straight up, in a fight. Not even us Cymeds here." She waved around, like she wasn't alone. They were, however. No one waited in the walls. There were people nearby, however. Most also mentally quiet. One was even almost silent, which was unique, outside of the void. That was a man, but Zack didn't recognize him. Not exactly. There was a thread that ran from the sense of self to someone that he'd met, but that was all.
Turning his mind back, talking to the woman, who was more muscular by far than was normal for a female, and probably about as powerful as some vampires, on the shadow level. One of the big problems they had here was that they didn't have weapons that could take out the armored forms very easily. They had some, but they were basically these large, air powered, super rifles. Big, slow, and while they worked, they didn't do it very well.
After a bit he started to nod, since he had an idea of where they could get some things that might help.
"Lesser Shia. We can get better weapons there, and they won't be traceable here. I..." He looked at the others, and shrugged.
"These two need to get home anyway. I'll take you by now, and see if we can find anything?"
The others didn't wait, vanishing from there, since they knew that Zack could get home on his own. They didn't make plans to meet again, but they knew where he worked, so it was doable. The timing of things was up in the air, but open, now that they had the void back.
The woman, not being all that trusting, still allowed him to lead her off into the distance, into the forest that surrounded the cabins that her people were working from. It looked like a nice place to take a vacation, compared to the combat zone from earlier. His last trip. Forever ago.
It took a while for him to get someone in Lesser Shia to come and take Glenda around, and Zack ended up working from there, on a night shift basically, until Troy came. His pal seemed shocked to see him, for some reason.
"Zack! We all thought you were off on vacation still. Claire mentioned you coming back, and um, Merry said that her big thing with you was done now? I hadn't known there was one, but she seemed pretty relieved about it." He looked away a bit, feeling sheepish.
Probably since Merry had gotten him into bed shortly after that. It could have been shocking, but honestly Zack had to force himself to recall that he was the one married to the Elth woman, not Troy. For his part, he liked the small red haired woman, but wasn't upset with her having fun. She didn't sleep, so that left her with extra time each day, a lot of which was spent with Troy, not him.
"I've been spending time in different realities, so continuity isn't flowing smoothly for me. You probably get some of that, working here all the time. I never really noticed it, but I bet there's some drift. Probably ten minutes every day or so." He looked at his friend, speaking silently, letting his buddy know that he wasn't upset with him over sleeping with his wife.
Especially since this made two of them.
Glenda came back, loaded with about five hundred pounds of gear, and a bill, that was carried by Hathe, the leader of the shopping city outside the doors. They didn't let him in, since danger seemed to follow him when he did.
"Troy, this is Glenda. She's in a war right now. Basically, she's me. So try not to seduce her, if you can help it? It would be creepy." He was joking, not caring at all, but his buddy snorted.
"She doesn't look like Maria at all. Hi, Glenda. Troy Lopez. You need to get home?"
Zack nearly said something, but it was clear that his friend was prepared to find the right world from her shadow, and that was enough. He'd gotten pretty good at that kind of thing, over the last weeks.
Nodding, Zack realized that he only needed to make a few more trips then, if Troy had this one. He patted his friend on the shoulder, and then, on a whim, did the same with Glenda, who didn't drop her large plastic wrapped bundle to hit him.
Her voice was smooth, and pleased.
"This might well help. I hear that you're paying for it all? Hathe here said that was fine." There was a grin that spoke of her knowing that couldn't be true. She also didn't think that she could pay for it, herself.
"Sure. I hope this works. If it does, we can probably get more for you. I'll check in with you, when I can. Things are about to get pretty busy around here. In my life, I mean."
She seemed to think that sounded fine, very happy about the weapons she had to try out, and followed Troy into the node, not handing the gear off. Hathe held out the bill, the translator behind him speaking almost at the same time that the man in charge did.
"It's for three thousand gold coins. Rounded down greatly, since the shop keeper was more than happy to haggle, given that it was for you. There are more battles to come?"
Zack nodded, slowly.
"Almost certainly. We'll try to draw them away from here, but that isn't up to us. This is... Kind of a big thing, in the end. There is a thing coming that..." Shaking his head, he noticed that the slightly square man was becoming fearful. "Well, it's always been coming. It's just our turn to address it. I'll bring the gold here, in a day or two? That's a lot to move around all at once and I doubt Lisa has it in the office."
Hathe understood that, and was actually willing to simply take it out of the amount that they owed him and Troy, which to his mind was the same thing, all of it going through the node anyway. That would mean the debt was settled that day, so Zack agreed.
Then he patted the man, who was an old friend of his now. From a long time ago.
After Troy came back, he waved, and spoke to his friend. It was an effort to make it feel warm enough and genuine, but he tried, since Troy was worth the effort.
"I need to get back and spend some time with people. Later, you and I need to talk. There are things going on, and if I get removed from the playing field, you might have to take over. Not that it will happen easily, or here, but just in case."
After all, Zack knew that his personal line wasn't going to end. Not unless all reality, everywhere, was undone. Then all bets were off. Given an infinite number of chances, it would eventually take place. It was his job to stop it now. If he, and the others that were slightly like him, and not his doubles, could pull it off, then that would be done for a small time. How long, he didn't know, but it was enough.
His part, theirs, was just that. Their part.
Nothing else was needed, or could help.
Thinking about that, he went back to his people. There was a lot to explain, and more to figure out.
If they could. If not, then, well, it wouldn't matter, since nothing that existed would any longer. That, in the end, was the real point. They either won, or not only did they die, no one else would survive. More to the point, if the insane beings from the end of reality had their way, none of them would ever have existed at all.
Including all of the people that had no clue that any of this was even possible. That was most beings, so Zack kind of wanted to avoid that.
The only thing was, he really didn't know if that was even possible. They had to fight the most powerful beings in existence, who had
infinite chances at bat. Sooner or later, that meant they were probably going to lose.
So with that cheery thought, he made the rounds, recalling only pain for a while, and wondering if never having been would be better than carrying that around forever. It pained him too that he could see the idea of destroying all of what was as valid, in some ways, just to stop that part from having taken place.
It lingered with him, like a haunting melody, until he went to the Frozen YoGhurt and found Claire there, smiling at him.
Then he recalled why he couldn't let that happen. There were things that were worth endless suffering, to make certain they had a chance to exist in the first place.
Knowing that, he understood why he had to go on, and protect them all. For the sake of one undead woman.
It was, for the time being, enough.
Other books by P.S. Power that you might like.
(All books are in the suggested reading order by series.)
Young Ancients: (The First Cycle)
The Builder (Tor's first book)
Knight Esquire (Tor)
Knight of the Realm (Tor)
Ambassador (Tor)
Counselor (Tor)
Slave Line (Tor)
The Dark Half of the Sun (This is the first book with Timon as a main character)
A Simple Darkness (This one has Tiera)
Ancient Kings (Tor)
Lord of the Sky (Timon)
The Silence Within (Tiera)
Kingdom of Stars (Timon)
Goddess of the Moon (Tiera)
Envoy to Earth (Gerent)
Strange Land (Sara)
Young Ancients (The Second Cycle)
Lineage (Dareg Canton)
The Infected: (The super-hero stories)
(The Beginning Arc)
Proxy (Brian)
Gabriel (Denis)
Cast Iron (Marcia)
Proxy: Reunions (Brian)
Cellophane (Penny)
Goblin (Tobin)
Reunions (Brian)
Ghost Girl (Becky and Scott)
Impulse: A Whole New Day (Bridgette)
War Day (Brian)
