The World Walker Series Box Set

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  Mee had a strangely unfocused look in her eye. Joni knew she was about to curse in her unique and infamous way. It showed the depth and profundity of her shock that all she managed to come out with was a whispered, “Shit.”

  Next, Joni told her about the dream. Her reaction to this was nothing like Joni had feared. There was no lapse into depression. If anything, it was the opposite. The sadness that underscored even Mee’s happiest moments seemed to lift temporarily as she digested what she had been told.

  “He’s out there,” she said. “Wherever there is. And he’s helping someone. It’s what he does. And he saw you.”

  “Well, yeah. Kinda. I don’t think he knew who I was.”

  “But seeing you did something, changed things. He was losing the fight before you showed up.”

  “Yes,” said Joni, remembering the dark blood between Seb’s fingers as he lay on the ground.

  “Did he go on to win? Was he ok?”

  “I don’t know,” said Joni. “I woke up.”

  “But he healed himself?”

  “Yes.”

  Mee stood up and paced. Then she smiled.

  “Well, ok. And this was a memory. You saw all this when you were nine years old. The first time you reset.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, whatever you inherited from your father, maybe that first use of it triggered that dream, vision, whatever it was. In a way, who cares? He’s alive, he’s out there in some shithole with three moons and people with faces that look like they ran into a wall. But he’s out there. And—as soon as he can—he’ll be back. The selfish bastard.”

  Joni smiled at her. John got up.

  “I’m gonna make up some sandwiches, some fruit, fill up the water bottles. I don’t know about you, but I need some air. It’s lunchtime already. Let’s eat in the forest, then walk along the north beach. That’s your usual spot, right?”

  “Yes,” said Joni. “And you two can tell me everything about Dad.”

  “One more coffee before we go?”

  “Are you trying to avoid the subject?”

  “Not at all, nope. I agree. It’s time to tell you.” He exchanged a meaningful look with Mee. They’d agreed many years ago that—when this day came—Joni didn’t need to know that John had once been Mason, the man who had tortured Mee and killed Seb’s friend.

  Mee took Joni’s arm as they headed for the door.

  “I was going to tell you when you turned eighteen,” she said. “It’s a lot to take in. First of all, your dad isn’t just some powerful Manna user. In fact, what he uses isn’t really Manna at all. And it’s not separate the way Manna is. It’s something far more powerful. He’s a World Walker. And he’s entirely responsible for Year Zero. That’s how he saved the world.”

  18

  The world Joni knew was very different to the one in which her mother had grown up. Mee, along with the vast majority of people, hadn’t even known Manna existed. Joni had grown up surrounded by people who had Used all their lives and came to Innisfarne knowing their era was passing and the next generation would have to live without the power they had taken for granted. The island had no Thin Places, yet Manna users had been drawn there for decades. Most of them were members of the Order who had found that daily meditation sessions, rather than the power to create food from dirt, was what they truly needed. No one ever managed to adequately articulate what it was about the place that kept them coming back, but certain words were heard again and again in people’s halting attempts to describe their experience: honesty, reality, solidity. Ordinariness. Joni hadn’t realized how much more grounded than the average sixteen-year-old she was until she had gone to the writing course and, among her peers, felt alone. Not lonely, never lonely, but alone.

  Accepting the truth about her father was straightforward in a way, because—despite the scale of what had happened to him, and the extent of his power—Mee made it clear how his humanity had always come through. Until those last few weeks. He was no saint, but a complex man who had always tried to do the right thing. In the end, doing the right thing had come at a cost they had yet to understand. It was why she’d given Joni Seb’s surname, rather than her own. She’d wanted Joni to know she had two parents who loved her, wanted her father to be a real presence for her. However long it took him to get home.

  Joni wondered why she was so different. Although she had been conceived before Year Zero, she couldn’t use Manna; yet she had a powerful ability, possibly unique. It was certainly an ability Dad had never demonstrated, although genetically she assumed it had come from him.

  “He never really understood what Billy Joe had given him, Jones,” said Mee, “so try not to stress about understanding why you can do what you do. That alien freak saved his life. Then Seb went to Roswell and, after that, he saved my life.” She sighed heavily and shook her head. “I had kind of hoped to spare you all this superpower shite. It’s not as much fun as it looks in the movies.”

  Uncle John had been even quieter than usual during their picnic in the small copse of trees they all generously, if inaccurately, referred to as ‘the forest.’ He spoke up now.

  “He saved my life, too, in a situation when pretty much anyone else wouldn’t have.”

  Joni looked at him, suspecting there was a lot more to that particular story. She also knew Uncle John would have told her if he’d wanted her to know. There was hurt there, and regret. She knew she’d never deliberately upset him by dredging up a personal history he had long decided to leave behind. She nodded at him and smiled, saying nothing.

  They finished up the sandwiches and walked out to the north tip of the island. The beach they were heading for wasn’t the one from which Seb had disappeared. Joni knew Mum still found it hard to be there. Mee had been lost in thought as they walked and, just before they reached the beach, she put a hand on Joni’s arm. All three of them stopped.

  “The reset,” she said. “I think I know what it is, what you’re doing.”

  A couple of seagulls screamed high above them. They ascended in a spiral, seemingly without any effort, before heading out over the open water. Mee sat on the coarse grass that grew wild on the edges of the rocky shore and patted the ground for John and Joni to join her.

  “Seb almost gave up Walking once,” she said. “It was after he rescued a family from a fire. He came back home afterward, but I thought he had failed. I’d see it all unfold on TV. The fire had spread, the building had been gutted, and the young mother and her family had all been killed.”

  “But you said he rescued them,” said Joni.

  “He did,” said Mee. “Just not in this universe.”

  She explained the concept of the multiverse, and it all started to make sense…slowly. In his ‘home’ universe, Seb had been too late to rescue anyone, but in a parallel universe, the family was still trapped, still alive. It was only when he got back to Mee that he had discovered what had happened. And, for a while, he had been unable to deal with the consequences; the knowledge that for all the people he helped, countless others would always be unreachable. In the end, he had continued to help, to do good, because that was all he knew - and the people he saved were real people who might have suffered or died without his intervention.

  “So the universe splits at certain moments?” Joni was trying to piece a coherent picture together out of the information she had just been given.

  “At certain moments, possibly, if there are a finite number of universes,” said Mee. “But there are plenty of respected physicists who suggest the number is infinite. Every time a choice is made, any time a situation arises with different possible outcomes, all of the outcomes occur, and new universes form. You’ve heard of Schrödinger’s cat?”

  John started whistling Give Me The Simple Life, but as neither Mee nor Joni knew the song, his attempt at humor went unrecognized. He stopped whistling.

  Joni was rubbing her forehead.

  “Shrew-who's what?”

  “Schrödinger’s cat. It’
s a thought experiment. You put a cat in a box with some decaying uranium and a bottle of poison. The uranium may or may not leak radiation before you open the box. If it does, the poison is released, and the cat dies. If it doesn’t, you open the box and the cat jumps out, perfectly healthy.”

  “Which means what, exactly, apart from never trust a physicist with your cat?”

  “Schrödinger said that—and this occurs on a quantum level—the cat, at the moment before you open the box, is both alive and dead. Both possibilities exist alongside each other, with an equal probability of becoming a reality. What you need to think about is what triggers the event that cements one possibility into reality.”

  “Opening the box?” said Joni.

  “Exactly. By opening the box, one of the possibilities becomes actual, the other collapses. The observer causes the reality.”

  “At the quantum level.”

  “Right. At a fundamental level, observation shapes reality.”

  It was a still, sunny afternoon and the sea was sparkling under the deep blue sky. A fishing boat bobbed about half a mile out. Joni had seen it before, but it had always been further out to sea.

  “So. Let me make sure I have this right,” said Joni. “It’s possible that I could be consciously splitting the universe every time I set up a reset? The moment I make a decision and hear the humming, a new universe forms?”

  “Either that, or a new universe forms whenever you, or I, or anyone, makes a choice. I have a question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “You can’t go back any further than your last reset, can you?”

  Joni considered the question. It had never occurred to her to try. She said as much.

  “Ok,” said Mee. “That fits my theory. Try it now. We’ll wait.”

  “Now?”

  Yeah, sure. Go for it. When was your last reset?”

  Joni thought back, letting the tingling grow, hearing the low sound, following it to the moment she refused a last cup of coffee back in the dining room. The process was become fast now, almost automatic.

  “The dining room,” she said.

  “And before that?”

  “Er, it must have been when I went for the tissues - before you told me about the ring.”

  “Ok, fine. Go back there.”

  Joni reached for the moment, but she knew even as she tried that it had gone. There was no connection to it at all. She shook her head.

  “Can’t do it,” she said.

  Mee nodded. “I wondered. I’m glad. If you could do that, it would be like traveling in time. But you could get lost in the labyrinth of your own past. How could you resist the temptation to keep going back? What would that do to you in the end? You might have lived a thousand years of experience over one lifetime, constantly branching off, avoiding problems. You’d have nothing in common with anyone. It would be a nightmare.”

  Mee was gazing out to sea, her eyes fixed on the fishing boat, but not really seeing it. Joni wondered if she was still talking about her. From what Mum had said, Dad was immortal. What did that mean for their relationship?

  John coughed, breaking the mood. He stood up.

  “I don’t know about anyone else, but I need to clear my head. Coming? Or do you want to go back?”

  Joni smiled and, virtually unconsciously, created a reset point. As soon as she’d done it, she tried reaching back to the last point. It had gone. Interesting. Finding a definite limitation was strangely comforting.

  “I’m game,” she said.

  Mee linked arms with her, and the three of them walked out onto the rocky beach. Joni smiled at the two of them as they walked. She felt unexpectedly buoyant. She hadn’t realized the stress keeping something from Mum had put her under. And having Mee’s sharp mind applying itself to the situation had already thrown up some really fascinating possibilities. The sun was shining, and anything seemed possible.

  So she was totally unprepared when the shooting started.

  It happened just after Joni waved at the boat. She had seen it there a few times recently, and she had the sudden urge to acknowledge its presence. She raised her arm and gave a long slow wave. She could see the figure in the boat take something away from his face and wave back. Binoculars? Maybe the boat wasn’t for fishing at all. Perhaps it was for birdwatching. Joni knew the island attracted arctic terns and some rarer little terns each year, but that was normally in the autumn. She wasn’t sure if there was anything worth seeing in summer.

  The figure squatted in the boat, then lay down on his—or her—front, picking something up from the bottom of the boat.

  Joni turned away and was about to ask Mum more about how Dad navigated the multiverse, when a flash of light distracted her. She turned back to the boat, frowning. It came again - a flash of sunlight reflected on glass in the bottom of the boat.

  There was a sound to her left. Joni had once knocked a melon off a table, and it had split as it hit the floor. The sound she had just heard was eerily similar. She turned just in time to see John spinning like an out of control ballerina. As he spun, she saw an arc of blood spiraling with him. He hit the ground face down, making no attempt to break his fall.

  She turned to Mee in time to see part of the side of her head disappear, one eye blown backward through her skull so quickly that Joni saw daylight through her head before she crumpled.

  Joni opened her mouth to scream, but something punched her in the back, and suddenly she was lying on her side. She could see the waves gently breaking over the rocks about fifteen yards away. There was a sound. It was getting louder. An engine?

  “Mum?” She tasted blood in her mouth when she spoke. She must have bitten her lip when she fell. Funny how that hurt so much, but there was no pain at all in her back.

  She knew she had been shot, but it didn’t seem important. Something had happened to Mum and Uncle John, but they had to be ok, really, right? She called out again, her voice a little stronger this time.

  “Mum? John?”

  There was no answer.

  Joni tried to move. Her brain sent the usual automatic signals to her legs, commanding them to move. Nothing happened. It was such a bizarre feeling. All her life, she had only had to decide to move, and her legs had done the rest. Now they had rebelled. Nothing was moving at all down there. She tried her arms instead and found that some movement was possible. With a huge effort, feeling as if something heavy was squatting on her upper body, she managed to lift herself up onto her elbows.

  She looked back up the beach toward Mum and John, then immediately wished she hadn’t. John had fallen face first into a rock pool. Even if the sheer amount of blood-loss he had suffered—evidenced by the color of the sand and stone all around him—hadn’t killed him, the fact that his mouth and nose were underwater would have finished the job.

  Mee was worse. Her body looked like a child’s discarded rag doll, limbs flung out at unnatural angles, unmoving. Her remaining eye stared lifelessly back at Joni.

  Joni was sick then, her stomach spasming weakly as she spat hot, acidic bile from her mouth. She turned away from the horror behind her.

  The engine noise had stopped. She could see the boat bobbing on the water just far enough out to avoid the hidden rocks closer to the shore. There was something else. She blinked away salty tears and tried to clear her vision.

  At first, she thought it was a seal. They came in close on occasion, curious or friendly. Then the head rose out of the water, revealing a pair of shoulders. Not a seal. And not friendly. As the figure waded out of the water, she could see it was a man. Not tall, but wiry and lightly muscled. Bald. And naked.

  Great. The first naked man I get a good look at is going to kill me. That’s just brilliant.

  Fear managed to introduce a little clarity into her mental state as she saw the curved knife in the man’s hands. He stopped about three feet away from her and knelt on the stony beach. He glanced at her, then bowed his head as if at prayer.

  “Ialdabaoth,” he said
, “I offer you this life, this final sacrifice. Joni Varden, the daughter of Sebastian Varden. Come back to your creation and rule over us.”

  Oh, super, a religious nut job.

  Joni was dimly aware that there was something she had to do, something important. The urgency of this was obvious, but her brain was struggling to cooperate with the request for action. Everything was slowing, becoming treacly, her awareness shrinking as the bald man picked up his knife.

  She realized she was staring at his penis.

  Something I need to do. Something I should do right now. Something, something…

  19

  Germany

  Three months previously

  Adam went to Father’s cottage, south of Munich to read the files. He needed somewhere away from other people, somewhere he knew he wouldn’t be disturbed.

  The cottage stood in twenty-five acres of Bavarian forest, invisible from the road. Adam used the back entrance. The turning was unmarked and looked like a farmer’s track. There was a gate, and a large sign warning of disease and pronouncing the area quarantined. A plastic box on the side of the gate revealed a keypad. Anyone breaking the perimeter without entering the correct eighteen digit code would trigger a silent alarm. A phone would ring in a nearby military facility, and two helicopters would be dispatched. There would be no attempt to engage with whoever was responsible for breaking the perimeter. The Oberst, who enjoyed a generous monthly retainer, would simply order the bombing and destruction of the building as part of a training exercise. Any accidental loss of life during the exercise would be considered a matter of regret, but would not warrant any further investigation.

  Adam entered the code, swung open the heavy gate and drove the 4x4 through before closing the gate behind him.