“Here!” hissed Tapestry, from outside a room with a closed door. “It’s her! She’s sleeping!”
Malcolm nodded and hurried over. They slipped through the door, closing it tightly behind them, and approached Jade’s bedside.
She looked frail, and it was clear from the machines around her that she was like many of the other patients they’d seen, paralyzed or in a coma. There was a pale green tinge to her skin, the telltale sign of a spryte. Malcolm was a little concerned that she didn’t react to their presence.
“Alright…” he said, glancing at Tapestry. “Now what do we do?”
Jade opened her eyes. She blinked a couple of times, focusing them, and her eyebrows shot up in surprise. The rest of her body remained unmoving, frozen in place. Malcolm wondered if that was the result of the injuries Rain Dancer had dealt her, or perhaps a chemical cocktail Multi was forcing on her to keep her from escaping.
“Jade,” said Tapestry. “Do you remember us at all? We were the two champions who you encountered at the Hawktail Casino?”
She couldn’t answer them with words, but Malcolm thought he saw a gleam of recognition in her eyes. Tapestry nodded to Malcolm, giving him an expectant look. He gave a shrug and stepped forward.
“So, uh, I know we were never the best of friends, or anything,” said Malcolm. “But for the record, I’m the one who killed Rain Dancer. He was our common enemy.”
“We don’t have all night, Malcolm,” said Tapestry. “Just get to the point.”
Malcolm bit back a frustrated remark and continued.
“Look, we’re trying to rescue the champion that Rain Dancer forced you to imprison,” said Malcolm. “I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention to what’s been going on in the world, but things have fallen off the deep end, and we need his help to fix things. And for that, we need your help.”
Jade Portal blinked. Whether it was a yes or a no, Malcolm had no idea.
“So… We need you to open a portal from here onto the spaceship, Jupiter III.” He frowned. “Uh… It’s somewhere in space?” He glanced over at Tapestry, suddenly realizing a massive flaw in their plan. “Tapestry, how is she going to know where exactly to make the portal lead to?”
“I have that covered,” said Tapestry.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, unfolding it and smoothing out the creases. Malcolm realized that it was a news article about the ship, with photos of both its exterior and interior.
“That’s not going to tell her where it is right now, though,” he said.
“That’s not how her portals work,” said Tapestry. “Think about it. If that were the case, she’d have to account for both the Earth’s rotation and orbit every time she used her power, which I don’t think she’s doing.”
Malcolm shrugged.
“It seems like a big bet to make, given that she can’t speak to confirm it for us.”
Jade Portal blinked several times in quick succession.
That’s either a definite yes… or a definite no.
“That’s it, though, isn’t it?” asked Tapestry. “You use the concept of a place, rather than its absolute positioning? Blink once for yes.”
Jade hesitated, and then blinked once. Tapestry breathed a sigh of relief.
“Okay,” she said. “Perfect. Jade, here is our plan. We need to get onto the ship, but just for a few minutes, so we can borrow the spacesuits. Then, we’ll come back here and–”
Heavy footsteps sounded from down the hall, along with shouting. Malcolm looked at the door, searching for a way to lock or bar it and finding nothing.
“We don’t have time,” he said. “We have to do this. Now.”
Jade needed no further encouragement. She stared at the article Tapestry had in her hand, and closed her eyes. A luminescent green portal burst into existence against the room’s wall, almost like someone had turned on a broken projector in a dark room, bright and psychedelic.
“If she’s off by even a hundred feet, we’ll be stepping through this portal to our deaths,” said Malcolm.
Tapestry smiled at him.
“I’ll go first, if you’re scared,” she said.
The footsteps were almost upon them. The two of them didn’t have time to trade barbs. Malcolm walked over to Tapestry, grabbed onto her hand, just in case, and stepped through the portal.
CHAPTER 16
The sensation was indescribable. It didn’t feel like anything painful, but the immediate shock of transitioning from one environment into another was similar to being roughly woken up from a dream. Malcolm’s stomach turned over as he somersaulted through the air, weightless and inside a dimly lit spacecraft.
Whoa… This is weird. And kind of spooky.
Tapestry followed, pushing through the portal with more force than he had and colliding into him as she emerged onto the other side. The green portal disappeared an instant after she’d made it all the way through.
Neither of them said anything. Malcolm supposed that Tapestry was having a similar reaction to his own, struggling with the dizzying and physically confusing sensation of weightlessness.
They were in a small room with a single table in the center. Four open, circular hatches led to other parts of the ship, and there were handholds along each wall to make movement easier. Malcolm noticed that the four chairs around the table all had what looked like seatbelts, most likely to keep the astronauts from floating off once they’d sat down.
“Tapestry…” Malcolm said, realizing it had been almost a minute since either of them had spoken. “Are you okay?”
“I’m… alive,” she said.
Malcolm tapped off the wall, turning himself to face the direction he’d last seen her in. Tapestry was floating upside down, in relation to him. Making eye contact with her made his head hurt, as though some part of his brain was trying to work facial recognition and failing due to their shifting relative perspectives.
“This was part of the plan,” said Malcolm. “We did it. We’re aboard the Jupiter III.”
“The portal closed behind us, Malcolm,” said Tapestry.
“Jade will open it again,” he replied, sounding surer than he felt. “In the meantime, we need to find those spacesuits.”
Anchoring himself against the wall with one hand, Malcolm took a slow survey of his immediate surroundings. The room they were in looked like it was designed as a general meeting space, which made sense. A single LED light was active overheard, though there were at least a half dozen that he could see that were either turned off or nonfunctional.
Tapestry looked worried, and also like she was about to throw up. Malcolm gently pushed himself off the wall and over to her, moving much faster than he’d anticipated. He caught another handhold next to her to steady himself, and then set a hand on her shoulder.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “This is all part of the plan, remember?”
Tapestry took a deep breath.
“You’re right,” she said. “I just… don’t do enclosed spaces so well.”
Malcolm nodded.
“I know what you mean,” he said. “But we’ll be okay. It kind of reminds me of our old headquarters. At least, the ambience of it.”
“Kind of.” She smiled, probably more at the fact that he was trying to cheer her up than anything. Malcolm noticed that her animosity for him seemed to fade as soon as they were under pressure, and felt guilty for appreciating the change.
“Does the article you have contain a map of the ship, by any chance?” asked Malcolm.
Tapestry shook her head. “We’ll have to find the spacesuits on our own. I’m guessing they’d be near the airlock, or possibly the crew quarters.”
Malcolm frowned. “Speaking of which, where is the crew?”
The question hung in the air between them. Malcolm had heard only a few details about the sabotage that had befallen the Jupiter III, just enough to know that the ship wouldn’t be able to complete its mission. But this didn’t match up
with what he’d been expecting.
He’d assumed that the astronauts aboard would either still be alive and just stranded on a damaged ship, or they’d all be dead, trapped inside a sarcophagus in space. But as far as he could tell, there was no trace of them whatsoever. No bodies, no blood, not even any signs of struggle.
“Maybe Multi had someone hack the ship,” suggested Tapestry. “Maybe he created a fake emergency, lured them into an airlock, and flushed them into deep space.”
“Maybe,” said Malcolm. “Or maybe he came through a portal, just like we did.”
“We’d see more traces of a violent confrontation if that was the case,” said Tapestry. She scowled, crossing her arms over her breasts. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Let’s just find the space suits and go from there,” said Malcolm.
He wanted to keep Tapestry’s mind off the fact that they’d arrived on the ship through a portal, and would need a return portal to stand any chance at getting home. He wanted to keep his own mind off it too, he realized.
Malcolm pulled himself along the handholds, moving through the circular connecting hallway toward what he assumed to be the front section. It led to the ship’s main command center, where the astronauts strapped themselves in and did the real work of the journey. There was window set into the front of the command center, smaller than Malcolm would have expected, but with a view that more than made up for it. He gasped as he stared out into space.
Jupiter loomed in the distance, at least four or five times the size of the Moon in the night sky on Earth. He could see the Great Red Spot staring back at him, like an incomprehensibly massive eye, watching the approach of their ship.
It made the hair on the back of Malcolm’s neck stand up straight. He guessed that they were a couple of days out from the planet, calculating that it was a six-month round trip, launched nearly three months earlier.
“Wow,” he said. He looked over his shoulder at Tapestry, who was making a concentrated effort to keep her gaze from the window.
“The spacesuits aren’t in here,” she said. “We have to keep looking.”
The next connecting hallway they went down ended with a series of four heavy hatches, two of them open, two of them closed. The open ones led to large storage rooms containing dozens of cryptically labeled supply crates. Malcolm glanced around, still not seeing what they’d come for. Tapestry’s anxiety was slowly beginning to infect him, too, but he did his best to shake it off.
Another hallway led to the crew’s sleeping area, which was an arrangement clearly designed with zero gravity in mind. Instead of beds, sleeping bags hung on tethers, with straps at the top to secure a person inside. Malcolm pictured what it would be like to sleep inside one, and it reminded him a bit of being a strand of seaweed, slowly swaying along with the current, tied down to the ocean bottom.
There was a hatch in the back of the sleeping area that led to a small exercise room, with a selection of different pieces of equipment. Some of them, like the stationary bike and elliptical, looked like anything else one might find back on Earth. Others were stranger, like a weird configuration of balls that Malcolm couldn’t guess at the proper usage of, and a long harness that would have made sense as a resistance line for squats, but was attached to the wall instead of the floor.
“Interesting,” said Malcolm. “I guess they really care about staying in shape.”
“They have to exercise to keep up muscle and bone density,” said Tapestry. “Weightlessness isn’t healthy for long periods of time. At least not if you’re planning on coming back to Earth.”
She wrapped her arms around herself and closed her eyes. Malcolm put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed.
There was one more hatch in the back of the exercise area, and it led to a tiny chamber barely big enough for a single person. The lights were completely off inside, and Malcolm couldn’t guess what it was for.
The sensation of floating was incredibly distracting, and Malcolm almost lost his sense of direction as they drifted back toward the main chamber. He found himself comparing being weightless to his wind manipulation. However, although they were superficially similar, the two couldn’t have been more different. It was like comparing a sketch with a statue.
They went down the last connecting hallway and finally found what they were looking for. The spacesuits, along with a wide variety of tools, medical supplies, and repair parts, were in a small room with a sealed hatch on one end that Malcolm could only assume led to the airlock.
“Well, here we are,” said Malcolm. “This is what we came for.”
It took him a minute to figure out how to release the suit from the latch holding it and pull it down. He passed it Tapestry, and then pulled one down for himself.
“We should head back to the room we first came in through to wait,” he said.
Tapestry nodded, but didn’t meet his eye.
Getting the bulky suits through the cramped hallways was challenging, but they managed it. When they returned to the conference room, Malcolm sat down at the table and strapped himself into one of the chairs. Though he was securely fastened into an upright position, he still felt loose and uncomfortable, his body shifting in the zero-gravity environment.
Lacking any other option, the two of them waited for something to happen. Malcolm kept thinking he’d glimpsed the return portal out of the corner of his eye, but when he spun his gaze to find it, it was never there. Slowly, over the course of an hour, he came to the realization that there would probably be no portal back to Earth.
CHAPTER 17
“Multi discovered us,” said Tapestry. “That’s what the commotion was in the hospital, right before we left. We were fools to go through that portal when we did.”
Malcolm shrugged, an underwhelming gesture in zero gravity.
“What other choice did we have?” he asked. “Stay, and let Multi capture or kill us? It’s not like we have our powers anymore, Tapestry. We couldn’t have fought our way out.”
“We could have gotten Jade to open a portal to somewhere else,” she said. “Somewhere safe.”
Malcolm frowned at her. “When have you been the type for regrets?”
She looked at him, and he saw a heartbreaking amount of despair in her expression.
“Ever since I led us both into a death trap, billions of miles away from Earth, with no way back,” she said.
Malcolm shook his head.
“First of all, we might still have a way back,” he said. “The fact that Jade hasn’t opened another portal doesn’t mean that she can’t. Just that she’s chosen not to.”
“Or that Multi’s killed her,” said Tapestry.
“Unlikely,” he said. “This isn’t the worst case scenario, remember? She could have opened up a portal for Multi and let him onto the ship to attack us, if she’d wanted.”
“And why doesn’t she?” asked Tapestry. “Who says she isn’t just waiting for more Multis to arrive on the scene so that she can do just that?”
“I do,” said Malcolm. “We trusted her to portal us here safely. That’s got to count for something.”
Tapestry looked like she was considering his logic, but her eyes remained dark. Malcolm had never seen her like this before. It was as though the hope had been burned out of her.
“This is all hypothetical,” she whispered. “It’s far more likely that Jade hasn’t opened a portal because she can’t. Because she’s dead. And so are we.”
“No, we aren’t,” said Malcolm. “We’re safe. At least for now.”
“Really?” Tapestry gestured to the LEDs, which seemed to be running on less than full power, resulting in the dim lighting conditions. “This doesn’t look like a ship in working condition to me, Malcolm.”
“Hey,” he said. “Don’t give up so easily.”
Despite his words, her cynicism was infectious. There wasn’t much either of them could actively do to improve their situation, and Tapestry was right. There was something wrong w
ith the ship, and what chance did the two of them have of diagnosing it, let alone fixing it?
And even if the ship had been in pristine condition, what then? They weren’t astronauts. Working the instruments in the cockpit would be a guessing game.
If it’s a guessing game, then let’s go get lucky with a good guess.
“Come on,” said Malcolm. “If we’re stuck here anyway, let’s get familiar with all our options.”
He took Tapestry’s hand and pushed off in the direction of the hallway that led up to the command station. It was obvious which one was meant for the captain, given how it was oriented directly toward the observation window and had, by far, the most buttons and instruments on the panels on either side of it.
Malcolm settled himself into the seat, pulling the seatbelt across his stomach and chest, and then examined his surroundings. He’d been hoping for something obvious, perhaps a dimmer switch with “POWER” written beside it only turned up halfway. No such luck.
“Alright,” he said. His heart was pounding faster in his chest. What if he pressed the wrong button? He could damage the ship, and put them in even more dangerous circumstances…
“Don’t press anything,” said Tapestry. “Look, maybe… we passed by a manual, or something.”
“Maybe,” said Malcolm. “But I’m guessing the astronauts spent years learning the ins and outs of their roles.”
There was a red button. That was tempting. He let his finger hover over it, considering why a button might be colored red, and what that might imply it would do when pressed.
It probably shoots the lasers.
“Uh…” Malcolm scratched his head. “Hmm. Okay, here we go.”
He settled his finger onto a series of buttons labeled, helpfully, one, two, three, etc.
You wouldn’t need that many buttons labeled in sequence for something that could be potentially dangerous, right?
Wind Runner: The Complete Collection Page 76
