InterWorld

CHAPTER TWENTY

She hung in midair, between us and the Malefic but to one side, one arm still uplifted, still poised from casting whatever spell she’d cast to stop us. As she spoke, she lifted her other arm and began to float away from the Malefic and toward us. “I congratulate you, Joey Harker,” she said as she came. “You’ve done what no one thought possible. You’ve destroyed the Malefic and its mission. Lord Dogknife has already returned to HEX Prime. He has charged me with bringing you to him. I look forward to doing so, believe me. With his conquest of the Lorimare worlds aborted, he has only his thoughts of revenge on you to occupy his time.”

She landed on the edge of the mast and started to trace in the air the luminous path of that same sigil she had used on me so long ago, back in one of the countless alternate Greenvilles. As she gestured, she began to speak the Word that would put all six of us in her thrall once again.

I knew I had to do something, or it would all be over. With their mission of conquest destroyed, there would be nothing to stop Lord Dogknife from using all the skill and knowledge he possessed to tear the secret of InterWorld from our minds. If Lady Indigo completed that spell, it was all over, for everyone. Worlds without end.

But I didn’t know how to stop her. A glance at my teammates showed me that they were already falling under her geas—their eyes were turning glassy, their muscles stiffening. And I could feel her will nibbling at the corners of my mind as well, seductively whispering how easy and right it would be to do whatever she told me…

Her spell was almost complete. The Word, the Sound of it, reverberated in the air, pulsing in time with the glowing Sign. I felt my hands rising, beginning to shape a gesture of obeisance to her, to Lord Dogknife, to HEX….

I had to distract her somehow. I looked around for something to throw at her, to break her concentration. I shoved my left hand into my pocket, knowing that it would be futile—and my fist closed around the pouch of powder.

I barely stopped to think. Instead, I just acted—I pulled the pouch from my pocket and I threw it at her.

I didn’t know what would happen—if anything. It was a gesture of desperation, pure and simple. As I said, the most I hoped to accomplish was to momentarily break her concentration.

But it did far more than that.

When the pouch struck her it evaporated, releasing strange crimson powder as it did so.

The red powder swirled around Lady Indigo, enveloping her in a miniature whirlwind. She looked astonished—and then afraid. She moved her arms in a warding gesture, opened her mouth to speak a negating spell, but no sound came out. The powder swirled faster and faster, and I could feel the potency of her geas lessening. I glanced at the others, and saw they were coming out of it as well.

What meant we had one chance—and only one—for escape.

The gate had been about a hundred feet long in the engine room. It was about fifty feet long when we set out. Now it was starting to evaporate into nothingness.

“Jo!” I called. “Start flapping! And, Jai—can you levitate us toward the portal?”

“I’m not entirely certain,” he admitted.

“Be certain,” I said. “Give it your best shot.”

As for me, I concentrated on the gate. I’m a Walker, after all. I probed, and I pushed. I reached out with my mind. And, with everything at my disposal, I held that gate open.

And slowly, oh so horribly, horribly slowly, like a train moving through a small Southern town on a hot summer day, the mast began to move toward the gate.

“It’s working!” shouted J/O.

I threw a quick glance at Lady Indigo, reassuring myself that she wouldn’t continue to be a problem. It didn’t look like she would. There were flashes of light within the crimson whirlwind now, and each one seemed to illuminate the lady from within, as if her flesh had become momentarily translucent, exposing the bones. She was writhing now as if in agony, her mouth open in a scream—a scream that no one could hear.

But the gate was closing, and it was all I could do to keep it open. “J/O! Jakon!” I called. “Help me! We have to keep the gate open!”

I felt their minds—their strength—push with mine, as the gate continued to shrink and fade.

We weren’t going to make it in time. We weren’t—

The Malefic blew up.

It was a huge, black, greasy cloud of an explosion, mushrooming in all directions. I think that if it had happened in the Static, or on a world where science worked better, the shock wave would have killed us. As it was, I felt a great hammering blast of superheated air that sent the mast, with us clinging to it, surging toward the portal—and through it!

Easy as a key turning in a lock, we slipped through the portal into the welcoming madness of the In-Between.

The mast and the rigging evaporated into things that scuttled, spiderlike, into wild, cartoony snarls of grapefruit scent. I glanced back through the narrowing slit of the portal. The Lady Indigo—or what was left of her—was nowhere to be seen. Then the portal blinked out. To this day I don’t know what happened to her.

“What about Josef? And Hue?” asked Jo.

There was a fizzing noise, and a burst of emerald sparks, and Josef dropped from the sky in front of us, surrounded by a thin bubble shape, which shrank as we looked at it. It came toward me and settled in the craziness, bobbing like a balloon in a spring breeze.

“I’m here,” said Josef. “Let’s go home.”

Home? I had a pang, as I thought of my mom, my dad, my brother and sister. Places and people I’d probably never see again. I reached up my hand and touched the stone Mom had given me, on my last night there. You’re doing the right thing, she said in my memory.

Thanks, Mom, I thought, and the pang eased, even if it would never entirely go away.

Then I thought of my home. My new home.

{IW}:=

would take us back there, wherever it was hiding.

I Walked, and the rest of my team followed.