Eternity's Wheel by Neil Gaiman Page B

side of it. We’ve been sitting on this mountain for the better part of a week now, running some rudimentary training and waiting to either hear from the Old Man or see your little dot show up on the ADT.”
    â€œWhat about the other officers with their teams? Do you know where they are?”
    â€œI don’t know if any of them actually made it off Base,” he admitted. “I grabbed my recruits pretty quickly—my teams, and what I could of yours.” He nodded to where Jo, Jakon, Josef, and Jai were sitting nearby, listening.
    â€œMost of mine were injured in the rockslide,” I murmured, more or less to myself. Why had the Old Man had him take the injured Walkers off Base?
    Joeb grinned at me. I blinked at the expression; for obvious reasons, his smile seemed kind of out of place. “They wouldn’t take no for an answer when they found out we were going off Base,” he explained. Jakon bared her teeth at me in her signature fierce smile, and Josef shot me a thumbs-up.
    I hung my head, giving a quiet laugh. That was my team, all right.
    â€œOkay,” I said, the word coming out as a sigh. “Ready to hear my side of it?”
    It didn’t take me long to tell Joeb and the others everything that had happened to me. I had told it so many times, to Mr. Dimas and to Josephine, that I did so mechanically now, letting my brain detach from what I was saying and think about other things. Like how to get them all back to InterWorld Beta.
    I hadn’t expected to run into so many Walkers at once. Honestly, I was concerned that having so many of them here would draw unwanted attention from our enemies, especially if we tried to Walk. Walking, if you weren’t careful about it, tended to alert the capture agents of either HEX or Binary. Not always, but they did have specific sensors for it. That’s how they’d find us, when we first discovered our power, before we even knew what was happening. . . .
    Would Hue be able to take all of us at once? Or, if he was covering me, would I be able to Walk all of us through time? Though that many of us Walking at once would still have to blip some sensors, somewhere.
    But, assuming FrostNight had been released, would they even care about what we were doing? You will not be able to Walk far enough away, Lord Dogknife had gloated to me. He’d left me alive on my home world; he obviously wasn’t too concerned with what I would or wouldn’t do. Would they even be paying attention enough to notice if that many of us Walked at once?
    Damn it . There was too much I didn’t know.
    â€œSo, when Acacia sent me into the future to keep me safe,” I continued, “she sent me to a future version of InterWorld. I was able to get back, thanks to the tracer the Old Man injected me with, and Hue. Hue can act like an encounter suit and form himself to me. When he does, I can Walk to any timeline. It’s like . . . like I become multidimensional myself.”
    â€œIs it safe?” someone asked.
    â€œYes.” Surprisingly, it was Josephine who spoke up. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m still not sure I trust that little balloon, but we Walked through time easily enough. And we found you.”
    I nodded. “So, we do have a ship. It’s just a matter of getting to it, and powering it once we’re there. Once we get the warp engines up and running, we can take the ship to our own timeline.”
    â€œThen what?” Joeb asked, watching me carefully.
    I took a breath. “Then we split into two groups. One group is responsible for extracting new Walkers, and the other will be training. Hard.”
    â€œOkay,” Joeb said, holding up a hand. “I know why we’re getting new Walkers; it’s what we’ve always done, and it ensures HEX and Binary won’t find them first. But what, specifically, are we training for?”
    â€œTo stop FrostNight.”
    A moment of silence followed,