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It felt like an eternity since I’d last woken on a sunny morning all snug in my bed. Who knows what planet Desmond pulled this mattress from, but it certainly wasn’t the disgusting colonial mattresses I’d heard horror stories about, what with the hay, horse hair, inevitable bugs, and the overall mixture of dead skin and salty sweat that they gathered over the years.
By the sound of typing and hushed words from the neighboring room, Zander and Desmond must have worked through the night, a small army of localized woodpeckers.
Zander.
I stared at the empty place in the bed beside me, cold and undisturbed through the night. We had said nothing and everything last night. He knew, he knew what I could do, yet, apparently, that was his flaw.
It wasn’t right. None of this was right. He couldn’t keep putting everything on himself; he was going to crumble under the weight.
The second my toes touched the floorboards, Urruin appeared in the doorway. He held a suitcase-sized package, which he promptly laid out for me on the cushy armchair in the corner.
“Morning?” I said quickly, inexperienced in the world of butlery.
“Good morning, Ms. Webber,” he said, turning to face me and give me a short bow. “Would you like me to draw a bath?”
He stared at me, unsmiling, unblinking, just waiting. It seemed the warmth from last night had entirely faded.
“Um... no, no need. Thanks.”
“Are you quite certain?” He scanned me up and down. “I have pulled out a dress for you from the costume trailer.”
“The... costume trailer.” Right. Agency safe house. Maybe they had a skin wrap or two lying around there too. I shuddered. How many of them would go up in flames, taking their occupants with them?
“Will you need help dressing?”
Probably. But even knowing he was a butler, I wasn’t all too jazzed at the idea of having a stranger seeing that much of me. Call me a prude, but we were living in the era of the Puritan.
“No, thank you.”
“Will that be all?”
“Yes, that will be all.”
Thank the stars for the Agency’s costume department. I had expected to be wearing Puritan black but instead was greeted by a lovely linen, a shade between sky and baby blue. Grabbing the box, I rushed behind the divider, stripping off the borrowed nightshirt, and pulling on the skirts. A sea of fabric swirled around my waist with no logical way to stay up. I frowned. This was the real thing, made by a real dressmaker, for real Earth women, years before the invention of zippers or Velcro. The Agency must have been too lazy to make their own outfits. Such a pain. At least they were investing in the local economy.
“Need a hand?” I heard from the door.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me, dumbass.” Blayde sighed heavily. “You need help?”
I paused. “Yes, please.”
She joined me behind the divider, tutting. She, too, had received a new dress, a soft pink that I would never have guessed in a thousand years she would be willing to wear.
There was so much I wanted to talk with her about. She had stuffed her feelings deep down again, and I knew from experience just how well that was going to go. And with Zander breaking down about his past, I knew she was going through the same thing.
“Well, the skirt’s on backward, for one,” she said and readjusted it with a swift twist. “Hold up that bodice. I’m going to tighten it for you.”
“Sure.” She laced it in quick, sharp movements as I held my breath. A jigsaw puzzle of clothing, each element fitting around me perfectly, now that somebody knew how they went together. “How do you know all this?”
“I posed as a maid more than once. Arms up.” She pulled the sleeves down over my arms, fixing my cuffs around my wrists. “I picked up a few tricks here and there.”
“Well, you’re a lifesaver, that’s for sure.” She had moved to fixing my hair, twisting and turning the locks until they were balanced upon my head. Then—squish—a coif came right down over it—and right back off.
“Wait, have you had breakfast yet?” she asked. “I was waiting for you. I’m bored out of my mind.”
“The IT Crowd don’t need any company?” I asked, trying not to touch my new headgear. As Blayde finished, she stepped in front of me and smiled to herself.
“They don’t need me to interrupt their work. Well, Zander’s work. The other two are just there to give him an excuse to smoke cigars. Anyway, let’s go eat. I’m hungry, and nothing’s going to stop me from getting a good dose of bacon.”
“Two? James is helping?”
Blayde nodded. I had been so wrong about James.
“What are we doing waiting here?” I gave her the biggest smile I could muster. “Come on, there’s good bacon to eat and no one to share it with, and we’re just wasting time up here!”
“Finally, something we can agree on,” she said with a sly grin.
The hallway was stuffy, probably due to the roils of smoke wafting under the study door. A door that was vibrating, the music behind it so loud.
“Don’t mind them,” said Blayde, but I was already pushing my way in, curiosity beckoning. “Fine. Meet you downstairs. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
The smell of burning grass hit my nostrils, making me cringe. Something else lingered in the undertone of the air, sound made odorous, the smell of sharp electronic music crashing in bitter harmony, slurring and shaking like dubstep.
I wasn’t hearing music; I was smelling it.
Massive stage lights towered over a blocky computer that had orange filters strong enough to cover up the phosphorescent glow of the screen. Desmond was perched on the desk like a vulture, a large pipe sticking to his lips. He was watching the bed where James lay with her eyes fixed on the ceiling, a can of probably-not-actually Red Bull balanced on her forehead.
We weren’t in Virginia anymore. Hell, we weren’t even on Earth.
Zander tossed back a can in a single gulp, crushed it in his fist, and tossed it over his back into a waiting trash can. He wiped his arm across his face, breathing a dramatic sigh before returning his fingers to the keyboard. Lines and lines of code burst onto the screen, faster than my eyes could track.
“Goal!” Desmond exclaimed. “Do I have a penalty?”
“Yep.” Zander looked up from his task to glower at his opponent, code still flying.
Desmond grabbed a pistol from the desk. Before I could react, there was now a hole in the can perched on James’s forehead, the liquid pouring into her mouth.
“Chug, chug, chug!”
The second the flow stopped, James lifted the can with her feet and tossed it to Desmond, who caught it, crunched it up, and threw it into the basket across the room.
“Score!”
I cleared my throat. “So, I take it you made some progress?”
Zander’s head spun around. He was glowing, but not in a way my eyes could see. He was somehow glowing in my brain. “Loads! Desmond was right; there was a virus. We tracked it down and purged the system. Once we get the new processes in motion, we’ll have the entire thing resolved and under lock and key.”
“In order to be sure there’s absolutely no tampering, we’re going to run the system on automatic and phase out its use,” added Desmond. “Like Zander said you have in your time. Only he and I will know how to infiltrate the system once more, so that secret will die with me. The Agency will still have access but can only use it as a last resort.”
I frowned. Was no one bothered by how comfortable this stranger was with our time travel? Maybe they were just too... high.
“The new parameters are simple.” Zander’s eyes twinkled. “We’ve set it so combustion only occurs after death, and only if there’s a chance of any Earth agency—not just the one with a capital A—getting a hold of the victim.”
Except the woman in Costco was most definitely alive when she’d burst into flames. Maybe Foollegg was right and the Dread had interfered with their system, no matter how well Zander fixed it today. Which would mean we were about as unable to fix the future as we were the past.
“Why not shut it off entirely?” I said, and Zander frowned.
“We know how it is in our time,” he replied, his voice less than confident. “So that’s how it has to be.”
I bit my lip. Why couldn’t changing the future be easy?
“I am the unicorn,” said James, distracting me from my thoughts.
“No, you’re not, James.” Zander sighed.
“I am, I know it. You know how I know it?”
“You are not the unicorn, James.”
“No, I mean it. I’m serious,” she said, sitting up on the bed. “I can see the curvature of time. I am here—” She stretched out her left arm, fingers spayed, face slack. “And I am there.” She extended the other arm, pointing her fingers out as far as they could go. “I am everywhere at once, and I burn at the center of time.”
“No, you are full of yourself,” Desmond said, shaking his head.
This. This was my team. I was meant to be in charge of this mission, we were meant to be saving the universe, and this is how they were going about it? And James, brilliant James, trying to fit in and getting this in the process. It wasn’t like her. And I wouldn’t stand for it.
“It’s normal,” said Zander to me. “Most fusion drinks give humans delusions of grandeur. Among other... side effects.”
“Fusion?” I asked.
“Cold fusion?”
“My hands glow with the feel of time,” James said excitedly. “I can play the harp made of the strings of time. I can—”
“You let her drink cold fusion energy drinks?” I rushed to her side. James’s eyes were the size of dinner plates, her blinks long and stretched. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Zander, who was usually ridiculously safe about us Terrans, so blasé about James?
“Relax, Sally,” Zander said without turning around. My hands formed into fists. “I needed some energy to keep going, and she wanted to be part of the fun. She’s fine; I wouldn’t have let her have any if there were any serious risks.”
“It’s not harmful,” added Desmond. “I was screened before I came to your planet.”
Yeah, like the Agency really cared. But before I could say anything, James yanked me down to her level so she could stare into my eyes. Her brow was slick with sweat.
“Sally, Sally, listen,” she said. “Can you hear them? The drums? Nah, I kid. Sally, have you heard? I am the seventh-dimensional unicorn.”
“This doesn’t sound fine, Zander,” I spat. This couldn’t be happening. “I’m getting her out of here.”
What was James trying to prove, partying with them? It was so unlike her. Unless... this wasn’t about proving anything. She’d just learned that her own partner was tracking her. Had implanted her. Talk about a massive violation. Cold fusion energy drinks and mystery cigars were nothing after that.
My friend was hurting, and I hadn’t even noticed. What a leader I was turning out to be.
“No, Sally, you mustn’t disrupt the ceremony of transcendence!” James belted. “The fate of Earth is in our hands. You can’t stop us! You cannot stop the unicorn—
“Right, I’m out of here,” I said, grabbing her by the scruff of the neck and dragging her out behind me. She struggled but was too weak to put up much of a fight. It was time for some tough love.
“You mustn’t touch the unicorn!” James spat angrily, trying to wrench away from my grasp. “The unicorn can change the past and the future!”
“Of course you can,” I said, struggling to keep my voice calm and even. “Unicorn, you need to rest that brilliant mind of yours. Can you do that for me?”
“I swear I had nothing to do with any of this,” said Zander, still typing. “I knew it was safe, and James isn’t a child.”
“The unicorn lives!” James roared.
“Right, well, next time you try and save a town from another senseless witch hunt, try not to do it while tripping, all right?”
I couldn’t believe Zander. I trusted him, and now James was losing it. So much for being my partner. If Zander was still hurting, he should have come talk to me instead of whatever this shit was.
“Oh great stars above, what have they done to James?”
Blayde stood on the landing, her jaw almost at the floor. She stared at James with her eyes so full of electricity she would be able to power the entire planet for over a century. She lifted her out of my grasp, shouldering the weight and darting back to my room. I rushed after them.
“So it shall be,” said James as Blayde splayed her on the bed, “that the cycle shall conclude, beginning and end melding as one, converging on one point.”
Blayde’s eyes snapped to me. “What has she taken?”
“Um... some alien cold fusion energy drink, I think, and she’s been locked up with some smoke that smells like cosmobeat.”
“Like what?”
“Electronic music.”
“Again, what?”
“Modern-day Earth stuff. Music made on the computer. Wub wub wub?”
“Oh.” She glared at me. “Was it more of a wub wub wub or a wab wab wub?”
“Something in between like wub wub wuuuub?”
Blayde cringed. “Might have been fine if she hadn’t been subjected to both. You take care of James. I’m going to mix up a remedy. Don’t listen to her rantings, all right?”
“I haven’t been.”
“We shall lose ourselves before finding who we are,” James continued as Blayde dashed off. “Though who may like what they find?”
“James, you need to calm down,” I said.
Her head was burning up, beads of sweat rolling down her cheeks like tears.
“The universe... like music, it clashes with itself. So the Unicorn sees, so the unicorn hears,” she continued, ignoring me. “Wub wub wub wub wub wub wub...”
“You have to calm down, James,” I said, though I logically knew that there was no use in trying to reason with her. “You can’t beatbox. And no one can sing dubstep.”
“This should help,” said Blayde, rushing back into the room with what appeared to be a bloody mary in hand, celery stalk tall and proud.
“Drink,” Blayde ordered, shoving the glass under James’s lip. Her eyes were shut before they hit the pillow.
“What was that?” I asked, shocked.
“A bad trip.” She shrugged. “Happens to the best of us.”
She placed the half empty glass on the nightstand, using the sheets on the bed—my bed—to wipe the layers of sweat from James’s face. She seemed so peaceful now. She was just as human as the rest of us.
Well, a few of us.
“She tried cold fusion and smoked some higher dimensional tobacco. She’s bound to feel a little drowsy.” Blayde glanced up at me, celery stalk in hand. “Sadly, I seem to have lost my appetite as a result.”
“Same.”
“Right. We can either stick around the house embroidering and talking about local singles and corn-related drama while watching her sleep all day, or... we can finally have that talk we need to have. Your pick.” She took a massive bite of celery to punctuate her sentence without breaking eye contact.
A chill ran through my bones. Oh god, not her too. I’d gotten sloppy, hoped two of the smartest people I’d ever met wouldn’t see I was lying to them. I needed an out. “James needs me. I brought her; I’m responsible for her.”
“She’ll sleep it off. It’s nothing.” She nodded. “Now come. We have a few hours before they’re finished in there. Let’s have our girl time.”
I knew what was coming, and I wasn’t ready. It was time to face the music. My face was hot as we strolled arm-in-arm out of the cosmobeat-smelling house and into the bustling streets of seventeenth-century New England. It hit me that these dresses were terribly out of place. While our dresses seemed perfectly accurate for the time, they weren’t the clothes of choice of this small colony.
We wandered through the streets of my past. My country wouldn’t exist for another century. This was the world of the colonists: a world of strange new lands, new foods, new plants, new animals.
New people too. I had no doubt in my mind why the wall around this town was so tall. Would my being here change anything? Could I change anything, if I would help right the wrongs of the past with the person I now was. I stared at that fence hard enough to drill a hole through it.
Was it useless to hope? I’d helped the siblings save entire worlds from crisis time and time again. If we’d arrived here without knowing it was Earth, we’d be all up in that interference. Stopping the witch hunts, stopping the Agency. Maybe more—so much more. But who was I, to act like I knew how to fix something as massive as History? Did knowing this past was my past actually change anything? Was there truly a clear divide between past and future that stopped us from intervening?
This past was somebody’s present. My past was somebody’s future.
Maybe when I met the Eternal, he could tell me what to do. If I dared hope it was all real.
Blayde tightened her grip on my arm, jolting me out of my spiral.
“So,” she said. Her arm was tight around mine like a vice. “Tell me how you did it.”
“Did what?” I asked. The vice, impossibly, tightened.
“Don’t play with me.” Her lips were tight, white. “I knew from the second we got here Zander’s never been near this place. I would have felt it. I always do. So how did you get us here?”
I shook my head. I had gotten sloppy, no, showy. Maybe part of me was proud of what I could do, move through space in a way even the great siblings could not. Maybe that’s why I’d let my guard down.
Maybe I had wanted them to know.
I took a deep breath. “I wasn’t going to say anything until I could explain why,” I said. “But I can see where we’re going, Blayde. Ever since my first jump. Ever since Cross...” I couldn’t keep the shiver from traveling up my spine. “Ever since he scrambled my brain.”
I could still remember the feeling of something rummaging through my head, still see through my eyes as someone had moved my body without my will. No matter what, I couldn’t wash myself clean of the knowledge that someone else had taken over the controls. And so effortlessly too.
Blayde’s vice grip slacked—good. But it wasn’t entirely gone. I still went wherever she was going, and where we were going seemed to be another dark alley.
“Tell me how,” she said.
“How—what? How to jump?”
“How do you find your way around in the dark?”
It was hard not to hear the yearning in her voice, the lilt to her question, the wanting there. In an instant, my perspective shifted. Blayde was my friend, someone I loved like a sister. I had to help her.
“The dark’s not all that...dark for me.”
She frowned, furrowing her brows. “What the frash are you talking about?”
“Okay, how do you jump?” I stopped, turning toward her.
“Come with me.”
She glanced both ways before dragging me down an alley until we were entirely cloaked in darkness. It smelled of urine and old potatoes.
“Take my hands,” she ordered. “You may have to bring us back.”
“Where are we going?”
“Anywhere,” she said quickly. “Hold on tight.”
My world was darkness in every direction, stretching on forever. The infinite universe in which I shrunk to a tiny insignificant speck, trying to tear me limb from limb. There was the cold, the cold that soaked into my pores, the cold that whispered, that called me to fear, to scream and run. My cells ripped apart, sinking into the infinite. They were leaving me, rushing away from the fear. The loneliness. The nothing. The nothing that whispered in called to me. The terror that reminded me that no one was there to catch me as I fell. As I fell apart.
The great empty.
An emptiness I hadn’t felt since I had become...whatever I was.
Then, in an instant, I was me again. My cells became mine once more, the feeling of infinity becoming finite once again surrounding me. The fear was gone. But the shock was the same.
And so was Blayde.
“So?” she asked.
“I thought...” I rubbed my arms for warmth. Why wasn’t I getting warm? Where was the light? Where were we? “I thought it was just like that because I wasn’t used to it. But you feel that every single time?”
She nodded. “It’s different for you?”
“Completely,” I replied. “I’ve jumped you a few times; you never noticed anything out of the ordinary?”
“Always the...nothingness,” she whispered. She rubbed her hand against her sternum, palm pressing down hard. Deep, even breaths—the same way I staved off panic.
If she was having a thought spiral, I needed to break the loop, distract her. I looked around. Nope, nothing but darkness. We stood in a small, rectangular room, barely the size of a closet. The wall in front of us had a long slit down the front, through which we received a trickle of light, along with a low brouhaha of what seemed to be a large crowd as a bonus. Whoosh. There came anxiety flooding through my carefully propped-up gates, twisting my empty stomach into knots.
“What is this place?” I whispered. Running my hand over the wall revealed nothing but smooth plaster.
“I have no idea. Hold on, don’t move. I think our dresses are caught.”
I looked down. They were more than caught; they were intertwined, the skirts fused down the seams. “Shit, it’s like in those video games when the graphics mess up. Does this happen a lot?”
“Never. Then again, I’ve never jumped such huge dresses into such a small room. Is it me or is it shrinking?”
It wasn’t just her. Soon the room was too small for us both. I extended my hand out of the door flap to give us more space, but the second it was out a huge wave of applause rose from the crowd outside. The wall gave us a shove, and I stumbled out into blinding light, Blayde grunting as the fused dresses dragged her along.
I blinked, my hand shading my eyes, searching for any clue to our whereabouts. A stage lamp was aimed right at our faces. We were in a large, cathedral-like room, air echoing with cheers rising from what had to be an enormous crowd.
We were on... a runway?
A fabulous, massively oversized runway. The room was shaped into a dodecahedron, the crowd around us rising in every direction like waves upon waves of sweetened-condensed people. The entire place was silver and blue with blinding white walls around the pit in which we stood, though there was no natural light. Large bubble blowers sat on either side of our runway, blowing colorful bubbles into the air around us. Larger-than-life-sized videos of us were suddenly projected upon the wide screens on the walls, our confused expressions stretched tenfold.
Right. Not colonial America. But whether or not this was better than the witch-burning madness we’d just escaped was yet to be seen.
“What is this place?” I whispered.
“Someplace I would rather duck out of quickly.”
“You’ve been?”
“Only once before,” Blayde said with a glare at the crowd. “The loathsome party of Pythanous Five.” My lack of response made her roll her eyes. She cleared her throat, all while waving at the crowd. “The people of Pythanous Five are seventh-dimensional beings. They’re the ones who created that stuff Desmond was smoking while they were seeking ascension.”
“Blayde, do you realize what this means?” I asked, and she shook her head. “It’s no coincidence. You brought us here because of that stuff. You still have some measure of control.”
She furrowed her brows. “Makes sense. Not that I like it.”
“We can still see them. Is that normal?” I asked. “Seventh dimensional. Isn’t it impossible for our minds to conceive?”
“Well, we are on a plane of existence where we can co-exist. They’ve brought themselves down to our level.”
A loud grunt came from the ground on our right. An eight-armed gelatinous glob cleared their throat—did they even have one? What were they clearing?—and nudged their head forward. I didn’t need a translator to tell me that meant go. And so, we walked the runway.
“And why is this party loathed?” Applause rose around us in many forms, clapping and snaps and honking accompanying our stride. We reached the end and marched into the crowd. “Looks normal enough to me. Well, except for the people in the unicorn masks. That’s terrifying.”
“Those aren’t masks,” she said. “It’s how you perceive them when they’re in this plane. We all see them differently. Anyway, it’s loathed because it hasn’t ended in a century or two. People come and people go, bringing more food and drinks as they come. The hosts have been working nonstop for generations.”
“So, what are people still doing here?” I asked as two seminude men walked past on their hands. Behind them, two women with pink skin were tossing squids at a man who looked strangely like Meedian, only blue.
“Contemplating ascension.” She shrugged. “Though, as I tried to tell them before, immortality gets rather dull in the end. They didn’t listen.”
At least this wasn’t anywhere remotely near Earth or the Dread. I took a deep breath. While I was here, I couldn’t muck up the timeline. And maybe these higher dimensional beings could be the key we needed to unlock the end of days.
A hand dropped delicately on my shoulder, making my body go rigid.
“The future is a distant thing,” a unicorn man said, his horn glistening under the strange lights. While the mouth never moved, the eyes continued to blink. He wore nothing but a silver leotard, his arms covered in large bangles that hovered above his skin without touching it.
“Excuse me,” I muttered, trying to pull away. Blayde stopped me.
“Let him speak. It could be important,” she advised. “Sometimes they have incredible insights.”
“Apple, apple!” he intoned. “The Apple never falls far from the tree. Think different.”
“Then again, this guy is really drunk.” Blayde sighed. “Come on, let’s get back to Earth.”
“No.” The unicorn’s clasp on my shoulder tightened. This time, I found the strength to shake him off. “Trust your instincts, Sally Webber, hand of justice, defeater of the Zoesh, friend of the lowly, protector of Earth.”
“This is creepy,” I whispered to Blayde.
She nodded. “Never mess with a seventh-dimensional being at a party...”
“And Blayde, the sword of stars, every warrior has their time. The lion’s roar was heard across the universe and ignored by none. You should have seen.... But you shall still find the truth, though be warned that you may not like what you discover.”
And with that, he tore off running through the crowd. Seconds later, his head was in the trash can, rainbows flowing from the strange horse’s mouth.
“Yeah, I heard that all before.” Blayde sighed.
“What was that about?” My eyes stung from not blinking. “I’ve been accosted by too many drunks today, Blayde. I’m beginning to think it’s all just some strange fever dream.”
“Take us back?” she asked.
“Sure.”
I placed a hand on her shoulder and guided us back to Petersburg, making sure to keep our skirts from mixing this time. And once again, there she was—or more accurately, wasn’t. Like a black hole in space. A rip in the universe. A spot where simply nothing existed, not even air, not even a single atom or quark. Like God himself reached down with an eraser to scratch that spot out of existence.
And then she was again.
Back on firm ground, she let out a sigh of relief. “Frash, it feels good to be out of that place.”
Did it really? This town had just condemned children to death from fear and superstition. I wasn’t all that eager to be among them again.
“And you felt no difference in the jump?” I asked.
“None.” She shook her head.
I took a deep breath, stepping closer to her. “I’m so sorry. We should have talked about this earlier; I was just... We have to talk to each other. I’m your friend, Blayde, and you need to talk. I’m here for you. Okay?”
She nodded, clutching my wrist in her hand. For a second, our eyes met and I saw the tightness there. The pain she must be going through. We were dredging up so much so fast.
A man’s scream took us right out of our sisterly bonding moment. A man screaming so loud he could have reached the entire town, which was exactly what he wanted to do.
“Witches! Witches! Heaven have mercy, there are witches among us once again!”
