I had missed the way the working ship felt beneath my feet. It wasn’t something I’d noticed until it was gone, but you could feel the hum of the engines through the floor no matter where you were. It was like standing next to a washer or dryer when it was on—a vibration against your feet so faint you barely felt it. I hadn’t realized it until I’d stood on an InterWorld with no power, the floor cold and hard and dead beneath me.

Now it was thrumming again, alive and itching to fly. I felt it the moment I stepped into the engine room; the console was on, all the lights and dials and digital readouts blinking and humming and waiting. Still, I stayed there only for a moment after I escorted Avery back to J/O. I couldn’t make myself look at the cots lining the back, the still forms occupying them all covered in sheets.

Instead, I went to the Wall.

Our monument to the fallen stood silent and still, not even a breeze sweeping through the hall to rustle the scraps of paper and feathers and fur. It extended a full three sectors past what I was used to; the InterWorld of the future had seen the deaths of thousands more of us.

I walked it for a time, up and down, memorizing the bits and pieces of people’s lives, the scraps of feelings and hopes and dreams. They were all that remained of the comrades I’d never known, of those who’d fought and died long after whatever my end had been. I went back and forth, twice, from the infirmary to the remains of the automatic double doors that led out to what had once been the gardens. The long silver boxes that served as our coffins were still sitting out there, silent shapes in pools of sun, lined up in neat rows. I stepped out into the bright daylight and made myself open one.

Despite my fears, it was empty. I didn’t know if the thin layer of dust that coated the bottom was all that remained of a person, if the boxes themselves transported the body within to somewhere else, or if these had never been filled in the first place. It had been so long since anyone had been here, it didn’t matter. This place was all just ashes and dust.

The box was light enough to move, so I pulled it inside, to the hallway. I stared at the Wall for a long moment, thinking, and then I started taking it down.

Feathers, bits of glass, paper made thin and brittle with age. Jewelry, faded pictographs and drawings, dusty and yellowed books, drawings so faint you could no longer tell what they were. I put them all into the long silver box carefully, and when that box was full, I pulled it back outside and got another one.

Some of the papers crumbled to dust in my hands, particularly when I got farther down the line, to the things that had been put up even longer ago. I cried for those papers, and the lost memories of people they had represented. Several times I stopped entirely, horrified at what I was doing, before I was filled once again with renewed determination. If ashes and dust and memories were all that remained of this InterWorld, it was our duty to fill it again with purpose. With hope.

The new recruits wouldn’t see hope when they looked at this Wall. They wouldn’t see hope when they saw the coffins outside, or how many of us had already died. These deaths weren’t personal to them. They were a nightmare, a horror story, a holocaust long past. They were legends and myths, shoes too big to ever possibly fill. They were my ghosts now, mine alone.

Microchips and nanochips, pottery, threads and scraps of clothing and candy wrappers, a long red braid and bits of foreign currency. Everything went carefully into a silver coffin, and when I finally finished hours later, long after the sun had dipped behind the distant horizon, I was tired and hungry and blessedly not alone.

My team had joined me slowly, over the course of the day. Jakon, Josef, Jo, Jai, and J/O all came to help me put the memories to rest. Avery stood and watched, though he never said a word. He followed us silently, seeming to feel his help wouldn’t be appreciated, though he looked like he understood. He even looked sympathetic as I took down my own monument to Jay, the dirt and rocks from the planet he’d died on that had spelled out “I’m sorry.”

We worked in silence until it was done, and then they helped me carry the coffins to the Old Man’s office. It seemed appropriate, somehow. We wouldn’t be using it much, and it was big enough that they could all be pushed against the wall and there would still be space if we needed it.

We went back to the engine room. This time I made myself go to the bodies; there had been more coffins than we needed to hold all the stuff on the Wall. We each took one end of a cot, carried them back out to the gardens, and placed our fallen comrades one by one into the boxes. Avery and I went back together for Josephine.

When we were done, there were six long silver coffins sitting out in the courtyard. Four of them were occupied, and I had Josef and J/O take the remaining two into storage. Then Avery went to each of the boxes in turn and placed a hand on them. One by one, they glowed green and vanished, and I didn’t bother to ask where he was sending them. The Old Man had touched the coffins and made them vanish, too, and as far as I knew no one had ever asked him where they went. Perhaps they took the bodies home, wherever that was. Maybe they took us to a world where we could be born again, or to a planet that counted as heaven. Maybe it was a graveyard or a black hole. I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. Death was death, and wherever we went afterward was something I would find out when my time came.

Avery paused by the fourth coffin, and he rested his hand on it for a moment longer than he had the other ones. I saw his lips move as he murmured something, too quietly for any of us to hear, and then he sent it off with the others. Luckily or not, I had been trained to read lips, and I echoed his words in a whisper as the final coffin glowed green and vanished.

“Good-bye, Josie,” I said so quietly that the words were carried away on the wind.

My team and I stayed up in shifts that night, each of us taking a turn keeping an eye on Avery and J/O. I knew I was probably being paranoid, but I couldn’t afford not to be.

Josef and a few of the Walkers he’d picked out slowly got the hallways cleared, and it became easier to get from place to place without having to crawl over rubble and debris. Jo, as I’d predicted, made short work of getting the public rooms ready; by nightfall the next day, all twenty-five or so of us had usable dorm rooms and the mess hall was, if not clean enough to eat off of, at least well on its way there.

The jump-start of the ship had gotten all the basic functions working, so we were able to open the storm shutters and get the ventilation working all through the ship. Auxiliary power kicked in on the second day, and InterWorld became self-sustaining once again. Avery, true to his word, expanded the time parameters in the warp drive, and we made the jump back into our own timeline without so much as a bit of turbulence.

Joeb brought in one recruit that second day, a sharp-looking girl who wore her red hair in a pixie cut. She was shorter and leaner than most of us middle-Arc Earth versions, and her eyes matched her hair. There was nothing really special about her—not from a magic- or science-heavy world, though she did have an affinity for fixing things. Her name was Jorily, and within the first few moments of meeting her I was of half a mind to make her the temporary quartermaster. After all, we still had an equipment locker full of what currently amounted to junk; now that we had power, some of the things in there could be recharged and possibly fixed. I told Joeb to go ahead and set her up down there, in addition to whatever basic training programs he was starting up.

I was operating out of the Old Man’s office, which had not been my idea. Joeb and a few of the others had formed a team to clean it and get it more or less organized, and they’d insisted I run communications out of there.

“It’s hooked up to all the main intercoms,” Joeb had pointed out. “It’s a secure location with more shields and protocols than we can even catalog, and it’s automatic for most of us to go there in an emergency.”

He’d had a lot more to say than that, mostly about how they needed someone to look to, and it wasn’t so much about being in charge as it was seeming like I was in charge. I was a symbol, at least for the moment, and that meant I got to sit at a desk and divide our current numbers into teams and make lists of things that needed to be done. It meant, at least for a few days, that I had to stay put and recover, since I was still injured.

I was ready to go insane by the third day.

Joeb had brought three more recruits in, and I’d met them all. I’d given them the condensed version of what was happening, wished them luck, and sent them off to combat classes with Jakon and tactic lectures with Jo. I’d combed through any and all of the files that were still readable in the Old Man’s office, trying to find something—anything that would give me some sort of direction, and I’d been doing this for two days straight before it occurred to me that though this may have been the Old Man’s office in my time, I had no way of knowing who it had belonged to when the ship had been abandoned.

The thought stopped me dead. This whole time, I had been thinking of a new crew and a much older ship, of our same cause centuries in the future, and the same Captain.

This was, of course, impossible. But equally impossible was the image of someone else sitting at this desk, someone else giving us orders or sending out teams. The Old Man didn’t have a second-in-command. He didn’t have a lieutenant, or any officers aside from those he sent out on jobs or to recruit. It had always been just him. What would happen if he ever died?

The Old Man’s office was the first place we went in an emergency, the first place we gathered in the event of anything that wasn’t in the official handbook. It was where we went to get our missions and the first place we went—even before the infirmary, in some cases—after we returned. I couldn’t imagine walking into this room and seeing anyone else.

But I was here. There were four or five people on this ship now who’d never even met the Old Man. People who’d only ever seen me sitting at this desk.

The thought was terrifying.

It was terrifying enough that I half stood from my chair before I even knew where exactly I was intending to go. I wanted out, away from this desk and its weight. I wanted to be training the recruits myself, or going out and getting them. This room was too big and too silent.

I sighed, then gingerly touched the tips of my fingers to the smooth surface of the desk. It flashed, then words started to crawl across it—Josetta’s message to me, telling me to stay still and that she was sending someone to help. When I’d first come to this InterWorld, when TimeWatch had sent me here, I’d gone to the Old Man’s desk and found the message. It was preprogrammed to react to the tracer in my bloodstream, which meant it would eventually go away. For now, though, I was stuck with seeing the message every time I touched it. I was stuck with the reminder that I was just a normal recruit who’d gotten in over his head.

I was still standing in front of the desk when one of the intercom lights blinked on. It was the private link from the engine room, where I’d left J/O, Jai, and Avery. “Joey,” J/O’s voice came over the speaker. He sounded rushed and worried. “Several of the alarm systems blipped at once, and Avery took off. He bolted out the door. I sent Jai after him, but—”

“What kind of alarms?”

“The radar blipped, then the proximity sensors.”

“Activate any shields we have the power for—”

“There’s nothing on the screen,” J/O interrupted. “There’s nothing to hit. The radar blipped once, but it’s dark.”

I stood there for a moment, waiting for a solution to come to me. I wasn’t a captain, damn it, I didn’t know what this meant or what to do in this situation. “And you said Avery just bolted?”

“Yeah. He—”

Whatever else J/O was saying was lost in a sudden, shrill beep. There was a subtle rumble beneath my feet, small enough that I almost didn’t feel it.

InterWorld was big enough that a small impact on one end of the ship wouldn’t necessarily be felt on the other side, or even in the middle. The short, warning beep I’d heard from the engine room meant we’d hit something.

“Talk to me, J/O! What was that?”

“The radar’s not— Wait, it’s blinking in and out. It’s too small to actually— Joey, it’s headed right toward you!”

The rush of adrenaline I felt was compounded by the sudden crash behind me. I whirled just in time to see something fly by me, a rush of black and green. It slammed against the back wall of the Old Man’s office with enough force that I felt the room shudder, and I coughed at the abrupt cloud of dust that welled up.

I’d insisted any weapons that had been scavenged or restored be given to the officers going out in the field; all I had on me was a switchblade I’d found in Josephine’s backpack. Making sure all the teams were equipped had seemed like a perfectly sound idea at the time, but maybe I was about to regret that decision.

The dust was slowly clearing, though it didn’t look like dust anymore. It was sort of pretty, like how the clouds would look on my world when the sun was setting. As if there was a light behind them, a purple light …

I ran over, skidding to my knees beside her. “Acacia!”

“Joey?” J/O’s voice came though the speaker again, urgent and worried.

“I’m fine,” I yelled, reaching down to clear some of the debris from her.

Acacia looked like she’d been through hell. Her clothing was marred by a hundred tiny cuts, dirty and singed in some places, like she’d fallen through a thornbush. (Or several. Some of them might have been on fire.) Her face and arms looked the same.

She was sprawled out on her back, a small indentation above her from where she’d obviously slammed into the wall and fallen. I risked a quick glance over my shoulder; part of the Old Man’s doorway, already not in the best shape from whatever had cleared out the ship, was made even wider from where she’d clipped the side of it. I felt my blood run cold as I realized: somehow, the thing we’d hit was Acacia. There was no way she could have survived that impact.

A mere thread of a sound came from her, something too quiet to even be a whisper. I put a hand to her neck, feeling for a pulse. Miraculously, there was one. Even more miraculously, she slowly turned her head to look up at me. Her lips moved.

“What?” I leaned down, so close I could feel her breath against my ear.

“I’ll pay for the damages,” she murmured.

“I’m gonna kill you,” I said, reaching out to touch her face.

“Get in line,” said a voice from behind me, and I was summarily shoved aside as Avery knelt next to his sister, gathering her carefully into his arms.

“Ugh,” she murmured, nose wrinkling in an expression I’d seen my own sister wear a thousand times, when looking at me. “Not you.”

“Where in the abyss have you been, Cace?”

“Everywhere. Couldn’t navigate. The stars were gone … they’re going … They’re …” She opened her eyes wide, sitting up in Avery’s arms and reaching out to grab the front of my shirt. “The stars are going,” she told me urgently, everything in her expression indicating this was of vital importance.

“Going where?” I asked.

“Dying,” she said. “They’re dying. FrostNight …”

Her grip on my shirt loosened, and her eyes lost focus. She passed out immediately, going limp against her brother.

“Sir?” another voice said behind me, as I felt the air shift from Jai’s teleportation spell. Jai was sort of big on protocol, and he kept insisting he call me that as long as I was at the Old Man’s desk. Ordinarily it bothered me; right now, I was focused on Acacia.

“Go ahead to the infirmary,” I told him. “Tell them we have our first patient, then get back to the engine room. I’ve got things here.”

He spared a brief glance at Avery, then nodded. Avery got to his feet, cradling Acacia against him. He lifted her easily, paying no attention at all to Jai as he vanished. Now that they were both in the same place, the resemblance between them was more obvious—but even unconscious, Acacia had a fire to her that was different from her brother’s quiet intensity.

“This way,” I said, and turned to leave. I saw a hint of green in my peripheral vision. Instinct took over, and I whirled and grabbed for Avery. One hand closed around his forearm, the other going to Acacia’s shoulder. Damned if I was going to let her vanish again.

“Let go, Harker.”

“Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“Why?”

“Because she needs medical attention, and my people are better equipped to give it than yours.”

I couldn’t argue with that, and I didn’t want to. I wanted Acacia to be okay, even if it meant going back to TimeWatch and away from me—and for that reason, I hated what I was about to say.

“Your mission wasn’t to rescue your sister. It was to help us stop FrostNight, and Acacia has information about FrostNight. She needs to stay here until I get that information.”

Avery was already standing rigid, but he managed to straighten up even more as he stared at me. His eyes narrowed, and I felt his arm flex where I had a grip on his wrist. If he hadn’t had Acacia in his arms, he might have tried to throw me off him.

“Look,” I said, trying to pitch my voice to be reasonable, “I’m worried about her, too. But you said yourself that FrostNight would eradicate everything, including TimeWatch. You can take her back there now, but it won’t be safe. Nowhere will be safe until we stop it.”

“And what information do you think she has?” Avery asked. His voice was cold and tightly controlled.

“I don’t know, but any information is better than what we have. Just bring her to the infirmary, we can do what we can and find out whatever she knows, and then I’ll let you take her back. I swear.” I relaxed my grip on his wrist, then deliberately let go of him, dropping my arm to my side.

He stared at me for an uncomfortable moment, and I was inches from losing my temper again when he finally turned and started walking. He didn’t say a word, didn’t give any indication of his agreement except the fact that he was doing as I’d asked, and not vanishing in a green glow. It was a miracle this guy hadn’t already gotten on my last nerve.

The walk to the infirmary was short and silent, full of bare walls and long corridors. I was painfully aware of where the Wall had been; the hall seemed to stretch on forever, and the blank metal surrounding us was empty and accusing. I didn’t doubt the tradition of the Wall would start again. One of us would inevitably die, and it was more than likely that those who remembered would continue honoring the dead that way.

It should be Josephine, I thought, unable to help myself. I should look through her backpack, find something she loved. …

It was a nice thought, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not yet. Not when we might soon be nothing but memories.

Avery didn’t leave Acacia’s side for the next several minutes until she woke. Once he was satisfied that our rudimentary technology would be adequate to help his sister, he stepped back and listened while Jianae (she’d been picked up with Joeb’s team, and was one of the few medically trained Walkers we had) asked Acacia questions about her breathing and whether or not she felt dizzy or faint. If I closed my eyes, I could almost pretend I was in a hospital back on my version of Earth.

“She’s severely dehydrated and malnourished, but the supplement shots will help with that. The cuts will heal on their own, but I’ve given her booster pills to make sure they don’t get infected,” Jianae explained, speaking to both Avery and me. “I can treat the symptoms, but I’ve never seen this kind of sickness before.”

“She’s timesick,” Avery said quietly. “You can’t fix it. TimeWatch can.”

I spared him a single glance (Jianae was giving him a similar look as she strapped a pulse monitor to Acacia’s wrist), then sat down on the edge of Acacia’s bed.

“Hey,” I said, not sure where else to start.

She smiled vaguely at me, though her eyes didn’t quite focus. It was sort of like she was looking past me, or looking at where I’d been a moment ago. “Hey,” she responded, though she paused slightly longer than was normal.

There was another pause, during which I became acutely aware that the last time I’d seen her we’d been inches away from … well, I hoped it had been about to be a kiss, but there was honestly no way of knowing. I knew she intrigued me, I knew I liked her, and it seemed like she felt the same way. Beyond that … it was hard to devote much thought to wondering if I might have a shot with a girl I barely knew when I was supposed to be finding out if the world was about to end.

I sighed. Then I said, “What did you say about FrostNight and the stars dying?”

“I was worried about you,” she said.

“I was worried about you, too,” I admitted. “What happened to you?”

She looked briefly irritated. Then she bit her lip and her expression shifted, becoming sad and worried, and—I was surprised to see—scared. “We didn’t stop it, Joe.”

“I know.” I impulsively reached out to take her hand. She didn’t react.

“Lord Dogknife … threw me out of time,” she said, glancing in Avery’s direction. “He broke my navigation and shoved me through the dimensions. Through the Nowhere. There was this … spider creature. …”

I leaned forward, squeezing her hand. Only then did she react, glancing down and giving a faint smile. “Lady Indigo?” I asked. I assumed that was who she meant, but …

“You know?”

“I …” I started to answer, then paused. I knew what?

“Who?” she asked.

I stared at her. It was starting to sound like we weren’t having the same conversation, especially since she wasn’t quite making eye contact.

“What?” I asked.

“Did you get hit in the head or something?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Well, I don’t think so. Why?”

“What, what?” she asked, beginning to look irritated.

I continued to stare at her, at a loss. “What?”

There was the sudden sound of laughter from behind me, though it was a laugh I didn’t recognize. I turned, surprised to find that it was Avery. He was laughing at both of us, his resemblance to Acacia even more obvious in his amusement.

“I really should just let you two talk,” he said, still laughing. “But I suppose it would be best if I translate. And, yes,” he said, looking at Acacia. “It is.”

“What do you mean, translate?”

“Shut up, Avery,” Acacia said. “It’s not funny.”

He grinned at me. I looked between him and Acacia, then blinked. “Did you just …?”

“Respond to her before she spoke? Yes, though not from her point of view. She’s timesick,” he repeated, some of his good humor fading as he explained. “A side effect of which is time lag. The leader of HEX threw her out of time, as she said. She is not swimming in the same stream, as it were.”

“You mean, she’s … lagging?” I looked back to Acacia, who was glancing between us—but as Avery spoke, she was looking at me.

“Not exactly. She is responding in what she perceives as real time, but her present is not aligned with our present.”

“Oh. How can you tell?”

“I’m a Time Agent,” he said. “I am trained to see these things.”

I fought off a wave of irritation. “I see. So, she was …”

“Responding to things you had said a moment before.” He grinned at me again. “If the situation weren’t so dire, I really would have let it go on. I imagine it would have gotten even funnier.”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” I glanced back to Acacia, who was looking at Avery. “She wasn’t like this when she first showed up, though, was she?”

“It … was just starting,” Avery explained hesitantly. I guessed this was more supersecret TimeWatch stuff. “If left unattended, she will continue to slip farther out of this timestream.”

“Is that bad?”

He hesitated again. “It is … inconvenient. It’s dangerous if allowed to continue for an extended time—months, or years.”

I nodded. All that mattered was that it could be fixed, really. I waited until Acacia was looking at me again (and made sure not to move too much, so she could track me) before I spoke. “So if I just … go slow, it should be fine …?”

“Yes, if tedious.”

“Well, it’s a good thing the fate of the Multiverse isn’t urgent or anything,” I snapped. I couldn’t help it.

Avery smiled, unruffled. “Yet you were the one who insisted you question her as she is.”

I sighed. I waited until Acacia had given her brother a reproachful glance and was looking at me again, then started over.

“Acacia, can you tell me about the stars dying?”

There was another long pause, then her eyes closed and her hand tightened around mine. “The stars and the planets,” she said. “FrostNight is moving. It’s been moving this whole time … but it’s not like they meant it to be. It won’t sustain itself. It’ll die out.”

I felt relief go through me so suddenly and strongly that I felt dizzy. Still, I made myself pause before asking, “It won’t sustain itself?”

The allotted time went by before she answered; I was counting roughly six seconds of lag between our exchanges, though I couldn’t be sure of how long it took her to process what I was saying and choose her words. “No. I could already feel it dying, but … but it’s still restarting worlds. I don’t know how many already, but it’s moving along in a projected arc. … Your enemies have already won some new bases,” she said, looking away from me. “FrostNight has made empty worlds they can use however they wish.”

I squeezed her hand, counted to six, then said, “But this is good, right? We can let it die, concentrate on tracking down that HEX ship and getting it off InterWorld’s trail. Right?”

She still wasn’t looking at me, even after I counted silently to six. “Acacia? Do you know where it’ll end?”

“Yes,” she said. “The last projected world is Earth F epsilon ninety-eight to the seventh.”

I didn’t have to count the six seconds before responding this time. The blood froze in my veins and time actually seemed to slow as I repeated the classification silently to myself. Earth FΣ98⁷. FrostNight had begun on Earth FΔ98⁶. The classification of Earths was confusing at best, since there had to be some leeway and margin for error; new Earths were being created all the time and old ones destroyed. The particular subset of Earths in the alpha through omega category were those in the middle of the arc, the ones not inclined strongly toward magic or science. Like mine.

The classification number of my Earth was something I hadn’t learned until I’d been on InterWorld for a while; they didn’t want to encourage us to be homesick or tempted to go visit. I’d looked up the number on my own, out of curiosity, and I’d always remembered it: Earth FΣ3¹⁴. Earth F epsilon three to the fourteenth.

One of those worlds was mine.

“Joe,” Acacia warned, a second before I stood up. Timesick or not, she apparently hadn’t had any trouble reading me. “I know,” she said, even as I started to speak.

“That means my world will be—” I cut myself off, since she was already nodding.

“I will,” Avery said.

“Avery,” Acacia said urgently. “You have to tell him.”

I looked over at Acacia’s brother, picking up on their off-pattern conversation. “Tell me what?”

“That you can’t leave,” he said.

Screw that. I started for the door.

Avery stepped in front of me, hands held out in front of him. “You must stay here, Harker. There is nothing—”

“Nothing I can do? Screw that,” I said, stopping long enough to glare at him. “I can get my family to safety, at the very least.”

“And bring them where? Here? To live on InterWorld with you, the only Walker here to have their loved ones? What of the other Walkers? Some of them may have worlds in the Wave’s path, too. Will you give them the same warning?”

“It’s only right,” I began, but he cut me off.

“And you will all run off into the Multiverse to bring your loved ones into a war they cannot possibly fight. So they will languish on this ship and wait for you—the ones they love—to come back from your missions, which some of you inevitably won’t.”

I glared at him and he matched it, neither of us giving an inch. “Tell me I’m wrong,” he demanded.

“You’re not. You’re not wrong, but what am I supposed to do? Just let my world be destroyed?”

“Worlds die and begin anew every day, Harker, every hour. Yours is nothing special.”

I started to push past him, but Acacia (who had probably said this a few seconds ago, according to her) called out, “Listen to him, Joe! TimeWatch can help!”

I stopped, looking at Avery. “How can TimeWatch help?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what she’s referring to, as it is not our right to interfere with the course of time.”

“This has nothing to do with time! It’s outside of it, outside of everything, you said so yourself—damn it, you don’t have any protocol for this!”

“You’re right,” he said. “We don’t. Which is likely the argument my sister intends to use.”

“I don’t know,” Acacia said, answering my question from a moment ago. “But I can try. And I have to go back anyway. Please, Joe, let me try before you go running off!”

“I will take her back to TimeWatch, get her the care she needs, and discuss this with the council,” Avery said. “It will be done as fast as we can possibly make it.”

“You’re a Time Agent,” I shouted, finally losing my temper. All I could think of was the necklace I always wore, the one my mother had made for me the night I’d left home, and how I’d told her I was leaving to protect them. “Time means nothing to you!”

For the first time, I saw him get truly angry. His hand snapped out to clutch my shirt, and I found myself shoved a few steps back.

“Time means everything to me,” he said, still pressing me backward. “Don’t you dare think that because I feel it differently I feel it less.”

“Is that how you fell in love with Josephine after only five minutes?”

It may have been a cheap shot, but I was pissed off and worried, and I’d been wondering what the hell was up with the two of them ever since he’d called her “Josie.”

For a second I thought I was going to get punched, but he let go of me. “Sit down, Acacia,” he said, though she hadn’t moved yet. Then, to me—“Time flows differently across the worlds, Harker. What was five minutes to you could have been five days to us, or five years. Besides,” he finished, a smirk tilting at the corner of his mouth, “where do you think she learned to use a grav-board like that? You certainly didn’t teach her.”

Acacia was getting to her feet anyway, trying to detach all the various wires and monitors she was hooked up to. Jianae was hovering around uncertainly, alternating between helping her unhook herself and telling her she should really stay put.

“Avery, stop,” Acacia protested. “Let’s just go. Please.”

I turned my back on him, going to Acacia. I was seething, furious at Avery and upset by the knowledge that my world was going to die. “Please come back soon, Cay,” I told her, and then I reached out to take her face in my hands. “I know this isn’t happening for you yet,” I said. “But I hope you don’t mind when it does.” I leaned down and kissed her forehead.

Avery put a hand on Acacia’s shoulder, looking disapprovingly at me. “No, I won’t tell him,” he said, and then they both began to glow green. Acacia smiled at me before they vanished, leaving me to wonder what it was she wanted said.