CROWELL

22 I was a universe away from home. I stumbled back at the sight of the man in front of me, but my eyes stayed locked on him. An impossibility. How in the world—?

“I said who the hell are you?” the man asked.

Standing in front of me was Vanderberg Parr.

Actually? Alan Brindos. A copy of Alan.

The Brindos.

He had more lives than fucking Terl Plenko. How could he be alive? Parr had sacrificed himself—I thought—to destroy the portal between universes. Caught in the antimatter detonation caused by the Landry.

“Hey,” Parr said. “Rook to old man. Who are you?”

Of course he didn’t recognize me. I’d aged so much, even though I’d only been away from here a year. How could he have been here by himself a whole year? I stood as tall as I could—or as tall as my back allowed me to stand. “You’re Vanderberg,” I said.

“That’s not the topic of discussion here,” he said. “Your name is.”

He didn’t seemed surprised I knew his name. “I’m Dave Crowell. I left here a year ago. You—”

“Crowell!” He squinted at me, checking me out. “Jesus, you aren’t kidding. It is you.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t a year ago. It was just a few days back, and holy Ultra, you crossed the brane, back into this universe!” He shook his head, disbelief in his eyes. “It sure did a serious number on your good looks.”

I self-consciously put a hand to my face. “Not much choice, I’m afraid.”

“Some type of time dilation.”

“What?”

“You said it’s been a year for you, but it’s only been a few days for me. So, you know: Time dilation. Ultras explained some of it to me.” He pointed to his head. “But good thing you did. There’s nothing to eat here, and I’m fucking hungry.”

I looked behind him at the damaged door of the Pool Room and put it all together. “You made it into the Pool Room. It saved you from the blast.”

“Well yeah. You didn’t think I was going to let myself die when there was a perfectly good place to hide, did you?”

“It didn’t occur to me.”

“I almost didn’t make it. There was Cara, her glow so bright I could barely stand to look at her, and I had this moment of crisis.” He frowned, and he struggled with something deep inside him; it took him a while to continue. “Here I finally knew who I was—or close to it—and there was my One about to send the House and me to Kingdom Come. To the Dead Lands. You know? And I thought about what you said, about Alan. About—me. Your friend. And all of a sudden, as the Ultras were feeding what they could squeeze into my brain, I understood I still had a part to play in your journey. I chose life. I ran to the Pool Room and forced the door closed just in time. It wasn’t completely secure, so the blast knocked it loose. But hell, I was alive.”

Parr smiled at me, and I couldn’t help but smile back. I’d never expected to see him ever again, but damn if I wasn’t glad he was here. Glad to see Alan. I didn’t have the code card anymore with the image blender prog, so it really was Alan Brindos standing in front of me, not the artificially altered visual of him.

“So you’re still a hybrid.” I asked him. “Part Ultra.”

He nodded. “I’ve been fine here so far. I’ve had time to process everything. Time to download the Ultra’s knowledge.”

“Useful for parties, I guess.” I was getting achy standing for so long. I found an outcropping of blackrock, shuffled over to it, and sat before my knees gave out. “No RuBy though.”

“The withdrawal was difficult, but at the same time, I was gathering more and more of my Ultra self and felt less of a need for it.”

“And what does your Ultra self tell you about me now?”

Parr remained standing. “You’re old. Did you know?”

“Know it would happen? Yes.”

“But you did it anyway.”

“Yeah. Plenko told me.”

“Ah, you found Plenko.”

I shot him a look. “You knew about him?”

“Sure.” He pointed to his head. “Well, now I know.”

“I’ve come to look for my dad.”

“I know.”

“As impossible as that seems to be—wait. You know?”

He pointed to his head again.

“Christ, what don’t you know?”

He came within a few feet of me. “Look, let’s get to the point, shall we?”

“All right.”

He reached into the pocket of his coat—the same coat he’d worn a year ago. “I found these in the Pool Room. As soon as I did, the Ultra brain did the rest and I realized what they were for. The whole backup thing set up for you.”

Plan B the next.

The Tarot cards he held out to me were barely visible in the low light. The sky had darkened. God, I had no sense of time here. I took one of the cards from him with a shaking hand. I didn’t know if it was shaking because I had developed some kind of tremor in my old age, or I was just nervous about it.

The Ten of Swords.

I’d read up about it, as I had most of the cards, and this one was scary, no matter how you looked at it. Consider the image on the card: a man face down with ten swords in his back. Beyond that, though, it was symbolic of some unwelcome surprise in the future. It could also mean something bad had already happened: that you’d been backstabbed by someone you cared about.

Those scenarios did not instill in me much hope.

“I figure you might be looking for that,” Parr said.

I felt a shiver run up my back. Or maybe I was cold. “I’ve been collecting the set for a while. But I didn’t know what I’d find here. And the other one?”

He gave it to me. There were three swords on the card, two up, one pointing down. “The Three of Swords.”

“Minor Arcana,” Parr said, “like the Ten of Swords.”

In my mind, I was already reviewing the card’s purpose in the deck. Like this turn of events, the card represented the unexpected.

“The Ten of Swords is the one you need now.”

“For what?”

“For travel to an Ultra world.”

“And the other card?”

Parr’s eyes ticked up, and he pursed his lips in thought. Or whatever it was the Ultra brain was doing.

“Not quite clear. Downloading the information and seeing the through lines could take some time. Hang on to both of them.”

I pocketed them, then gulped hard. This time, my shiver was a visceral reaction to the renewed hope inside me. An Ultra world. A world—an antimatter world, not this buffer world—where I might find my dad. I didn’t know how it could be remotely possible for him to be alive, or for me to get there alive.

“You’re lucky,” Parr said.

“How’s that?”

“You have me.”

“Because you’re an Ultra/human hybrid. A—what was it? ‘A special creature.’ You can exist in both universes.”

“Pretty much.”

The thing I really needed to do, I thought just then, was apologize to Parr. Even though it had happened a year ago, on my timetable, it hadn’t been that long for Parr. “I’m sorry I punched you in the nose.”

He smiled. “And stepped on my hand.”

“Could you blame me?”

“No. And in the end? It worked, didn’t it?”

It did. Parr changed his mind about the Ultras’ designs for our universe and helped us escape Rook. Blew the portal. And yet, here he was, still alive.

“We were all very lucky,” I said. “So—speaking of lucky—what downloaded knowledge did the Ultras give you about why they took my dad?”

“He’s Lucky Lawrence.”

“That’s just it. Plenko said he was the Ultra’s good luck charm, but he didn’t elaborate. Maybe he didn’t even know.”

“Your dad,” he said, “was a failed Ultra experiment.”

“How so?”

“They were going to turn him into a hybrid.”

My breath caught, stunned by this news. Parr waited for me to say something. “A hybrid,” I mumbled. “Like you?”

“Well.” He shrugged. “In a way. But a reverse prototype. The Ultras thought—well, if they could find a way for your dad to survive long-term in an antimatter world, they could figure out a way for the Ultras to survive in a world made of matter.”

“And did he survive . . . not being a hybrid?”

Parr looked away, blinking. Processing his Ultra brain probably. “It seems so. You wouldn’t think so, considering the problems the Ultras had over in our universe, but he did.”

My dad—alive. Could it really be true? Everything from last year rushed up to remind me of this quest to find him. Everything Terree had helped me discover through the Memory, about the life I’d lived before with him up until I was sixteen, when he disappeared. The past projected into my consciousness like family home flashvids, Mom and Dad together, and me, happy most of the time, but slipping past my escorts when I could; you know, just being a kid, but at the same time learning what my dad did as an Envoy.

“So.” I took a deep breath. I needed to slow my breathing, the pounding in my chest. I hated feeling so helpless. “How do you help me get to an Ultra world and find my dad?”

Parr spread his arms wide. “My dear Crowell,” he said, grinning ear to ear. “You solved that problem on your own. You found what the Ultras left behind and brought it with you.”

He pointed behind me, and I craned my neck. The Exeter.

I’d been right. “Jesus, the Ultras did leave the ship for me.”

“Sort of.”

I had a hard time believing it, even though the Exeter had fallen almost magically into my path. “How could they possibly have known I’d come along, in that jump slot, at that time?”

Parr scoffed. “Please. No way they could’ve known.”

“So how—” In an instant, I knew. The truth bled out of me. “It wasn’t the only ship.”

“The Ultras are a little obsessed with copies.” He grinned.

“So you just seeded jump slots with copies of the Exeter. The one ship that fucked up the whole Ultra Transcontinental Conduit plan, and that’s the ship they copied?”

“If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” He walked past me, abruptly, toward the Exeter.

I stood, and my knees creaked. Halfway to the ship, Parr stopped and waited for me to catch up. I drew alongside him, and the two of us stared at the Exeter until my back started to ache. I fidgeted, and Parr noticed.

“Won’t keep you waiting,” he said. “You discovered that the Exeter has special properties, including that Ultra skin.”

“It’s unique, to say the least.”

“Your ship is what gets us off this buffer world and safely through antimatter space.” He patted my shoulder lightly, as if afraid he might break me. “The Exeter will take us to the Ultra world where your dad lives.”

Dad. I kept trying to catch up to that idea. Dad was alive.

Something occurred to me. I fumbled around until I found the Ten of Swords Tarot. “Then, if we have the Exeter, we don’t need this.”

“Not to get there, but we’ll need it on that end.”

“We’ll power it up there?”

Parr almost laughed. His eyes crinkled enough to show his amusement. “It’s a calling card. Without it, the Ultras will throw you into the antimatter and consider it good riddance.”

This didn’t ease any tension. I closed my eyes. I concentrated on the positive, and in a few moments—Parr stood there waiting me out—the tension actually did drain from me. The prospect of seeing Dad again did a lot to make me forget my dread. It was as if I’d been reborn, my aches and pains gone. I’m coming, Dad.

How lucky was that?