---Chapter 7
Once they were finished in the engine, Lenny moved back to the passenger car in order to start rigging the wire. As he walked in the door he noticed a narrow, full-length mirror hung on the wall. Catching a glimpse of himself in it, he realized that he was still wearing the ridiculous jacket which Jax had brought him as camouflage. Stopping in front of the glass, he began to unbutton the jacket down the front. He did not need it anymore: Amber knew that he was not from this world and they would soon be leaving it behind.
Once it was off, he stopped for a moment more to study his reflection. It seemed that there was something different about it, though he could not grasp what. There was the slight bulge on the smooth, silver sleeve of his jumpsuit. That was from the rag protecting the rat bite, but was not what was bothering him. His hair, always thin and flat before, had become a little bit wilder with their last adventures. But a brush of his hand fixed that, the pale gold strands laying flat and even all around. But once they were in place he realized that it was his expression itself which startled him. His eyes had a haunted look, almost as if he had been seeing ghosts. They were also more alert than formerly.
“So much change in just a few day’s time,” he muttered, turning away. He glanced once over his shoulder at himself and said to the strange expression, “it’s not my fault that I had to kill those creatures. And they aren’t human, anyway. Or even real in the same way that we are.”
But he was not sure if he had convinced himself as he hurried away. Burying those thoughts, he set to work hooking up the wire, making sure that it was stripped and tightly fastened at either edge. Raggsy helped him with the tubing outside, which was at an awkward place for a human’s bulky hands to get to. The Ratperson’s thin, delicate claws could reach into spaces that would cramp anyone else.
Once everything was in place they reported to Amber, who was standing in the engine, hanging her head out to look down the track. In the morning, it was hard to believe in what had happened overnight. The grass was green in the fields, the sky a clear blue. Even the wind and shade seemed more friendly, refreshing instead of oppressive.
Jax was with Amber in the engine, looking at the levers which controlled it with an expression of avid curiosity. Once they had reported that everything was in place, his eyes snapped up to them full of excitement. Amber pulled her head back in the window. “When can we travel?”
“Between worlds?” Lenny shrugged. “Anytime we want to, now. But are you sure you want to go, Amber? You have a family that will worry about you, and a life to leave behind. Raggsy and I were fleeing our lives, while Jax is an adventurer. But do you want to join us in our wild ramblings, looking for people who might have an answer, or else an answer that does not exist?”
Amber smiled, laying a hand on the window of her locomotive. “As long as Sophia is going, my home is always with me. Besides, I can’t live here doing nothing, knowing that the things of the night are getting worse. It’s just like inventing a new tool for a job: you have to make an experiment to fix the problem, or else the problem will just keep getting worse. I don’t want my world to turn into a nightmare all the time.”
“I hate being trapped in a small circle of worlds, or even just one for too long,” Jax said, skipping over beside the Di-jump machine. “Let’s go!”
Lenny and Raggsy hurried back to the passenger car, where they gripped the rod up above and waited to see what would happen. A few minutes passed without anything changing. Then there was a slight shock through their arms and the world began blurring outside the window. To Lenny’s surprise, he was not forced to blink during this jump. In fact, everything inside the train stayed perfectly clear and focused. It was outside the windows that strange things happened.
First the landscape blurred to a flowing mass of blue and green, which gradually faded to gray. Then it turned black, there was a sparkle of stars like a flash of lightening, and the train was sitting somewhere else.
The two passengers rushed to the windows to look out. It was then that Lenny realized a problem which none of them had seemed to think of. The train was only sitting on a short section of tracks, which had unfortunately been pulled up and teleported with them. It was not moving and it could not travel any further on this world. For all purposes, it might as well have been a house that was shifted across the barrier.
But this thought only took up a minute of his time. Then he was gazing curiously around to see what sort of world they had found themselves in.
Rain was bucketing down outside, falling from a sky which was a dark, bruised purple color. The fallen water ran along what looked like a pier of wooden planking, flowing under the train and into wide expanse of water below the pier. Looking out across it, Lenny thought that it must be an ocean. The water reflected the hue of the sky, appearing almost black beneath the clouds. This gloomy water stretched outwards as far as his eyes could see. Long, heavy swells were slapping against the side of the pier, which rocked alarmingly every time a wave hit. Lenny was worried that their train might have destabilized whatever they had landed on, and that it was starting to sink.
Tied to it at a small distance were a few sailing ships, the nearest of which had a figurehead shaped like a mermaid holding a cutlass. Hurrying across to the opposite windows, he peered out at a much more inhabited scene.
The wooden pier spread for about a hundred yards away from the sea, before hitting a sidewalk of smaller planks set crosswise on it. On the other side of this boardwalk was a long row of buildings, all small, crammed together and built out of what looked like the cast-off pieces of wrecked ships. Many of these establishments had other buildings on top of them, some of which had bridges reaching over to their further neighbors. Often, the bridges were nothing but a rope net with wooden planks laid across it here and there. Narrow alleys, twisted roads and ramshackle walkways squeezed their way between some of the structures, creating even wider gaps for the bridges to span.
There was little movement in the strange, ruinous town. A wind chime made of seashells and daggers blew in the storm wind, rusty with having hung out in the weather so long. Tawdry awnings hung off the fronts of buildings, flapping wetly. There were signs, too, here and there to swing in the breeze. But most of them appeared to be devoid of lettering. Instead, they declared what was in them by faded pictures.
“This looks like a quiet place,” Raggsy commented, “I wonder if that sign that looks like a fish means that their cooked for you inside, or if they’re just sold raw?”
“I don’t know.” Lenny made a face, feeling the dip and surge of the train as it sat on the floating dock. “But I don’t like this place one bit.”
Jax and Amber came bursting into the end door then, dripping wet and full of excitement.
“It worked!” Jax was wringing water out of his hair, which had collapsed a little from the rain. “We made it through with the whole train.”
“But I’m afraid that father is not going to be happy,” Amber admitted, “we took a section of rail with us. I didn’t think of that: the wheels are metal and will conduct energy down to the rails, which are also metal.”
“But we never take the pieces of metal through with us. They stay behind,” Jax retorted.
“This time it didn’t.” Lenny pointed out the window. “Or else, it just left the spikes and shoes behind. We undoubtedly have a piece of track under us. But the thing that worries me is that this whole place is bobbing up and down. We seem to have broken the pier.”
“I don’t think so.” Amber seemed to be hiding a laugh behind her hand. “Let’s all go out and see.”
Water was running down the windows in rivulets, stained with the odd tinting of the sky. Lenny was anxious about the wooden structure that they had landed on, so he hurried outside with the rest of them despite the wet. The rain immediately blew into their eyes, running down their faces and over their clothes. Raggsy had a little protection from it, because of his helmet and coat, but he still hunched his shoulders against the cold uncomfortably.
They walked to the edge of the wooden planks, looking over them at the swelling sea. Lenny quickly realized that the dock was not broken at all: it was meant to float. Looking back towards the train, he could see that the whole town was bobbing and swaying gently with the ocean waves. It made him feel ill looking at it, so he turned his gaze down at his shoes instead.
“It’s just floating,” Amber confirmed, “the whole place is built on a raft!”
“Yep,” Jax agreed, swaggering over to kick an empty shell into the water. “I knew it all along. ‘The pier is broken’ huh!”
“Alright, you needn’t rub it in,” Lenny said irritably. The motion of the waves and the wetness of the rain were combining to make him feel decidedly unhappy. “Let’s go back in and dry off.”
Amber agreed to go with him, as her clothes were not meant for heavy weather either. But both Raggsy and Jax were prepared for it.
“I’m going to explore this place. It looks pretty cool.” Jax started strolling towards the buildings. “See you suckers later!”
Raggsy was quieter about his decision, “I’ll go lookin’ around too. Those gaps between the buildings look like they have some good holes down 'em.”
“Have fun.” Lenny tossed over his shoulders tersely, stepping up on the back of the caboose to hold the door open for Amber. Once inside they stoked the little wood stove that sat in it, using pieces of wood from a stack inside the caboose. Lenny stood by it until he was somewhat dry, then went to lay down on the folded chair in the coach, confessing a touch of illness and fatigue.
Amber let him alone, only offering to make him mint tea if he wanted it.
But there was another reason Lenny wanted to lie down for awhile. If he needed to, he could refill his cybernetic power reserves slowly, with his own energy. But it required him to be doing as little as possible at the time, as he fell into a state near unconsciousness the while. Settling into the chair, he leaned back and closed his eyes. With a thought, he flipped his own energy over to filling the hidden batteries and began to slide towards sleep.
As he drifted on a light darkness, his mind thought over all that had been happening. So far, he had not found a world that he would be willing to spend the rest of his days on. Raggsy’s was ruined, Amber’s in the process of being taken over by corruption and this one appeared miserable. But there had to be a better world out there, somewhere. Or at least a way that he could stop the power core from harming his own.
If Belltoh was becoming more like Amber’s town, he did not want to go back to it until it was fixed. But even then, what did he have waiting for him there? He had always been an outcast because of his cybernetics, and the decisions that had led him to adopting them. Perhaps he could find a place, while traveling with Jax that would accept him...
No one noticed the dark shape which slipped away from the underside of the train into the bedraggled town.
---
The rain beat down on Jax’s head, slowly melting his bright yellow hair onto his face. Flipping it away with the back of his fingerless glove, he took a look around him. He was in a wider street, if it could be called such, between the giant rafts buildings. The sky was still a color like plums, bubbling and roiling together. Lenny and Amber had not been able to stomach the cold, but it did not bother Jax much. He was used to living without solid shelter most of the time. His coat, once bought at an auction on a barren, bright world’s city, was thick enough to keep him warm.
Stolen story; please report.
“Though the rain does run into my eyes all of the time,” he muttered, wiping it away again. Up ahead, a bridge crossed the street at the second story, providing some thin shelter. Standing under it, he swung his head back and forth to shake out his hair like a dog.
So far, he had not seen anyone on the streets. But there was plenty of signs of inhabitants around him. Lights in windows, music coming out of one place and the smell of wood smoke were plentiful indicators of people’s presence.
“Hah, maybe I’ll just find a little inn or something to take a breather in,” he decided, looking up and down the street sharply once again. “I wonder what the people here are like? I hope that they’re not fishes.”
Jax chuckled at his own joke as he moved out into the rain again, looking for a public place to stop in. Though he always played things off coolly around the others, making jokes and being cheerful to raise the morale, deep down inside he was troubled. The corrupt power core was slowly eating its way into all of the universes it had drawn together, that much was evident. He had no idea what his own world would look like by now. He was afraid that he would come back to find it overrun with mad creatures, the buildings cracked and stained by purple smears.
“And why purple?” he snorted to himself, “there’s a lot of better colors to be taking over all nine worlds.”
In fact, there seemed to be smears and cracks of it on many of the buildings he passed, showing how the power had spread. But those were not the only things which bothered him.
Questions kept nagging at the back of his mind. Why had those particular worlds been cut off from the rest? Why did it seem that each one had one particular person on it who followed a 'master’ and now wanted him dead? Was it just coincidence that all of the worlds in the circle seemed to be more alike each other than many of the dimensions he had explored before?
Maybe not in technology, but so far all of them had contained a city at nearly the same place, and had shared languages, continent formations and other small points. Jax knew that most dimensions reflected each other strongly, but there were still many more similarities in these than he was used to. Even down to the fact that Raggsy was the only non-human which they had met so far.
As he was thinking over his problems, he came to a cramped, wooden structure which seemed to be caught in the act of slowly falling over to one side. Frozen in place, it hung leaning against the pigpen next to it. But its door was propped half-open, the windows were all lit up and a sign hung above the door which showed a mug of beer and a ham.
“Must be food and drink in here!” Jax told himself, perking up. The rain had started to soak into his shirt down the back of his neck. Any shelter was beginning to look beautiful in his eyes. Striding over to the door, he put his hand out to open it further. Then he paused, looking up and all around him. For just a minute he had the strong feeling that someone, or something, was nearby watching him.
A swaying bridge of rope and plank creaked in the wind a few houses over. A ragged assortment of socks and underclothes were hanging from the window of an up-stair house, apparently to dry out in the rain. The signs on the buildings, showing everything from beer to jewels, swung softly. Rain ran down everything in miniature cataracts. Nothing else moved.
Jax shrugged the feeling off, reaching into his pocket once to make sure that the Electrospark taser was still in its place. It felt strange to not have the Di-jump machine there, a little unsettling to know that he could not escape anything on a whim like he used to. But that was the price he paid for picking up companions.
The door squealed as it opened and then half-shut behind him. He found himself standing in a puddle of water in a dip just inside a smoky, dirty brown room. The space was deeper than it was wide, so that tables sat at staggered intervals going off into the gloom. Over to one side, in what seemed to be a portion that had been hastily added on to the rest of the building, a barkeeper stood picking his teeth lazily with a broom-straw.
It seemed that all of the missing inhabitants of the floating city had come into the various inns of the town to stay out of the wet. And half of them, Jax told himself, were in here.
But at least they appeared to be some sort of humans. Mostly dressed in big seacoats and wide hats, or bright vests smeared in tar and grease. A few wore uniforms of faded gray and they all had big, waterproof boots with worn toes. The innkeeper even wore these boots, though his clothing was of a more delicately soiled white color. The only women in the place were barmaids, two of them, both wearing red and white dresses with low necks and too much lacing up the front.
There appeared to be no entirely empty tables to sit at, so Jax drifted over to the bar and leaned against it idly. Nearby, a few coals burned in a brazier, which he held his hands over to dry them. He didn’t want the electronics inside his gloves to short from getting too wet, though they were supposed to be ‘water resistant’.
“Wha’tt’l ye have?” The innkeep asked in a thick brogue, which stretched the Ts out and shortened the L to almost nothing.
Changing his accent just slightly to match what he heard around him, the young traveler replied, “a glass of ye best.”
“And wha’tt’l that be?” The barkeep pressed in a bored but insistent manner. Hoping that they had such a drink in this world, Jax ordered brown beer. The keeper gave him a look as if that was far from the best thing available, but filled a glass from a bottle and passed it to him. Jax payed with a small sliver of gold, which the innkeeper took without comment. Turning back to watch the crowd, the glass held carefully in one hand, Jax tried to pick out anything that would give him amusement or be of interest.
There was a pair of young, shifty looking men trading knives at a table nearby, while beyond them at another place three sailors were laughing over what was apparently not their first cups. In the darkest gloom of the place men with long coats pulled up tight were sitting silently, contemplating the world through penetrating eyes.
On the opposite wall from Jax, nearer the door than the back of the room, a table held six people altogether. It was the most customers at a table that he had noticed yet, drawing his interest in that direction. Ranged in a semi-circle around one half of the circular table were five men dressed all alike. Dark blue sweaters with tall collars, hats that were not too disreputable and boots with ensigns upon them. Across from them sat a character which instantly drew Jax’s admiration.
He was of the red vest category, and had a white, baggy shirt underneath it. The collar was open down the front, showing a silver cross hung on a chain around his neck. His pantaloons were wide and flowing, tucked into the biggest, most worn pair of boots of all. One of his eyes had a black patch over it, while from the opposite ear hung a golden ring. The face was cunning, narrow and had black hair which looked like it had not been washed or brushed since he was a lad.
These six men were all playing cards, but the ones dressed alike did so almost silently. On the other hand, their eccentric companion was speaking and laughing the whole time, telling one anecdote or another as his hands flashed over the cards. Hoping to find some fun, Jax crossed the room quietly and stood behind this fellow’s chair. The people at the table noticed him, looked up once and then went back to playing. While savoring his bitter brew, Jax listened to the stories that this piratical seaman was telling and watched the game.
“Yea, the last time the Cunning Wench sailed the seas was the strangest voyage I’ve ever been on. And I’ve seen many a day at sea that seemed like a nightmare or a dream come true,” the seaman began a new story, tossing out a handful of silver coins to meet a bet in the game. “Ye be quiet sailors of the ship Hannry and probably have not seen as much, so methinks that you would not have seen anything like this on all your days. First a wind blew up, strong and stiff, but nothing that the Cunning Wench could not handle. It was what came next that turned my innards to water. And I’m not ashamed of it, I’ll tell ye!”
He stopped at this critical point to make a play, before resuming, “the wind blew up a storm, but a mickle strange one. It was like a cyclone on the land, except that it was made of purple mist on the water. It encircled us in a moment, tearing at the canvass and whining through the rigging. The first mate began screaming for us to reef the mainsail and furl the top-gallants, but the first men who tried it were hurled into the drink. And one of them, Scully Toe by name, was a great matey of mine! Anyhow that was not the strangest thing, mark ye. For despite the wind in the spars, the ship was not going anywhere! I swear it by the locker of the sea, it was not moving more than when at anchor in a bay. The waves broke against it, the whirlwind rolled around, but nothing came of it other than the lost men and torn rigging. Well now--”
He broke off a minute to rake in some coins, before another round was started.
“Well now, that was not all. While we were a sittin’ there in the cyclone, a face appeared in it before us. A face made of clouds, as big as the brigantine itself! It was a woman’s face, as beautiful as the sunshine and as wild as a curlew’s cry. Though it was marred a little by her having a patch over one eye, as dark as my own. Her hair whipped around her face, all made of clouds, and she blew on the ship while laughing. These are the words she spoke, in a voice made of wind and rain, 'the world is mine now. All mine! Ye shall suffer as I say, and to my winds ye’ll play!’. Then the face kind’o blew away, leaving a rent into the daylight. Soon the whirlwind was gone, whipped across the drink onto the horizon. Many thought that day that we had seen a goddess, Thetis or Medusa herself, but I’m of a differing opinion, I’ll have ye know. I think it were more of a pig-poker from the underworld than anything from the light above!”
At the end of the story the somber men in the blue sweaters grunted, or muttered things about the 'world coming to no good, anymore’ but did not seem to take the piratical gentleman’s story at its face value. Jax had enjoyed it greatly, though the fact that the storm and whirlwind had been purple made him somewhat uneasy.
At that juncture the game began to get really heated, with the wagers going higher and higher on all sides. Jax leaned over the edge of the chair, watching intently. He saw his favorite’s hands go flashing here and there, always quick and clever. But he had not seen any foul play when suddenly one of the men in blue cried out, “‘Ay, Patch MacCore! You’re cheatin’!”
“Ain’t,” the accused returned steadily, raking in all the piles of cash. “Ye simply be a sore loser.”
“Ye are too!” One of the men, the smallest and nastiest looking of the bunch, stood up to point his finger like a claw across the table. “I saw you swap a card into the deck when t’was against the rules. You’re makin’ money off of us by cheating!”
Feeling that he was a key witness, Jax stepped up beside the table on Patch’s side. “He didn’t cheat. I’ve been watching the game from his side, so I would have seen it if he did. You are just sore losers!”
Everyone was on their feet by now. One of the other sailors from the Hannry snarled, “so, ye have a toady to help you! Well, we won’t stand for that, nor for being swindled out of our hard-earned cash. Give it back now, MacCore, or else ye’ll regret it.”
“Promises, promises. Ye’ll no start trouble here. And this young man stands for me, don’t you lad?”
“Of course, you didn’t cheat. They’re liars!”
The biggest and strongest-looking of their opponents stepped forward, cracking his knuckles. “You think we won’t, ‘ay? Well, we’ll show ye! Get 'em, lads!”
There was the ringing of steel and Patch drew a cutlass from his side, while the men in blue all picked up short clubs and daggers from beside them. They rushed at Patch, five to one, while he swung his cutlass to parry the first man’s attack. He looked like he would soon be overrun, despite a certain agility and practice with the blade, but Jax was not about to stand by and do nothing. He thought that the piratical personage was being wronged, so he lost no time in jumping into the fray.
He gave a blow to the side of a man’s head with his clenched fist, swinging hard. But it was not enough to phase the toughened seaman. He turned with his knife and swung at the young man, who ducked the arc of the blade and jumped forward to tackle him. During the ensuing tussle he was able to get to his taser, giving the man a shock while holding off the dagger blade. That sent him running frightened into the rain, but from there the battle went wild. Jax could hardly tell what was going on, other than that he was in a foment of fighting energy. He gave blows with a sort of grim joy, dodging the ones he could and taking them when he couldn’t. Patch was a terror with the long blade, knocking cups off of the table and slicing away at his attackers. At one point, Jax looked up from where he had been knocked to the floor to see Patch MacCore up on the table, hacking at an enemy who barely blocked the swings with his dagger while trying to advance.
Not much later, Jax found himself fighting the burliest of their opponents, neither of them with a weapon anymore. Behind him somewhere, Patch was dueling with the cunning, small man, but the other two had fled by now, or perhaps lay on the floor unmoving. Jax wasn’t sure, and his head was too full of the heat of battle to care.
“Take that!” He cried, seeing an opening and jumping forward to give the man in blue a sound blow to the chin. The tall, thick fellow staggered to the door, Jax following with the intention of knocking him entirely out of it. But his enemy recovered, staggering forward to grasp him around the waist with his giant hands.
“Alright, my lad, out the door with you!” the giant bawled, heaving him off the floor in his grip.
Jax pounded at his face with fists, but it didn’t change anything. As if he had been made of stone, the giant ignored the blows and ran to the door, kicking it open and sending Jax flying to the wooden planking outside with a blow of his own. Jax’s face felt like it was smashed in, while his head hit against the wooden planks so hard that it rang and he lay there stunned, gasping for breath. Looking up through bleary eyes, he saw two things happen at once. First, a curved sword jerk through the burly man’s chest from behind, making him stop in his tracks with an expression of surprise. Secondly, a dark shape detached itself from a bridge nearby and fell down towards Jax.
It was the creature from the train, which had been carefully waiting its moment outside the inn. The dark underside of the bridge had been a good place to wait, wrapped up in its black, bat-like wings. It had seen the men in the blue coats go running from the inn and heard the commotion inside. It was powered by only one command and one will: to kill the World-Traveler. When it saw him flung unto the walkway below, it felt a surge of joy. Here was its prey, laid out before it like a fly in a spider’s web.
And with that, it jumped down onto him.