Eternity's Wheel Read Online Free PDF Page A

from a music box. Random sensations are common when Walking, since you have to pass through the In-Between in order to get anywhere, and the In-Between is . . . well, it’s pretty much everything. At once. It’s the place we pass through when we Walk, sort of like its own pocket dimension. Or, more accurately, the dimension between all dimensions.
    The park was spread out before me, looking almost the same as it had a moment ago. There was a tree about a hundred yards in front of me that hadn’t been there before, but that was the only notable difference, at least at first. I started moving through the park, glancing around with fascination as the tiny changes became more noticeable.
    I didn’t smell the doughnut shop anymore; instead, the scent of freshly brewed coffee wafted over me from a twenty-four-hour diner across the street. I had to admit I was jealous. My Greenville didn’t have a twenty-four-hour anything.
    I walked to the corner, crossing the street at the protected crosswalk. The little light-up man was blue, not white as I was used to. I’d missed that the last time I’d been here. I passed by a McDonald’s with arches that were green instead of yellow. I had to smile; that was the first thing I’d noticed when I first wound up in this version of my town.
    I hurried as I went down my street. My injuries weren’t bothering me as much as they had been (aspirin for the win!), and I needed to get this done as quickly as possible. The first time I’d come here, I’d run into the first other version of me I’d ever met. A girl. Josephine.
    I remembered her name like I remembered my own, because in a way, it sort of was. I’d gone into my house, lost and confused, and there she’d been. She’d lived in my house with my mom, who’d looked at me like she’d never seen me before and called her daughter Josephine. Her daughter, not her son. A female version of me, living a life parallel to mine.
    She would be my first recruit.
    I was about halfway to my house when I stopped to cast out for her. We can sense each other, sort of, like when you’re alone in a room but you can tell when someone walks in without turning around. I paused for a second and closed myeyes, expanding my senses, and that’s probably what saved my life.
    They’d been waiting for me.
    I threw myself to the side as a netlike thing hurtled over where I’d been standing. They started to come up out of the shadows, or maybe they were the shadows themselves. It was hard to tell. All I knew for sure was that they were agents of HEX, and they had found me.
    There were maybe four or five of them. I was trained in thirteen different styles of martial arts and immediately recognized six nearby objects that could be used as improvised weapons.
    I also had no defensive gadgets on me whatsoever, and I was injured in five different places. Not to mention these were HEX agents, not Binary. The Binary at least were predictable; they had their plasma guns, their sheer numbers and one-shot shields, their grav disks. Basic stuff. HEX agents? Those were unpredictable. I’d taken three different Magic Study courses on InterWorld Prime, and I probably knew about a quarter of what they could do.
    I was more than a little outgunned.
    They were slowly surrounding me, moving like liquid, fanning out in a semicircle. The moonless night and scattered streetlamps made some of them all but invisible in the dark. I did the sensible thing: I ran.
    Well, I Walked.
    I heard the music box again and a sound like bowling pins toppling over. I smelled something salty and saw a splash of bright pink as I slipped through the In-Between and into yet another version of Greenville.
    The street was empty again, but I kept moving anyway, back the way I had come. There was no point in going to Josephine’s house, not in that dimension and not in this one. I couldn’t sense another version of me here;