she shook her head.
âYouâve gotta start trusting me sometime,â she said. âI canât be the only one taking leaps of faith here.â
âItâs not about trust,â I protested. âYouâre my first and only recruit. Youâre my responsibility. I canât let you run off to do something potentially dangerous, and beyond that, where are you even going to go? Weâre on a prehistoric Earth, remember? Itâs not like you can just Walk to the corner store and buy us some milk.â
Now it was her turn to hesitate, though it was for an admirably short moment. âThere are other ways to get food.Iâm sure there are fruit trees, right? And fish?â
âI donât think there are fish trees,â I said, and she threw a coil of copper wire at me. Iâd gotten her to laugh, though. Sort of. âAlthough, thatâs not a bad idea. Fishing, I mean.â
âNo, itâs not. I donât even have to Walk anywhere, I can just go off ship. Okay? Send your bubble thing to find me if Iâm taking too long.â
âHis name is Hue,â I reminded her, though I refrained from pointing out that I wasnât sure I could really send Hue anywhere. He wasnât exactly at my beck and call.
âWhatever. Gimme one of those satchels and Iâll go get us some fruit, okay? Itâs better than nothing, which is what weâve got.â
I handed her one. Somewhat reluctantly, but I knew she was right; I had to start trusting her. Weâd only been working together for a few hours, but this was fate-of-the-world stuff. I needed to let her stretch her legs, and it was best she do it now while we were still relatively safe.
Besides, this meant I could do a few things around the ship I was way more comfortable doing on my own.
First and foremost, once she left, I made my way down the cleared hallways to the living quarters. It may have been silly, but I wanted to find my own roomâor what had been my room. If this InterWorld was thousands of years in the future, Iâm sure I was long dead. It must belong to another Walker by now, but I just . . . wanted to see. I wantedsomething to be familiar, anything at all.
Nothing was, of course. InterWorld didnât allow for much customization in the first place, and whoever had used this room before the base was evacuated (abandoned? Surrendered?) hadnât left any personal items. The most I found was an old T-shirt, so yellowed with age that it was impossible to tell whether it had ever had any kind of logo on it at all.
I set my backpack in there nevertheless, and swept out as much of the dust as I could. The shift shuttersâmade of the thick acrylic they use to make airplane windowsâwere down and wouldnât open until the ship was powered again. The sun had been up for a few hours now, and was currently directly overhead; the solar panels were soaking it in, and with any luck we would have enough power to run basic functions by the time Josephine got back. Then I could open the windows and air out the rooms, get the dust out of the ventilation systems, use the stove and ovens in the kitchen, and (I hoped) have enough hot water for a shower.
And maybe, if I could use the solar energy to charge a few of the power cores, I could get the Hazard Zone up and running. Then Josephine would have a chance to really stretch her legs.
She came back a few hours later, right as I was starting to worry. While she was gone, Iâd managed to get two rooms as cleaned out as I could for us, and moved our stuff into both of them. I was staying in âmyâ room; hers was rightnext door. I figured itâd be safe enough and far less awkward than trying to share. I was still pretty sure she didnât like me much. That was sort of par for the course with most of my para-incarnations, it seemed. (A small part of me wondered exactly what psychological implications it had that I never seemed
âYouâve gotta start trusting me sometime,â she said. âI canât be the only one taking leaps of faith here.â
âItâs not about trust,â I protested. âYouâre my first and only recruit. Youâre my responsibility. I canât let you run off to do something potentially dangerous, and beyond that, where are you even going to go? Weâre on a prehistoric Earth, remember? Itâs not like you can just Walk to the corner store and buy us some milk.â
Now it was her turn to hesitate, though it was for an admirably short moment. âThere are other ways to get food.Iâm sure there are fruit trees, right? And fish?â
âI donât think there are fish trees,â I said, and she threw a coil of copper wire at me. Iâd gotten her to laugh, though. Sort of. âAlthough, thatâs not a bad idea. Fishing, I mean.â
âNo, itâs not. I donât even have to Walk anywhere, I can just go off ship. Okay? Send your bubble thing to find me if Iâm taking too long.â
âHis name is Hue,â I reminded her, though I refrained from pointing out that I wasnât sure I could really send Hue anywhere. He wasnât exactly at my beck and call.
âWhatever. Gimme one of those satchels and Iâll go get us some fruit, okay? Itâs better than nothing, which is what weâve got.â
I handed her one. Somewhat reluctantly, but I knew she was right; I had to start trusting her. Weâd only been working together for a few hours, but this was fate-of-the-world stuff. I needed to let her stretch her legs, and it was best she do it now while we were still relatively safe.
Besides, this meant I could do a few things around the ship I was way more comfortable doing on my own.
First and foremost, once she left, I made my way down the cleared hallways to the living quarters. It may have been silly, but I wanted to find my own roomâor what had been my room. If this InterWorld was thousands of years in the future, Iâm sure I was long dead. It must belong to another Walker by now, but I just . . . wanted to see. I wantedsomething to be familiar, anything at all.
Nothing was, of course. InterWorld didnât allow for much customization in the first place, and whoever had used this room before the base was evacuated (abandoned? Surrendered?) hadnât left any personal items. The most I found was an old T-shirt, so yellowed with age that it was impossible to tell whether it had ever had any kind of logo on it at all.
I set my backpack in there nevertheless, and swept out as much of the dust as I could. The shift shuttersâmade of the thick acrylic they use to make airplane windowsâwere down and wouldnât open until the ship was powered again. The sun had been up for a few hours now, and was currently directly overhead; the solar panels were soaking it in, and with any luck we would have enough power to run basic functions by the time Josephine got back. Then I could open the windows and air out the rooms, get the dust out of the ventilation systems, use the stove and ovens in the kitchen, and (I hoped) have enough hot water for a shower.
And maybe, if I could use the solar energy to charge a few of the power cores, I could get the Hazard Zone up and running. Then Josephine would have a chance to really stretch her legs.
She came back a few hours later, right as I was starting to worry. While she was gone, Iâd managed to get two rooms as cleaned out as I could for us, and moved our stuff into both of them. I was staying in âmyâ room; hers was rightnext door. I figured itâd be safe enough and far less awkward than trying to share. I was still pretty sure she didnât like me much. That was sort of par for the course with most of my para-incarnations, it seemed. (A small part of me wondered exactly what psychological implications it had that I never seemed
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