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  “What, again? I swear, they teach you Feds how to cheat.” I threw my cards down. “But seriously,” I lowered my voice to a whisper, “how’re we gonna get outta here?”

  Mary frowned. “We are not. We will serve our time and then will be free to return to our mission.” She was already collecting all the cards and stacking them neatly for Ned to shuffle.

  “But two hundred years?” I held up a hand. “I know, intraspace and all that, it’ll seem like a lot less on the outside. But how much less? And can we afford to lose however long it is?”

  Now Ned was frowning, but not at me. “We don’t know exactly how much time it’ll wind up being in our reality,” he admitted. “Time’s a bit . . . elastic here. It could be a day, it could be a week. It probably won’t be more than two or three weeks, but there’s no guarantee.”

  “Three weeks? But what about the invasion?” Tansy was listening intently—she’d already picked up a bit about our mission from previous conversations, and I didn’t see any point in excluding her or lying to her. Gwarmesh didn’t seem interested in the least. “Won’t it all be over by then?”

  “It might,” Mary replied. Her frown deepened, but after a second she shook her head. “There is little we can do about it, however. There is no escape from a Galactic Authority prison, and even if there was the idea of violating our sentence and bringing the weight of the galactic government down upon us is not one I wish to contemplate.” She shivered slightly, which told me it really was that bad of an idea. “No, we must simply make the best of matters.”

  “There is one bit of good news,” Ned offered. “The officer who tried us said we’d covered over thirty-three million light-years since the problem on the train—thirty-three million, seven hundred and eighteen thousand, five hundred and forty-seven-point-six-five light-years, to be exact. The train would have reached its first stop past Earth, two-point-seven million light-years away, in one hour, so it was traveling at a speed of point-four-five light-years a minute. We stopped the train,” he took a second to look slightly guilty before pressing on with his math word problem from hell, “about twenty minutes in. Which means we’d covered roughly nine million light-years, and had thirty-four million to go.”

  I rested my head in my hands. “And this is a good thing how?” I don’t think I’d ever realized just how far from home we were until then.

  “We had forty-three million light-years to cross to reach the matrix,” Ned reminded me. “The train dropped us within three hundred light-years of it, but we had no idea how far we’d gone before we crashed onto that planet. But if his math was right—and the Galactic Authority doesn’t make mistakes when figuring distances—we’ve actually covered forty-two million, seven hundred and eighteen thousand and change light-years total. Which means we’re within three hundred light-years of the matrix, or will be once we’re returned to our own plane after serving our time. We haven’t lost any distance at all!”

  I stared at him. Tall stared at him. Mary stared at him. Tansy stared at him. Hell, even Gwarmesh stared at him, and I wasn’t completely convinced he knew what any of those words meant.

  “You’re excited,” I said slowly, “because after all this time and all this trouble, we haven’t lost any distance since we got off the bus?”

  Ned had the decency to look a little embarrassed. “Well, silver linings and all that, right? Gotta look at the bright side.”

  “And that’s bright for you? The fact that we still have three hundred light-years to go?”

  “Sure. Three hundred light-years is nothing.”

  “Yeah? Look what happened the last time we thought that.” Now he looked a little more embarrassed. But something else had occurred to me. “Wait a second. You said intraspace is ‘geometrically fixed,’ right?”

  “Geographically fixed,” he corrected. “Yeah.”

  “So this prison was already here before we arrived.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But that ship picked us up by the planet, didn’t it? Why would they put a big-ass prison like this right near a planet that’s under Interdict, even if it is on another plane of reality?” Ned was starting to look a little concerned, and I don’t think it was because he was bending the cards. “It makes more sense that the prison’d be in some other location, and they’d beam us to that spot before sending us through, right?” I could tell from the look on his face that I was on to something, though I devoutly wished I wasn’t. “Which means we actually have no idea where we are right now. And when we do finish serving our sentence, they’ll probably just drop us at the nearest bus depot to the prison exit, rather than returning us to that planet we were never supposed to be near anyway. So we could wind up anywhere in the universe, including even farther from the matrix than we’d been when we started this ridiculous journey!”

  I had to stop because I was out of breath, but I’d gotten my point across. Ned looked at me, then at Mary. Mary looked at Ned and then at me. Tall looked at me, at Mary, and at Ned. I looked at Mary—hey, I’ve got my preferences here. Tansy’s head was moving back and forth so fast I thought it was just gonna spin off and shoot across the room. Gwarmesh was studying those enormous gnarled claws protruding from his fingers.

  Tall was the first one to break the silence, and he said the one thing I never thought I’d hear him say:

  “We’ve got to break out of this place. Right now.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Immovable Object meets Irrefutable Farce

  “Ooh, really?” Tansy started bouncing up and down so fast she was practically vibrating. “You’re gonna break outta here? Can I come too?”

  “You have to,” Ned answered. “Without my tools I can’t get these anklets off, and that means if Mary goes you go.” He glanced up at Gwarmesh. “And you too, big guy.”

  Gwarmesh grunted. He might have nodded his head, too—either that or there was a brief hair avalanche from his forehead down—so I guess that meant he was in.

  “Okay, so how do we do this?” I asked.

  “No idea,” Ned admitted. “We need to get out of intraspace first. That’s the biggest problem. Then we have to get these manacles off.”

  “And,” Tall added, “we’ve got to find a way to keep the Galactic Authority from figuring out where we’ve gone and tracking us down. Ideally, we’d keep them from ever realizing we’ve left.” He frowned. “I’ve no idea how to do that, though.”

  “Heh. Leave that part to me.” Surprisingly, that rumbling statement came from Gwarmesh. He grinned down at the rest of us, revealing teeth that would’ve done a nettle patch proud. “Just give me a week’s warning.”

  I waited for him to explain, but he’d gone back to admiring those scythes he called nails. “I don’t even want to know,” I muttered, though of course that wasn’t true. “But anyway, great. So we won’t tip them off when we leave, and there won’t be any cosmic manhunts. Excellent. And, Ned, you think you can get these things off us once we’re back in our own space?” I shook my leg so the anklet and its green cord jangled against the chair leg.

  “No problem,” Ned assured me. “I just need a few tools—I’d like to get my own back, of course, but if I can’t do that I’m sure I can improvise from whatever I find. These things aren’t too complicated—they only work because we can’t get to anything to remove them.”

  “Great. So that just leaves getting out of this prison and out of intraspace. Anybody got any ideas?” There was suddenly a whole lot of headshaking going on. “Right. Well, let’s all think on it a while, okay? I’m sure we’ll come up with something.”

  That had been over ten months ago.

  “Still nothing?” I asked when we’d gathered for lunch that day. More headshaking. We were all getting really strong neck muscles. But not a whole lot else.

  “There’s got to be a way,” Tall griped for the ten thousandth time—I had been trying to keep track but gave up when we hit two hundred. It just wasn’t worth it. “Every prison has a weak point.
We just need to—”

  “Yeah, we know, find it and exploit it,” I cut in. “Great. When we see the big sign saying ‘hey, prison weak point over here!’ we’ll let you know.”

  “I don’t see you doing any better,” he snapped at me. “What’ve you contributed to all this lately?”

  “Hey, I’m the one who suggested we start stockpiling food,” I pointed out. And it was true. For the past few months we’d been cutting the corners off our meal squares, pushing them back together into a smaller square, and then rolling that up and sliding it into our bunny slippers. Turns out whatever these squares are made of, they stay fresh for two or three days. Then they dry out, which means they become like fruit-leather. They still taste just as good—better, actually—and once in that state they don’t seem to age or decay or anything. So we each had a supply of food now for whenever we finally managed our escape. Hey, no point being on the run if you’re gonna starve to death, right?

  But Tall wasn’t impressed. “Yeah, that’s great,” he sneered at me. “So we have food. We’re still stuck here!”

  “So find us a way out!” I snapped back at him. All our tempers were short. It didn’t help that I’d gotten a nasty paper-cut that morning, so I was a little irritable already.

  “You find one,” he retorted, “and I’ll happily throw you out of it!”

  “Yeah, good luck with that, brainiac,” I countered. “You’ll just come flying out right behind me, remember?” I raised my leg and shook it slightly to illustrate the point. Then I stopped in mid-shake.

  Ever have one of those “Eureka!” moments you always see in cartoons? The one where the light bulb goes off over your head because the most perfect idea in the world has just leaped into your brain and brought its own spotlights and back-up band? This was a light bulb the size of a planet, and there was an entire symphony orchestra in there providing the swelling background music. For a second I was so impressed with the delivery I almost forgot the idea itself. Fortunately it was pretty insistent.

  “What?” Tall had noticed my glazed look. “What’s wrong?” Aw, he did care!

  “Nothing,” I managed to reply finally when I got my mouth and throat working again. “Nothing at all. Except that you’re a genius and you may have found us a way out of here.”

  “I did?” Now he looked even more confused. “How?”

  “I don’t know yet. It’s just an idea, and it may not work. But if the soundtrack is any indication, it just might at that.” He was looking more puzzled by the second but I didn’t have time for that. I turned to Ned. “Ned, you said you’d need your tools to get these anklets off us. Any chance you can cobble something together from what we’ve got here?”

  Ned thought about that a second, then nodded. “Yeah, they’re not too careful at guarding the automatic tape dispensers or the stamp holders. I could get my hands on some of those, take ’em apart, and probably get something that’ll work. It won’t be pretty, and I might need three of ’em because they’ll fall apart—or blow up—during use, but they should work.” He was studying me. “Why?”

  “Don’t worry about the why just yet,” I warned him. “Just work on cutting us loose. We also need a way out of intraspace.”

  “I thought—” Tall started to say, but I cut him off.

  “No, I don’t have a way back to our reality,” I explained. “I do have a way out of this prison though. I think. So the question is, if we can get out of here, can we get out of intraspace itself?”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” Tansy said. She gave us a bell-like little laugh. “I can get us back to our reality, no problem.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure!” She fluttered her wings and her eyelashes at the same time. I’ll tell ya, if she wasn’t less than half my height and if I wasn’t already stuck on Mary I could probably fall hard for that little space-pixie. “I’m a bender—it’s what I do. I bend the laws of physics, though usually just for a few seconds and in a very small area.”

  “You mean like with the guy who became a walking Box O’Noodles?”

  “Yeah, like that.” She pouted. “He would’ve changed back in a few minutes. Is it my fault we were near a schoolyard during lunch hour?” Ick. “But anyway, if you can get us out of here I can warp things enough to get us back.”

  I scratched my bill. “Wait, if you can do that, why’re you still here at all?”

  “I can’t affect anything in this place,” she explained. “They’ve got the differentials all locked down—I’m guessing they’ve had benders here before. But if we’re outside the prison? Done deal.”

  “Great!” I glanced up at Gwarmesh. “What about you, big guy? You still up for creating our stand-ins or alibis or whatever it is?”

  He nodded. “Been workin’ on it a while, actually,” he admitted. “Just need another day or two to finish up.”

  “Perfect. Ned, you get to work on your release gizmos. Gwarmesh, you finish up your thing. Mary, Tansy, Tall, just be ready. As soon as everything’s in place we’ll test my idea. And if it works? We’re outta here.”

  It was three more days before Ned said he was ready. It was after dinner, and we all decided to take a little walk. The guards watched us go but they didn’t bother to follow us. After all, where we going to go?

  Once we were out of sight from everyone, we ran back to the guys’ barracks and to the sleeping cell Ned and Gwarmesh shared. Each cell was the same—a little room, maybe eight by eight, with a bed against each side wall. The back wall had a toilet, a sink, a shower, and shelves for clothes, slippers, and the few personal items we were allowed, like toothbrushes and towels and squeaky toys. The front wall didn’t exist—after lights-out a mesh of energy covered it, to make sure we stayed in our rooms all night, but until then it was open. Inmates often returned to their rooms to get cards or books or something, then headed back to the rec room for the rest of their leisure time.

  “Okay, Gwarmesh—time to knock our socks off,” I said as we gathered between the two beds there.

  He nodded. “Strip,” he barked.

  “What?” I stared at him. “It’s an expression, about the socks—I didn’t mean it literally.”

  He gave me his big snaggle-toothed grin. “Strip. All of you. Now.”

  We looked at each other, then Ned shrugged, kicked off his bunny slippers, and started to shuck his poncho. The rest of us quickly followed suit—good thing those emerald bands passed through matter or we’d never have gotten our pants off.

  In a few seconds we were all standing there, completely nude, at least pretending not to look at each other. I tried not to stare too much at Mary—this wasn’t the time or the place. But damn! Either the aliens had picked her because she was in phenomenal shape or they’d enhanced her appearance a bit during all the other modifications. All I can say is, they’d made a great choice. I just hoped no one else walked by. This might be a little hard to explain. Not impossible, mind, and not all that unheard of in here—hey, you had to amuse yourself somehow!—but tricky.

  “Right.” Gwarmesh had knelt down by his bed while the rest of us were disrobing, and now he hauled out—

  —dust bunnies.

  No, that wasn’t right. These were more like . . . hairballs. Great big hairballs. Six of them.

  “Is now really the time for spring cleaning?” I asked him, but he ignored me. Instead he grabbed my poncho and pulled it on over one of these hairballs. Then he shoved the thing on top of my pajama bottoms, and the whole mess onto my bunny slippers. Ew. I wondered if I could requisition new clothing?

  “I don’t see—” Tall started to say from behind me, but he stopped and stared. So did the rest of us.

  Because the bundle that had been my clothes and some of Gwarmesh’s stray fur was . . . rising. And expanding. He wasn’t doing anything that I could see, just leaning back with his arms crossed and a smug smile on his face, but the hairball was growing somehow, like a balloon being inflated. It filled out the pajama bottoms and the poncho, s
lid into the bunny slippers, and rose above the poncho in a distinctly duck-like head. After only a few seconds I was looking at an exact copy of myself.

  Only, y’know, made out of yeti fur.

  “That’s . . . amazing,” I whispered. And damn near shed my feathers when it opened its matted-hair bill and echoed me perfectly. “What the hell?”

  “Talk to it,” Gwarmesh urged. “It needs to absorb the sound of your voice to get it right.” He moved on to Tall’s clothes and inserted the next hairball. And so on.

  In less than a minute the cell was really really crowded. There were two of each of us, and our doubles looked and sounded exactly like us, except for the whole “made of fur” thing.

  “Do you really think these’ll fool anyone?” I asked. “I mean, the resemblance is uncanny but they are, well, a bit hairy.”

  “Nobody’ll notice,” Gwarmesh assured me. “Nobody ever does.” He pulled a stack of clothes out from under Ned’s bed and started tossing garments at each of us. I was happy to pull mine on, and relieved that I could stop pretending not to notice Mary’s unclothed state, but it did make me wonder.

  “If you had these spare clothes all along,” I asked Gwarmesh, “why’d you make us strip?”

  “Needed the DNA,” he answered. “To complete the doubles.”

  Oh. That made sense. “And how long’ll these things last?” It would suck to have them collapse into scattered mounds of hair after a few days or a week. Especially since, back in the real world, that’d mean only seconds from when we left.

  But Gwarmesh chuckled. “Long as they get food and water? Indefinitely.”

  “Nice.” I turned to Ned. “Okay, your turn.”

  “We’ll need a little more elbow room,” he replied. “And we should send our doubles back to the rec room now, before anyone notices we’re gone.”

  “Fair enough.” I looked at my double one last time, then held out my hand. “Good to know you, hair-me. And good luck.”