“About going home. Like maybe something’s wrong there.”
“Nothing’s wrong there, Jep. You’re tired, that’s all. So am I. You’re tired, and when we get home we have to go to school, and there’s sports practice, and your body isn’t interested in doing anything but sleeping. Neither is mine. The idea of music practice makes my throat hurt like crazy.”
“I guess that’s it,” he said, returning her kiss and smoothing her wild hair away from her face. They smiled comfortingly at one another and set out after Gotoit and Willum R.
Voorstod
ONE
• Jeopardy Wilm woke into a strange world and a strange time, with a headache that roared and howled between his ears. His body was on a bed, arms and legs flung out in all directions. His mind was somewhere else, looking for him. The air smelled wet and moldy. There were voices in his head that he did not know, voices and a horrid wrenching he thought he might have felt once before, long ago, and hated then and now. Both the voices and the wrenching had happened elsewhere, in the darkness before he woke, and he remembered them as he sometimes remembered parts of an unpleasant dream from which he had wakened too quickly.
A moan came from his throat of itself, unintended, making the pain in his head thunder and throb. Nearby a chair scraped on a wooden floor, the noise sending jagged lightning through his skull. It was not a usual sound, not the sound a chair would make in the settlement. Sponge panels made a soft, cushiony sound. This sound shrieked, but he knew what it meant. Someone, someone getting up to see to him.
The face that came to hang over him was not a face he knew. It had an aura of red light around it, a disturbing tendency to swim toward him and then away.
“Wakin’ up, are you?” the mouth above him asked, a gaping maw of teeth, ogrelike, with a great oar of a tongue waggling in it. Jep squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again, and again. The aura faded; mouth and face dwindled to a proper size; and he was able to understand the voice. It wasn’t a Hobbs Land voice. He knew the words—System language—but the pronunciation was odd, full of sliding tones which had nothing to do with the sense of the words.
The face turned away, the mouth still uttering. “He’s comin’ back, Preu. I guess you didn’t kill him with the stuff after all.”
“I’ll see for myself, Epheron.” Another face ballooned over him, one with white hair fringing the edges of a dark cap, a face that wavered in his sight, back and forth, back and forth. Jep shut his eyes again, sure he was lost in nightmare.
“Boy,” said a harsher voice. “Listen to me. You’ll get your sense back quicker if you know where you are and who you’re among. I’m Preu Flandry, and this is Voorstod.”
Nothing. It meant nothing. “Who’s Voorstod,” the boy mumbled through dry lips. “Voorstod? Who is that?”
“You’re in Voorstod on the planet Ahabar,” Flandry said angrily.
“Ahabar,” mumbled the boy. He knew the meaning of the word. Ahabar was a planet. One of the inner-System planets. Large. Ruled by a monarchy. Queen somebody. “I’m on Ahabar. Queen somebody.”
The man struck him, not hard. “We don’t talk of Queens here. Though we may share the planet, this isn’t Ahabar, this is Voorstod.”
Which left him where he had been before: nowhere. If Voorstod was not a person, what was it?
“He’s never heard of Voorstod?” someone said incredulously. “Maire Girat’s grandson?”
“Not anybody’s grandson,” mumbled Jep, coming to himself a little. “China’s mom died. I don’t have a grandma.”
There was angry murmuring punctuated by snarls, like dogs fighting over a not-very-interesting bone, more out of habit than appetite.
Another man came to the bed, a squinty-eyed man. “Who’s Sam Girat?” the man asked.
“Sam Girat?” asked Jep, trying to pull himself up a little. “He’s Topman of Settlement One.”
“He’s your father,” snarled a voice from somewhere else, not one of the voices he had heard before.
“You don’t need to talk like that,” said Jep. “He’s nothing to do with me. That’s improper, saying my mother’s friends have anything to do with me.” He succeeded in getting more or less upright and stared around the room. Against the far wall was a stone hollow with a fire in it and a small door next to it. The floor was wood, not polished, as Jep was accustomed to seeing wood, but dry and splintery. The ceiling was crossed with round wood beams, then crossed the other way with flat boards laid side by side. The walls were splotchy and stained, dun and rust colored, as though water had leaked through everywhere, in some places more copiously than others, making islands and peninsulas of stain upon the dank surfaces. A curtained window occupied the center of the wall opposite the fire; plank doors, bound heavily with metal straps and hinges, opened at the middle of the other walls. From where he lay, Jep could see that the door to his right was spiked shut with huge nails, driven deep.
Two of the three chairs by the fire were occupied. The man beside the bed went back to the third chair, slumping into it gracelessly. “Kid doesn’t have a grandma! Hah.”
“Question is, Pye, does the grandma have a kid?”
The white-fringed man leaned forward to warm his hands at the fire. For the first time, Jep realized how cold and damp the room was, how bitterly cold he himself was. He shivered. The blanket across his body was sodden with moisture, like a fungus after rain. He shivered again and tried to distract himself by identifying the men. The white-haired one was Preu. The younger one with the huge mouth who had spoken first was Epheron. The squinty-eyed man who had just left him was Pye, and Jep had seen him before.
“What’s your whole name?” asked Jep, pointing.
“My
