It was apparent that Earhart was in charge of the community of lost souls, which numbered about eighty people. After the initial greetings and excitement, Earhart had led them to one of the narrow caves where they sat on old wooden boxes. A samurai stood guard at the entrance.
Earhart shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s no way of telling time here. Watches don’t work, in case you haven’t noticed. I would guess I’ve been here about a year, but it’s hard to say. They” — she nodded at the group of samurai who had escorted Dane, Shashenka, and Ahana—“think they’ve been here about five years. But they come from thirteenth-century Japan. There are others here” — she indicated the people occupying the caves along the wall—“who come from all different times. From as early as two hundred B.C. to my future, like you. Some people from times earlier than mine arrived here after I did, which I don’t understand, either.
“We think time is a variable here that doesn’t flow in a linear fashion as we are used to,” Ahana tried to explain.
“I do have to say that you’re the first people who ever came here on their own,” Earhart noted. “Can you get back out?”
“We’re working on that,” Dane said. “We have a submarine on the water, but we lost power when we entered the portal. We think we can get out to the portal, and then we hope our people are still keeping our hole in the portal open.”
Earhart nodded. “Nothing works here.” She pointed at Shashenka’s rifle. “Go ahead. Try it. It won’t fire.”
Shashenka frowned and aimed into the air. He pulled the trigger and, as predicted, nothing happened other than the click of the trigger and the firing pin clicking uselessly on the cartridge in the chamber.
“That’s why we use these,” Earhart had a sword in her hand. “The only good thing is that the Valkyries can only use blades also. Our weapons can’t penetrate their armor, but we’ve learned hitting them in the eyes disables them. They pretty much leave us alone as long as we aren’t a nuisance. They do have another weapon that can turn people into stone, but they rarely use it.”
“Where is here?” Ahana asked.
“I’ve been trying to figure that out since I got here,” Earhart said. She described what had happened on her last flight, and Dane realized her experience was similar to what had happened to the Reveille.
“After the large sphere engulfed my plane,” she continued, “I was in darkness. Then there was a blue glow and—”
“Blue?” Dane interrupted her. “Are you sure it was blue?”
“You don’t forget something like that,” Earhart said.
Dane remembered the two different color beams he had seen inside the Angkor gate. Gold seemed to be that used by the Shadow, but blue was that used by the Ones Before.
“I think the craft was automated,” Earhart continued, “because I saw no one. The blue light seemed to point a direction, and I left my plane and followed it. I walked along the inside of the sphere along a flat surface until I reached the outer wall. There was a hatch. I opened it and went inside. There was another hatch in front of me, and I shut the one behind and opened the other one. I didn’t’ know why I was doing this, but felt compelled to.
“When I opened the outer hatch, I was surrounded by the blue light, which was fortunate, because water poured in. The light kept me in a small circle of air, though, and pulled me out of the craft. And then I was here,” she finished simply. “On the beach, half dead. That’s when they found me.” She indicated the people on our side. They all had similar experiences. Entering a fog, being taken by the sphere, being rescued by the blue light.
“We’ve made the best we can of this place. We divert water here. And the soil was gathered before I arrived from smaller deposits into sections large enough for us to grow food. Sometimes an animal from our side comes through, sometimes it’s one of the strange creatures from the other side.”
“Wait a second,” Dane said. “You just said the other side. Isn’t this the other side?”
Earhart shook her head. “You asked me where this was, and I couldn’t tell you, but if you asked me what this place was, I would call it the space in the wall between our world and their world. We’re like rats trapped in the wall. We can see the sphere come through every so often. Sometimes the blue light brings us people. Sometimes the sphere drops people off at the Valkyrie camp, which is about four miles that way,” she pointed. “They work on the people they get there. Experiment on them.”
“How many people?” Shashenka asked.
“Hundreds, maybe thousands. We raided it not long ago and put some of them out of their misery, but the Valkyries droves us off.”
Dane could pick up the small flicker of hope in Shashenka that his brother might still be alive. From the agony he could sense in the direction that Earhart had pointed, he hoped that wasn’t the case.
“So there is another portal inside the water?” Ahana asked. “One that leads to the Shadow’s side?”
“I would assume so,” Earhart said. “There are several portals here. We’ve tried to explore as much as we can, but it’s huge and sometimes seems to even shift shape. I followed the wall that way” — she pointed in the opposite direction from the Valkyrie camp—“for a long time. Probably several days. It curves slightly, but I never completed the circle. I had to return the way I came, as I was running low on food. There might even be other free people over here.”
He thought of his teammate Flaherty and wondered where he was. “Do you have contact with the Ones Before? The ones who use the blue power light?”
Earhart shook her head. “No.”
“Have you tried any of the portals?” Dane asked.
“Some have, they either don’t come back, or they come back with a strange sickness that kills them quickly.”
Dane was tired. All this effort, and all they had done was to get halfway to where they wanted to go.
“This would be a good area to stage an assault,” Shashenka said.
“It is most fascinating,” Ahana said. “This area is most likely a buffer between the laws of physics and the environment on both sides.”
“Can you get us out of here?” Earhart asked Dane.
‘We can take about a dozen people,” he said. ”Then when the rest of our forces come through, they can take out the rest. But first, we have to figure out what good it would do to bring our people here. Since we can’t use modern weapons, and this really isn’t the other side like we had hoped…” He trailed off, confused.
“We’re one step closer to the Shadow’s home,” Ahana said, trying to put a positive spin on things.
“I don’t think—” Dane began, but there was a commotion among the samurai. One came running up to Earhart and rattled off something quickly.
She stood, slipping the sword in its sheath. “More visitors are coming. A man in armor and a woman in robes. They had Ragnarok with them.”
“Ragnarok?” The name sounded familiar to Dane.
“A Viking. He was captured by the Valkyries during our raid on their torture chambers. Come.” She strode toward the gully, Dane and the others right behind.
As they turned the corner into a cross-gully, three people appeared. As Earhart had described, a man and woman were accompanied by a hulking warrior whose hand had been amputated.
“Damn them,” Earhart hissed when she saw Ragnarok’s condition. “They must have probed him and learned it is the greatest insult a Viking can receive before death to not be able to defend himself in Valhalla.”
“How do they know that.” Ahana asked.
“They have ways to getting into people’s heads,” Earhart answered enigmatically.