David Clarke

The Second Nexus

The Nexus Trilogy Book II

Preface

***

The Second Nexus

Chapter One

Okay, so here we go with the sequel proper. It follows on immediately from the end of the first story, so you don't have to fill in any blanks, because there aren't any. This story was written for everyone who wrote to me about the first one – I hope you all enjoy it!

The only bad thing about our arrival in this world – I'll call it 'The Space Travel World', I think – was the timing: we arrived on Saturday August 29^th, which was right at the end of the school holidays, and that meant – or so I expected – that we would have to go straight back to school the following week. Though I suppose that it wasn't as bad as all that, considering that the alternative might have been getting killed by the Grey soldiers up in the Hub.

But it turned out that the Residence actually had its own small classroom, and it was here that the Kerpian boys started their education – after all, since they couldn't speak English or French they would not have been able to follow ordinary lessons. And the four of us who spoke French and/or English were sent there too to help them, because we had all been implanted with the Kerpian language during our earlier adventures.

To start with we were introduced to a couple of linguistics experts from the local university, and they listened to both the original language and our translations of it, ran it through their computers, and quickly came to the conclusion that Kerpian was a version of Hungarian. And that made things considerably easier, because they already had translation programs available for Hungarian.

In a way it was harder for Alain and Oli, because although they could read Kerpian they couldn't read French or English, which of course used a different alphabet; and so they were put on an elementary reading and typing course to teach them to read and type in French, which they both spoke fluently already. Stefan decided to use the opportunity to improve his French, and I thought I might as well try to learn the local dialect, which was called Elsassisch. And so our language learning, interspersed with some basic history – because of course we knew nothing about this world beyond the little I had learned from Dr Feldela and Colin Jordan – got under way. We were told that if we made sufficient progress we would all be moved to the local school the following trimester.

As if that wasn't enough to keep us occupied, in the third week Stefan and I got a visit from a couple of scientists from the capital, Strossburi. They wanted to talk to us about what we had seen on the computer in Hub Two – clearly Dr Feldela had passed on what I had told him about it. We explained to the scientists that we hadn't understood any of what we had read, and in most cases we had simply flipped to the next page as soon as we realised that what was in front of us was incomprehensible gobbledegook, but that didn't seem to put them off in the slightest. And before too long we found ourselves on a train heading north to the capital to help with their research.

We weren't exactly compelled to go, but we were told that it would virtually guarantee that our new papers would come through very quickly if we co-operated. We held out long enough to ensure that the promise extended to all eleven of us and not just me and Stefan, and then we said that of course we would be delighted to help.

I'd never been to Strasbourg in my own world, though I had seen a few pictures, and the one thing I noticed was that in this world the cathedral had two spires: in my world – and apparently in Stefan's – it only had one. I wasn't sure about it, to be honest: the lopsided façade it had in my world made the cathedral unique; with two spires it was just another cathedral.

We were taken to the university, allocated two rooms (in practice we left my room empty and I slept with Stefan in his) and taken to a room where we spent an extremely dull two weeks asleep. This was because they used some sort of hypnotic technique to put us into a trance and then attempted to retrieve from the depths of our memories the various pages we had viewed on Dead Guy's computer at the Hub. They were lucky that we had chosen to look at the computer in English, because it made the job of reconstructing what we had seen a lot easier.

During our free time we wandered around the city sightseeing or just stayed in bed entertaining ourselves – we locked the door when we were doing that, even though we knew that attitudes to sex in this country were a great deal more relaxed than in either of the worlds we had come from originally.

Eventually the scientists said that they thought they had recovered everything that was recoverable, and that we could go back home to Milhüsa.

"Was it any use to you?" I asked.

"Oh, yes. It might take us a while to put everything together, but you've given us some useful material. I would say that there is a genuine possibility that we will be able to open a portal to the world that built the Nexus Room. And if we can talk to their scientists, we might be able to build a Room of our own."

"Well, if you do, and if you can find the world where I was born… do you think I might be allowed to use it? I mean, I like this world a lot, and I'm very happy here, but I'd like at least to be able to tell my parents that I'm safe."

"I'm sure that would be possible. But don't get your hopes up just yet: it'll probably be quite a long time before we even manage to establish a portal to the last world you were in, and according to the records you saw it was sometimes years between the creation of successful portals.

"All the same, we'll keep you informed. We might need to speak to you again once we get a bit closer to actually building a portal, but for now we'd just like to thank you for your help. Can you find your own way back to the station?"

And that was it, apparently. In fact I was a little more optimistic about being able to revisit my own world now, because I was sure the Kerpians would have records of the co-ordinates for it, and I was equally sure that, once the Grey problem had been solved, they would want to reconstruct the Hub Two Nexus Room – and that would mean rebuilding the portal to my home world. If, that was, the bomb had actually gone off, because we had no way of knowing whether it had done the job of sealing the portal to the Grey world or not.

We took the train home and resumed our studies, but we hadn't heard the last about our trip to Strossburi because, four days after we got back, the director of the Residence called me and Stefan into his office.

"I've got a present for you," he said, and he handed me a package about the size of a half-brick.

I opened this up with the help of Stefan's knife and discovered a pile of Identity Booklets and eleven plastic cards, each stuck to the outside of a small envelope.

"Those are your credit accounts," the director explained. "As I told you when you first got here, you're paid a small amount for studying, just so you can afford to buy clothes and other bits and pieces, and now you have your cards you can access your savings at any time: you just present the card in the store when you want to buy something. The envelopes contain the access codes you'll need to authorise purchases, and the ones you'll need to contact the bank by computer to check how much you have. And I can tell you that you two have rather more in your accounts than the others: the scientists made quite a generous payment for the help you gave them last week and the week before."

"Oh. Is there some way we can transfer our money to someone else's account using the computer?"

"Of course. Go to the bank site and you'll see how to do it. Anyway, if you'd like to give the others their cards… and their ID papers, of course: you're now all officially citizens of Elsass. Congratulations!"

It was good to know that we now had a proper legal status in the community, though the way everyone had treated us so far meant that even without papers we hadn't worried at all about our position: this really did seem to be a friendly world.

We took the ID papers and bank cards down to the school-room and interrupted everyone's studies long enough to hand them all round. I handed the ID papers out first, and while everyone was examining them I went round again with the bank cards. This took longer than it might have done: I'd handed the ID papers out using the photos on the front to identify the holders, but the bank cards had no photos and gave only the holder's surname, one initial and an ID number. And I had no idea what the Kerpians' surnames were – although I'd seen the memo Hansi pinched from Mr Jaecklin's office I'd skipped over the surnames.

Alain had decided to keep the name I had chosen for him when we first went to the mine, and so his card was in the name of De Columbarier A. However, Oli had apparently decided to take the same name, since they had a relationship somewhere between brothers and partners, and so his card was in the name of De Columbarier O.

I was able to guess at most of the Kerpians' surnames from their initials, though Hansi's real name turned out to be Johannes and Markus's first name was actually Hermann ("I hate it," he told us. "I like my second name a lot better, so I've been Markus for years. But the director asked for our full names, and I thought I ought to be honest – after all, this world is a new start for me: I wasn't very honest back home and I wanted to change.") And we had two names starting with 'T', so Tibor and Tommi had to enlighten us as to their surnames (Hedj and Ulmer respectively, although Tommi told us that he had changed his name back to his birth name of Ulmer, rather than his legal name of Paulauskas, which he had been forced to take when his mother had remarried).

Of course, once they had the cards they wanted to check and see how much money they had. As we weren't sure of the value of the Credit this was actually a bit meaningless, though we did discover that Stefan and I were both around five hundred credits better off than the others. I wanted us to share the extra around so that everyone was equally well off, but Markus refused to let us.

"You're the ones who got us here," he said. "And you've just had to have the insides of your heads examined for about two weeks, which I don't suppose was a lot of fun. I think you've earned the extra. Okay, if it turns out that one of us actually needs more money, maybe we'll ask, but otherwise it's yours. And if you don't shut up about it I'll have to thump you."

And I thought that was reason enough to let the matter drop.

***

For the next few weeks nothing much changed. We went on studying, and when we were free, usually at weekends, we went exploring, sometimes together and sometimes individually or in smaller groups. One weekend Stefan took us all out on a bicycle expedition (the director somehow arranged for the loan of eleven bicycles) to the forest he had talked about, and we had fun running about, playing war games and climbing trees. We found a couple of miradors, which were platforms that hunters had built high up in the branches of trees, ideal for watching out for wild boar. One of these was in a poor state of repair and so we didn't risk actually climbing the thoroughly unsafe-looking wooden ladder, but the other was in far better condition. It even had a roof so that the hunters wouldn't get wet in bad weather, and we all thought it made a good base for our games. Stefan said that in his world there were several of these dotted across the forest, and we decided that on future days off we would try to locate some of them.

And the following weekend Stefan and I rode out on our own. We headed for a different part of the forest to start with, but it started to rain shortly after we reached the forest and so we diverted to the mirador we knew about in order to take shelter. We left the bikes at the foot of the ladder and climbed quickly up.

This platform was well-constructed, with low sides as well as the roof, and coupled with the canopy of branches higher up the tree it provided a complete shelter from the weather; and the hunters who had built it had even put an old piece of carpet on the floor. The weather wasn't cold, and now that we were out of the rain and had taken off our wet jackets we felt fine, even though we were only wearing tee-shirts and shorts. Stefan settled into a corner, put his arm round my shoulders and pulled me close to him.

"Are you happy?" he asked me, speaking Kerpian as we usually did between ourselves: even though his French was improving and his English was pretty solid, his Kerpian was implanted and so more fluent than either. And, of course, so was mine.

"You know I am," I replied, nestling against him.

"So am I," he said. "Very happy. Look, Jake… if they do manage to open a portal… you're not really going to go back to your world, are you?"

"Well, I might go for a quick visit, I think. But I wouldn't really want to stay there: this is a far more interesting world than mine. And, besides, all our friends are here."

"Well, if you do go, can I come with you?"

"Of course you can! Though I'm not quite sure how it would go down with my parents… I can sort of imagine saying, 'Hello, Mum and Dad – this is my boyfriend. His father's in the SS and he's in the Hitler Youth.' I'm not sure they'd be altogether happy…"

"I'm not in the HJ yet," he pointed out. "You have to be fourteen. Technically I'm still in the Jungvolk, although because I'm a cadet at a Napola I'm counted as being somewhere in between…. Except I'm not, not any more. It's silly to even say 'I am a cadet' because I don't really intend going back there, even if they do open a new portal. I suppose it would be good to get a chance to say 'Goodbye' to my parents, but the problem is that if I once went back I don't think they'd let me leave again. And that's why I was a bit worried when you said you wanted to go home. What if they wouldn't let you leave again?"

"I'd run away if I had to. Look, Stefi, you don't have to worry: I want to be with you, and I want to stay here. Like I said, this is a good world."

"Good," he said, and he hugged me hard.

For a while we sat quietly, listening to the rain.

"Jake," he said, quietly, "I was wondering… how do you feel about us having sex?"

I stared at him. "Do you really need to ask?" I said. "I love doing stuff with you, Stefi – you know that!"

"No, I mean… you know, proper sex. Like gay boys are supposed to do."

"Oh! Well, yes, I would like that… at least, I think so. I suppose it's hard to know until you try, but… well, to be honest I first thought about you doing that to me a long time ago, and I decided I definitely wanted you to try."

"No, Jake, that's not what's going to happen: I don't want to do anything to you. I want to do it with you, and that's not the same thing at all. If we're going to do it, it should be something we share, just like when we use our hands and our mouths. So we're not talking about me doing it to you: we're talking about us doing it to each other."

I wasn't sure what to say. I'd never for a moment considered taking the active role: in every fantasy I had had about it – and I'd had a few, mostly in the days when I was kept apart from Stefan, at the mine or in the Grey world – it had been him doing it to me. He was taller, stronger and, well, bigger – okay, not a lot bigger, but he was still clearly more mature than me, and so logically I felt he should take the active role.

"Jake?" he said, when I didn't speak. "What do you think?"

"Is that what you really want?" I asked. "To take turns, I mean?"

"Of course it is! I want to share all these things with you! We're equals, aren't we?"

"Well, yes, I suppose so. Okay, then: if that's what you really want then we'll do it that way."

"Great!" he said, hugging me hard. "Can we set a date for the first time, so we've got something special to look forward to? I was thinking maybe we could do it at Yule."

"Yule?"

"You know, the big festival for the longest night of the year. The Christians used to celebrate Christmas then, and I expect your people had a festival of their own, too."

"Chanukah," I said. "And I think that's a brilliant idea – though I'm not sure I can really wait that long…"

"Same here, but I want us to try. Besides, I was talking to Tibor and Hansi, and they both said the first time can hurt a bit unless you do some preparation first, and if we agree not to actually do it until the festival it'll give us time to sort of work up to it. Hansi told me a few things we could try in the meantime…"

"Wow, you have been thinking about this," I commented. I'd have been embarrassed to talk to Tibor and Hansi about it, even though I knew that this was a stupid way to feel, because all of our friends knew that Stefan and I loved each other, and all of them approved.

"I know. In fact they said they'd be happy to help us prepare by showing us the sort of things they did with each other when they were getting ready for it, and I said I'd talk to you about it and we'd let them know. So what do you think?"

"Well, if they don't mind… after all, I suppose that the better prepared we are, the more we'll enjoy it."

"That's what I thought. Thanks, Jake." And he hugged me again, and I snuggled up even closer to him. And then I thought I ought to kiss him for being so thoughtful, and so I did, and then he kissed me back, and we spent the next half hour or so kissing and cuddling happily until the rain stopped and we were able to ride back home.

As soon as we got back I got on one of the Residence computers and printed myself out a calendar of the next three months. I discovered that this year the Festival of Lights that marks the beginning of the Chanukah celebrations would be on December 12^th, whereas Yule would be on the 21^st. But the big plus point for Chanukah was that the twelfth was a Saturday, and so we wouldn't have to get up the following morning. And when I ran this past Stefan he approved entirely, and so we pinned the calendar to the wall in our room with a big red ring around December 12^th.

Our studies went on. The Kerpians' understanding of English grew steadily, and soon they were asking us to speak English to them some of the time to help them practise. Often we had to supply a Kerpian translation, but it was fun, all the same. And Oli had started to take English lessons, too, even though he was still barely able to read French, and somehow he managed to persuade the normally lazy Alain to share his lessons. By the time the mid-term holiday came round at the end of October all eleven of us were able to hold a very basic conversation in English, even though in most cases this was limited to things like 'Pass the salt, please.'

And it was during the mid-term break that Hansi and Tibor began to show us ways to get each other ready for what we intended to do on December 12^th.

"We wouldn't do this for just anyone, you know," commented Tibor, as they came into our room, closed the door behind them and started to undress. "But you're a bit special. After all, if it wasn't for you we'd still be shovelling coal all day long."

"I nearly got you killed, though," I pointed out, looking at the nasty scar on Hansi's hip and the smaller one on his chest.

"It was worth taking the risk," said Hansi. "Before the Greys came I was in an orphanage and Tibor was in the House of Detention, so we didn't have a lot of fun even before we were sent to the mine. What we've got now is unbelievable. And I know the others feel the same: they'd all do anything for you two.

"Anyway… first you need to get in the mood."

And they started to cuddle each other and to kiss. I wasn't sure that I would have felt entirely comfortable doing that in front of an audience: okay, they'd all seen me and Stefan kissing, but only when we were fully clothed. But then I suppose that Stefan and I both came from worlds that didn't exactly approve of this sort of behaviour, whereas in Kerpia sex between boys of the same age was perfectly acceptable.

For the next half hour they showed us all sorts of things to do, using fingers and small candles, not to mention plenty of lubricant.

"It's actually easier doing it for real," said Tibor. "Hansi feels a lot nicer inside me than that candle. But it's best to spend a while getting each other ready first, especially if you've never done it before."

"It's still probably going to hurt at first," Hansi warned us. "But I can promise it's worth it in the end. It's a whole lot better than anything else, even sucking… have you two tried that yet?"

We assured him that we had.

"Well, actual sex is even better. And now that we're in the mood… do you mind if we actually do it here, or would you prefer us to go back to our own room?"

"No, go ahead," I invited, interested to see how this would work in practice.

So first Hansi did it to Tibor, with Tibor lying across the bed on his stomach, and then, after a little cleaning up, they swapped places. Only Hansi positioned himself lying on his back with his legs raised, so that when Tibor entered him they were facing each other.

"You can do it either way round," Tibor said, "but we prefer it like this. It's nice being able to see each other – and you can kiss if you do it like this, too."

We watched, fascinated, until it was over. They cleaned themselves up and got dressed, and I impulsively hugged them both.

"Thanks," I said. "We really appreciate it. And I promise we'll tell you what happens when we do it ourselves."

"Do we get to come and watch?" asked Hansi, grinning at me.

"No," I said, firmly. "Or not the first time, anyway. Maybe when we've practised a few times, but I bet we make a mess of it the first time, and I'd prefer to do that in private."

"It's okay, I'm just teasing. We don't normally do it in public, either – unless you count Radu, but he's been our friend for ages and he doesn't mind. Besides, sometimes we rub him so he won't feel too left out, and he enjoys that."

"We ought to try to find him a boyfriend, though," said Tibor. "Or a girlfriend… but I'm pretty sure he prefers boys, at least at the moment."

"Did you know Markus has a girlfriend now?" asked Hansi. "They got together while you were in Strossburi. It's hard for them to actually talk to each other, because Markus's English is still pretty rubbishy, but I suppose talking isn't what they're most interested in."

In fact I hadn't known that. I'd noticed that Markus seemed in a good mood lately, but I hadn't realised why. So the next day I got him on his own and asked him about it.

"That's right, I haven't told you," he said. "Sorry – I meant to, I've just been a bit busy. Anyway, her name's Sylvie and she lives on the first floor – in the girls' wing, obviously, though there's nothing to stop us visiting each other whenever we want. And she's really nice. She's lived here for a long time now and she likes dancing – she's going to teach me."

"Don't you find it hard to talk to each other?"

"Well, we cheat: Oli interprets for us. Sylvie speaks French, after all. We just have to chase him out of the room when we want to kiss, otherwise he giggles a lot. He seems to think he and Alain kiss a lot better than me and Sylvie."

"That's just practice," I told him. "You'll just have to keep working at it until you get it right."

"That's exactly what I was thinking." And he gave me a big grin.

So it looked as if our friends were starting to settle down here: Markus had found a girlfriend, Tommi – who was making faster progress in English than most of the others – had found some friends of his own age among the other residents, and all of the rest of us had already had a close friend when we arrived: Tibor and Hansi, Frank and Shander, Alain and Oli and of course me and Stefan. The only remaining singleton was Radu, and the half term break solved that problem, too.

What happened was that he went out on the Wednesday on his own, borrowing one of the Residence bikes and cycling out into the forest to continue our ongoing hunt for miradors. I didn't get to hear the whole story until the Saturday evening, when he came and sat on my bed and told us what he had been doing for the past couple of days….

"I'd had a look at the map and checked the bits we've already looked at," he told me, "and I decided to go right through to the far side of the forest and look there. And…"

***

Radu rode most of the way to the village of Bantzenheim, which was just beyond the eastern edge of the forest, and then he started following one of the paths that led off into the trees. And after a while he saw a mirador away through the trees, so he found some bushes to hide the bike in and then walked the rest of the way to the hunters' platform. And this one was even better than the one we had found on our first expedition: not only did it have a proper roof, but it had complete sides as well, hinged halfway down so that one or more could be opened ready for shooting. This one, like the one we had found, had a carpeted floor, though by now we had worked out that this was probably to minimise noise, rather than purely for comfort.

So Radu climbed the ladder. At the top was a hatch in the floor which, he discovered once inside, had a bolt on, so it could be securely closed, and he thought that made this a perfect base for our games. So he sat down to rest for a bit, and promptly fell asleep.

He was woken up when he heard someone climbing the ladder. He'd left the hatch open, and before he could close it a boy's head appeared, swiftly followed by the rest of the boy, who yelled something down the ladder. And the first thing the boy did once he was inside was to jump on Radu and pin him to the floor. A second boy followed him into the hide, and this one closed the hatch and bolted it.

The first one asked Radu something, but unfortunately he spoke in Elsassisch, and so Radu didn't understand a word.

"I am sorry," he said carefully in English. "I do not understand."

"Oh, you're foreign! Hey, Fredi, we've been invaded by foreigners," said the boy to his friend, followed by a lot more that Radu didn't understand. Fortunately he, like the rest of the Kerpian boys, had been given a hand-held translator. It wasn't perfect because it had been set to translate English to Hungarian and vice versa, and Kerpian wasn't exactly the same as Hungarian, but it was better than nothing. So as soon as the boy got off him he pulled this from his bag and turned it on.

Over the next five minutes he established that the fair-haired one was called Kris and the dark-haired one was called Fredi, that they lived in Bantzenheim, that they were thirteen (and so a few months older than him: he was still only twelve and a half) and that this mirador belonged to Kris's uncle, who wouldn't be using it this season because he had broken his right arm. And that, they said, made it their property, and any foreigners who entered it uninvited would get beaten up.

Radu apologised, told them his name and age and that he lived at our Residence but that he originally came from a long way away.

"Where, exactly?" asked Kris.

"Not in this world," answered Radu, which led to an argument in which they accused him of lying: unlike Colin Jordan, these two had never heard of a parallel interchange. He swore he was telling the truth and offered to prove it, if they didn't mind coming back to the Residence with him, but they said it was far too far to walk, and that the only way to deal with liars was to beat them up. And that led to a fight, though in fact they didn't actually beat him up, just pinned him down and tickled him until he begged for them to stop.

They talked for a bit longer afterwards: Radu tried to explain where he came from, which was difficult because there was no such place as 'Kerpia' in this world. But eventually he told them that he had been born near the Black Sea, and that they did understand.

"Wow, that's hundreds of kilometres away," said Fredi. "You must be Bulgarian or Romanian or Bessarabian, or something like that. No wonder you can't speak English or French very well. What's it like there?"

"It was all right most of the time. But I didn't get on with my family, and in the end I ran away and got put in an orphanage."

"That sounds rough," sympathised Fredi. "Well, perhaps we won't beat you up, then. Fancy a swim?"

"A swim? Where?"

"In the canal, of course. Come on, we'll show you."

They led him less than a hundred metres [300 ft.] from the hide and there was a canal running through the forest. It seemed to be more for irrigation purposes than anything else because it was only about five metres [15 ft.] wide, and there was no towpath, just ordinary banks. If it hadn't been dead straight Radu would have thought it was a natural river.

Fredi and Kris threw their clothes off and jumped in. Radu hesitated: he had bad memories of the last time he had been outdoor swimming. But after a few seconds he decided to join them: it was a very warm day for late October, and the water looked good. So he stripped off and jumped in, and found that the water came up to his shoulders in the middle, and that there was an appreciable current: trying to swim against it he was hard pressed to make any headway at all, but going with the current he was able to swim a lot faster than he had been able to do in the Danube back home, because the river near his house was merely meandering along. And it felt really good, too: the water wasn't really very cold at all.

For a good hour they swam about, chasing each other and having races, and Radu was able to demonstrate that he was totally at home in the water. And it was nice to have someone else to swim with, too, even if they did gang up on him and duck him now and again.

Eventually they got out. Kris and Fredi had brought towels with them, but they opted to share one and handed the other to Radu. This gave him a good opportunity to check them out, and he was able to see that Kris was a little bigger than he was, and that Fredi was about the same size, and that both had a little hair. In fact they looked quite similar to Hansi and Tibor in terms of size, though Hansi had no hair yet. And Radu found himself wondering if these two were partners as well as friends. In his own world he would have asked, but he wasn't sufficiently sure of social customs here to risk it.

"Do you want to come back for something to eat?" Kris asked him once they were dressed. "Only I've got an atlas at home, so maybe you can show us where you come from."

So Radu accepted, pushing his bike along beside them as they walked back to the village, and up in Kris's bedroom he looked at the atlas and tried to work out where he had been born. It wasn't immediately clear, because in his world the whole area from the Black Sea to beyond the Vosges was a single country, whereas here it was several different states; but eventually he realised that the town which in this world was called Tulcea was the place he had lived in Kerpia.

"That's it," he said. "We lived about ten ezerhersps… that's about nine kilometres [6 miles], I think – outside the town – about there." And he pointed to a spot on the map.

"That makes you Romanian… at least, it does if all that nonsense about coming from a different world is just lies."

"It isn't! It's true, I swear – and next time I come I'll prove it!"

"So you want to come and play with us again, do you?"

"Well… yes, if you'd like me to."

"I don't know… what do you think, Fredi?"

And the two of them went into a huddle and jabbered at each other in Elsassisch, before Kris finally turned back to him and said, "Of course we would. You're a good swimmer – and you're fun, even if you do tell lies. So, what are you doing tomorrow?"

"Nothing."

"Good. We'll meet you at the mirador at two o'clock."

So next day Radu was waiting at the hide at two o'clock, and today he had brought a copy of his legal paperwork with him. This was the document that we had all been given to attest to the fact that we had entered this world through a parallel interchange, which was why there were no birth or other papers for us.

Kris and Fredi arrived five minutes later, and today there was a third boy with them, a slightly younger boy with curly black hair and blue eyes… and Radu thought he looked stunning: he could barely take his eyes off him.

"This is Marc," Kris told him. "He lives next door to me and he usually comes with us when we play out here, but he was away with his parents yesterday. He's the same age as you, so maybe you'll have stuff in common – except he can hardly swim, and he doesn't tell lies all the time, either."

"Neither do I," said Radu indignantly, and he handed over his naturalisation papers.

Kris and Fredi read them carefully, but Marc didn't bother: instead he just looked at Radu, smiling.

"I like your earring," he said, shyly. "I've never seen a boy wearing one before."

"Oh! Well, they're quite common where I come from. We had to take them off while we were in the Hub because of the barriers and I didn't get time to rescue mine before we left, but I was able to buy a pair just like it here. The shopkeeper seemed surprised, though: he thought I was buying them for my girlfriend, or something, and when I put one of them in my own ear he gave me a very funny look. Still, because they only sell them in pairs here at least I've got a spare if I lose it again."

"Oh. I'd sort of like to try wearing one… I think yours looks nice."

"You'd have to have your ear pierced first. That was easy for us because everyone in my family wore them, and there were lots of people who knew how to make holes in ears safely; but here you'd probably have to go to a place that normally only deals with women, and they'd probably look at you a bit funny."

"I wouldn't mind," said Marc, quietly.

"No, he's used to being looked at funny," said Kris. "Aren't you, pube-head? Anyone who has pubes on his head and none on his cock is going to get funny looks."

"Shut up!" said Marc. "You didn't have any either until about a year ago. I'm sure I'll get some soon."

"You wish!"

"Don't worry," said Radu. "I haven't got any yet either."

"Really?" said Marc, looking at him gratefully.

"Really. If we go swimming later you'll be able to see for yourself."

"Well," said Fredi, handing him back his papers, "looks like all that stuff was true after all: you really do come from a different world. That's pretty amazing. Tell us about it."

So they sat in the hide while Radu told them a bit about Kerpia and how he and the other orphanage kids had been sent to the mine after the Greys invaded.

"It was really bad there," he said. "We didn't get enough food and we had to work really hard shovelling coal all day. And then one of my friends at the Residence here came up with this brilliant plan to rescue us…"

He told them about the flight to the Hub and the battle there against the Greys, and how they had found the emergency exit just when they had given up hope.

"Wow, that makes our lives seem really boring!" commented Fredi. "I wish I'd had an adventure like that!"

"It sounds exciting when I look back at it now," said Radu, "but at the time I really thought I was going to die. And we so easily could have done. Adventures are best from the outside, I think. I'm in no hurry to have another one, anyway."

"I think you were all really brave to try to fight against real soldiers like you did," said Marc. "I think I'd have just tried to hide under a bed or something."

"I don't think you would. It's surprising what you can do when there's no real choice."

By now the batteries on Radu's translator were showing signs of failing, and so he suggested they should go for a swim, as that wouldn't involve any real talking. So they went to the canal and swam for a while. And Marc really wasn't much good at swimming, though he was happy to splash about with the others.

"You swim really well," he said to Radu at one point. "I wish I could swim like that."

"It is practice," said Radu, whose English just about stretched that far. "Perhaps I help you to practise."

"I'd really like that!"

Today Radu had brought a towel, and so he was able to start drying himself as soon as he got out. And Marc came and started to use his own towel right next to him, which gave Radu a chance to look… and he saw that Marc was circumcised, just as he was himself. It was slightly smaller than his, and there was no hair.

"Oh, wow, you look the same as me!" said Marc, doing just as much looking as Radu was… and then Marc began to get an erection. Flustered, he tried to hide it with his towel, but Fredi whipped the towel away, grinning, and Marc gave a cry and ran off naked into the trees.

"That wasn't very nice," said Radu, turning his translator on again.

"I thought it was funny… but I suppose you're right. Marc's okay, but there are times I wish he wasn't always hanging around. It's pretty obvious he likes you, though."

"Do you think so?" asked Radu, pulling his pants on.

"Of course." And he did an impersonation of Marc. "'Oh, I really like your earring… oh, you're a really good swimmer… oh, you're really brave…' Come on, Radu, it's obvious he fancies you!"

"Oh."

"'Oh'? Is that all you can say? Don't worry, we won't let him come with us next time if you don't want him to."

"No! No… I mean, I like him, too. I'd better go and see if he's all right."

Radu finished dressing, grabbed the translator and Marc's towel, which Fredi had just dropped on the ground, and headed off into the woods.

"We'll wait for you at the mirador," Kris called after him.

Marc hadn't got very far because he had bare feet and there were too many bramble-bushes around. Radu found him about fifty metres [150 ft.] away, huddled down at the base of a tree and sobbing.

"It's okay," he said, kneeling down facing him and putting the translator down between them. "That happens to me all the time."

"Really?"

"I swear. It's natural. In fact it would probably have happened to me back there if you hadn't run off."

"Huh? Why?"

Radu took a deep breath, hoping that Fredi's assessment was accurate. "Because I think you're really good-looking," he said. "Especially naked."

"Do you really mean that?"

"I swear."

"Oh. Because… well… I think the same about you."

"I don't see how you could think that. I'm just ordinary."

"No, you're not! You've done masses of things I never will, and… and I think you're really handsome, too. And it's amazing the way our… you know… look the same. I've never met anyone else who has one like mine. They had to cut part of the skin off when I was little because the hole in the end was too small and it wouldn't open properly. Is that what happened to you?"

"Not exactly." And Radu told him about his cousins and the fish hook.

"That's horrible! How could they do something so nasty?"

Radu shrugged. "A lot worse has happened to me, or nearly happened to me, since, so I've more or less stopped thinking about it. Look, you'd better finish drying yourself or you'll catch cold. Stand up."

So Marc stood up, but Radu didn't hand him the towel: instead he used it to dry the other boy himself. And Marc liked that, giggling a little as Radu tickled him as he dried his ribs. And then Radu moved a little lower and dried Marc's bottom, and Marc seemed to like that, too. Radu moved on down, drying the other boy's legs, and then stood up.

"Turn around," he said, quietly, and Marc turned around and looked at him solemnly. And Radu dried his chest, then his stomach, and then waited…

"Carry on," said Marc, in a whisper.

Radu very carefully cupped Marc's small genitals in the towel and dried them slowly and gently. And when he took the towel away the penis was stiff again, standing out from the hairless groin. But this time Marc stayed where he was and made no attempt to cover himself.

"That looks nice," said Radu.

"Do you really think so? You don't think it's too small?"

"No, I think it's perfect."

Marc smiled. "Fredi and Kris tease me because I haven't got any hair yet, but they're both a year older than me, so I don't worry about it too much. So… please can I see yours?"

Radu undressed, and by the time his briefs came off he was stiff, too, and so they were able to make a proper comparison. And Radu was a little longer and thicker, but not by much.

"I think yours looks nice, too," said Marc. "Please… I mean, would you mind if… that is…"

"What?"

"Could I touch it, please?"

"Oh. Okay, then – as long as I can touch yours…"

So they spent a couple of minutes feeling each other, and Radu thought it was a really exciting sensation. Sometimes Hansi and Tibor had masturbated him, but somehow simply touching and being touched by Marc felt even better than that. And when Marc said, "We'd better get dressed and go, or they'll come looking for us," Radu was very disappointed. But he realised that Marc was right, and so he got dressed and then gave the other boy a piggy-back to the side of the canal, where Marc had left his clothes. Once Marc was dressed Radu turned to head back to the mirador, but Marc grabbed his arm and held him back.

"Please can we do this again?" he asked. "This and… maybe other things." And he blushed.

"I'd like that," answered Radu, feeling himself getting hard again. "I'd like that a lot."

"Great! Maybe I can help you with your English, and then perhaps we can… you know… sort of undress again, and do some stuff together…"

"That would be great!" said Radu, getting even harder.

"Good," said Marc, giving him a dazzling smile. "Come on!" and he ran off towards the mirador.

Just before Radu left to go home Kris managed to get him on his own.

"So, do you think you and Marc are going to be friends?" he asked.

"Definitely."

"Good. He's a nice kid, Radu. And it'll be more fun playing here with four of us than with three, too. Have you got a chipfone?"

"No, not yet. But I've got some credits saved up, so I can probably get one."

"Okay. I'll give you my number, then you can phone me to let us know when you're free to come out this way. And I expect Marc will want to give you his number, too…"

***

"… so I definitely want to get a phone," Radu concluded his story.

"I'll give you the money if you haven't got enough," I promised him. "And I'll help with your English, too, if you want. Working through a pocket translator can't be ideal, no matter how good those things are."

"Thanks. I really hope this works out."

"So do I. I didn't like you being the only one of us who didn't have someone special. So, are you going to invite Marc to come and visit you here?"

"Would I be allowed to?"

"I'm sure you would. And I'm pretty sure Hansi and Tibor could be persuaded to go and do something else for a couple of hours and leave the room to you and Marc."

"Great!"

***

So the mid-term break came to an end and we got back to our studies, and as the end of the year grew steadily closer Stefan and I spent a little while two or three times a week doing the things that Hansi and Tibor had taught us so that we would be ready to make our first attempt at a proper joining on December 12^th. November gave way to December, and then we were into the final week of our countdown, and then…

Then one of the portal scientists from Strossburi arrived at the Residence. Stefan and I were called to the director's office to talk to him.

"We think we're ready to open a portal into the world you came here from," he told us. "And, since you two can speak the language and know the country and the people, we want you to go through it for us…"

Hmmm… Jake made it fairly clear at the end of the first story that he intended settling down and leaving portal-hopping to others. Is he going to let himself be talked into helping the scientists out? I hope so, because there won't be much of a story otherwise…

Chapter Two

It won't come as a big surprise to learn that this chapter describes what happens when Jake agrees to go back through the portal into Kerpia. And he has some surprises to deal with when he gets there…

"Are you sure it's safe?" I asked.

"Well, we obviously won't ask you or anyone else to go through until we're sure it's stable. But we've done plenty of simulations here in the laboratory and on paper it works perfectly."

"Well, fine, but I'm not interested in results on paper. If it works in practice I suppose I wouldn't mind going along as translator for you, just to help get things started, but I'm not going near it until a couple of you guys have been through it – and back – first."

"That seems entirely reasonable."

"Well, okay, then. Where are you going to site it?"

"Initially we intended to put it on the Vosges, where you came through, but then we decided that it would be easier to contact the authorities over there if we sent you through nearer to the town you told us about, the one with the mine…"

"Hintraten," I put in.

"That's the one. So we spoke to our colleagues in Baden-Bayern, on the other side of the Rhine, and they've given us permission to run our experiment on the Feldberg. We're establishing our portal a little further down the mountain, so you won't have so far to walk."

"Sounds like a good idea. So who's coming with us?"

"Two of our colleagues, and a couple of militiamen, just in case your bomb didn't work and there are still Greys around – and if that is the case we'll retreat through the portal at once. They'll be going through on their own first to scout around before the rest of you go."

I thought that sounded like a good idea – after all, the last thing I wanted was to walk into a troop of Greys. Though I suppose that if the bomb hadn't gone off they wouldn't have any reason to be hunting for me…

When we told the others what was happening they tried to talk us out of going.

"You must be mad!" was Markus's reaction. "After everything that happened last time you were in Kerpia, why on earth would you want to risk going back? Stay here where you're safe!"

"Or at least let us come with you," said Oli. "Even if your bomb worked there might still be stray guardians around on the mountain. You need my catapult."

"And if Oli's going, so am I," added Alain.

"It's okay, they're sending some soldiers through with us, and they've already said that at the first sign of trouble we'll come straight back. But I think we really have to do this – after all, this world has been really good to us all, hasn't it? We turned up with no money and no papers, and they've given us a really decent place to live, and they're even paying us for studying. We owe them. Besides, this is only going to be a short trip: once we've done the introductions the Kerpians can implant their language into the scientists from this side, and then they won't need an interpreter any longer."

They argued for a little longer, but I pointed out that if a portal could be established successfully it would benefit them, too: after all, if the Kerpian language-implanting technology became available here it would save them a lot of struggling with the learning of English and French. And eventually they accepted that we were going.

"But if you don't come back safely I'll have to beat you up," said Alain, just as we were leaving.

I didn't bother pointing out the failed logic of that threat; instead I assured him that we'd both be very careful indeed, and that we were looking forward to being back well before December 12^th – after all, we had something planned for that day.

We packed an overnight bag each, though Stefan as usual made sure he had his knife, compass and mini-tool set with him as well as a change of clothing, and then we were driven across the Rhine and into the neighbouring state of Baden-Bayern. Of course we had seen only a very small part of this area, and even when we reached a town called Hinterzarten an hour and a bit later we didn't recognise it as the place we knew as Hintraten. There was no mine here, for a start. But as we drove out of town, up towards the top of the Feldberg, it did become a little more familiar: the hamlet where we had first been captured by the Greys looked much as it had in the Kerpian world, and the road that led up from there towards the four loggers' houses looked exactly the same.

We turned off before we reached the houses, however, taking another track that led to an area with no trees, a large meadow on a slope, and here we found a number of tents set up. The largest of these contained two two-metre [7 ft.] high arches about two metres [7 ft.] apart, and it also contained a number of the other scientists we had met in Strossburi.

"Well, it works," the senior scientist told us. "We'll be sending the first scouting party through in a few minutes."

"Why have you got two of them?" I asked. "Where does the other one go?"

"It isn't two, it's just one. Somehow the Kerpians managed to get both ends of their portals into a single interface, the two planes only millimetres apart – at least, we're assuming that's how they did it. We can't get our two planes that close together without the whole thing collapsing. It's one of the things we want to ask them about. Ours works more like an airlock: you go in this end and come out at the other end, only that exit is in the other reality.

"Now, can you think of anything else our scouts need to know before they go through?"

He indicated four men in uniform who were standing to one side. They were carrying rifles, though they also looked distinctly nervous, which I suppose was understandable: this wasn't exactly a normal mission for them.

"I expect they've already told you about the Greys," I said to them. "They wear red-brown uniforms, so if you see anyone in that colour, run: they have poor stamina, so if they don't catch you in the first fifty metres [150 ft.] they won't catch you at all. They might shoot you, of course… oh, and look out for the guardians. One of our friends pointed out that even if the Greys have gone there might still be one or two guardians about that got left behind. Their range is about ten metres [30 ft.], so don't get closer than that, and watch out for the red and black ones: their sting is fatal. Shoot them before they get close enough to shoot you.

"If you meet any humans in uniform, they'll be friendly. Their uniform is dark green, so you can tell them at a distance from the Greys. I can't think of anything else. Stefan, have I forgotten anything?"

"I don't think so."

We watched as the four men went through the first arch. We could still see them as they waited for a few seconds between the arches, though they looked fuzzy: it was a bit like seeing someone through one of the barriers in the Hub. And then there was a humming noise, at which they moved on through the second arch and disappeared.

"They'll be a while," the chief scientist told us. "We told them to have a proper scout round the area, and of course the first thing they have to do is to erect a tent over the portal: we don't want it being disrupted if the weather on that side is bad. So you might as well go and rest for a bit. We'll call you when they get back."

We were taken to a smaller tent in which a field kitchen had been set up, and here we were given some soup, which was welcome: it was of course mid-December, and up here in the Black Forest it was quite cold, though there was no snow on the ground yet.

We drank our soup and then wandered around the camp for a bit, and when we got bored with that we went to the tent where we had been told we were going to be sleeping and lay down for a bit.

The scouting party came back as it began to get dark, and their report was entirely positive: they had been down the mountain as far as the outskirts of Hintraten without seeing anyone except humans – there were no Greys and no guardians about anywhere. Of course they hadn't actually been able to confirm this by asking anyone because of the language barrier, but they saw people moving about quite freely, which I was sure would not have been the case if there had still been guardians in the area.

That tent wasn't very warm, and although we were each provided with a fairly thick sleeping bag they were of a type that couldn't be joined together, and that meant that Stefan and I couldn't cuddle up to each other for the night the way we were used to doing. But somehow we got through the night, and next morning, as soon as we had eaten breakfast, we went to the big tent and prepared to go through the portal.

There was just about enough room between the arches for eight people, provided that they didn't mind being jammed up against each other. The four militiamen went first, then me and Stefan, and finally the two scientists who were coming with us, Dr Schmitt and Dr Szabo, who had been chosen because his father was Hungarian and so he hoped to be able to communicate a bit with the Kerpians even if there was a problem with the language implanting system. Once we were all between the two arches we had to wait for a few seconds while the first arch closed behind as and the second one opened ahead of us, and then we were able to walk out into Kerpia.

The only difference was that here the trees were a bit closer to us: the meadow was rather smaller than the one in Baden-Bayern. But that seemed hardly important. Stefan didn't even need to get his compass out, because the militiamen had already been here and had found the way down to Hintraten, and so we simply followed them into the trees and down the hill until we met a road, which I was pretty sure was the one that led up to the Grey checkpoint above the Hub One Nexus Room. We followed that road downwards until it met another one, and now I definitely knew where I was: the cabin that had been used by Haless and Issin was only a short distance away, and the town itself was probably only ten minutes further on.

By the time we reached the first houses the militiamen were carrying their rifles slung on their back so as not to alarm people: we'd seen a number of people going about their business by now and none of them seemed to be worrying about guardians, so there seemed little risk of us meeting one, either. And soon we were in the town centre.

I took everyone to the clinic, since I had decided that Narj Larzel would be the best person to speak to first: he knew about the Hubs, anyway. But when I asked for him at the clinic I was told that he was now based at the Rathaus. I knew where that was because I'd been there before, and so I led the party on down the road until we reached the town hall.

And this time my enquiries were successful: the person at the front desk made a phone call, and two minutes later Mr Narj appeared, and his face lit up as he saw me.

"Stone Jake!" he exclaimed, grabbing my hand and shaking it. "We were afraid you'd been killed! How did you get away?"

"First of all, did the bomb go off?" I wanted to know.

"Oh, yes. I don't know how you managed to plant it, but it worked perfectly: the portal collapsed, and so did about ten hersps of tunnel. And that's one portal that we're in no hurry to restore, I promise you. Most of the portals at the Hub One Nexus Room are either still open or can be dug out fairly easily, but we're holding back for the moment because there are still Greys in some of the other worlds. There's a Grey officer in their checkpoint at the moment, rounding up everyone who comes through for us so that we can send them home."

"But I thought you said you weren't going to reopen the portal to the Grey world?"

"We're not – at least, not on a permanent basis. Every time we have a dozen or so ready to go back we open a temporary portal on the surface – in a slightly different place every time, of course – and send them through, and as soon as they're through we close the portal again. We agreed that with their surviving senior officer: he realised that if they didn't co-operate with us they would never be able to return to their own world, so they've been entirely sensible about it. But I still want to know what happened to you. Have you been hiding somewhere all this time?"

"No, we got out through the Hub Two Nexus Room. We've been living in another world for the last four months."

"Ah, so you were responsible for the chaos at Hub Two. We wondered if it might have been you and your friends… By the time we got there everything had stopped working – all we found was eighteen or nineteen living Greys and around twenty dead ones. The survivors surrendered fairly quickly once they found out that they were trapped and outnumbered. They told us they'd been fighting Kerpian militia – at least, they said the defenders were in uniform, so they assumed it was a militia unit. There didn't seem to be any human bodies, though, except for the remains of one – in several pieces – that had obviously been dead for several months."

"Ah, our friend Dead Guy. No, we found the emergency exit just in time, and then blocked it so that they couldn't follow us. There were still four tunnels open in the Nexus Room, so we took pot luck and found a really good world. And that's why we're here now: these men are scientists from our new world. They managed to set up a portal to get us here, and they want to talk to you about building a permanent one between our worlds so that we can learn from each other."

I introduced Dr Schmitt, who hadn't understood a blind word of the conversation so far, and Dr Szabo, who seemed to have understood at least some of it. Mr Narj explained that if they were prepared to spend a while in the clinic he could arrange to have the Kerpian language implanted in their brains, and that would make communication a lot easier. I translated this, and both scientists agreed enthusiastically.

"Once we've got them safely installed in the clinic, will I be able to go back home?" I asked.

"Well, you could. But the King wants to see you."

"What!? Why?"

"Why do you think, Jake? You're a hero! You planted the bomb that saved our country from the Greys, and you took some serious risks doing it, too, because if they'd caught you with it you would almost certainly have been killed. It took a lot of courage. And now we know that you also defended Hub Two against them and stopped them from accessing any of the tunnels there, that makes you even more of a hero."

"That wasn't me: that was Stefan, mostly, and the Kerpian kids who escaped with us. They were the ones defending their country. I was just trying to stay alive."

"If it hadn't been for Jake we'd never have got as far as Hub Two," Stefan interrupted. "And if it hadn't been for Markus knowing about Kerpian computers we'd all have died there. It was easier for me: I've been trained. The Kerpian boys hadn't, and the way they fought, even though they were tired and hungry after working in the mine, was incredible. So don't listen to him, Mr Narj: it's Jake and the Kerpians who deserve the thanks."

"And I'm sure they'll get them," said Mr Narj. "Jake, could you take your friends down the road to the clinic for me? I'll make a call and arrange for them to have the language work done, and then I need to make a couple more calls. Come back here when you're finished."

So we escorted the two scientists back to the clinic, translated the technicians' explanations for them and saw them safely ensconced in two of the implanting chairs. At that point I suggested to the militiamen that they could go back home if they wanted: clearly there was no danger here any longer. And they seemed quite happy to do that, so they said goodbye and headed back towards the portal site.

We walked back to the town hall and discovered that Mr Narj had been busy: apparently we now had a standing invitation to travel to the capital to meet the king. And the invitation extended to all the boys who had helped in the defence of Hub Two.

"A couple of them were in the House of Detention before the Greys came," I said. "I'm not sure that they'll want to come back, in case they end up getting sent back there."

"Oh, there's no danger of that happening – or not unless they were there because they'd murdered someone, or something. Had they?"

"I don't think so. Markus stole some cars, I think. I'm not sure about Tibor, but I don't think it was anything too awful."

"Then I guarantee they'll be safe. So I'd like you to go back through, collect the others and bring them back here… the day after tomorrow, perhaps? That will give us time to sort out some transport for you."

Stefan and I looked at each other. There didn't seem to be any risk here, and I definitely wanted Markus and Tibor to get a royal pardon for whatever they'd done to put them in prison in the first place. If the king offered us a reward for services rendered, that would be the first thing I asked for. Of course, some money would be nice, provided it was in the form of gold or silver, so that we could exchange it back in Elsass…

"Okay," I said. "We'll do our best to persuade them all to come."

"Excellent! And now I can save you the walk back to the portal: I have to go up to the Hub to see if any more Greys are waiting to be repatriated, so if you'd like to come with me I'll drop you off at your portal on the way back."

He took us out to a Kerpian version of a jeep – like all Kerpian vehicles, this was a lot more streamlined than the versions from my own world – and we headed off through the town and up towards the former Grey checkpoint. This looked a little different from the way it had been on my previous visit: there seemed to have been a substantial fire-fight here, because the stonework was chipped in several places and the doorway had partly collapsed. The fallen stones had been cleared away now, but the entrance was still a mess.

Inside there was more damage, though some clearing up had been done and the actual desk by the barrier appeared intact. Today it was manned by a bored-looking Grey.

"Is Force Leader Nass here?" Mr Narj asked him in Grey.

"Force Leader!" called the Grey, not bothering to get up. And a slightly older Grey appeared from one of the back rooms. He'd obviously been in the wars: his right arm was strapped to his chest, and he was walking with a pronounced limp.

"Hello, Narj," he said. "We've got a couple more for you, but I really think we've got almost everyone who was out there by now. It's only World Six I'm not quite sure about. I think we should perhaps give it another three or four days, and then I'd like to go home myself. I can leave a message for anyone who comes back after we've gone, but I really don't think there'll be many more."

"That sounds fine to me," said Mr Narj. "We'll put a sign up downstairs, at the entrance to what's left of Tunnel One, telling anyone who sees it to come up here to report. We'll keep this place manned for a little longer. I'm sure any of your people who do try to get home after that will have the sense to come out here and look for instructions. I'll be coming back this way in a couple of days' time, so if you like we can send you all home then."

"I would appreciate that." The Grey officer called over his shoulder for someone to bring him out some writing materials so that he could prepare a suitable message for any Greys returning from the other worlds after he and his staff had left, and a smaller figure emerged from one of the back rooms carrying one of the Grey mini-computers. And I recognised the newcomer.

"Ssyrl!" I exclaimed.

I was surprised to see him, and not entirely comfortable with it, either: after all, the last time I had seen him he had more or less betrayed me, given me a very nasty dead-leg with a tyre iron and run out on us, leaving us threatened by guardians. And it was because I'd led him there that the Greys had found the entrance to the Hub, something I would prefer Mr Narj not to know about. Of course, I could understand why he'd done it, and I thought that maybe I would have done the same thing in his place.

"You're still here!" I went on. "Are you okay?"

"Yes… I thought you'd gone home!"

"Well, we had a few problems with that…"

"Do you know this mammal?" the Grey officer asked Ssyrl.

"Yes, I do. He was the one who…" Ssyrl broke off, looking at Mr Narj. I guessed he'd been about to say something like, 'the one who told me about the other entrance to the Hub,' but realised that this might get me into trouble. Instead he said, "The one who helped me when I was in the mine."

"We sort of helped each other," I said, considerably relieved that he had decided not to drop me in it. "So why are you still here?"

"I wanted him to stay here until I left," the officer said. "When we get back home I'm going to make sure that the High Council hears about what he did."

That had me worrying for a moment: after all, Ssyrl had expected to get into very serious trouble if his people found out he had helped us to escape from the mine. But the officer went on, "He defended this place almost single-handed for a very long time: most of our soldiers were dead, and I'd been hit twice and couldn't fire a gun any longer. And Ssyrl picked up my weapon and held the door on his own. And at one point they threw a grenade in, and he reacted quickly enough to pick it up and throw it out again before it exploded. And when he finally ran out of ammunition he stood over me and another wounded soldier, threatening to use his rifle as a club if the enemy got near us. I've never seen courage like it."

I stared at Ssyrl: this didn't sound much like the boy his colleagues had all derided as unmasculine, so I jerked my head at him and took him off to one side, where we could speak privately.

"Thanks for not mentioning that I showed you how to get into the Hub," I said. "I mean, it wasn't deliberate or anything, but I don't suppose Mr Narj would be too happy about it. I hope you got credit for it, anyway. And what on earth was all that heroic stuff about?"

Ssyrl shrugged. "At the time I didn't see that I had any good reason to stay alive," he said. "For a few hours I was a hero for showing our troops the way into the control centre, but then something went wrong and the portal back to our world exploded…"

"Do you know what happened to it?" I interrupted.

"No. Force Leader Nass thinks it was some sort of power feedback, perhaps because we kept the door open all the time – we left the doors and trapdoors in place on the other tunnels, but because there was so much coming and going with ours we removed the trapdoor completely and left the door open. And Nass thinks maybe it caused some sort of overload. We can't find out for sure because half the tunnel collapsed at the same time and we didn't have time to dig it out before the Kerpians attacked us."

I managed to prevent myself from jumping for joy at that point: apparently the Greys didn't know I was responsible for destroying their portal. Of course I had no intention of going anywhere near any Greys once Ssyrl and his few remaining colleagues had gone, but it was still nice to know that there wouldn't be a Grey death squad after me if by some mischance they ever found a way through to my new world.

"Anyway," Ssyrl continued, "I didn't see that I had any future: I couldn't go home, and I knew we'd never be accepted here. I thought I'd either end up in a zoo or find myself being dissected for medical knowledge, the way Haless and Issin were originally going to do to you. And so I decided that it would be better to die fighting – at least there's some sort of honour in dying in a battle, and I thought it would be a lot quicker than being sliced up by scientists. Nobody thought much of me back in my own country, and I suppose I can understand why, because I wasn't much of a soldier, but here I had a chance to at least try to behave as a soldier should. And, of course, when you don't care whether you die or not you probably find it easier to be brave.

"So I tried to do everything the instructors taught us. I was lucky with the grenade – it must have had an extra long fuse, or something – and somehow none of the bullets hit me, except for a graze on my left arm. And when I ran out of bullets I just stood in front of the Force Leader and told the Kerpians they'd have to shoot me to get at him. At the time I actually wanted them to – I thought it would be better than being taken prisoner – and so I was very disappointed when they didn't. A Kerpian officer who spoke our language came in and explained that if we'd surrender they'd do their best to repatriate us, and that was the end of it. And so it worked out lucky that I didn't get shot, because now I can go home after all, and Nass is going to say lots of good things about me – and that should mean I can go back to school and have the rest of the boys respect me, the way I originally hoped when I tricked you into showing me the way into the tunnels."

"Good," I said. "I'm glad, Ssyrl. If Haless and the others hear about what you did here I'm sure they'll ease up on you in future."

"I'm certainly hoping so. If I go back to school with a bravery commendation I think they'll have to look at me differently. So what happened to you? How come you're still here?"

"It was a struggle, but in the end we got out into another world," I told him. "And the new world has worked out the basics of opening a portal, too, and they sent me and Stefan through to make contact with the scientists here because we can speak the language. And now we've done that we're going home, too. No more adventures for me!"

We wished each other luck, and then Mr Narj drove me and Stefan back to the meadow where the temporary portal had been set up.

"Did you know the Greys think the explosion was an accident?" I asked him.

"Well, I thought it odd that Nass never mentioned the words 'bomb' or 'sabotage', but I thought that was just because he thought it would be a waste of time asking me about it."

"No, apparently they think it was a power overload, or something like that," I told him. "So please make sure nobody says anything to make them think otherwise – just in case they change their minds about leaving and decide to come looking for me instead."

"My lips are sealed," he promised me.

He came into the tent with us to have a look at the portal.

"Why have they made a tunnel instead of a flat interface?" he asked.

"Don't ask me. All I know is that they said this was the only way they could get it to work. Probably the two guys back at the clinic can tell you more."

"All right. Now, I'll arrange to have some transport here for you the day after tomorrow – in around mid-morning, say Kend Nine? That way you won't have to walk down to the station."

I agreed to that. I knew that some of the boys had still got their Kerpian watches, so we should be able to arrange to arrive at approximately the right time.

We said goodbye and walked through the first arch. Once inside Stefan pressed the button on the arch frame and the first interface closed behind us, and five seconds later the second one opened ahead of us and we were able to step back into Baden-Bayern. The remaining scientists were waiting for us, so we explained what was happening, saying that Dr Schmitt and Dr Szabo would be getting the language implant for the next three or four days, but that we had been asked to go back through in two days' time. They said they had no problem with that, and once they had driven us back to the residence they arranged to pick us up again at around nine o'clock on the Thursday morning.

***

"No chance!" was Markus's reaction when I said that the Kerpians had invited everyone back. "I'm not getting put back into the House of Detention! I like it here, and I can't see any good reason for going back!"

"Not even a royal pardon and a pat on the back from the king for being a true Kerpian hero?"

"Huh?!"

So I explained the situation to them, and afterwards they were a lot more enthusiastic about it.

"And I'm sure that if you two decided to stay there they'd be happy to have you," I added to Frank and Shander. "After all, before we came here you said you'd prefer to stay there if it could be arranged."

They looked at each other. "No, thanks," said Frank. "When we said that we didn't know what this place would be like. Sure, it wasn't too bad in the orphanage, but things are far better here – and we wouldn't want to leave all our friends behind, either. We'll be happy to go back with the rest of you to visit the palace, but we'll want to come back here afterwards."

"Can we bring a friend with us?" asked Radu. "Only I'd like to show Marc my own country…"

"That's a good idea," said Markus. "I'll ask Sylvie if she'd like to come and see where I used to live."

I hesitated, but nobody else showed signs of wanting to invite a guest, and I supposed that a couple more travellers wouldn't make any difference. And I thought that if I was going to be honoured by my king I'd probably want my friends there to support me.

"I don't see why not," I said. And that was clearly enough to overcome any doubts Markus might still have been entertaining, because he immediately announced that he was going to come with us. Of course it was still term-time, and I wasn't sure that either Sylvie or Marc would be actually be allowed to come, particularly into a completely different world through a brand-new piece of technology.

A bit later I managed to get Tibor on his own long enough to ask why he had been in the House of Detention.

"Why do you need to know?" he asked, distrustfully.

"Well, Mr Narj said you'd definitely get a pardon unless you'd done something really serious, like murdering someone."

"Oh. Well, no, it was nothing like that. It was burglary. I broke into quite a lot of houses, but I never hurt anyone."

"Then I'm sure you'll be okay." I hesitated. "Why?" I asked. "What made you do it? Was it like Radu – you were hungry and needed to steal something to buy food?"

"No, it was nothing like that. I just liked having money and lots of nice stuff, so I stole things, sold them to a man I knew and bought expensive clothes and stuff with the money."

"Didn't your parents ask how you afforded them?"

"They never asked me anything. They more or less let me live my own life. I wasn't badly treated or anything, I just didn't have a lot of contact with them. They were away a lot, anyway: I quite often had the house to myself for days at a time. But I can't make the excuse that I needed the money: I just liked buying stuff. And doing the break-ins was sort of exciting, too – at least, it was until I got caught. And the third time they caught me they seemed to lose patience, and I suppose I can't blame them. Anyway, something good came out of it, because I met Hansi at the mine. I'd never had a proper friend before: I'd had people I thought were friends, but they vanished once I got into trouble.

"But Hansi was different: I told him what I'd done to get sent to the House of Detention and he said I was really stupid and made me swear never to do anything like it again, and once I'd sworn he just carried on as if I'd never done anything wrong. You know what the mine was like: there were times I just wanted to die, and I thought about running for it, even though I knew there was no hope of escape – I really thought I'd be better off dead. But Hansi got me through it…

"The first time he kissed me, it was like being in an earthquake: nobody had ever kissed me before… well, perhaps my mother did when I was really little, but I can't remember. It was the first time I got really miserable and I'd said I was going to run and hope the Greys shot me dead. And Hansi hugged me and said that I couldn't go because he needed me, that having me there was what got him through the day. I was crying a little, and then he promised he would always stay with me if I promised to stay with him, so that we could help each other through everything… and that's when he kissed me. It felt for a moment like my heart had stopped beating: it was only a little peck on the cheek, but I'd never felt needed before, and I didn't know how to react. I think I cried a bit more, and he held me, and then I kissed him, and after that I never thought about running again, at least not until you and the Grey kid got us all out safely.

"It's funny, but we didn't do anything… you know, sexual, until quite a bit after that. I suppose being tired all the time was the main reason, but it was also because now I had a friend I didn't want to risk spoiling it by suggesting something he might not have wanted to do…"

"I thought it was easier in your world, that there was no stigma involved in doing stuff with other boys?" I asked.

"What, and you think that makes it easy?" he asked, staring at me. "Just because a lot of boys do stuff together, it doesn't mean that they all want to – I mean, as far as I know Frank and Shander have never done anything together, even though they're probably as close to each other as me and Hansi. After all, in the world you come from I bet you couldn't just walk up to a girl and ask her to have sex with you, could you? And even if you were friends you'd be nervous about asking in case she didn't want that sort of relationship. Well, it was exactly the same for me: I wasn't sure Hansi would want to do anything like that… not that I'd done anything like that myself before. I knew about sex, but I'd never been all that interested, both because I didn't have anyone I wanted to try it with, and because I suppose I was too young to have any real interest in sex. But I thought Hansi was really good-looking, and he's got a beautiful body… okay, he was too thin, but then we all were. So it took a lot of courage to actually suggest getting undressed together. And then it turned out he felt exactly the same way as I did: he'd been trying to pluck up courage to try it on with me for ages.

"Still, even though the sex is great, I'd have to say the friendship is more important. Even if he didn't want to do sex any more I'd still love him…. So I'm never going to steal again, because I think that's about the only way I'd ever lose him, and I never want that to happen."

Well, that was a much longer answer than I had expected, but the bottom line was that I could see nothing to prevent the Kerpians giving him a full pardon, too.

We spent the Wednesday getting ready, which mainly consisted of making sure our best clothes were clean. On the Wednesday night Stefan and I briefly considered moving our December 12^th appointment forward, but we decided against it. First, we might be back by then anyway, and if not another day or so wouldn't make a lot of difference.

"Or maybe we can borrow the king's bed and do it there," suggested Stefan, grinning at me. "Or we could sneak into the throne room when nobody's about and do it on the throne."

"We'd probably be executed for high treason if we got caught," I said.

"No, we wouldn't: we're not Kerpian, so we can't be guilty of treason against Kerpia. But I don't suppose they'd be very happy, so perhaps we'd better not. I'm quite looking forward to doing it right here, to be honest, and then going to sleep with your arms round me afterwards."

And that summed up the way I felt, too, so I agreed that we should wait until we got back.

Next morning we were up and ready to go well before nine o'clock. We'd decided to travel in older clothes and keep the good ones to change into before we were presented to the king, so we were all carrying bags. I was anything but surprised when I saw Stefan packing his bag, not just with his best clothes, but also with his compass, water-bottle, knife, mini-toolkit and various other pieces of his survival equipment. I could have pointed out that we would be making a simple return journey through a portal that led into a world we already knew to be safe, but I'd seen Stefan's careful preparations prove necessary too often to say anything of the kind. Instead I packed a torch and a few other odds and ends into my own bag, just in case.

Markus had not had too much trouble persuading the director of our residence to let Sylvie accompany us, but it had taken a number of phone calls before Marc had been allowed to take time off school. His parents arrived at the Residence at around half past eight and had a short chat with the director, but the upshot was that Marc was allowed to come with us, which I suppose is a testament to what a peaceful and relaxed society I was now living in. It wasn't the first time I had seen him because he'd been to visit Radu a couple of times before, but today he looked particularly happy and excited, and I had to agree with Radu's initial description of him as 'stunning'.

"Keep your eyes off," growled Stefan in my ear. "He's spoken for, and so are you."

"I know, and you don't need to worry: he's pretty, but you're perfect. And Radu says Marc only has a small you-know-what, and I'm a lot happier with your massive one."

"And don't you forget it," said Stefan, hugging me. "Mind you, he is attractive, isn't he?"

"Don't you start!" And I parked myself in his line of sight and then hugged him hard, and after that he showed no sign of being distracted by anyone other than me.

They had sent a large minibus for us, which was rather more comfortable – and probably a lot warmer – than the army truck I had expected, and so although it was quite cold outside we made the journey in comfort. When we reached the meadow where the portal had been established and got out of the bus, though, we found it a lot less warm, and we were grateful for the warm quilted jackets we were all wearing: we'd already discovered that winters in this part of the world could be quite chilly, and so we'd all made buying a decent jacket a priority once the weather turned cold.

A couple of the portal scientists were waiting for us, bundled up in thick winter clothing. They said they were coming with us as far as Hintraten, where they intended to wait until Schmitt and Szabo had finished at the clinic and then start work with their Kerpian counterparts.

There wasn't room in the tunnel between the interfaces for all of us at once, and so the scientists went first, together with Markus and Sylvie, Tibor and Hansi and Frank and Shander. The rest of us waited until the cyan light on the portal arch lit up again, and then we opened the door and stepped inside ourselves: Radu and Marc, Alain and Oli, Tommi, and finally Stefan and I. Stefan hit the button on the inside of the arch and we waited a few seconds until the second door opened ahead of us and we were able to step though and join the others. And so, around three and a half months after we had escaped from the mine, our whole party found itself in Kerpia once more.

It was cold in Baden-Bayern, but colder still in Kerpia, and there was a little snow falling. Fortunately we didn't have to walk very far, because Mr Narj was waiting for us with a trio of Kerpian jeeps: he'd been counting on eleven passengers rather than fifteen, but we all managed to squeeze in somehow. We stopped off at the clinic to let the two scientists out, and I went inside with them to make sure they were found accommodation for the next couple of days until Schmitt and Szabo woke up and were able to talk to them. Then I went back to the jeep for the short journey to the station.

We took a local train as far as Ulm, where we had a bit of a wait for our connection, but after that we got VIP treatment: we were allocated first-class seats on the main line train. The journey to Temishar was going to take around eight hours, so we settled back to watch the countryside go past. Stefan had brought a map of Europe with him from home, and while we were waiting at Ulm he managed to persuade Mr Narj to buy him one of the whole of Kerpia, and he used the two maps to follow our progress east, translating the Kerpian place-names into ones that he and I could recognise: Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, Budapest – which I remembered had been the Kerpian capital until 2217 – and on into what in our world was now part of Romania. We reached Temishar – or Timişoara, as it was called in my native world – at around seven in the evening, but of course by then it was too dark to get a proper idea of what the town was like. We were taken straight to a hotel, allocated rooms and then led to the restaurant, where we ate an excellent meal. The only bad thing was that we each had a single room, but of course I spent the night in Stefan's room, and I'd guess that some of the other rooms weren't slept in either.

I'm going to skip over most of what happened next day because it's sort of embarrassing: everyone from the king downwards wanted to make me out to be some sort of superhero who had put his life on the line to deliver Kerpia from the Greys. Okay, I suppose I had taken a risk, but I certainly hadn't been thinking of Kerpia at the time: I was thinking of me, mostly – and of Stefan, Alain and Oli, of course, and perhaps to a lesser extent of my fellow stokers. I tried to deflect as much of the praise as possible at Stefan and the Kerpian kids who had helped me survive the mine and who had defended Hub Two – I had barely fired a shot during that battle – and to an extent it worked.

Anyway, there was an informal meeting with the king in the morning (and at that stage he was an ordinary-looking chap in a suit) and a more formal presentation of awards in the afternoon. Markus and Tibor got their royal pardons, and that was really the only thing I was bothered about: the fact that I now had some sort of gallantry medal is something I'm not going to mention again because I'm far from convinced that I deserved it. At least everyone else got some sort of an award, too.

So we had another night in the hotel, which was noteworthy mainly because late in the evening we got an unexpected visit from Radu and Marc. It was unexpected because we'd locked the door, but that didn't stop them coming into the room after we'd got into bed.

"Tibor's been giving me lessons," Radu explained, grinning at us. "He told us how he ended up in the House of Detention, and although he's sworn he's never going to do any more break-ins, he's still been teaching me and Hansi a bit about getting past locked doors and windows for a while now, just for fun. So we thought we'd see if I've learned anything."

"And apparently you have," I observed, glowering at him. "Why pick on us for your experiments, though?"

"Because you're nice and I knew you wouldn't get mad and hit me."

"Jake might not," growled Stefan. "But I might."

"I don't think so," said Radu, and that was more than enough for Stefan, who rolled out of bed, not caring that he was naked, and grabbed the other boy. Marc tried to defend his friend, so I piled into him, and for a couple of minutes we all rolled around on the carpet, play-fighting.

Eventually we managed to throw them out into the corridor, though not before Marc had made some observations about how big Stefan was, and how my penis looked like his and Radu's. I closed the door on them, threw the lock once more and wedged a chair under the door handle, and then we were able to get back to our interrupted cuddling.

Next day we travelled back to Hintraten. Mr Narj said that if we wanted to stay another night we would be very welcome, but I said that I'd like to get back home today if possible. And I had good reason for that: today was December 12^th and Stefan and I had plans for the evening.

The weather had turned rather more unpleasant now: as we travelled up to the portal it was snowing hard, and there was quite a strong wind whipping the snow about and making visibility very poor for the drivers. We reached the meadow safely, though the tent was almost invisible through the driving snow.

"Are you sure you don't want to stay until the weather settles?" asked Mr Narj.

"No, I want to get back now if we can," I said. "Maybe the weather is better on our side."

We struggled our way through the snow and into the tent, and here we found a couple of militiamen waiting for us.

"About time!" said the first one. "We're freezing, hanging around here. The boffins want you back straight away – they're worried about the effects of the cold on the portal, or something. They say it's safe enough at the moment, but they don't want to risk it after dark when the temperature drops."

I could barely hear him above the noise of the wind, but I got the point quickly enough. I told the militiamen to go through with the first half of the party – they looked half-frozen: at least we'd been sitting in warm vehicles since we left the station. I sent Markus and Sylvie, Tibor and Hansi and Frank and Shander through with them, and the rest of us huddled together waiting for the cycle to complete. After what seemed an age the cyan light above the portal came on and the rest of us were able to get into the tunnel. I could see that the entrance to the tent had blown open and was flapping about in the wind, but all I could think of was getting back to our own side, where hopefully the weather would be a bit better.

Stefan pressed the button on the arch and the first door closed. The portal started to hum as the process kicked in… and then there was a hell of a crash and I was thrown to the ground. I must have hit my head as I landed, because I passed out.

And when I woke up again I thought at first that I was still asleep and dreaming, because there was a face looming above mine and a hand holding a dagger close to my neck. And the face and the hand were both grey…

This can't be good… incidentally, I should warn you that I got sort of addicted to cliffhanger endings in the first Nexus story, and I'm afraid there are going to be some more in this one. Don't miss next week's exciting episode, etc. etc.

Chapter Three

In this chapter… well, let's just say that something somewhere has gone terribly wrong and Jake and his friends are in deep trouble. And this time around there's no clear or obvious way out of it, either…

A second look told me that I wasn't dreaming after all: there really was a Grey leaning over me and holding a knife close to my neck. I had no idea of what had happened or how I had got wherever I was now, and I still felt far too woozy to move, even though I knew that if I didn't I was in danger of getting stabbed.

The Grey drew the knife back, and still I couldn't move. And then a shrill voice yelled "Leave him alone, you bastard!" in Grey. The Grey froze, looking absolutely shocked, and a small red-topped missile suddenly flew into my line of sight, hit the Grey and hurled it off me. And at that I shook myself out of my trance and jumped in to help Tommi pin the Grey down, though in fact Tommi was doing a fairly efficient job on his own: the Grey was no bigger than me and was dressed only in rags, and I could clearly see how thin and scrawny he was compared to the ones I had met at Haless's school.

"Stop struggling and you won't get hurt," I said in Grey, and the Grey stared at me in something that looked not far from outright terror.

"You can speak!" he croaked. "What are you?"

"We're humans," I told him. "Most of us can't speak your language, but Tommi and I can. So who are you?"

"I'm nobody!" he said, trying to wriggle free. "Who sent you? Was it the Southern Bloc? And how did they make you?"

"Nobody made us," I said. "We grew up, the same as you did… well, we didn't hatch from an egg, but after that it's the same. And I don't know anything about a Southern Bloc: we don't come from this world at all, in fact."

I looked around. There was no snow on the ground here, but it still felt very cold, even in my thick clothes, and I thought the Grey had to be freezing: I was surprised he could still move at all, in fact. The sky was dark, darker than it had been in Kerpia, and the area we were lying in looked less hospitable: there was no grass, just cold, bare earth, with rocky outcrops here and there and the black trees of the forest looming over us on one side. I did a quick head-count of the bodies and found that all six of my friends were here with me, but there was no sign of the tent, or of the portal that it had contained.

I got off the Grey, though not before I'd taken the knife away from him, and motioned Tommi to do the same, and then I pulled the Grey to his feet.

"My name's Jake," I told him, "and this is Tommi. We're mammals. We're not supposed to be here – wherever 'here' is: we sort of got diverted on our way to somewhere else. What's your name?"

The Grey was still gaping at us, and I supposed I understood how he felt: after all, if a chimpanzee suddenly started speaking to me in French I guess I'd be a little surprised, too. But then he pulled himself together.

"I'm Torth," he said. "Have you got any food?"

We had, but as far as I knew none of it was meat, and as one by one my friends woke up I was able to confirm that this was indeed the case. Their reactions ranged from the obvious 'Where are we?' and 'What happened?' to the rather more belligerent "How did one of them get here?" That was from Alain, who really didn't like Greys: he hadn't forgiven them for separating him from Oli while we were working at the mine.

"His name's Torth," I told them, and I switched to Grey. "Torth, this is Alain, Oli, Radu, Marc and Stefan. None of them can speak your language, I'm afraid."

The Grey grunted, looking nervous: he was, after all, heavily outnumbered.

"How old are you?" I asked him. "And what happened to you?"

"I'm thirteen. And… there's a war on. We think that the Southern Bloc must have attacked about twenty days ago… at least, I think it was about twenty days ago. I've been underground for a long time, and I don't know for sure what day it is."

"Well, it's December 12^th in my calendar," I told him, "or 39 Hideb in the one my friends use. But I don't suppose you use either of those."

Torth shook his head. "We didn't know they were going to attack," he told me. "Everything was normal. I'd decided to explore the Hirsh caves with three colleagues: we'd done some basic exploration before, but this time we wanted to go right into the complex and explore some of the deeper chambers. And while we were underground the whole area was destroyed by concussion bombs and ultrasound beacons – and most of the cave system collapsed. Again, we can't be sure, but there haven't been any cave-ins before, and we know what concussion bombs can do, so we can't think of any other explanation. One of the others was killed in a landslide, and it took the rest of us until yesterday to find our way back to the surface. We've been living on small rodents, but there weren't very many of them…"

"You said 'we'," I pointed out. "Where are the others?"

"I'm not telling you," said Torth, looking at me distrustfully.

"Okay, but if they're in the same state as you they're going to need help."

"All we need is food. But the attack will have killed all the animals. We've been looking in the woods for bodies, but we haven't found any yet – and, besides, I don't know if it would be safe to eat them without cooking first, and we haven't got anything to make a fire."

"Then you'll have to let us help you," I said. "And maybe after that you can help us to find a way out of here."

He didn't say anything, so I switched back to Kerpian and explained to the others what he had told me.

"We can certainly get a fire going," said Stefan, "but we need to find some shelter first. Ask him if he can show us where these caves were – if there's enough of them left for us to get into we can at least get out of this wind."

"I think we can help him with the food, too," said Radu. "He needs to dig out some hibernating animals. We used to do that sometimes when food was scarce back home. I can show him where to look if you like. But… do you think we should? I mean, can we trust him?"

"Probably not," I said. "Greys always think of themselves first. But I think we should try to help, all the same: at least he'll be able to tell us more about this world we've ended up in."

I switched back to Grey. "We can get a fire lit for you, but we need somewhere with a bit of shelter, so you'll need to show us where these caves were: if there's enough cover we can build a decent fire that won't go out. And Radu here thinks he can help you dig up sleeping animals…" (my Grey vocabulary only went so far, and the word 'hibernation' was one I didn't know) "…you know, the ones that sleep through the winter – if there are any in this world."

"There are, but they're probably dead, too. The beacons will have killed them. The only reason they didn't kill us is because we were deep underground. But we can eat them if we cook them properly."

"So will you trust us?"

"Why? I mean, why would you want to help us? What's in it for you?"

"That sounds like a normal Grey response… well, I was thinking that if we help you, perhaps you could tell us a bit about this world, and maybe then we'll be able to find a way out of here."

"Then… I think I can agree to that. I'll admit that if we don't find food soon, we'll die, and it's hard for us to function properly when it's as cold as this."

"All the more reason why you need us to get a fire going for you – and we'd probably feel better ourselves, too, if we could warm up a bit. So where are your colleagues?"

He hesitated, but then seemed to come to a decision, and he led us into the trees. Quite a lot of them seemed to have been uprooted and were only still standing because they were caught up in the branches of other trees, but in places whole swathes of the forest had been flattened. The land began to slope steeply downwards, and the trees began to thin out, but before we emerged from them Torth led us into a crack in the rocks which eventually widened out into a proper cave. It was quite dark inside, but there was enough light filtering in from the entrance for me to be able to see a Grey lying on the ground and another one sitting beside him. This one stood up as we moved into the cave.

"You found us some food!" he exclaimed. "Well done, Torth!"

"We're not food," I told him, and had the pleasure of seeing him jump back in astonishment as I spoke in his language. "We're here to help you."

I left him and Torth jabbering at each other and turned to Stefan.

"What do we need to get a fire going, Stefi?" I asked. "Can you find somewhere in here where the smoke will be able to get out?"

"I think so," he said. "There's a draught coming from the back of the cave, and the roof is fairly high here, too… I should think any smoke will find its way out of the door. But we need to try, anyway: it's too cold to sit around without heat."

He organised a foraging party consisting of everyone except me and Tommi, whose job it was to stay and talk to the Greys, to see what we could find out. So I waited until Torth had finished explaining, as best he could, who we were, and then I broke in with some questions of my own, learning that the second Grey was also thirteen, and his name was Verdess, and that the one on the ground, who seemed to be sleeping, was eleven and was called Sarleth. And it was obvious that all three of them were almost immobilised by the cold and were extremely hungry.

I took off my heavy jacket and handed it to Torth.

"Put this on," I said. "It'll help you to keep warm until we get a fire going. Tommi, I think yours is a bit small for Verdess, but it'll probably fit Sarleth. See if you can get it on him, and I'll have a look in my pack and see what else I've got."

The only other thing I had that would be useful was the decent jacket I'd worn when I had met the king, and it looked a bit odd on a Grey. But Verdess accepted it all the same: like Torth, his own clothes were torn in several places, no doubt as a result of being caught in landslides and scrambling about over sharp stones. I don't know how humans would have coped in those circumstances: probably we would have died, because our eyesight isn't anything like good enough to allow us to see in the dark, whereas the Greys could at least make some things out – or so I had learned during the tests I had done with Issin.

Some time later – and by now it was getting so dark outside that here in the cave I could barely see anything at all – the others came back. Not only had they brought plenty of dead wood with them, but Radu and Marc had found some squirrels.

"We got lucky," said Radu. "These weren't dead – I suppose they were so well insulated that the sound weapons didn't affect them – or maybe there wasn't one that went off close enough. Anyway, they're still fairly fat, so there should be enough meat on them to keep the Greys alive for a little longer – though I'm still not sure about helping them, Jake: they're the reason we all got sent to the mine in the first place."

"That was a different world," I pointed out. "These three are just kids – and, like I said, we need someone to help us find a way out of here."

Stefan was already hard at work building a fire. He still had the little cigarette lighter he had shown me on our first day together, so at least he didn't have to mess about rubbing sticks together – though I have no doubt that he could have done it that way if he had needed to. And soon there was a proper fire going. We all crowded round it happily, though I made sure that the Greys were able to get a good place, too: they needed the warmth even more than we did.

Torth took the squirrels Radu had found, skinned them expertly with his knife (which I had given back to him once he had accepted that we weren't his next meal) and spitted them on some green pieces of wood that Radu had helpfully provided, and soon they were cooking nicely. Fortunately none of us was particularly hungry: we'd had a large breakfast at the hotel and another good meal served on the train, though I thought that in another half-day or so we'd all start to feel peckish, and in another day or two we'd probably find roast squirrel quite an attractive prospect.

"So what are we going to do, then?" asked Alain. "I mean, first of all, where are we?"

"No idea," I said. "I'd guess something went wrong with the portal – I saw that the tent wasn't properly closed, so maybe the wind disrupted it, or something. The main thing is, we're not in Kerpia and we're not in Baden-Bayern, so somehow we've ended up in a third world. I'm pretty sure this isn't the Grey world Tommi and I visited before: there was no question of a war there. So we're off the map, because the Kerpians only found that one Grey world. That means that this one doesn't have a portal."

They stared at me – all except Marc, who was the only one of us who didn't speak Kerpian. Oli gave him a rapid translation into French, and I waited until he was up to speed.

"So we've got to decide what to do," I went on. "We could hang around where we came through and hope that either the Kerpians or the bunch from our world manage to re-establish a portal – except that we know our lot can only build one to Kerpia, and the Kerpians probably have no idea where we went. They'll know we went somewhere, because sooner or later the portal between Kerpia and Baden-Bayern will be rebuilt, and then both sides will know for sure that we're missing, but I can't imagine how they'll be able to work out where we went."

"But… what else can we do?" asked Radu.

"We could try waiting on top of the mountain. We know that portals do pop into being spontaneously up there from time to time: that's how the Kerpians found out about the whole concept. The record said it's a sort of thin point where worlds are close to each other. What do you think, Stefi?"

"I think we don't want to hang around on top of the Feldberg in mid-December unless there's a proper shelter up there," he said. "We haven't got any food, and I don't think we could stay up there in the open for very long anyway. But I think we should investigate. I'll go up there tomorrow and scout around: if there's a shelter, perhaps we could try that. Though I think we'd need to stock up with food first, and I'm not sure how to go about that."

"Hang on a moment," said Alain. "Are you really suggesting that we stand around on top of a mountain on the off-chance that a portal will conveniently pop into existence right next to us? What are the chances of that happening?"

"Well… probably not very good," I admitted. "I mean, we know it happens occasionally, in the correct weather and atmospheric conditions, but frankly I can't think of anything else we could do except to stay here and hope someone rescues us. And since nobody knows which world we went to, I don't think the chances of that happening are very good, either. But we have to do something. Got any better ideas?"

"Well, no," admitted Alain. "But it seems a bit desperate."

"I think we are a bit desperate," I said.

"Don't worry, Alain," said Oli, brightly. "Jake's clever and Stefan's strong. They've looked after us so far, haven't they? I know they'll find a way out sooner or later."

The vote of confidence was really nice, but of course Oli had always looked on the bright side of everything, and I was very much afraid that this time I was going to let him down.

I tried to take stock of what our resources were. Unfortunately the older members of our party were no longer with us, so we no longer had Markus's strength or his ability – even if it was a bit limited – to hotwire vehicles. Nor did we have Hansi's shooting ability, or Tibor's dependability. So what did I have to work with? Well, Radu could shoot a bit, and he was obviously good at foraging for food, which could be very useful in our current situation. He could also pick locks, though I wasn't sure that this would be needed in the middle of a forest. Oli's catapult was with him as always, and he could be counted on to cheer us all up, and Alain had experience of surviving, and keeping his friends alive, in difficult circumstances. Tommi could speak Grey, which was obviously going to be handy. Marc was a completely unknown quantity. Against that I had three Greys who could certainly not be depended on to worry about anyone except themselves. I didn't think this was going to be easy, although as long as I had Stefan beside me I knew our situation wasn't completely hopeless.

"Tomorrow I think we should go down into the valley and see if there's any food or shelter," I said. "Our Grey friends can show us where to go. Of course, if there are hostile Greys down there we'll have to avoid them…" I switched to Grey and asked Torth if the Southern Bloc would have sent its troops in.

"I don't know," he admitted. "Possibly, although where we live isn't particularly useful land. They're more likely to bypass us and head for the flatter country further north. They'd just bomb this part of the country to make sure we didn't have any troops in the area."

"Then we'll do that," I told my friends. "And afterwards Stefan wants to have a look at the top of the mountain, to see if there's anywhere up there we could shelter while looking for portals. So for now I think the best thing we can do is to sleep. Except I want us to keep a watch through the night, just in case Torth decides that we'd make a nice snack – he has got a knife, after all. So we'll keep watch, the same as we did in the Hub: two hours – or a kend – on watch, then four hours, or two kends, asleep. Radu, you and Marc start, then me and Stefan, then Alain and Oli, then we go round again. As far as the Greys are concerned we're just making sure the fire doesn't go out, but make sure you stay awake and keep an eye on them, okay?"

I explained to Torth that we were going to make sure the fire was kept burning all night. He offered to take a turn, but I said that he and his friends needed rest, and that we'd be happy to deal with it for tonight at least. I'm not sure if he guessed the real reason we were keeping watch or not, but he didn't say anything about it.

The ground beneath us was very hard, which made sleeping difficult, and I didn't actually manage to get to sleep before Radu told me it was our turn. Stefan and I sat up, while Radu and Marc lay down in our place, their arms around each other. I felt sorry for Marc: at least the rest of us had been through this sort of thing before. He must have been scared, but he was managing not to show it, which I thought was quite impressive.

The night passed without incident: the Grey boys seemed to sleep right through it, anyway. I didn't sleep a lot myself, and I got the impression that most of my friends hadn't, either. Still, as soon as there were signs of daylight outside the cave we got up and made our way to the entrance. It looked dull and damp, but at least it wasn't actually raining or snowing.

"We're going down into the valley," I told Torth. "Hopefully we'll meet someone who can help us – and obviously they'll be able to help you, too: you still need some proper meat, and you need to have somewhere warm to stay, too."

"If I was right about the bombing there won't be anyone alive down there," he told me. "Unless the Southern Bloc troops have turned up, of course. And there won't be any shelter, either."

"Well, we can't stay here," I said. "There's no food, and it's too cold. If there's no food or shelter in the valley we'll have to keep moving until we find some."

"There's one thing we need to do first," said Stefan, when I proposed moving out to my friends. "I want to go back to the place where we arrived and leave a note, just in case the Kerpians or our own people manage to find this world. Get yourselves ready: I'll be back as quickly as I can."

He slipped out of the cave, and so the rest of us settled down again. He came back about twenty minutes later and we started to move out, but I called a halt when I realised that Torth and Verdess were heading for the entrance, but that Sarleth was still lying by the dying flames of the fire.

"What about him?" I asked them.

Torth shrugged. "He has injured his leg, so he can't walk. He'll have to stay here."

"What, you're just going to leave him?"

"Why not? He would only slow us down. We brought him this far in case we became desperate enough to want to eat him, though frankly we taste horrible – it would have had to be a last resort. But now we won't need him any longer: if we get really hungry we can eat the weakest of you – the small one with red hair, perhaps. Mammals generally taste fine, even uncooked."

"You're not eating me!" declared Tommi, vehemently. "I'd taste nasty, anyway."

"But… Sarleth is your colleague, isn't he?"

"So?"

I suppose I'd forgotten quite how selfish Greys usually were, but I'd already decided that if I was at least in nominal charge of the party then nobody, human or Grey, was going to be abandoned.

"We're taking him," I said. "Suppose it was you with the hurt leg – would you want to be left behind?"

"No," admitted Torth. "But I'd expect to be – we all have to think of ourselves."

"Not in my parties, we don't. Here we think of each other, too. So we'll carry him, if we have to. We'll all take turns, including you two. And in return you can both keep wearing the extra clothes we lent you last night. Fair?"

"We need the warmth, so… I accept. But I think you're being stupid about this."

"Perhaps I am, but I'm not changing my mind."

Stefan and Alain managed to rig up a rough stretcher: there was plenty of wood about, of course, and Stefan had some string in his customarily well-equipped back-pack, and soon we had Sarleth, who still seemed to be semiconscious, on the stretcher. Alain and I started carrying it, and the whole party moved off down the hill.

We walked for quite a while. In Kerpia there were several houses on the lower slopes, but here there seemed to be nothing, and in fact we reached the town before we found any other buildings. And the town was an absolute shambles: there seemed to be no buildings that were intact. There were piles of masonry half-blocking the street, and here and there we could see bodies. There was nothing moving except for some pieces of rubbish that were being blown about by the wind.

"Told you," said Torth, morosely. "There's nothing here."

"Well, there will probably be some food we can scavenge, provided we can get into what's left of the buildings. Can you show us where you lived? I'd guess your school had kitchens, and maybe there'll be food we can get at."

It took Torth a while to identify his school, so complete was the destruction, and the school itself had virtually been levelled. There was clearly no chance of finding any food without a substantial amount of digging. The same was true of the adjoining building, which Torth said was an apartment block of living quarters for adult males.

"We need something smaller," I said. "There must have been eating places here somewhere, and the ones I saw last time I was in a town like this were a lot smaller. They might have been sheltered from the blast by the larger buildings, and even if they collapsed there should be a lot less digging to do to get to their storerooms."

"That could be true," agreed Torth. "There were eating places close to the transport centre. It's this way."

He picked his way through and over the rubble, and we followed him. Stefan and Verdess were carrying the stretcher at this point, and Verdess certainly wasn't happy about it, to judge from the muttering I could hear, but I ignored him and followed Torth on through the remains of the town.

The 'transport centre' proved to be a bus station, and it struck me that I hadn't seen any cars at all on our way through the town. Perhaps this was a particularly green world, or perhaps it was just one in which private transportation didn't exist, a bit like Soviet Russia. And here we got very lucky indeed: there was a small restaurant next to what was left of the bus station, and it had only partially collapsed. We were able to get inside it, and right through to the storeroom at the back. The various refrigeration and freezer units had no power, but there was also a cupboard that held a lot of tinned food, mostly meat. We formed a chain and passed every tin we could reach outside: I didn't want to risk staying inside the building longer than necessary in case the rest of it collapsed.

"I'm sure this will taste better than we would," I said, handing Torth a large can of something that I thought was probably a type of preserved beef.

"I think you're right," he said, opening it with no finesse at all using his knife and scooping out the contents into his mouth. I passed another can to Verdess and opened a third for myself. Neat corned beef isn't exactly my idea of a perfect meal, but it tasted good, all the same. I ate enough to keep me going and passed the tin onwards, and soon everyone had eaten enough to get by on for a while. That led me to the next big issue, and that was water. There was a stream running through the valley – we'd crossed it on the way to the transport centre – but I wasn't sure that the water would be safe to drink.

"It should be," said Torth when I asked. "It comes down from high up on the mountain, so it should be completely clean. It would be as well to take it from the steam before it gets into town, just in case someone fell in it and died when the bombs went off: we can be fairly certain there won't be anything in it once we get upstream of the town."

"What about the bombs? Could there be any contamination?"

"No, these are just explosive and sound-based weapons. We don't use chemicals or poisons at the same time as concussion bombs: this is only a civilian area, after all."

Well, that sounded okay. That just left us with the third major requirement, which was shelter, and that looked to be a lot more of a problem: I didn't want to risk staying inside the restaurant, and there didn't seem to be any other buildings left with even part of a roof.

"How far is it to the next town?" I asked. "And how far do you think we'd have to go to get out of the bombed-out area?"

"A very long way," said Torth, gloomily. "The next town is about ten khirokubs along the valley, but it'll look the same as this one. But…" He hesitated, and then looked a little more optimistic. "If we can get to Hilsstok, I'll bet there'll still be buildings standing there, because it's got a military base. They'll have saturated the area with ultrasound beacons to kill everyone, but they'll have wanted the materiel intact, and so they probably won't have used the heavy bombs. It's textbook practice."

"How far away is it?" I asked.

"Around twenty to twenty-five khirokubs, I should think."

"How far is that, for people who don't use your measurements?"

"Well… I suppose you don't use our time measurements, either?"

I'd learned a little bit about time measurements during my stay with Haless and Issin, but I could remember very little of it now.

"You'd better assume not," I said.

"Well… if you were on foot, I suppose the sun would move about that far in the sky," he said, indicating an arc over his head. That looked very inexact to me… and then I realised I could probably use Grey measurements of distance after all.

"How many kubs in a khirokub?" I asked.

"A thousand. Why?"

"Well, I know I'm three point four four kubs tall – at least, I was about four months ago. I think I was about a metre fifty-five [5'1"] then, so that means…" I did some rapid calculations in my head. "So a metre is about two point two kubs, so that means your army base is about ten kilometres [6 miles] away. I think we could walk that far without too many problems, even carrying Sarleth."

"You're not still going to drag him along with us, surely? We've got food now, and there'll almost certainly be more available in Hilsstok – provided the Southern Bloc hasn't got there first, of course… Anyway, we don't need to lug him about any more. Let's just leave him here."

"If we do that he'll probably die."

"Yes, he will. But we'll be able to move a lot faster, won't we? And if we do run into enemy soldiers we'll be able to run a lot faster if we're not carrying a dead weight, too."

"If we meet enemy soldiers we'll decide what to do then. But I've already told you I'm not leaving anyone behind. He's coming with us."

And I was pleased to discover that none of my own party wanted to question the wisdom of carrying an injured Grey with us, not even Alain. So we packed as many cans as we could into our bags and headed back the way we had come until we reached the point at the edge of town where the road forked, the left fork going back the way we had come, towards the top of the mountain, and the right hand one leading down to the main valley. We stopped at the edge of town and filled our water-bottles at the stream: the Greys all had one, Stefan had his as usual, and everyone else except Marc had a plastic bottle in their bags. Radu immediately said that he would share his water with Marc, and I added that if Radu ran out we'd all be happy to share with both of them – and again nobody disagreed, although I thought that I might run into more of an argument if I tried commandeering any of the Greys' bottles.

Stefan walked with me for most of the journey. He hadn't said any more about scouting the top of the Feldberg, though I agreed that it would be sensible to do so sooner or later: for the time being he agreed that finding proper shelter was more important.

"But I don't think we should stay in that place for very long," he added. "If Torth is right it's likely that enemy troops will turn up sooner or later."

"I know. I was hoping for maybe a night or two so that the Greys can recuperate fully, and to give us a chance to stock up on food and water. And maybe there'll be survivors there who can help us…"

"Or kill us," he interrupted.

"I know. We'll have to be very careful. But there's no reason for them to attack us unless they're short of food: they'll be far more worried about the southerners. What I'm really hoping is that we can find transport there, because it'll be a lot easier to get back to the top of the Feldberg if we can find a truck or something. And it'll be a lot easier to stock up with supplies if we don't have to carry everything on our backs, too."

We walked onwards. After a couple of hours we came to the remains of the next small town, and this was if anything even more of a mess than Grey Hintraten had been: there were vast craters here and there, and between those and the piles of rubble we found it hard to get through the streets. But eventually we made it and were able to continue onwards in the direction of Hilsstok.

We stopped for a break shortly after leaving the destroyed town, had another impromptu meal of tinned meat, and then carried on. The Greys were making heavy weather of it: I knew their stamina wasn't good to start with, and these two were still suffering from cold, hunger and lack of sleep, so I took it slowly and stopped for breaks as often as I felt we could. And eventually we saw another town ahead of us.

"That's it," said Torth. "That's Hilsstok. And it looks as if I was right about the bombing, too."

We stopped where we were while Stefan made a quick scout forward on his own: if there were live Greys inside the town I didn't want just to walk blindly into them. But he came back shortly afterwards to report that there was no sign of life, but that there did appear to be bodies lying in the streets. So we moved forward again, and as we got closer we could all see for ourselves that the nearest buildings were still standing. The place still didn't look normal, though: it was absolutely silent, and as we reached the first buildings we could all see the bodies Stefan had mentioned.

"Do you know where the army base is?" I asked Torth.

"No, I've never been here before. Bases are generally in the centre of towns, though, so that the soldiers can head out of town equally quickly in any direction."

So we kept going until we found the military base. There was a high wall around it and a fairly solid gate leading inside, and fortunately the gate was open, though there were a couple of dead Greys in uniform – a dark grey one, rather than the red-brown that had been in use in the Grey world I'd visited before – lying just inside it. We stepped over them and continued towards the heart of the base.

"How come all the glass is intact?" I asked Torth. "If they're using a sound weapon, shouldn't it all be shattered?"

"Those weapons are very finely tuned," Torth told me. "If one went off close to you it would pulp all your major organs and possibly break most of your smaller bones, but it would leave those vision frames you're wearing intact. Of course, they might not work exactly the same on you because your organs are probably different from ours."

"Not that different," I said, thinking of Haless's test results.

"Well, anyway, I think they probably used gas here as well," Torth went on. "If you're attacking a military base there's a danger that some people will be behind thick walls or in deep shelters, so the textbooks say you should follow up with a poison gas attack, just to make sure."

"What? Is it safe for us to be here, then?"

"Oh, yes – the gas clears fairly quickly, a couple of days at the absolute outside, and it'll have been quicker here because of the wind."

"But if it's textbook stuff, won't the soldiers have taken precautions – worn gas masks, or something like that?"

"Some of them probably did. But any survivors will have cleared out by now, because they'll know the enemy will be on the way, and unless a large number survived – which is unlikely: as I said, there hadn't been any hostile action for months – they'll have fallen back northwards."

So we're not going to get any help here, then, I thought.

There were bodies here and there, so if there had been any survivors they clearly hadn't bothered tidying up before they left, but then Greys almost certainly wouldn't have bothered, even if they had been thinking of anything except making a fairly rapid withdrawal.

Best news of all was that the power was still on, and when we finally found our way into the kitchens I found plenty of supplies, including enough meat to keep our three Greys alive for months. Torth seemed almost ready to eat half a cow raw, but I persuaded him to wait and let me cook a proper meal for everyone. Alain stayed to help me with the cooking and Sarleth, who was still drifting in and out of consciousness, was left with us, but everyone else went out to scout around and look for somewhere for us to sleep for a couple of nights.

There were enough vegetables in the storerooms to provide 'garnishes' for a great number of typical Grey meals, so we got to work on those as well, and for a while I forgot everything else and concentrated on making us all a really good meal.

One by one the scouting parties returned, and by the time the food was ready everyone was sitting at one of the dining tables impatiently. I piled up the plates, giving the Greys a couple of thick steaks each with a small portion of vegetables, while the rest of us ate a bit less meat and a few more vegetables. Nobody complained, and nobody seemed disposed to talk while they were eating.

Sarleth roused himself long enough to eat one of his steaks, but he really didn't look well and I thought we were going to have a problem there if he didn't improve – we simply couldn't go on carrying him everywhere we went.

After we had eaten we sat back to discuss what the foraging parties had discovered.

"The good news is that we have transport," Stefan reported: he'd gone with Verdess and Tommi to look for a truck for us. "There are four or five trucks, something that looks like a jeep, and a couple of motorbikes. Verdess tells me they all run on some sort of super-battery, so they don't need fuel, and once they're charged up they're good for at least two hundred kilometres [125 miles]. Or if we're really feeling aggressive there are a couple of light tanks down there, too. Verdess says the trucks are easy to drive, but he doesn't know about the tanks."

"We've found somewhere to sleep," reported Radu. "Off the base, like you said, in case the enemy troops turn up while we're asleep."

I'd thought this a sensible precaution: incoming troops would head for the military base, which meant it would be safer to sleep outside it.

"It looks as if the bombs fell during the day, because the accommodation block we found was empty – there aren't any bodies in it at all," Radu continued. "And it's a couple of hundred hersps from the base, too, so it should be safe."

"I found the clothing store," Oli told me, "so our Grey friends can replace their torn clothing, as long as they don't mind wearing uniforms."

I translated that for Torth.

"I'll wear anything, as long as it's warm," he told me. "And… I found the armoury, so we can take weapons with us."

I wasn't sure I liked the idea of the Greys being armed: after all, they were only with us because it suited them, and as soon as they decided they'd be better off on their own they'd leave. I didn't mind them leaving, but I didn't want them to take a couple of Jake steaks with them for the journey. And, as for the idea of the rest of us carrying weapons, I'd had quite enough of that last time around, and I was fairly sure that Alain, Oli, Tommi and Radu at least would agree with me. Stefan, however, was interested, and got me to ask Torth to show him where the armoury was.

"One other thing we need," I said to him once I'd transmitted his request, "and that's medical supplies. I'm worried about Sarleth, and it would be sensible if we carried some basics with us anyway, just in case. See if you can find an infirmary while you're looking for guns. Take Tommi with you: he'll be able to interpret for you."

I cleared away the empty plates and started to wash up, but Radu and Marc came and pushed me away.

"You did the cooking," Radu said, "so we'll wash up. That's only fair."

Stefan came back just as they were finishing off – unarmed, I was pleased to see, though he said that it wouldn't be a bad idea to carry a couple of rifles at least, even if we were only going to use them for hunting purposes. He'd also found the infirmary, though again he hadn't bothered bringing any supplies yet.

"We'd better have a look at Sarleth," I said. "I don't suppose Torth and Verdess are going to be a lot of help, but if they want me to keep cooking for them they'll have to at least try to find some sort of suitable medicine. I just wish there was a proper doctor round here…"

As usual, Oli was translating everything for Marc, and at this point Marc put his hand up timidly as if he was in school.

"I know a little bit about medicine," he said in English. "My parents are both doctors, and they've taught me quite a lot, because I'd like to be one too when I grow up. Obviously I don't know anything about these creatures, but I'll have at look at him for you if you like."

"Please do," I invited. "Stefan knows the basics of bandages and splints, otherwise we're all pretty hopeless at anything to do with health."

So Marc went over to where Sarleth was lying – he'd lapsed into unconsciousness again, and it was a measure of how unwell he was that he'd left one steak completely untouched. There was a large bloodstain on the right leg of his trousers, and that seemed to be the obvious place to start, though the material was stuck to his leg and Marc had to ease it free with warm water. He then cut the trousers off completely, because that didn't involve moving the injured boy, and looked at the wound, a fairly deep gouge about halfway down his thigh.

"This is infected," Marc said, and I think even such complete medical novices as the rest of us could tell that there was a problem here; the wound looked puffy and inflamed and seemed to be oozing pus. "We'll have to open it up, clean it out and then sew it up again – so we need some sort of alcohol to clean it, a needle and some surgical thread, and a probe, or forceps, or something – I think there's probably something stuck inside that's causing the infection, and we need to get it out."

Stefan ran to the infirmary and returned carrying everything Marc had asked for, and over the next ten minutes or so my opinion of Marc changed completely: I'd thought him timid and weak, but the way he worked on that wound showed me once again that it's best not to judge people too quickly. He got Torth and Verdess to hold Sarleth down when he started to struggle and scream, and eventually he was able to extract a sliver of stone from deep in the wound, releasing at the same time a flood of creamy pus, at which point Sarleth mercifully fainted.

"I think that should fix it," he said, once he was sure there was no other foreign matter inside. "Now it just needs stitching closed. He won't be able to walk for a bit, but at least it should heal cleanly – at least, it will if their bodies are anything like ours. Stefan, could you do the stitching, please? It would probably be a good thing if someone else could do this as well as me, just in case."

Stefan was obviously as impressed as I was, because he took the needle and thread and, following Marc's instructions carefully, closed the wound up. Finally they applied a bandage.

"Wow, Marc, that was amazing!" cried Radu, throwing his arms around his friend. "I never knew you could do stuff like that!"

"I just wanted to help," said Marc, hugging him back.

We all went to the apartment block that Radu had found, carrying Sarleth between us. Of course Greys didn't have families, so adults lived in blocks of what we would call studio apartments, except that these had no kitchen space: Torth told me that each block had a communal kitchen and dining area. Since Greys only ate every two or three days there was no need for anything more.

Some of the apartments were unlocked, and the others didn't pose too much of a challenge to Radu's lock-picking skills, and soon we had enough of them open for what we needed. Each apartment had a small bed, so we did what we had done previously in these circumstances and borrowed beds from other apartments to give each room a double instead of a single bed. We fitted out five rooms on the second floor in this way, finding fresh bedding in a laundry room in the basement.

"Do we need to keep a watch tonight?" asked Alain.

"I don't think so," I said. "I think we'll be safe enough – and if enemy soldiers reach the town they won't start here, and we should hear them long before they try coming into the block. And we could probably all do with a decent night's sleep, too. Tommi, do you want to come in with me and Stefi? I don't suppose you want to be on your own tonight."

"It's okay," he said. "I'll go in with Sarleth – if he wakes up and needs anything I'll be able to understand him."

"Are you sure?"

He nodded. "He sort of reminds me of Trethar, and he and I got on pretty well."

Trethar was the ten-year-old at Haless's school whom Tommi had befriended, and I supposed there was a slight resemblance.

"Well, okay, then," I said. "But we'll be right next door if you change your mind."

Alain and Oli took the room on the other side of ours, and Radu and Marc the one beyond that.

"We'll see you in the morning," I said to Torth – he and Verdess were going to use the room on the other side of Tommi's. "And don't worry if you hear strange noises from our rooms: it's normal for boys in our world to… well, to practise sex together, and some of us can get a bit noisy." I darted a glance at Alain and Oli. "I know you sometimes do that too, so we'll ignore anything we hear from your room."

"We don't do it with each other," Torth told me. "Sarleth was taking the female role for us, because he isn't big enough to take the active role yet. That's another reason why we carried him out, to be honest, though we haven't felt strong enough for days, and we couldn't do it anyway while his leg was hurting as much as it obviously was. I suppose we could do it together until he's better, but we'll probably just sleep instead." He paused. "I should tell you something," he continued. "When I found the armoury I considered simply arming myself and Verdess and leaving. Normally I wouldn't have hesitated, in fact. But … I have never met creatures like you: even though we are not even the same species, you still cared for us, sharing your clothing, finding food for us and carrying Sarleth for a long distance. I think you're insane, but I am glad that your insanity helped me. So we're going to stay with you and see what happens. Perhaps it will be educational."

"I'm sure it will," I said. "Goodnight, Torth."

I went into our room with Stefan and we closed the door, locking it just in case Torth had a change of heart and felt hungry in the night – though with the amount he and Verdess had eaten I thought it far more likely that they would sleep soundly for several hours. Still, it never hurts to be careful.

I've no idea what Greys do in their free time, but to judge from the room we were in it wasn't done at home: there were no books, no TV, no radio – nothing, in fact, except the basic furniture. It didn't bother me, though, because all I wanted to do was sleep… well, not quite all.

"We're a day late," I pointed out to Stefan. "Are we going to do it here tonight, or should we wait?"

"I'd definitely like to do it, but… I really want to do it in our own bed at home, where we can relax and be comfortable and not have to worry about anything else. So, to be honest, I think we ought to wait until we get home."

"Good. I'm glad you said that, because I'd prefer to do it there, too. Except… do you really think we'll be able to get home, Stefi?"

He shrugged. "It won't help to worry about it," he said, starting to get undressed. "You know as well as I do that the chances aren't great, especially if we're relying on a random portal appearing on top of the mountain and leading us somewhere decent. Ideally we want one that will take us to one of the worlds still open to the Kerpians' Hub One Nexus Room, because then we'll be able to get home easily. But we'd have to be amazingly lucky to find one at all, never mind a useful one."

"I know," I said, removing my own clothes, turning out the light and getting into bed with him. "We've got no chance at all unless the weather settles down: the stuff on Dead Guy's computer said the first natural portal appeared in mist, and there won't be any mist unless the wind disappears completely."

"Still, we can't give up yet," said Stefan, cuddling up to me. "We've been in as bad a mess as this before, and we got out of that one okay, didn't we? Tomorrow we'll scout out the top of the Feldberg. If we're lucky there will be shelter up there. And we've got plenty of supplies now, and there are sure to be sleeping bags we can use somewhere in the stores here."

"They'd better be the sort that you can zip together," I commented. "I'm not sleeping anywhere that I can't snuggle up to you: that one night in the tent in Baden-Bayern was more than enough."

"In that case, maybe we'd better make use of the room we've got here, just in case," he said, and he started burrowing down into the bed.

It's amazing how quickly you can forget your worries when someone has your penis in his mouth, and over the next half-hour or so we made sure that neither of us had time to worry about anything except making sure that we were doing everything we could to keep each other excited. And by now we were pretty good at that. And so by the time I fell asleep with Stefan's arm around my shoulders I felt nicely relaxed. Stefan was right, I thought: we'd been in a bigger mess before. Surely we'd find a way out of this one…

Unfortunately it's going to be a lot harder than Jake thinks to get out of the mess he's in here, and in the next chapter things are going to get significantly worse.…

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