Free InterWorld by Neil Gaiman Page A

myself why I hadn’t done the right thing.
    I lowered his body and rocked back on my heels, feeling a sudden lump in my throat. I’m not sure how long I stood there, just breathing.
    Then I looked down at the figures he had drawn in the sand.
    It had to be important. But when I looked closely at the characters, they made no sense. It seemed to be some kind of mathematical equation:
    {IW}:=
    I didn’t understand what it meant, but the symbols seemed to take root in my brain, glowing in my mind’s eye.
    It was quiet in that rocky place. I could hear Jay’s gasping breaths and the hiss of the windblown sand and nothing else. I didn’t know how long it had been that way, but I knew that unequal battle between the dinomonster and the little mudluff could have ended only one way. I felt sorry for the little soap bubble thing: first bait in a trap, then killed trying tosave Jay and me from a monster.
    I stood, turned and looked back. There was no sign of either critter. I took a few cautious steps forward, trying to get a better view.
    Nothing but settling dust…
    Jay’s skin was changing color, taking on a bluish tint. There must have been venom on that creature’s teeth, like he’d said. And if I’d listened to him, and not been stupid, he would never have put himself into the jaws of death, trying to get me out of them. I’d rushed in where angels probably really did fear to tread—and Jay was dying because of that. Because of me. It was my fault. There was no one else to blame.
    I looked up at the sky, and I made another promise, to anything that was out there, anyone who was listening, that if Jay lived, if he pulled through this, if I got him medical attention and he was fine, then I’d be the best, hardest-working, nicest, coolest person anyone could ever be. I’d be St. Francis of Assisi and Gautama Buddha and everyone else like that.
    But his eyes were closed, and he was not breathing, or moving, now, and it didn’t matter what I promised or how good I was going to be in the future or anything.
    Nothing mattered.
    He was dead.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    I couldn’t leave him there.
    You’re going to laugh at me, but I couldn’t. It might have been the sensible thing to do—maybe if I could have dug a grave or something, I would have felt okay about leaving Jay in the desert at the borders of the edge of the In-Between. But the ground was baked, hard red mud with a thin layer of sand over it.
    So I tried to pull him. He didn’t budge. I knew that he outweighed me, but even so, I’d helped him drag himself away from the chasm’s edge not ten minutes ago—and probably used up every ounce of adrenaline in my system doing it, I now realized. Now that the danger was over, I had about as much chance of moving him as I had of raising the Titanic with my teeth.
    I wondered if it was the metal suit that weighed him down so. I examined it, looking for a catch or a zipper or something.
    Nothing.
    There was a hushing noise beside me and I turned. It was the little In-Betweener. The mudluff creature was hoveringin the air beside me, floating in space like an amoeba the size of a cat, glittering with all the colors of a rainbow.
    “Hey,” I said. “Well, at least you’re okay. But Jay’s dead. Maybe I ought to have left you there with that tyrannosaurus thing after all.”
    The soap bubble color changed to a rather miserable shade of purple.
    “I didn’t mean it,” I said. “But he was…my friend. He was me , kind of. And now he’s dead, and I can’t even get him back to his home. He’s too heavy.”
    The purple color warmed up until the thing glowed a gentle shade of gold. It extended something that wasn’t quite a limb and wasn’t really a tentacle—a pseudopod, I suppose, if that means what I think it does—and it touched the metal suit just above the heart.
    “Yes,” I said. “He’s dead.”
    It pulsed gold—a sort of frustrated gold—and tapped exactly the same place on the suit.
    “You want me to