Kingdom Keepers V(85)

He stepped forward to where the hallway became the bedroom. Another step and he’d be free of his confines.

The girl lunged forward. Philby jumped back instinctively. He would have to fight such instincts. He had to hold his ground.

She seized the ship’s-wheel clock from the semi-circular counter top at the end of the closets. She held it out as a shield.

Philby swung the hanger. She deftly deflected the blow.

The boy leaped forward—a fast one, this kid—and swiped the broken glass across Philby’s left arm, getting nothing but air. The shards of glass swept through Philby’s hologram. The next attempt was met by Philby with the life preserver. A sliver of the bulb’s glass broke and rained to the floor.

Distracted as he was, Philby left himself open to a charge from the girl. She swung the clock for Philby’s head. He leaned back and felt the wind from the miss.

The boy’s blue outline dimmed following Philby’s block. Philby took advantage of the weakness of the hologram and stabbed with the end of the hanger. He hit the boy in the shoulder—the boy, not his hologram—and sent the kid back onto the bed. He quickly recovered, leaping to his feet. His blue outline regained color.

Philby swung to his right and caught the girl on the forearm. She dropped the clock. He swung again, hitting her on the side of the knee, and she collapsed.

His hand stung. He’d let go of the life vest. The boy had wisely attacked his hand, knowing it had to be material enough to hold on to the vest. Philby was bleeding, a shard of glass lodged in his wrist. Philby screamed—out of anger and strategy, not pain—and charged the boy, swinging the hanger like a sword fighter and pushing the boy back into a corner formed by the bed and end table. Pinned. He whipped him with the hanger, watching the blue outline drain of color as welts formed on the boy’s forearm.

The girl would not be intimidated. With Philby’s attention on her partner and his body angled away from her, she also screamed out as she charged, hands outstretched. She passed through his hologram, but managed to take hold of his more solid hand and pulled him with her. She dragged him through the wall and into the next stateroom—or almost.

His hand holding the hanger caught against the interior wall. He stopped suddenly, half in, half out, as he had at the stateroom door. It was like someone had stepped on the brakes. He stopped so quickly, she lost her grip and let go. She fell into the adjacent stateroom, landing on the floor by the bed, while Philby remained stuck in the wall. He lunged back into the original stateroom, where the boy had now recovered and picked up the hanger.

The boy swung and stabbed at Philby’s 2.0 hologram, swiping through his hologram’s projection until focusing just on Philby’s hands. Three repeated blows connected with the knuckles on his right hand.

Philby cried out in pain. With the pain, fear. With fear, a somewhat weakened hologram, 2.0 or not. The boy was winning.

Spinning and kicking, Philby managed to slip past the battery of blows and reach the closet. He grabbed a hanger and the two boys launched into a sword fight, the object of which was to strike the other’s hand and make him drop the hanger, then step in and beat the other’s failing hologram senseless.

The girl reappeared through the wall. Angry. Defiant.

“The bulb on the floor,” her partner said.

She bent and picked it up.

“We’ve got him now,” the boy said.

Philby wanted to object. He felt wounded. Decidedly at a disadvantage. But he did not feel defeated. Far from it. In fact, as his hologram went through the motions of defending himself, and while admittedly losing some ground, Professor Philby was again thinking about his getting stuck in the wall—stuck for a second time in a matter of minutes.

The hanger had been knocked from his hand by contact with the interior wall. Had he not let go, it too would have prevented him from making it through the wall. But he had let go. It wasn’t a limitation of projection that prevented him from making it through the wall and door—the girl’s first-generation DHI had managed just fine. It was something material, like the hanger. Something holding him from getting through as a projection.

And then it occurred to him: the strand of black hair.

He’d put it into his pocket. It was a material item he had not crossed over with, but had picked up from within the stateroom. A single human hair, but matter, not projected light. Matter that could not pass through a door or a wall. The strand of hair was stranding him.

He turned his pocket inside out as he fended off the dual attack. Picked at the fabric, lacking any possibility of taking the time to look down for the strand of hair. The boy swung at him. Philby dodged the blow, moving right. The girl swiped his hand—his material hand—and the bulb’s glass sliced into him. The pain caused him to look down. With that glance, he saw the black hair against the white cotton of his pants pocket. He snagged it and dropped it to the carpet. It floated, nearly motionless.