“Not until I’m more than seven jumps out, I wouldn’t,” I said. “If I can get that far without using my own charms, I can get back.”

  Naga looked dubious, but put the book down on his desk, fingers lingering on the cover, before slithering over to one of the shelves. “If you lose these, we’ll lose you,” he cautioned. “I can’t send someone to retrieve you.”

  “I know.” For all that he was a professor of extra-dimensional studies, Naga didn’t travel much himself. Neither did many of the people who thronged around him, the other professors, the employees, the younger students. The University of K’larth attracted scholars from dozens of dimensions, but apart from coming to class and popping home to see their families, most of them found my predisposition for wide-ranging as strange as my own family did. No one had ever been able to tell me precisely why that was the case, or maybe I just hadn’t pressed them for an answer.

  It’s funny, really. For some species, dimensional travel was as easy as doing a bit of math or casting a spell or closing their eyes and concentrating. For others, it was virtually impossible. I couldn’t do things the Johrlac way—their math was miles beyond me—and without magic to fuel my crossings, I can’t travel using any of the natural mechanisms of those species, but it seemed like we should have been able to find a method to make this easier. To go all Star Trek, but with dimensions instead of outer space.

  Naga’s species had found the keys to dimensional travel, probably aided by the fact that snakes have very little friction and can slide through dimensional membranes with distressing ease, and then decided that while it should be studied as much as possible, it shouldn’t be done when it could be avoided. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand much about their culture. Most of my time with them had been spent here in the estate, passing through.

  Naga reached into a deep vase and pulled out two . . . I suppose the best English term for them would be “charm bracelets,” although each of them was large enough for me to wear as a necklace. They jingled faintly as he slithered back to me and held them out. “Here.”

  I took the necklaces from his hand, trying to handle them as carefully as I could. They had to be at least stable enough to deal with ordinary movement, or he wouldn’t have let me touch them, and anything that couldn’t take at least as much jostling as a grenade wasn’t going to do me much good.

  Each of them had five little glass beads on it, and each bead contained a swirling silver liquid. I glanced up. “One crossing each?”

  “Break the bead and open one door,” said Naga. “You can go ten out before you have to start using your own charms, if you’re careful, and don’t get yourself so badly hurt that you can’t go any farther. Please try not to die out there.”

  “I’ll do my best.” I slipped the necklaces on over my head, and fought the urge to ask him why, if we had crossings in such an easy, portable form that he could have ten of them in his office just waiting to be used, I needed to have them etched into my skin. The answer wouldn’t have mattered. The crossing tattoos took up so little real estate, body-wise, compared to everything else, and everything else was there because it needed to be. He’d been anticipating my future needs, not trying to keep me away from a resource.

  “Each one will use up as much of your bodily reserves as a crossing etched into your skin, so be careful.”

  “I’ll pack extra electrolyte powder,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Of course, Alice. All I’ve ever wanted to do is help you in your quest.”

  I smiled at him, touched the necklaces now hanging against my chest, taking some reassurance in the weight of them, and turned to leave the room.

  Naga apparently hadn’t realized that for me to have read the books at all, I would have needed to activate a translation charm, or that it would still be in effect, because before I could move out of hearing, he hissed, in his own language,

  “Curse the endless curiosity of monkeys.”

  I couldn’t stop and tell him I understood, not without starting something I didn’t have time for and that wouldn’t make any difference right now anyway. I left the room, pausing in the hallway for a moment to blink, then took a deep breath and continued on. I needed to get my things.

  It was time to go.

  * * *

  My pack—which was important enough to me that I would have gone back to Helos to get it even if I hadn’t been in the middle of a job—contained mostly weapons, ammunition, and spare clothing. I filled the remaining space with electrolyte powder, more bullets, and the other two books before untying my robe and dropping it to the floor, turning to the dresser that held more clothing than weapons.

  I was never the most fashionable girl in Buckley, and spending most of my time around people who have no idea what’s attractive for a human hasn’t helped with that. Pretty much all my drawers were filled with the same things, simple, practical clothing that I could move in without getting snagged on something, cut to accommodate as many knives as I could cram under a shirt. So I didn’t have to think about what I was going to wear, just pull it on and fasten the buttons, and then I was ready to go.

  Strapping on my weapons took longer. Mama’s revolvers went back to my belt, as always, and from there, it was a game of hide and seek with everything else. The last thing I put on was my boots, sturdy enough to run over crusted lava if I moved fast and the convection didn’t kill me, sufficiently broken in that if I had to wear them for the next three days, the worst thing I’d have to worry about would be the smell. All told, it took me less than ten minutes to get ready.

  I spent the whole time watching the door, waiting for Naga to realize that I must have translated the text somehow. I didn’t know why his last words had left me with such a bad feeling, but it sat in my stomach like a stone, too heavy to carry for long, making everything else seem uncertain and sour. He didn’t show up. No one did.

  Sighing, I slung my pack over my shoulders and hooked the map case over one arm. The same bad feeling that told me I needed to be concerned about how Naga was going to react to having spoken candidly in my presence was telling me not to leave it behind, and I trust my feelings, especially when I don’t understand them. They haven’t steered me wrong yet.

  Time to see if these beads worked as advertised. I took a deep breath, reached up, and snapped one off the necklace where it dangled, dropping it to the floor and grinding it under my heel. A wave of dizziness washed over me even as I closed my eyes and focused on Ithaca, a world that was familiar enough by this point that I didn’t even need to think of a direction, just the destination. Everything shifted around me.

  Abruptly, I could smell the sea. Opening my eyes, I beheld Ithaca. No flashback. No moment of total disconnection from my own life. I lifted the necklace and stared at it, reeling. I could have been traveling this way the whole time?

  Oh, Naga and I were going to have words when I got back.

  I already touched on this a little, but it’s important to be as clear as I can, so: there are dimensions, and there are worlds. If every dimension is a body, then every world is an organ—or again, more accurately, a cell. When you enter a dimension, the direction of your approach will determine which world you wind up on—and that’s why intent matters. Every dimension I’ve visited has been as large and complex and complicated and confusing as the one I’m from, full of worlds with their own natural laws, climate, civilization or lack thereof, and inhabitants. But to go back to the blood metaphor—I know, I know, too many metaphors, like I said, I’m trying to explain the unexplainable—in order for me to cross into a new dimension, I have to have something in common with it. So while there are dimensions that would kill me instantly, I don’t have access to them, no matter how close they are to my starting point or destination. I can go to worlds that don’t want to support human life, and that’s part of why I listen when people say a direction isn’t safe.

  A dimension whose physical laws don’t allow for my existence wouldn’t let me in in the first place, and that’s the difference.

  Naga says he assumes less than twenty percent of reality is accessible to any traveler, and honestly, that sounds more than generous to me. There’s a lot of places where humans can’t survive.

  But what this really means is that everyplace I go has at least a few commonalities with the world where I grew up. Gravity, oxygen, consistent laws of physics. It’s nice. It makes a real difference, where comfort is concerned. Ithaca is only two steps removed from Earth, since Empusa is directly connected, and I found myself standing in a loose circle of old stones that were probably once part of some sort of foundation. Grass grew between them, green and sweet-smelling, with just a hint of spice.

  So far, I hadn’t found anything on Ithaca that I was allergic to in pollen form, which was nice. Some of the food, yeah, which isn’t always something I have time to discover about a new world, since I tend to be in and out in short order. I was suddenly grateful that Ithaca was my best starting point. According to Naga, Aikanis had been a satyr. Maybe Helen knew something about him.

  I tromped out of the circle and started down the hillside, moving toward a rustic brick-and-wood house in the middle of what looked like an entirely untended field. Appearances can be deceiving. I’d never been much more than a mile from my standard arrival spot, and while I knew all of Ithaca wasn’t a bucolic coastal paradise, that was mostly what I’d experienced. The locals were incredibly good at making things look natural and unattended while simultaneously cultivating them to within an inch of their lives.

  It made walking down the hill surprisingly fraught, since I knew nothing here would be regarded as a “weed” by the people whose house I was approaching; it was all incredibly intentional. Helen’s wife once cried for three days because I’d stepped on a wildflower she’d been trying to cultivate for years, and only stopped when Helen was able to successfully harvest seeds from the flowers I hadn’t squashed. Phoebe still didn’t fully trust me. I couldn’t blame her, since by satyr standards I was clumsy and unobservant. Anyone who stepped on a flower was suspect to her.

  At least Helen liked me. I kept descending the hill, fully visible in the afternoon light, and by the time the ground leveled out beneath my feet, the front door was banging open and Helen herself was making her appearance.

  She was a reasonably tall woman with the sturdy build of someone who farmed for a living and enjoyed the fruits of her own labor a great deal, belly contained by a flowered apron and arms thick as planks. If not for the fact that from the waist down, she had the body of the largest goat I’d ever seen, she would have seemed perfectly normal.

  Well, that, and the horns. “Alice!” she called jubilantly. “I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”

  “Just passing through, I’m afraid, but I wanted to ask you about something, if you have a little time for me.”

  “For you, my friend? Anything. Come into the kitchen. Phoebe’s been baking, and there’s fresh bread and butter if you have a hunger to you.”

  “That would be lovely, thank you.” I’ve learned not to eat before going to Ithaca. For them, refusing food is a greater insult than physical assault. My grandmother had been similar, if less codified; she didn’t offer people who turned her down second chances.

  One of the theories I’ve been vaguely poking about dimensional travel is that not only are the worlds closest to us almost always ones where we can survive, they’re the source of many of the cryptid species we know. The ones that seem just a little out of alignment with the local biology, that don’t make any sense from an evolutionary standpoint? Yeah, there’s a reason for that. Ithaca, the parts of it I’d seen anyway, seemed vaguely Grecian in nature, and could easily explain all those old stories about the utopian fields of Mount Olympus. Not that I’d encountered any gods here. Mostly just satyrs, who were charming, friendly people, and the occasional centaur, who were . . . less friendly, to put things extremely charitably.

  It wasn’t hard to believe that a group of satyrs might have been exploring the dimensions near their own at some point, found their way to Earth, and been stranded there. It was sadly not hard to believe that they wouldn’t have lasted long after that. Despite a skill with horticulture that felt like it verged on the supernatural, the only real inhuman talents any of them had demonstrated were the ability to walk up almost sheer cliff faces, and the power of eating virtually anything without having an allergic reaction. High levels of goatiness, in short.

  Humans are not unique in the universe for violence. I’ve met plenty of people since I started traveling who believe that shooting first and asking questions later is absolutely the way to go and will make everything better when all is said and done. But humans are pretty unique in our narrow definition of what it means to be a person. Almost every other inhabited world I’ve been to has had multiple kinds of intelligent people living in accord, if not actually in harmony, while back on Earth, humanity’s response to realizing we were not alone had been to build bigger guns and try to fix what we saw as a problem.

  So drop some people whose main attribute is looking like livestock and really, really wanting to run their farms and be left mostly alone in ancient Greece, and you’ve basically created a recipe for mildly cannibalistic goat stew. Helen smiled at me as she turned to go back into the house, clearly holding no grudges over the fact that my ancestors had probably eaten some of her distant relations. That was all in the past. Here and now, it was time for bread.

  The kitchen was bright and airy, like something out of a storybook about witches who lived in the woods and dried all their herbs by hanging them in bundles around the edges of the room. The air smelled of rosemary and lavender. Another satyr was at the table, rolling out a sheet of focaccia bread. She glanced at me warily, flicking long white hair out of her eyes with a tiny jerk of her head.

  “Alice,” she acknowledged.

  “Phoebe,” I replied.

  She grunted and went back to kneading her bread as Helen bustled into the room and past me to the icebox, which looked as old-fashioned and antiquated as anything that we’d had when I was growing up, but opened to reveal a sleek white interior, brightly lit by low-impact LED bulbs and frosty with internal cold.

  “I have lemonade,” she said. “Fresh this morning, made from lemons out of our own grove. We didn’t expect to see you today.”

  “We’d have been elsewhere if we had,” muttered Phoebe. It took me a moment to realize her words sounded slightly odd because they were; she was speaking the local language, which was shaped something like ancient Greek if it had managed to stay the dominant form of communication for an additional two thousand years, and something not at all like that. Centaur had different phonemes than humans or satyrs, and they’d influenced the linguistic development as much as anyone else had.

  The translation charm was still working, then. That was good, since it meant I’d be able to go over the books I was carrying with Helen, and not ask her to translate for me. “I didn’t know I was coming until about an hour ago,” I said, and shrugged off both my pack and the map roll. “Lemonade would be lovely, Helen, thank you.”

  “So you’ve just been seen to?” she asked, as she pulled a pitcher out of the icebox and closed the door.

  The satyrs were always very noncommittal when discussing the process by which Naga had my tattoos redrawn. I wasn’t clear on how many of the details they knew, and had never really wanted to explain, not least because my mice were never allowed in the procedure room. Something about the smell of rodents distracting my surgeons. They said farewell to me when I went with Naga and didn’t see me again until I was clean and tattooed and equipped with a full measure of skin.

  If the mice had ever known exactly what I was putting myself through to keep on going, it would have been the same as telling Mary. They would have informed the rest of my clergy, and the clergy would have told the family—whether they intended to or not, the first time they decided to celebrate the Festival of Flensing or something like that, Kevin and Jane would have figured it out—and then I would have been dealing with a whole new set of problems. So telling the satyrs had always been out, because speaking those words aloud would have meant speaking them in front of the mice.

  “Yes,” I said, and held out a hand as she poured me a tumbler of lemonade. It was sweet and tart and had a faint herbal taste to it that I couldn’t quite identify. “Is that mint?”

  “Meadowsweet.”

  “Ah. It’s nice.” I took a longer drink before saying, “I’m just heading out again. Found a new direction in a diary by some old dimensional explorer, a man named Aikanis. Naga said he was a satyr. I thought you might know something about him.”

  Phoebe turned and stared at me, hands still full of dough. “Aikanis?” she asked. Then, more loudly, “Did you find him?”

  “I found some of his books,” I said, and bent to retrieve the map roll from the floor. “And this map. I think they go together. I didn’t check to make sure.”

  Comparing the handwriting could confirm it, but also might not prove anything; many explorers travel with cartographers, rather than drawing their own maps. I certainly don’t draw my own maps. Couldn’t work a protractor if you paid me. So maybe Aikanis had just been charting someone else’s expedition.

  I paused before uncapping the roll. “Is there a table where I can spread this out?” I asked, looking to Helen, who stared at me like she’d just seen a ghost. Ghosts didn’t seem to be as common on Ithaca as they were on Earth. I’d never been sure why. Maybe Ithacans just died with less in the way of unfinished business.