The mantis took off as soon as they were next to me, and the three of us were alone in a strange world, too far from the mound where the locals and our former followers were located to make it back before dark.

  I wasn’t sure I’d been happier since we left the bottle dimension. Sally and I fell in behind Thomas, one of us to either side of him, ready to muster a defense if anything went wrong.

  He glanced at me. I smiled.

  “Come on,” I said. “Get us home.”

  This time, when he raised his hands, the bruised spot in the air clarified on a meadow dotted with tiny white flowers. A house stood in the distance, oddly Greek architecture with a modern sensibility that I couldn’t have described if I’d been paid to do it, but recognized all the same. That’s the thing about time periods. Sometimes you just have to know them when you see them. The spell, seeking the easiest option, had seized on the dimensional crossing circle Helen and Phoebe had on their property. We were finally going to wind up exactly where we wanted to be.

  A light wind blew through the opening, smelling of wildflowers and herbs. I smiled. “Ithaca.”

  Sally looked less enthusiastic. Well, she’d only been there once, and then only in the process of passing through with our train of survivors. There’d been no time to linger or relax, which was a shame, since Ithaca is one of the nicer dimensions that I’m actually familiar with. The places Naga liked to send me were much more likely to fall under the heading of “horrifying murder world,” and since Sally knew Ithaca was one of my regular stops, it made sense for her to be wary.

  I gestured her through. She shook her head, gesturing for me to go first. I sighed.

  “You know I don’t go before Thomas does,” I said. “I didn’t spend this much time trying to find him to voluntarily go into another dimension without him.”

  Sally rolled her eyes. “Codependent much?”

  “Ladies,” said Thomas, sounding faintly strained. “If one of you could go through, I would very much appreciate it.”

  Sally shot me a dirty look and stepped through, onto the green, flower-speckled ground. I wondered, somewhat idly, whether she was going to step on the wrong flower and invoke Phoebe’s wrath. Should probably have warned her about that. Oh, well.

  I stepped in front of Thomas, breaking his line of sight on the portal, and took his hands in mine. “Come on, baby,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

  He blinked at me, dazed as he always was by holding a gateway—although not as dazed as he’d been when we had to hold it long enough to usher dozens of people through—and smiled as I tugged him through the opening and into another world.

  * * *

  Ithaca is not a preindustrial dimension, for all that it tries very, very hard to look like one. What it is is a dimension with incredibly strict ecological protection laws, which has always taken “we live in concert with the natural world” very seriously indeed.

  The gateway closed, leaving us in the meadow. Sally was already on alert, scanning for threats that were unlikely to materialize this close to a residence. Helen says they have excellent perimeter fencing, and since I’ve never been attacked while I was at their house, I’m inclined to believe her.

  Thomas wobbled, unsteady on his feet, and looked at me. “Are we safe?”

  “We’re safe,” I assured him. “We’re on Ithaca, you, me, and Sally, and all your people are settled where they can figure out their lives and what they want to do with them from here. You did it. We won.”

  “Oh, good,” he said, closed his eyes, and collapsed.

  There are a lot of ways people can collapse. Blood loss is one. Getting shot is another. This, though . . . this was boneless exhaustion, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. I lunged to catch him, not quite fast enough to grab anything more substantial than the wind left by his passing, and landed on my knees next to him, grabbing his arm to check for a pulse.

  It was there, solid and a little faster than I liked. I looked over my shoulder to Sally, who was staring at us in open-mouthed shock.

  “The house,” I said, curtly. “Helen and Phoebe live there. Go tell them we’re here, and Thomas has exhausted himself by pushing the dimensional crossings. We need help.”

  She didn’t move. I narrowed my eyes.

  “Go!” I snapped.

  Sally turned on her heel and ran for the house, doubtless trampling dozens of Phoebe’s precious flowers in her flight. I ignored her, focusing on Thomas.

  He was still breathing, which was good. Collapses like this were familiar from my own time opening dimensional gates, when my body had cannibalized itself to try and let me go farther than I should have been able to. I’d never seen it happen to a sorcerer before, and I suddenly had to wonder whether he’d been intentionally overstating how much pneuma he’d been able to draw from a few of the more dangerous worlds we’d passed through, in order to get us out of there just that tiny bit faster than would have been possible otherwise.

  If I had no sense of self-preservation when it came to him, it was balanced out—and not necessarily in the best way—by his absolute lack of self-preservation when it came to me. We might destroy each other. We might be blissfully happy in our little house in Michigan. Either way, we’d be together, and for both of us, that was what mattered.

  When I’d pushed myself to this point, I used to handle it with glucose gel and electrolyte powders, both of which had run out half a dozen dimensions ago, and which I hadn’t been trying to restock, even if it would have been remotely possible, because I’d had no idea they might be needed. I positioned myself so I could pull his head into my lap, leaning down to straighten his limbs. Wouldn’t do to have him wake up having strained something.

  Thus, having reached the limit of my usefulness, I settled in to wait.

  Sally came running back across the field, followed by two satyrs, one carrying a wicker basket over her arm, neither hurrying half as fast as Sally was. The taller of the two actually looked faintly amused, like this was funny. I swallowed the urge to yell at her for that. Sally had probably communicated the situation in a way that sounded entertaining, rather than the taller satyr finding the fact that Thomas had collapsed in the first place somehow funny.

  “Hoy, Odysseus!” called the taller satyr as they approached. “Broken your Penelope already? For shame. I expected you would be more careful, all things considered.”

  “Thanks, Helen. You’re very sweet.” The other satyr laughed, kneeling in the grass next to Thomas. Watching a woman with the lower body of a goat kneel was a spectacle in and of itself. As a human, I find digitigrade anatomy unaccountably complicated. But they probably feel the same about my weird-ass knees, and so it all works out in the end.

  I returned my attention to Helen as Phoebe unpacked the contents of her basket, narrowing my eyes. “Is this exhaustion? Because it looks like exhaustion to me, and I don’t think I’ll handle it very well if it’s anything else.”

  “Peace, Odysseus.” Helen held up her hands, palms outward. “Give Phoebe the time to work. As it’s just the three of you, I’m assuming your long journey is well complete?”

  “All the survivors of the bottle dimension have been settled, either in their original worlds or in compatible communities,” I said. “You need to update your maps. A few of those ‘suitable’ unoccupied dimensions turned out to have some pretty big inhabitants. Bats and moles large enough to eat people do not make for very good neighbors.”

  “You asked for places without intelligent people,” said Helen. “You didn’t ask for worlds incapable of supporting life.”

  Phoebe had produced a bottle of something pink and oddly sparkly, like it was laced with edible glitter, from inside her basket, and was tipping it against Thomas’s lips, clearly encouraging him to drink. I glanced over and bit my lip.

  Helen put her hand on my arm. “Peace,” she said again. “Phoebe will help him to wake from this miscalculation, and you have no further travels from here, yes?”

  “Only home,” I said. “We’re going home.”

  “The pneuma of your world has continued to recover,” she said, approvingly. “I’ve taken glances at it when the connections were clear, and things are progressing in the right direction. Earth may be a healthy world again someday.”

  “That’s cool,” I said. “We’re planning to stay there.”

  “Yes, you promised,” said Helen.

  Phoebe was still pressing her bottle to Thomas’s lips. Finally, he coughed and swallowed, then began to drink in earnest, all without apparently waking up. I blinked, stroking his hair, then looked back to Helen in silent question. She sighed.

  “He is exhausted. Had you no way of seeing that?”

  “I can’t see magic,” I said. “Neither can Sally. He wasn’t telling us how tired he was. He’s been trying to keep things moving along. We were safe enough in that last dimension. If he’d said anything, to either of us, we could have stopped for a few days, given him time to rest up. But we were so close to home, and I think he wanted to get to the end as much as I did, so he didn’t tell us anything was wrong. Is he going to be okay?”

  The only acceptable answer was yes. Anything else and I was going to tear down the world to make it change. We’d come so far, fought for so long; this couldn’t be the point where my luck—where our luck—gave out.

  Phoebe returned her bottle to the basket, giving me a cold look. “You will allow us to open the gateway between here and your ‘Earth,’” she said. “And you will allow us to give you a hamper to take with you, as I doubt your destination will be provisioned for your arrival.”

  “I keep cans and shelf-stable foods on hand, but the house is rural enough that I don’t even trust the freezers when I’m going to be away for a long time,” I said. One trip where the power had gone out almost as soon as I left the dimension had been enough to teach me that stockpiling meat was only a good idea when you could be there to make sure it actually stayed frozen. Some smells do not bear repeating. “Oh, and Cynthia from the Red Angel drops off a cake every Thursday, for the mice. But that’s about it.”

  “A hamper,” said Phoebe firmly. She stood, taking her basket with her. “And keep your handmaid close to you. She nearly trampled my cat’s brush when she came running to the house.”

  Sally bristled at being called a handmaid, but I mustered a smile as I nodded to Phoebe, and said, “She’ll stay here with us, I promise.”

  “He’ll be fine,” said Phoebe, taking pity. “No large workings for a fortnight, you understand? Anything that draws more pneuma than he can gather from the air stands the chance of doing him harm, and I feel you would prefer that not occur.”

  “I’ll sit on him if I have to,” I said firmly.

  “Good.” Phoebe leaned over to kiss Helen on the cheek. “Come to the house for the hamper, my leman, and set them on their way. I’ll see ourselves alone this evening.”

  Sally blinked, looking surprised. Helen smiled a small, besotted smile after Phoebe as the other satyr walked away, then turned back to me.

  Thomas was making little grumbling noises and shifting in my lap, although his eyes were still closed. I stroked his hair again, watching Helen.

  “Well?” I asked. “Other than waiting for Thomas to wake up and Phoebe to deliver our lunch, is there anything else we need to do here?”

  “Tell me, precisely, where you want your crossing to conclude,” she said.

  I took a deep breath.

  “Buckley Township is located in Michigan, on the continent of North America . . .”

  Seven

  “Alice comes home. No matter how hard it is, no matter what it costs her, Alice comes home.”

  —Laura Campbell

  Standing on a backcountry road in Buckley Township, Michigan, at long last

  WHAT THE HELL IS wrong with that house?” demanded Sally, gesturing toward the old Parrish place with her spear, like she thought the house might be some sort of terrible monster she could square off against if she just tried hard enough.

  The house did not oblige her by getting up to attack, but sat there in its horrifying splendor. I smiled.

  “That, my friend, is home.”

  “Does it look like that on purpose?”

  “No, we think it’s cursed.”

  Sally blinked. “Cursed.”

  “Yup.”

  “But you live there, voluntarily.”

  “Semi.”

  The old Parrish place was a fairly classic example of middle-American farm architecture turned gothic and just a little menacing. The windows seemed to follow people as they moved, watching them with an oddly malicious expression. Houses shouldn’t be able to look malicious, and yet this one did. Three stories tall, or maybe more, depending on the light, with a decrepit wraparound porch that was sturdier than it looked, thanks to both my own efforts and Cynthia keeping an eye on the place when I was out of town, and painted the leprous gray-green of rotting flesh, it was not the sort of place anyone should really be glad to see.

  I had never been happier to see a house in my entire life.

  The porch swing was rocking gently back and forth, meaning our appearance had startled a few of the local tailypo, who liked to curl up there when there weren’t any strangers around. Good. They needed to see us sooner than later. I hefted the hamper Phoebe had given us with one hand, my other arm still wrapped firmly around Thomas, keeping him from toppling over.

  He’d woken up about ten minutes after Phoebe finished delivering her tincture, but had remained groggy and only half-present since then, with the bleary gaze and slightly slurred speech of a man who’d had far too much to drink. I was just grateful that Helen had been able to open her doorway this close to the house.

  Thomas managed to stay on his feet as we crossed the street, and with Sally on his other side, we were able to make it up the porch. I eased him onto the porch swing as my backpack cheered uproariously, the mice rejoicing in their return to one of the places they recognized as home.

  Sally watched warily as I shrugged out of my pack, putting both it and the hamper next to Thomas, and moved to the rail, where I put two fingers in my mouth and whistled, high and shrill and piercing. Sally winced.

  “What, the mice aren’t loud enough, you have to break my eardrums on your own?”

  “Not quite,” I said. The bushes rustled. “See, the man who lived here before us axe-murdered his entire family as a sacrifice to a swamp god he swore was talking to him. We’ve never been able to find any proof the swamp god existed, but most ghosts don’t like the house, and it may be because of whatever convinced him he should make hamburger out of his wife and kids. The Covenant bought it sight unseen when they decided to banish Thomas to the hinterlands in order to get him out from underfoot.”

  The fact that they hadn’t bothered to scout the area before sending Thomas here made it so much easier to convince their strike team that they’d wiped us all out, back when they finally came to clean up their little mess. That was, oh, forty-five years ago at this point, and the sting of it was still fresh. I whistled again. The rustling in the bushes got louder.

  This time, I stepped back, not repeating my whistle, and gestured for Sally to keep quiet. She blinked but held her tongue. A few seconds later, half a dozen long-tailed, stripy bodies burst out of the bushes and swarmed onto the railing, chittering.

  They looked like ring-tailed lemurs if they had been designed by someone trying to spin a toy line out of the idea of plush toys whose tails could double as boas, bondage devices, and rappelling lines. Their bodies were a little more than a foot and a half in length, while their tails hit five feet, easily. The smallest wrapped its tail defensively around itself, forming a cocoon of stacked stripy rings that covered its entire head. They had masks, like lemurs, or raccoons, and clever little hands, and all of them were staring at me.

  “Sally, meet the tailypo,” I said. The mice cheered. Sally stared.

  “Tailypo,” she said, finally. “Like the ghost story you tell on Girl Scout campouts. That tailypo?”

  “I’ve heard the story, and they’re nowhere near that vicious most of the time, although I don’t recommend cutting their tails off to test the theory. Especially because the house conspiracy is mine, in that nebulous way that things which don’t belong to you can be yours, and I’d be upset if someone hurt them.”

  Sally gave me a sidelong look. She seemed to have a near-infinite repertoire of ways to look at me like I’d just said something ridiculous. “Conspiracy?”

  “It’s the collective noun,” I said. “A group of fish is a school, a group of geese is a gaggle, and a group of lemurs is a conspiracy.”

  “So they’re lemurs?”

  “Sort of. We call them the American lemur, and we’re pretty sure they’re primates—not a lot of good phylogeny when it comes to creatures science doesn’t admit exist.” One of the tailypo made a chirring sound. I whistled softly. “The tailypo got labeled folklore pretty early on in European colonization, and no one managed to convince the people who were putting things in ‘real’ or ‘not real’ boxes that they needed to be put in the ‘real’ one. Didn’t help that the Covenant of St. George labeled them too ridiculous to exist, and did their best to make sure no one who saw a live one told anybody about it.”

  “Why? They’re adorable.”

  The tailypo didn’t speak English, so it was entirely my imagination that they looked pleased by Sally’s praise. But it made me think better of her. “The Covenant started out fighting things that were a danger to humans,” I said. “I mean, there’s a good reason to be a dragon slayer when the dragons are trying to burn your village down on the regular, and nobody likes sharing their bay with a bunch of swamp hags. But they did such a good job that they ran out of real threats, and they were so convinced of their own necessity that rather than dissolving or pivoting to being a general public-service organization or something, they started focusing on anything they considered unnatural, or potentially dangerous in ways other than the physical. Why kill a tailypo? Because it’s a silly thing. Evolutionarily, they don’t make a lot of sense, and they make kids want to laugh and play dress-up with long tails of their own, and they can be pests. Better to get rid of them. Better to make sure people stay serious, and focused, and afraid of anything they didn’t recognize. Like a raccoon with a super-long tail. Better to make the world a little simpler, because then it’ll be a little easier to control.”