“This way,” said Helen, and gestured for me to follow her as she turned to go deeper into the house. “The dining room.”

  I grabbed my pack—maybe they’d want to see the books—and followed.

  She led me to a room dominated by a massive oak table, which was covered by a tatted lace runner my grandmother would have admired endlessly. She pushed it aside and motioned for me to spread out the map, so I uncapped the map roll and did precisely that, producing knives from inside my shirt and laying them out on the corners.

  Phoebe, who had come up behind me, gasped and pushed her way between me and the map, her hands pressed to her mouth. She muttered something, words too muffled by her palms for me to make them out, before reaching down and tracing one of the pathways with her finger, not quite making contact with the paper.

  She lowered her other hand and turned her head to look at me. Her pupils were rectangular, like a goat’s, but her tears were perfectly understandable. “We never knew what happened to him,” she said. “He just . . . he didn’t come home.”

  I blinked. “This map is very old, and there’s a whole library at the university named after him,” I said. “How long ago did he disappear?”

  “Satyrs are very focused on the family,” said Helen quietly. “Aikanis the mapmaker is known enough even now that his name has been taken to retirement, and his family has never known what became of him.”

  As my family would never know what had become of me if I insisted on going as far out as I was currently intending to and didn’t make it back. That wasn’t a thought worth dwelling on. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize either of you would be relatives of his, or I would have been more circumspect in my questioning.”

  “He was my októfather,” said Phoebe, the word untranslatable but still twisting itself inside my head to “eight-father.”

  “That’s a lot more efficient than the way we’d say it back home,” I said. “We’d just repeat the word ‘great’ eight times, probably while counting on our fingers.”

  Both of them stared at me.

  “And you don’t care about that,” I said. “Right. Okay. So you’re a descendant of his. And he didn’t come back from his last expedition. I have two books that were with the map. There were three originally, but Naga took one.”

  Helen’s face hardened. “He knows the Ithacan government has declared all artifacts not specifically deeded to other dimensions to be cultural treasures and requested their immediate return.”

  Meaning I wasn’t walking away from here with the map. That was fine. I have a good memory, and I could take notes. “Maybe he’s planning to return it.”

  “Or maybe he was counting on the fact that you wouldn’t know about the law and didn’t realize you would think to tell us.” Helen shook her head, then paused. “If you didn’t know Aikanis and Phoebe were related, why did you come here and tell us? I know you’ve never used Ithaca for a jumping-off point.”

  “Not often, no,” I said, and bent to pull the two books out of my pack. “The book Naga took included a list of jumps leading to what Aikanis called a ‘bottle world,’ whatever that means, and to get there, I need to get to Cornale to reach the bottle.”

  “Which means you need to start from here unless you want to go the long way ’round, and I’m guessing you’re already going pretty far,” said Helen. I blinked at her, and she gestured toward the necklaces that dangled against my chest. “It’s nice to see you fueling something without burning yourself up to do it.”

  “These still throw me off balance, but yeah, I have to go farther than I’ve ever gone before. I thought there was nothing past Cornale that I could survive.”

  Helen and Phoebe exchanged a look, expressions turning concerned before they looked back to me.

  “Alice . . . we told you that wasn’t so,” said Phoebe carefully. “The last time you were here. Don’t you remember?”

  “No, and I think I would,” I said.

  They exchanged another glance.

  “Alice . . .” said Helen.

  “No, Naga told me there was nothing past Cornale, and you’ve never told me any differently,” I said.

  “And you just believed him? Without seeing the charts or asking for any evidence?”

  I bristled at her tone. “Of course I did. He’s helping me. I wouldn’t be here if he weren’t. I’d have died decades ago if he hadn’t taken me in and provided me with ways to survive. So when he said that none of the worlds past Cornale were capable of supporting human life, I believed him.”

  “Maybe he didn’t understand,” said Helen, catching the discomfort in my voice. “Phoebe, did you want to see those books?”

  “They belong to my family,” said Phoebe, watching me warily. “They should all be returned.”

  “And I’m happy to return them, although I’d like it if you can tell me anything I need to know about the path I’m planning to take, or ‘bottle worlds’ in general. I’ve never encountered that term before.”

  “Most of us would like to know how Aikanis was able to detect them,” said Phoebe. “We have records that imply he entered some, and even left again, which is meant to be impossible.”

  “Bottle worlds are what remains of dimensions like any other after they have died and lost their souls,” said Helen. “Nothing beats at the heart of them, nothing keeps them cleaved unto the great weave. When something stumbles into one of those, it remains there, until it is digested.”

  I frowned deeply. “I understood every word of that, but not the way you put them all together,” I said. “Can you please try and make it make sense for a silly little librarian from a backwater world that doesn’t even know other dimensions exist yet? Please?”

  “Every living world possesses a pneuma of its own,” said Phoebe. “A living spirit, as it were, that allows the world to sustain smaller life than itself.”

  “People are ecosystems, so I guess it makes sense that ecosystems would be people,” I said slowly. “All of us are more bacteria by volume than we are the people we think we are. We’re basically swamps that decided to go for a walk one day and haven’t figured out yet that it’s a ridiculous thing for a swamp to do.”

  “The pneuma—the soul of a world—is formed by the presence of so much life that it becomes another life through proximity to itself,” said Phoebe. “If enough pneuma is gathered together, it will give rise to another life, even greater and more glorious than the pieces that comprise it.”

  “I’m with you so far,” I said. “This swamp is following.”

  “This dimensional oversoul makes sure everything below it remains healthy and whole. When people move between worlds, that’s what clings to them.”

  “The dimensional oversoul is the membrane?” I asked slowly, trying to make sure I was still understanding her.

  “Not entirely, but the two are connected. The membrane is a physical thing, like air or water are physical things. The dimensional oversoul is the living energy of that membrane.”

  “Huh.”

  Dimensions are surrounded by an intangible membrane that, well, sticks to people whenever they pass through, for lack of a better metaphor. It’s part of why snake cults gain so much traction; it’s easier to summon your god when your god is essentially a tube. Very low friction. It’s also why dimensional crossing is such an effort for someone built like me. Lots of friction. So much friction. I am an irregular shape being magically dragged through the fascia that’s intended to keep one dimension from bleeding into the next.

  The membranes around individual worlds are so thin by comparison that they barely register, so if these bottle dimensions didn’t have any membrane left, there would be nothing to block my entry.

  Helen put a hand on my arm.

  “No, although I can guess what you’re thinking, and it’s not as clever as it seems,” she said. “The dimensional oversoul is the source and sustenance of the membrane. It animates it and provides its strength. It’s like an eggshell. It protects the entire egg. If you take away an eggshell, there’s an internal membrane—the pneuma and membranes of the individual worlds—that will hold for a while, but that dimension’s membrane will be dead. It won’t renew itself or grow any longer. Gradually, it’s going to get damaged. It’s going to tear. And when that happens, you’re going to lose the whole egg.”

  I blinked at her. “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “When you remove the membrane from a dimension, all the pneuma inside it will die,” said Phoebe.

  “Okay, so the pneuma is the same as the soul, and the membrane—or that internal membrane you were talking about, like the yolk sac of the egg—would be sort of like the body?”

  She nodded.

  Oh. An extinction event for the souls of literal worlds seemed like a bad thing to me. I frowned down at the map. “So a bottle world is really a . . . a dead dimension?”

  “A dimension where something happened to kill the oversoul, and left the lesser pneuma defenseless, yes,” said Phoebe. “Most of them collapse, like stars sometimes do. They warp inward and devour themselves, and there’s nothing left to show that they ever existed. But a few will curdle instead. They twist into something new, and they’re lonely, and they’re hungry. Worlds in the places where dimensions used to be, eating until their own ends.”

  “Meaning . . .”

  “Meaning that anything they catch never gets out.” She turned to the map, all but glaring at the point that had been flagged as a bottle world. “They devour whatever they encounter. But you found these materials elsewhere. Aikanis found an exit.”

  “Maybe he wrote it out in one of these.” I pulled the books out of my pack and offered them to her. She virtually snatched them out of my hands. “If you find it, please let me know.”

  “Alice, you’re not planning to do something stupid, are you?” asked Helen.

  “Bottle worlds swallow people,” I said. “No witch or sorcerer I have been able to find in dozens of different realities has been able to tell me where my husband is. Wherever the crossroads put him, it’s outside the reach of normal magic. And don’t get that soft-eyed face that means you’re about to try and make me accept some hard truths, because I know two things I didn’t know last time we talked about this.”

  “Those being?” asked Helen.

  “He’s not dead,” I said. “But the crossroads are.”

  Phoebe gasped, turning to stare at me. “You would speak so lightly of the end of your world?”

  “What?” I frowned at her. “That’s not what I said.”

  “But it is,” said Helen. “Your world has a pneuma akatharton—an unclean spirit. That’s why we cut off trade with you. It came through the membrane and devoured your world’s native pneuma.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “The thing you call the crossroads is your world’s pneuma,” said Helen, words slow and deliberate, like she was trying to make a child understand. “It wasn’t always, but it killed the original pneuma and took it over. It came from somewhere outside your dimension, and it darkened your world’s spirit, such that we stopped traveling there. It’s not the only case of parasitism I’ve heard of, but it’s the only one I’ve seen for myself. I’m so sorry, Alice. Your world is doomed if it’s not already dead.”

  “My granddaughter said it was something called the ‘anima mundi’ that told her my husband was alive when the crossroads sent him away,” I said. “I always heard that translated as ‘world soul,’ so it sounds like what you call the pneuma is what she called the anima mundi. Does that sound about right to you?”

  Phoebe and Helen exchanged a glance before Helen looked back to me and said, “It does, but it’s not possible. The invader killed your world’s pneuma. It can’t be telling anyone anything.”

  “And I can’t get wrapped up in whether the world is doomed when I’m trying to find my husband,” I said. “For right now, let’s just accept that everything was normal the last time I went home, and I have a job to do. We’ll worry about the fate of the world later. Bottle worlds. Nothing gets out, but things can go in. Things like a sorcerer chucked across dimensional walls by an unclean spirit, maybe?”

  “Maybe,” said Helen reluctantly. “But, Alice, you have to understand that if you go into a bottle world, you’ll never come back. You’ll be trapped in a dead place, one that’s falling apart all around you, and you won’t be able to escape it.”

  “Aikanis did,” I said. “He seems to have written everything else down, so I expect the answer to how he got out is either in one of those two books Phoebe has, or in the one that Naga took. I have to go, Helen. You’d go if it were Phoebe. You know you would. If Thomas is there, if he’s still alive and waiting for me to find him, I can’t make him wait because I’m finally stopping to worry about my own neck. My neck doesn’t matter. My neck made a lot of choices, and none of them said ‘hey, it would be fun to survive a long, long time.’ Will you read the books? If Aikanis had a method for exiting the bottle dimensions, you can come and get me as soon as you figure out what it is.”

  “Why are you so determined to do this?”

  I shrugged. “Because I’ve been hunting for my husband for fifty years without a single lead, and then I find out the crossroads are gone, I’ve potentially been right all along and he’s out here for me to find, but also somehow outside the scrying range of literally any magic user or dimensional mathematician I’ve met, Naga hasn’t been telling me about the dimensions off of Cornale, and I just happen to trip over a map pointing to a dimension people can get trapped in? Don’t you see why I have to go?”

  “Don’t you see how likely this is to be a trap?” countered Helen. “Everything you’ve just said is true, but that doesn’t make this an invitation, it makes it a lure. You could be getting set up.”

  “By whom, though? I know that ink can’t be faked.”

  “Someone could have planted the books for you to find, knowing you’d be unable to resist the lure of answers.” Helen looked almost sympathetic. “You have your share of enemies.”

  I thought of how close I’d come to dying on Helos, with those spines in my legs and the sepsis spreading through my bloodstream. “I do, and it’s possible,” I allowed. “But I don’t think so. Healy family luck has always had a tendency to trend toward coincidence. Things either go really, really right or really, really wrong where we’re involved. And I don’t think the anima mundi would have rewarded my granddaughter for killing the crossroads by telling her something she could use to send me to my death.”

  Phoebe and Helen both stared at me. I blinked at them. “What?” I asked once the silence had stretched on for long enough to become uncomfortable.

  “Your granddaughter killed a world soul?” asked Phoebe. “I’m sorry, but—no.”

  “She says she did, and I believe her when she tells me things,” I said. “She’s a sorcerer. Takes after Thomas. That’s one of the reasons it’s important I bring him home now. She’s doing pretty well for herself, but she needs training if she’s going to stop setting things on fire when she doesn’t mean to.”

  Phoebe put the books down on the table and put her hands over her face, making a despairing noise. Helen put her arm around her wife’s shoulders, still watching me with concern. “If your granddaughter told the truth, then she has accomplished something neither of us has ever heard of,” she said. “I’ll test the crossing point to your Earth, and see if it remains intact, and if so, I’ll look to the other side to check the health of Earth’s pneuma. If it confirms your story—and that’s a very large if, Alice, this is impossible—then maybe you’re right and your luck is arranging the universe the way you want it to. But, Alice, if you’re wrong, if there’s no way to get out in these books, or if Naga tries to claim he doesn’t have the one you say he has, we could lose you forever.”

  I paused. “I’ve been to Helos a hundred times,” I said finally. “A hundred times, Helen, on bounties, on pass-throughs, just to get back to Earth if I’ve been wandering. I’ve fought the people I fought today on dozens of occasions, and I’ve never seen their hoard before. I could have passed through a hundred more times without seeing those books, if I hadn’t gotten lucky. I have to believe it’s the same coincidence that’s been keeping me alive all this time, and that if it had been trying to destroy me, it would have been a lot more upfront about it. A few inches to the right when I fought the big fucker guarding the treasure and I would have bled out in the cave. A few feet to the left and I might not have seen the books at all. I have to go.”

  Helen sighed deeply. “Alice Healy, when you die, they’ll retire your name for generations,” she said. “The line between bravery and stubbornness is even thinner than the line between love and foolishness, and you cross them both so often it makes me ache. But you’ve brought some of the treasures of Phoebe’s family back to us, and we will help you. I’ll talk to your . . .” She paused, nose wrinkling like she’d smelled something bad, and finally said, “Patron. I’ll ask him for the book. If he refuses me, I’ll remind him of the treaty between his university and Ithaca, and the number of items we could demand repatriated to us if we wanted to state them in breach. And if we find a means of pulling someone from a bottle, we will come and rescue you. We cannot stop your foolishness. We may be able to save you from its costs.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and hugged her. She smelled of healthy goat, that warm farmyard scent that mostly reminded me of childhood petting zoos and summers with the carnival. I let her go and stepped back before Phoebe could glare at me.

  Phoebe glared at me anyway. “Is there anything else we can do for you?” she asked. Apparently, the brief period of grace brought on by my returning something her family had lost was over now. “A sandwich, maybe?”