My stomach growled. I smiled at her as endearingly as I knew how. “A sandwich would be great, thanks,” I said.

  Phoebe threw her hands up in the air and stormed back toward the kitchen, hooves clacking sharp against the floor. Helen and I exchanged a wry glance.

  “She’s never going to like me, is she?” I asked.

  “Not likely,” she replied.

  “Ah, well,” I said. “Let’s go eat, and then I’m gonna go do something seriously stupid.”

  “A normal day for you, then.”

  I laughed and let her lead me to the kitchen. I was feeling better already.

  Seven

  “I love my wife, but every time she repeats something her father told her, I want to travel back in time and slap the man. It would be worth it, even if it meant she grew up to be someone else. The Grandfather Paradox be damned.”

  —Thomas Price

  Leaving Ithaca for a series of unfamiliar dimensions, culminating in Cornale, which has never been a pleasant place to visit

  I’d been to Cornale twice before, once with Naga, when he was still going with me on my earliest jaunts, testing the limits of what my body could carry, and once on my own, by mistake, after pushing my crossing charms to the absolute limit of what they were capable of. Neither visit had been particularly pleasant.

  In fact, it was the climate on Cornale, coming as it did after a series of increasingly less pleasant dimensions, that had gone a long way toward convincing me Naga was being utterly sincere when he told me there was nothing more in that direction that could sustain human life. I still wasn’t sure he’d been lying. A bottle world was, by the definition Helen and Phoebe had given me, already basically dead, and definitely not a place you wanted to wind up by mistake.

  Naga could have had absolutely no idea that the bottle world would be the next place I needed to look for Thomas. He could have been acting in good faith.

  And if I kept on telling myself that, I would eventually start to believe it, and everything would go back to fitting together neatly, the way I needed it to.

  I stepped into the stone circle that would let me transition to the first dimension on the list of jumps, a place Helen called Mul, where it was apparently monsoon season. My sandwich—which had been closer to a gyro, packed with onions, tomatoes, mild, soft cheese, tzatziki, and ground poultry of some kind, lightly spiced and as delicious as it was unfamiliar—had come with a side order of both stuffed grape leaves and grudging advice about how to handle the chain I was about to embark on. Don’t try to talk to the locals on Mul; they were aware of the dimensional space between the warp and weft of their local weave, but they didn’t appreciate the people who sometimes came through. They wouldn’t bother me if I didn’t bother them, but if I made myself their problem, they would absolutely answer in kind. My last route from Cornale had been longer and less efficient. This was the straightest shot I could make to the bottle world, where Phoebe still said I shouldn’t go.

  And despite that, she had hung a waterproofed woolen cloak around my shoulders before I left the house and thanked me in a low voice for bringing her októfather’s final journey home, even if her októfather himself was lost to them forever. The cloak was warm and heavy enough to feel reassuringly solid against my back, protecting me from bad weather yet to come, even if it was slightly too warm here in the Ithacan sunshine.

  Phoebe and Helen both stood at the bottom of the path to the circle, watching me go. Phoebe would return home to her baking and reading after this, while Helen would head onward to request a meeting with Naga. It’s good to have friends.

  Transit circles aren’t necessary for movement between worlds—if they were, it would be even harder to accomplish—but they ease the process somewhat when they’re built at the location of a weak spot in the membrane, making it easier to find and push through. That was what Phoebe called “a space between the warp and the weft,” which an interestingly textile metaphor. If I thought of it that way, I started to picture the barriers between dimensions as a pie crust, and the weak spots as the openings in the latticework on top.

  Standing smack in the middle of the circle, I pulled another bead off my necklace and ground it under my heel, closing my eyes. Again, a wave of dizziness washed over me, followed by a sheet of stinging rain so cold that it made my skin feel like it was trying to become two sizes smaller as soon as it lashed against me. I opened my eyes on the present, no flashback gnawing at me. A girl could get used to this, if not to the weather.

  I was standing on a boardwalk, oil-treated wood beneath my feet, a raging sea all around me, and the distant lights of a village on the shore. At least the local dislike of travelers didn’t extend to routing the boardwalk around the weak spot and dropping us into the water. Given how hard the waves were roiling, I would have been swept away in an instant, and it would have been a pretty lousy way to end a fifty-year journey.

  According to Phoebe, if I wanted to hit the next world on the chain—a place called Hríðarbylur, which I would have had no concept of how to pronounce if she hadn’t said it aloud first—I would need to walk about twenty yards from my starting point, face west, and concentrate on the idea of snow. Going straight from a world of endless rain to one where the key to finding the right place was thinking about snow didn’t seem like a great idea to me, but it was the route I had, and at least my cloak was keeping me semi-dry. Maybe I wouldn’t freeze if I moved fast enough.

  There was no need to linger, and it felt increasingly like doing so would result in being swept off the boardwalk by an errant wave. I walked as instructed, turned, and pressed my fingers to the inside of my arm under the cloak as I closed my eyes and concentrated. I hated to use one of my tattoos so soon, especially given how much harder that transition would be, but if I dropped a bead on this boardwalk, I was never going to be able to find it in the storm.

  The feeling of wetness immediately went away. That was good. What replaced it was bad. The worst flashbacks are the ones that come with immediate sensory memories. Like, say, the acid burn of Apraxis nymphs gestating inside my flesh, getting ready to chew their way out into the open air and add me to their collection of copied, captive minds. Their telepathy isn’t like the Johrlacs, or like anything else we’ve come across; it’s a unique, terrible thing.

  The waves of pain were as intense and immediate as they had been the first time, enough to make me lose track of the fact that this wasn’t really happening; this had already happened. Maybe it was better that way. Maybe I could be happy if I stopped trying to live in the present when I was in the past, even though I was living in the past when I was in the present.

  I never said I was psychologically healthy, okay?

  I was lying on my stomach on a hard wooden table, and the air against my back was cool verging on cold, almost soothing on the spaces that weren’t on fire from the developing nymphs. A hand touched my shoulder, pushing me down.

  “I’m sorry, Alice,” said Thomas’ voice, familiar and tight with fear. “This is going to hurt.”

  “I know,” I said, closing my eyes. When this had actually happened, I hadn’t been focused on looking at him, more interested in getting through the removal of the nymphs from my flesh without throwing up or passing out. Keeping my eyes open—fighting the flashback to keep them open—wouldn’t change what had happened.

  It never did.

  “Take a deep breath.”

  I did, and held it as he began digging the first nymph out of my shoulder, fighting to yank it free, and the pain, the pain, the pain—

  Again, that feeling of dizzying blur and transition, and the air got warmer. Warmer? That didn’t match up with picturing snow. I opened my eyes, suddenly afraid I’d ended up in the wrong place, and looked around me at what seemed like a cozy hunting lodge. There was even a fire burning in the fireplace, although there weren’t any people in sight. A piece of paper rested on the nearby table, held down with a rock. Curious, I walked over and picked it up.

  Either my translation charm was still working—impressive, after more than three hours—or the note was written in English. Either way, it read, “Welcome, traveler! The fire needs no feeding. Cheese and bread have been left in the box by the door. If you choose to linger, we will see you when the sun rises. If not, we are sorry to have missed you, and glad to have supplied you with a moment of peace on your journey.”

  I put the note back down, smiling to myself. Sometimes people are pretty decent. Not that I was going to eat anything they’d left for me. Sometimes people are really good at pretending to be pretty decent when they’re actually predatory assholes trying to set up nice little caches of meat on the bone to help them get through the winter. There was a door. I walked over and pulled it open, revealing a frozen, snow-swirled landscape that explained Phoebe’s instructions, and made me even more grateful for the fire. I closed the door.

  Well, I couldn’t eat their food, but I wasn’t hungry yet after lunch with Phoebe and Helen, and while my key for the next world involved thinking about jungles, I didn’t really want to rush on before my hair was dry. I walked over to the fireplace and sat down on the edge, leaning as close to the flames as I could without actually setting myself on fire.

  Dating and eventually marrying an elemental sorcerer whose magic liked to express itself in flames was a great way to get way too casual about the risk of immolation. I had to jerk upright several times to keep my hair from going up and was once again glad I’d been keeping it short.

  Once I was sure I was dry enough, I stood, walked forward, and closed my eyes again, pulling a bead from my necklace. This had been a nice waystation, and maybe it was as innocent as it seemed to be, but it was time for me to move along.

  That bottle world wasn’t getting any less dead.

  * * *

  The next five worlds passed in much the same way, brief glimpses of one tiny slice of what they had to offer, what was accessible when traveling along this particular route. If I’d been approaching from another starting point, I would have passed through other dimensions along the way, which was how I knew Cornale in the first place; it had been part of a chain I’d run along to bring back a bounty, and taken from that direction, it had only been five jumps away from Empusa. But taken from that direction, there had been no bottle world. Reality is like a kaleidoscope. The angle you view things at makes a huge difference.

  My last step dropped me into Cornale, but a whole different part of the world. Rather than the wide, open scrubland of my last visit, I was standing in an alley that looked like it could have been lifted from a period drama about Victorian England, tall brick walls rising around me and cobblestones under my feet. I couldn’t tell whether the placement of my arrival was due to the alley being built to accommodate travelers, or whether the beads I’d been using to cross had shunted me out of sight of the locals. It didn’t entirely matter.

  I paused to shrug off my pack and pull out two packs of my electrolyte powder, ripping them open and dumping them into my mouth. They tasted like vaguely fruit-flavored dust, sucking the moisture from my tongue. There was technically nothing to chew, but I chewed anyway, trying to work up enough spit to let me swallow. Food is easy to carry between worlds. Liquid is more difficult. It’s heavier, for one thing, and sometimes the different physical rules from dimension to dimension will make it start boiling, or freeze, or otherwise render it undrinkable.

  I don’t know why that doesn’t happen to the water inside a person’s body. There’s a lot about dimensional travel that I don’t know. Given how long I’ve been doing it basically full time, that seemed odd to me, like there were questions I should have been asking all along but somehow hadn’t been. Thinking about it made my head hurt a little, and so I stopped. It wasn’t going to help me right now one way or another, and it’s better not to get distracted in potentially hostile territory.

  The powder had absorbed enough spit to be a thick paste. I swallowed it, waiting until my head stopped spinning before I shrugged my pack back on and stepped cautiously out of the alleyway, looking around.

  According to Phoebe and what she’d found in Aikanis’ notes, the bottle world’s opening would be approximately a league away in a westward direction. If his definition of league matched mine, that would be about three miles. Hopefully, there’d be something to tell me when I was getting close. Normal weak spots can sometimes show themselves in their environment—if you know how to look for them. Maybe they’re places without any obvious water source and really lush flowers. (Of course, those could also be underground springs or body dumps, it’s hard to say without a shovel). Or maybe they’re narrow strips where the bugs are a different color, or a little too big, or behaving oddly. It usually manifests in plants and insects if it’s going to impact anything living. It’s never something that’s super obvious. You have to learn how to look.

  I’ve been learning for fifty years. Weak spots are easier places to cross, and when you’re chasing a whisper across worlds, you start looking for easy whenever you can. They can also, as in this case, signal an access point for a world that’s not widely accessible from anywhere else.

  There were people on the street. Most were substantially more respectably dressed than I was, or at least they were wearing substantially more clothing, which I assumed meant the same thing; it was difficult to say without more context. At least none of them pointed at me, threw up, or fainted. That was nice.

  Most worlds that are close enough to Earth to support human life as we understand it will have some sort of biped somewhere in their local food chain, regardless of what dimension it’s in. The bipeds don’t always win out—see also Empusa, where Naga and the other lamia ran the show without any native bipeds to offer conflict or competition—but we happen, at some point in the evolutionary chain.

  That’s nothing to get all smug about. Those are just the easy-to-access worlds, the ones where we can live. There are worlds that belong to creatures we wouldn’t even be able to recognize as forms of life, entire dimensions so packed with snakes that they’ve basically given up on having anything in them except snakes, places where the things that have managed to catch on and thrive would make Earth’s Cambrian period look measured and reasonable. The limitations of the human form keep us, mostly, from tripping and falling into worlds where the air would dissolve our bones, and it means that when we do run into the locals, they may consider us a little weird looking, but no more so than we’d think about a perfectly ordinary cryptid.

  If the architecture made me think of Victorian London, the clothing was more akin to Meiji-era Japan, long, loose garments that looked something like kimonos on people of all ages and sizes. Almost everyone I could see was taller than me, thin in a way that could have been either genetics or fashion, with skin in varying shades of blue, green, and even pale purple. Their hair was a similar range of colors, plus red and black. All of them seemed to keep it long, and about half the people on the street had jeweled pins holding it in place. They weren’t staring and so I didn’t stare either, just turned in a slow circle as I tried to get my bearings.

  Thus far, my trip had been environmentally annoying and occasionally exhausting, but had involved surprisingly little violence. I was starting to wonder how many of the fights I’d been in had been consequences of Naga sending me after criminals, and not a matter of the universe being an inherently hostile place.

  Had he actually asked me before sending me on the first set of bounties? Or had he just added, after giving me a map to a potential lead on Thomas, that if I were to capture a few runaway criminals, I’d be able to make some money and put myself into a better position to keep searching? I wasn’t actually sure anymore. It had been such a long time, and there had been so much suffering between then and now. I remembered everything before this all began vividly and with absolute clarity. Much of the last fifty years was a lot fuzzier.

  Maybe that was bad. Maybe when I finished this expedition, regardless of how it ended, it was time for me to go home and talk to someone. Or maybe I needed to stay focused and not let myself get distracted by worrying about things that wouldn’t change anything.

  Naga had been helping me get back to my husband. If he’d decided to make himself a little profit in the process, I couldn’t exactly blame him; not when he’d been feeding, housing, and caring for me for all this time. I’d never have been able to make it this far without him.

  Some of the people on the street were starting to nudge each other and turn to look at me. More details about their physicality became obvious in that motion. What I’d initially taken for some kind of iridescent shawl worn by people of all ages and quality of clothing was actually the thin membrane of a pair of wings that sprouted from the shoulder blades and then folded down to approximately waist level before stretching upward and over the arms, meeting at the middle of the chest in two hooked claws that formed a shape almost like a brooch. Given the way ideas sometimes cross-pollinate across realities, maybe that was where humanity had gotten the concept, although fastening a thing with another thing seemed straightforward enough that we could have reached that conclusion on our own.

  The direction I needed to go followed the line of the street, which was convenient. I started to walk, not rushing enough to attract more attention than my alien nature was already going to, but quickly enough to make it clear that I was going somewhere. I wasn’t just a weird alien thing walking around their city for fun. Maybe that would be enough to let me avoid any awkward encounters with the locals.

  Maybe not. When I reached the corner, three people dropped out of the sky, folding their wings as they landed. Their descent allowed me to glimpse bare, clawed feet and long, fringed tails that I would have assumed belonged to amphibians if not for the rest of the package they presented. All three were armed, holding long spears with shafts of polished metal.