Second, I was dressed, although the filmy, diaphanous robe I was wearing was barely worthy of being considered clothing. It wasn’t transparent despite its weight, which was pleasant, but it felt like wearing a dress made of gauze, or flower petals, or something equally unsuitable.

  Whoever had redressed me had also taken my underclothes, and the fabric I’d wrapped around my wrists to stabilize them. I was more naked even with a robe than I normally was any time short of stepping out of the shower or moving between rejuvenation treatment and the tattoo station. I didn’t like this. Big surprise there. I was, at least, reasonably sure the fabric was thick enough to let me hide a few knives if I could get my hands on them. I’ve had years upon years of practice to determine exactly how much clothing I need where in order to go armed enough to feel comfortable. One of my granddaughters does something similar with fringe and sequins when she puts on her ballroom costumes—it’s all about knowing both your body and your wardrobe. Nothing hurt. The people who’d stripped me had done it without injuring me.

  That was good. It wasn’t going to stop me from injuring them, but no one ever said I was into proportionate response. And either I’d somehow forced my way into the wrong dimension, or I’d just confirmed that the bottle world I’d been looking for had people in it. Either way, I was still alive, and all I had to do from here was get my stuff back and get the hell out of here.

  “You’re awake!” The voice was light, easy, and incredibly bright, like the speaker was on the verge of bursting into a happy ballad about how nice it was when the company woke up. I turned. A woman had entered through a small door I hadn’t turned to notice before; it was round at the top, like a Hobbit hole, and had no sharp edges.

  The woman herself had plenty of them, thanks to the fact that she had what looked like thorns growing out of her shoulders, upper arms, and the sides of her neck. Her throat, chest, and face were free of thorns, and her skin was a pale, rosy pink. I couldn’t have explained exactly what about her face wasn’t quite human; she was one of those species who would have been called cryptids back at home, close enough to pass through humanity’s world, not quite close enough to blend in.

  She was wearing a short dress with a toga-style neckline, made of the same diaphanous fabric as my robe, and beaming at me brilliantly, all sunshine and sparkles. “They don’t always wake up as fast as you—you were lucky to break through where you did, and Sally heard the wards when you arrived, so you weren’t alone out there for too long. But it’s all right now. You’re safe here. Oh, and our Autarch is going to be pleased to see you. You look like you’re probably the same species he is. You even have the same kind of skin.”

  I blinked, very slowly. “All right . . . let’s start with the easy ones. Where am I?”

  “The Palace of the Autarch,” she said. “All newcomers come here first—and have since he claimed and warded it to provide us with safety. I mean, if that’s not precise enough for you, you’re in the women’s quarters.”

  “The women’s quarters?” That sounded suspiciously like a polite way of saying “harem,” and I didn’t like it. Then again, I hadn’t liked anything since I woke up, so why should this be any different? Liking things was no longer a part of my job.

  “Yes. All who come through the great barrier are taken under the Autarch’s protection upon arrival, to keep them safe.” Her smile got somehow even brighter. “He’s a very good man. You’ll like him. And oh, he’ll like you. I don’t think I’ve seen any females of his kind except for Sally, and she’s of a different phylum. I didn’t even think their females had the markings.”

  “Uh.” I do not like passing through thick dimensional walls. I like losing consciousness even less than that. I like waking up without my weapons so much less than that that it’s almost comic. And more than all of those things, I do not like being confused by pink, thorny women who tell me I’ve been dumped in a stranger’s harem like it’s a good thing. “Do you have a name?”

  “Oh, yes! Rubina is my name. It’s a pleasure to meet you . . .”

  “Alice,” I said. “Are we speaking English?”

  “No, we’re speaking whatever language brings you the most comfort. The Autarch was concerned, as so many of us come from dissimilar worlds, that we would be unable to find commonality. He arranged for translation runes to be painted in all the rooms, to be sure we’d be able to speak with one another freely.”

  She was still smiling. Either this Autarch of hers was a great guy and would be totally willing to let me out of this supposedly protective custody as soon as I met him and explained exactly what I was doing here and who I was looking for, or he was a monster operating a girl collection and she was too afraid to say anything bad about him.

  “Okay,” I said. “Cool. Can you do me a favor?”

  “Of course! Anything to make you comfortable here.”

  “Okay, then, is it possible for you to take me to get my stuff back, please? A lot of the things I was carrying when I arrived have sentimental value.” And the ones that didn’t could be used to hurt people. Which might be necessary if the Autarch wasn’t miraculously awesome.

  People who call themselves “Autarchs” and start collecting people who need their inexplicably benevolent “protection” are very rarely awesome, in my experience. Whoever this guy was, he was probably already a dead man walking. He just didn’t know who was going to pull the trigger. I was happy to volunteer.

  “Of course,” repeated Rubina. Either she was naturally good-natured, or I needed to be careful about what I put in my mouth while I was here. Drugs in the water would be pretty solidly on-brand for an “Autarch.” I was really starting to dislike this guy, and I hadn’t even met him yet.

  She walked over to the Hobbit-hole door, still smiling. It opened easily when she pressed the latch, and I relaxed slightly. So they weren’t locking me in here.

  “Belongings of new arrivals are temporarily kept in the storage rooms for safekeeping,” she said. “Come with me.”

  I didn’t have to be invited twice. She walked out of the room into a winding hall, and I followed her, relieved when no wards activated to keep me locked in. All this could still be a trick—send your friendliest, most unassuming representative to work on the paranoid stranger while you get her to drop her guard—but I was starting to suspect that it might not be.

  “You know,” I said carefully. “This isn’t what I was expecting.”

  “No?” The walls out here were something smooth, plaster or clay or drywall, and had been painted as white as the walls in the room where I woke up. There was something industrial about it, like the color had been chosen because it was easy to repaint, and not for any aesthetic reasons.

  She led me down the hall to a large, circular doorway leading to what I would have called a community room at a library: it was built on a scale that fit the entry, large enough to hold a small 4-H assembly. Pillars supported the ceiling at regular intervals, necessary due to the lack of load-bearing internal walls, and people were scattered around the space. Most of them were women, dressed in the same diaphanous fabric as Rubina and myself, although the cuts ranged from something that looked like pajama loungewear, with long sleeves and actual pants, all the way to dresses much shorter than Rubina’s, or my robe.

  The only men stood to either side of the arch we’d just entered through, or to the sides of the matching arches on each wall, four in all. The men, all of whom were bipeds of roughly human conformation and proportions, wore brown leather, lace-up vests and tight trousers, and held an impressive assortment of polearms.

  I like polearms. They’re not the most practical weapons under most circumstances—you need too much room if you’re going to use them effectively, and while they’re great for keeping people at a distance, if you’re dealing with someone who mostly works with firearms, they’ll quickly cease to be your friends, as the jaghirdar and their lackies had learned to their dismay. None of the guards—because that’s what they were, harem guards, whatever fancy description they liked to use locally—were carrying the sort of spears I’d seen in the last dimension. That was good. I wouldn’t have wanted to deal with more of the same.

  But they were carrying spears, or at least some of them were. The rest—and there were seven in all—had an assortment of blade designs that made them look like a medieval recreation troupe with very poor historical accuracy. Fauchards and bardiche and billhooks don’t belong in the same armory, much less the same guard. I downgraded my weakly forming assessment of the local security a few steps for sloppy equipment reconciliation. Not that it would matter. Any of those things could stab me, whether or not they should be used together.

  But none of the men were making any threatening moves with their weapons, and Rubina smiled at several of them as we entered.

  Once I took my eyes off the polearms, I found the assortment of visible species in the room much more distracting. No two of the women looked like they’d come from the same starting dimension. While they were all vertebrate bipeds, that was about where the similarities ended. Some were covered in fur. Others had scales, or wings, or extra arms. One of them looked like she would be nine feet tall if she stood up, instead of lounging on a pile of beanbags on the floor. Any Autarch who could maintain this kind of wide-spectrum buffet of women and still want more wasn’t going to be a nice man.

  Rubina led me straight across the room, waving and smiling at the women we passed, all of whom looked at us with curiosity, though they didn’t stop her or speak to me directly, even as they assessed me with their eyes. Checking out the competition if I was making my guess correctly. Wouldn’t they be surprised when they found out that I was nothing of the sort?

  The entryway opposite the one we’d come through was equally large, while the entries to either end were smaller, limiting the shapes and sizes of the people who’d be able to use them. Some of the women in this room wouldn’t have been able to walk upright through those doors

  Rubina stopped at the far entryway, knocking lightly on the wall. “Sally? New arrival is awake, and she wants her things back.”

  “Yeah, well, some of ‘her things’ are weapons of mass destruction, so I’m not necessarily in a rush to return them,” answered a voice. Like Rubina, the speaker’s words came through in English. Unlike Rubina, she had an accent I recognized, solid Mainer. She didn’t talk like a lobsterman, but she had the inland accent, an inhale on her “yeah,” soft “r”s, and vowels that didn’t subscribe to any other region I knew, not even quite Boston.

  Not the accent I would have expected to hear in a place like this, but it wasn’t the strangest thing that had happened to me today, so I was willing to roll with it.

  “Sorry,” I said. “But they’re mine and I didn’t consent to having them taken, so I want them back.”

  “You were practically in a coma when we found you and brought you into the compound for medical attention. I would think you’d be a little grateful,” said the speaker, who emerged from the dimness on the other side of the opening to lean against the archway and look at me flatly. “Not every day you pass out in a freezing field and wake up in a nice bed.”

  Rubina seemed to have no sharp edges, despite the thorns growing out of her neck and shoulders, a woman designed for softness, like a rose from a safely walled garden. This woman was nothing but sharp edges, every inch of her. She was dressed in the same basic uniform as the guards, in contrast to all the women I’d seen so far. Interesting, that, given how much she looked like a human being. Her hair was long and black, and her skin was a tawny beige. If I’d been asked to peg her to an Earth ethnicity for some reason—something it was hard not to do, given how much she sounded like home—I would have guessed Asian-American, probably Korean-American.

  “I thought you’d be out for a lot longer,” she said, casually pushing away from the doorway and moving closer. I tensed. She stopped, holding up her hands. “Whoa, no, not planning to hurt you. Just wanted to ask how you’re doing, see if maybe there’s anything you need. You were down pretty hard when we found you. I’m guessing you’re diabetic? And from Earth, to boot. I found the glucose paste in your bag and put it on your gums when you wouldn’t wake up. I figure that had to have helped.”

  “Not diabetic,” I said, more curtly than I meant to. It had been a long, hard, weird trip, and a chatty Earth girl dressed to audition for the new Mad Max wasn’t what I’d been looking for. “Not a sorcerer either. So.”

  “So you sucked all the sugar out of your own body to fuel the crossing? Nice. Innovative. And really, really stupid.” Her voice turned hard. “Shouldn’t the big-ass ‘Keep Out’ signs have been some sort of a warning that maybe this wasn’t the best stop on your vacation tour of the dimensions?”

  “Excuse me?” I asked, eyebrows climbing toward my hairline. “Listen up, young lady. This isn’t a vacation tour. I’m on a mission, and I needed to be here, so I came in. I could have killed myself getting past those ‘Keep Out’ signs you mentioned. Did you set those?”

  “Nope,” she said, with what seemed to be far more relish than the word warranted. She spoke like someone who’d been spoiling for a fight all day and was happy to accept it from the woman who’d just shown up if that was what she had available. “Boss did that. He wanted people to stop falling out of the sky like assholes we’d have to patch up and feed and rehabilitate. He’ll like you, though. He likes the human ones.” She looked me deliberately up and down. “Blonde’s just a bonus.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Didn’t whoever told you to try in our direction tell you? This is a roach motel. You can check in, but you can’t check out.” Her shrug was deliberately broad. It was like she was actively trying to get under my skin. Which maybe she was. Again, she stood like someone who wanted to have a fight.

  Maybe she was head wife or something, and me looking human made me the competition. I didn’t actually care.

  “Yes, I knew that part,” I said carefully. She might be antagonistic. That didn’t mean I had to be. “I came here on purpose after I found a cartographer’s record indicating that this was a bottle world. He got in and he got out. Some friends of mine back in Ithaca are going over his papers to see if they can figure out how he did it and extract me.”

  For a moment, what looked like hope flared in her dark eyes. She tamped it down and scowled at me. “So you really are on a vacation tour of the dimensions,” she said. “Ithaca’s a long way from here.”

  “Earth’s even farther,” I said, somewhat cautiously.

  To my relief, there was recognition in her nod. “Yeah, it is. Can’t imagine there’s anything this far out to be worth making the trip for. Especially not when you’re probably stuck here with the rest of us.”

  “Let me worry about that,” I said. “Can I get my things?”

  “Can you tell me why you’re armed like you plan to start a war against whatever gets in your way? Some of these grenades are older than my grandfather.”

  “Like I said, it’s a long way from Earth, and I did the whole trip on foot and by myself,” I said. “And like I said, I’m not a sorcerer. I can’t just fling a fireball at somebody if they decide I shouldn’t be allowed to keep going.”

  “Most people aren’t sorcerers, and yet most people don’t go around with half an armory on their back,” she said, and looked me up and down again, apparently coming to a decision. “I’m sorry, I really am, but I can’t. Not until you’ve seen the Autarch. If he says you can have your things, you can have your things. Boss calls the shots, the rest of us just count the bullets.”

  “Nice effort to fit the metaphor to the person you’re talking to, even if it fell a little flat in the execution,” I said. I turned to Rubina, who had been watching us with confusion and concern. “All right, since you came to get me, when do I see this Autarch of yours?”

  “Please, as if you didn’t come here specifically to try and play the lost Anastasia?” said Sally, snapping my attention back around to her.

  “I’m sorry, what?” I asked.

  “You look human,” she said. “You say you started from Earth, but you don’t have an accent I recognize, and you mention traveling through other dimensions like that’s something someone from Earth would know as anything other than science fiction. Which they wouldn’t, by the way. Whoever prepped you forgot to mention that Earth is still isolated enough that we mostly don’t know other dimensions even exist, much less how to move between them.”

  “But you’re from Maine, and you know those things,” I said.

  “Yeah, because I attracted the attention of the crossroads and got slingshot across creation to wind up here,” she countered. “I’m stuck. You came here voluntarily. Forgive me if I’m suspicious. And then just look at you.”

  I raised my eyebrows again. “Look at me?”

  “Whoever prepped you missed the mark by a couple of decades, Princess.” Sally gave me another up and down look, not even bothering to hide the way her lip curled. “Too young to be the wife or the daughter, assuming either of them survived, and the wife, which I assume is the goal, didn’t have any tattoos. You’re not good enough. You’re not going to pull it off.”

  I stared at her, a hard, cold feeling starting to gather in the pit of my stomach. It had begun with her casual mention of the crossroads throwing her here, which was exactly what I’d been hoping for but somehow sounded upsetting coming from someone else’s mouth. If the crossroads had been putting their victims here, then I might be in the right place.

  In the palace of an Autarch who grabbed every woman who entered his territory. “I don’t need to be good enough for anything,” I said, tightly. “I’m moving between worlds because I’m trying to find my husband. He disappeared, and I’m looking for him so I can take him home. I’m not here to steal anything that belongs to you, or to mess around with whatever system you’ve got going here.” I waved my hands vaguely, indicating the whole room. “I don’t care. Maybe that makes me a bad person and I should be worrying about how to set you all free from whatever messed-up form of communal bondage you’ve gone and fallen into, but I’ve been doing this for a long fucking time, and I’ve had plenty of opportunities to learn that sometimes you don’t want to mess around with the way the locals do things.”