Sally pursed her lips. “Rubina, go tell the guards that we’re going to need an escort,” she said. “I’d like to chat with the new girl in private for a minute.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that won’t be—”

  “Now, Rubina.”

  “Yes, Sally.” The thorn-skinned woman turned and hurried away toward the nearest set of guards, leaving me alone with Sally, who gave me a slow, measuring look.

  “If you have a way to leave, you should leave, now,” she said. “I know what you’re trying to do, and they didn’t prep you as well as they probably think they did. Something got lost in translation.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t you?”

  She was fast, I’d have to give her that: she grabbed the front of my robe and yanked me toward her, stepping backward through the archway as she did. The room on the other side was smaller than the main room, about the size of my bedroom back in Buckley. Shelves lined the walls, piled with a wide assortment of bags and boxes. She let me go once I was safely in the room, waving a hand at the wall across from the entry.

  “See?” she snapped. “He’ll know, you fucking imposter. He’ll know.”

  I said nothing. I just stared, silent. Because there on the wall, looking back at us, was me.

  Not literally me. A painting. I even remembered the picture it had been painted from. The year between Kevin and Jane, the library had decided that we would treat staff photo day as an occasion and asked us all to come to work dressed for a formal portrait. I’d worn a pink dress and my grandmother’s pearls, and I’d done my hair in pretty curls, the way my mother always wore it in the posters.

  Thomas had liked that picture so much he’d carried a copy in his wallet. His wallet, which had disappeared the same night he did. Guess I knew where it had gone now. Guess I didn’t have to wonder anymore.

  “They should have modeled you off of the historical records, not whatever messed-up assumptions they’ve made about how the family would change,” said Sally, not appearing to notice the sudden tension in my stance, or the way my breathing had gone fast and shallow. “They didn’t do you any favors. They didn’t—”

  She was so confident about being in the right that she didn’t even block as I brought my knee up and slammed it into her stomach, grabbing her hair at the same time and jerking her head downward, so that her forehead connected with the hard surface of my lower thigh. When I let her go, she staggered backward, off balance.

  “Shut the fuck up,” I snarled, and punched her twice in the face. She was unprepared for the sudden additional assault, and clearly too dazed to hit me back fast enough. I took the opportunity to strike her under the ear with my forearm. She went down without a sound, landing in a heap on the floor. That was no guarantee that she’d stay down. People are frequently sturdier than they seem.

  I heard voices just outside. I didn’t have time to tie her up or to really properly loot the place. None of my things were immediately visible. Fuck. I’d have to find a way to come back for them later. Sally might be armed, but—if so—it wasn’t obvious. I decided my best bets were still speed and the element of surprise and left her where she was as I stepped back into the main room.

  Rubina had returned with one of the guards, an anxious-looking green-skinned man with the facial features indicative of the dominant species on Cornale, gauzy wings wrapped around his shoulders and a fauchard in one hand.

  “Where is Sally?” he asked.

  “Indisposed,” I replied. “Can I see your polearm, please?”

  “No,” he said. “We don’t arm strangers.”

  “Kinda think you do, though,” I said, and punched him in the throat. Not the most subtle introduction, but absolutely an effective one—again, especially when the person being punched doesn’t see it coming. I’ve never been much of a brawler, she says, while assaulting people left and right. I prefer my fighting to happen on the other end of a bullet or a blade. Thomas used to despair of teaching me to throw a punch without telegraphing it.

  But I’ve improved enough over the years to stay alive, and I can still hit with sufficient force to get my point across when I feel the need. People who aren’t expecting to be punched in the throat don’t care about your form, they care about their tracheas. Tracheas are crunchy when you hit them hard enough. The guard staggered backward, gasping, and I snatched the fauchard out of his hands, bringing it up to shoulder level and holding it like a barrier between us as I kicked him between the legs.

  That maneuver works better when I’m not barefoot, but again, the element of surprise was on my side. Dainty, sweet little harem girls aren’t supposed to start whaling on the people assigned to protect them, and maybe I shouldn’t have been doing it. Maybe I should have stayed polite and demure and let him lead me to the Autarch like an offering, but right now, all I felt like “offering” to their Autarch was fifty years-worth of extreme disapproval. I’ve always found disapproval easier to express through violence.

  Rubina recoiled, visibly shocked by my actions, as the guard stumbled into the wall and sank slowly down to floor level, pulling his knees toward his chest. I didn’t know whether his genitals were in the same place a human’s would have been, but whatever I’d hit seemed to have been an effective target. I whacked him in the side of the head with the butt-end of my new fauchard, before spinning to point it toward the rest of the room, turning in a slow arc to make sure every single person there saw that I was armed.

  “All of you stay where you are, and I won’t have to knock any more of you down,” I said. They blinked at me, some more slowly than others, and didn’t move. Guess this Autarch wasn’t as good at inspiring loyalty in his people—or his “wives”—as he probably assumed he was. Well, that worked for me.

  Sally probably wasn’t going to be as passive when she stumbled out after me in a minute or two, and from the musculature I’d felt when I hit her, she wasn’t as soft as this guard had been, either. I’d won only because I’d surprised her. Yeah, I had a weapon now, but here’s the thing about most weapons: you shouldn’t use them unless you’re willing to kill the person you’re using them against. Sally was complicit in this system. She was also trapped here and may not have had any choice in the matter. As long as she stayed out of my way, I didn’t really want to hurt her. What I had done to her could be pretty disorienting, so hopefully she’d stay down long enough for me to get out of here.

  “I’m going to be leaving now,” I said, loudly and clearly. “None of you are going to stop me. You won’t like how things play out if you try.”

  They continued to watch me, saying nothing. I leaned over and grabbed Rubina by the arm, careful to grip below the point where the thorns stopped.

  She whimpered, and I immediately felt terrible. I’m not normally in the business of terrifying people who can’t defend themselves. It’s not kind. That didn’t stop me from pulling her toward me like a hostage, and hissing, voice low, “Which way to the Autarch?”

  “You don’t have to do this!” she said, voice rapidly approaching a wail. “We were going to take you to see him!”

  “Yeah, well, I prefer to take myself,” I said. “Just get me pointed in the right direction.”

  Not surprising me in the least, she pointed to the leftmost archway, one of the ones too small to be used by some of the women. The guards on that door were holding a boar spear and a voulge. Whoever was in charge of their armory needed to get a little consistency into the program.

  I wanted that voulge. A fauchard is nice, although it’s not much of a stabbing weapon, but it’s not as nice as a voulge, which has a longer cutting edge and a better spike at the bottom, making it ideal for hooking things that don’t want to be hooked.

  “Thank you,” I said. “You did nothing wrong.” Then I let her go, giving her a little push away from me to make it clear that I wasn’t going to grab her again, and walked toward the door she’d indicated, giving my fauchard a spin as I walked, like I was completely unconcerned about what was going to happen next.

  I paused when I reached the door, getting a little closer than was probably wise, close enough that either of them could have tried to hit me if they’d had the presence of mind to do it. Also close enough that they would have been fighting against their own weapons in the process. Never let it be said that we aren’t limited by our tools.

  “Hi,” I said to the one with the voulge, holding out my fauchard. “Wanna trade?”

  He looked utterly nonplussed, taking a step backward. “I am loyal!” he snapped.

  “Never said you weren’t. I have a weapon, you have a weapon, I’m not asking you to give me your weapon, I’m asking you to do an equal exchange, at the end of which, you’ll still have a weapon, and so will I.” The other guard, with the boar spear, brought it down to level with my gut.

  Boar spears are a bitch if they break the skin. They’re designed to disembowel more than anything else, and I don’t approve of them. I spun my fauchard in my hands again, pointing the butt end of it at that guard, and whacked his fingers before he realized what I was about to do.

  The sound of his weapon clattering to the floor was beautiful. I put a foot on it to stop him picking it up again and drove the butt of the fauchard into his stomach, eliciting a loud “oof” as he staggered away from me. They were all going down so easily, I was starting to feel bad about it. These people didn’t seem like very good guards. Only Sally had presented any real challenge, and one kid from Maine was never going to be enough to protect this many people.

  If they could have shaken off their passivity and swarmed me, it would have been over in minutes. I wasn’t willing to really hurt them, and sometimes there’s not a way to win a fight without really hurting people. I whacked my current playmate again, this time on the head, and pointed the blade at the one still holding the voulge.

  “Trade, or I take it away,” I snapped.

  He held his weapon out toward me, cringing.

  “Thank you,” I said brightly as I plucked it from his hand, replacing it with the fauchard. The weight on the voulge was much more balanced to my liking. I gave it a spin and smiled at him, bright as anything. “I really appreciate it. Now, you want to get out of my way?”

  He stepped to the side, staring at me like I was all his nightmares come to life and rolled up into one perky blonde package. I smiled at him and stepped through the archway, into another long, featureless white hall.

  I’d made it about fifteen feet before someone sent up the alarm. Awesome.

  Time to party.

  Ten

  “If there is anyone in this world or the next more stubborn than Alice Healy once she gets her teeth into something, I truly hope to never meet them.”

  —Mary Dunlavy

  Running hell-bent for leather down an unfamiliar hallway, hoping I won’t have to kill anyone

  The alarm was a loud, shrill belling sound that seemed to pour out of the walls themselves, filling the air. It wasn’t quite loud enough to disorient, but it definitely made it harder to focus on what I was doing. Footsteps filled the hall behind me, running after me, and a spear clattered to the ground some feet ahead of me, thrown by a guard who clearly hadn’t stopped to consider that when you only have one weapon, throwing it at people isn’t the best plan. I paused to duck down and grab it, whipping around to face the sounds of pursuit. All the guards who hadn’t already been knocked down were running after me, accompanied by about half a dozen more who had apparently answered the call.

  And all of them were carrying polearms from the same grab bag assortment of ways to stab people. When I found the Autarch, after I finished beating the everloving crap out of him—twice if my suspicions were correct—we were going to have a serious talk about diversity in armaments.

  I threw the spear back at the one in the front. My aim was better than theirs. It hit them in the shoulder, embedding itself there and sending them rocking backward into the rank of guards behind them as they clutched at the wound. The blood that spurted forth was darker than I would have expected. Biology is fun sometimes. I turned my attention back to the hall ahead of me and kept running.

  I had a head start and a lot of practice fleeing from angry mobs. I was also barefoot and dealing with the aftereffects of physically and magically exhausting myself breaking through the dimensional barrier. That meant we were probably on roughly equal footing.

  The hall widened ahead of me, into another of those wide, round openings. I plunged through, into a tiled courtyard lined with unfamiliar vegetation, like something out of a home décor magazine. I kept running.

  The guards, when they reached the opening, didn’t. They stopped there, piling into one another, but didn’t cross the boundary. That probably wasn’t a good sign.

  The branches around me weren’t rustling. I slowed down, coming to a stop right around the center of the courtyard, and looked at my surroundings more closely. Most really predatory plants are attracted to motion. If they were going to strike, they would strike at me while I was moving. Still nothing rustled in the brush. Still nothing appeared to threaten me.

  Then I smelled apples mixed with strawberries. It was a characteristic perfume, and one I hadn’t been expecting to find here. Looking more closely at the trees, I saw the vines wrapped around them, green and edged in white, the thorny “teeth” of the bromeliads outlining them. I looked down at the ground. Thin white roots snaked across the tile. This whole place was a bromeliad feeding nest.

  And here was I, barefoot in the middle of it. No wonder the guards had stopped. I’d step on a vine or a mature enough root any second now, if I hadn’t already, and the soporific sap would get into my veins. After that, it was only a matter of time before I collapsed.

  Or it should have been only a matter of time. You don’t run around the disreputable parts of several dozen dimensions without finding a way to avoid roofies. I pressed my fingers against the ammonite tattooed over my hip, pressing hard to make up for the lack of skin contact. Like hell was I taking off my robe, thin as it was, with the guards looking on.

  The tattoo warmed beneath my fingers as it dissolved, and a brief wave of dizziness told me that the price had been paid for temporary poison resistance. I began walking across the courtyard again, watching my step. The thorns might not be able to incapacitate me, but they would still sting like the dickens if I stepped on them directly.

  What kind of person keeps a courtyard full of swamp bromeliads in a place easily accessible from his harem? Not a person who worries much about the women supposedly under his protection. I scowled as I angled for the archway on the far side of the courtyard. I was liking this Autarch less and less, and that was pretty impressive, given where I’d started. I was honestly beginning to hope I was wrong. The man I was looking for would never have been this careless about the safety of others. Time changes everyone. I didn’t want it to have changed him like this.

  The archway on the other side was as open as the others had been. I stepped through into a narrower hall. The air was cooler here, probably in part due to the high windows on the walls, which allowed the wind to pass though. The air hadn’t been stale in the other wing, but it had been still, something I hadn’t really noticed at the time. There were doors along this hall. All of them were circular, matching the rest of the local architecture, but unlike the majority I’d seen in the wing where I woke up, they actually had doors in them, closing off the rooms on the other side.

  I ignored them and kept going. The alarm was still ringing, but no additional guards had shown up to complicate my day. Either there were no additional guards, which didn’t make a lot of sense, or they assumed they would only have to wait a few more minutes before I passed out from the bromeliad sap, becoming much easier to collect without further risk to life or limb.

  Or maybe they just didn’t like their Autarch all that much. It would make sense. People don’t usually like the guy who takes all the women. Mostly because that guy is usually a jerk.

  At the end of the hall was another, much larger circular arch, containing a pair of tall, closed doors. I gripped my voulge tightly and strode toward it. The end of my long journey might be on the other side. If that was the case, I didn’t know what I was going to do next. I also didn’t know whether it would end well, and I wasn’t ready for that. And it was too late to turn back now.

  It was too late by fifty years. I approached the door. I pushed the latch.

  It swung open, and I stepped through.

  * * *

  The room on the other side was a throne room. There wasn’t any other way to describe it: it was too big, too grandiose to be anything else, like something out of a Gothic castle as designed by architects from Hobbiton, who couldn’t think in terms of things being impressive without them also being round. A single worn rug ran from the door all the way to the back of the room, a distance that felt as long as a football field but was probably more like a hundred and fifty feet in reality, where it reached the foot of an ornate wooden throne.

  Unlike almost everything else in here, the throne had hard edges, and looked like it had been crafted according to more familiar-to-me rules of design. It was stained dark with some sort of resin, and the smell of apples and strawberries hung distantly in the air, telling me where at least some of the materials had originated. And I was focusing on the throne to avoid focusing on anything else.