“The people who originally constructed this place were gone long before my arrival, and they had a tropism toward circles,” he said. “Any door with sharp edges was built by people who came later and took over what they’d left behind.”

  “Is that your polite way of telling me that you finally learned how to hang a door?”

  “I’m handy!” he protested. “I patch drywall like a champion.”

  “You put holes in drywall like a champion,” I corrected. “I had to hang all the doors for the mice, and those were so small that you should have been able to manage them one-handed in the dark.”

  He smiled and pressed a kiss to my temple before undoing a latch on the front of the door. It swung open easily. “I missed you so much,” he said, and stepped through, pulling me with him into a dim, narrow tunnel that smelled of wood resin and time. No dust, though, and no spiders; just a faint underlying scent of strawberries and apples, making me suspect he’d been treating the wood in some way with bromeliad oil.

  Interesting. Maybe he’d finally found a decent use for the stuff. The door swung closed behind us, throwing the hall into darkness. Thomas kept walking, pulling me along. He didn’t create a light to guide us to our destination, and that was a little strange—once he’d fully relaxed into the idea that it was safe for him to be a sorcerer around me, he’d become casual about showing his magic, casting near-constant little spells to make things easier on the both of us. After a lifetime of hiding, he’d finally been able to relax and be himself. It seemed odd that he wouldn’t do it here.

  The hall was only about ten feet long. At the end, Thomas opened another door, revealing a small, square room with the same whitewashed walls I’d seen throughout the rest of the building.

  There was a small, round window high on one wall, allowing sunlight to trickle into the room. The window was open, but largely choked off by a tangle of bromeliad vines. One opportunistic bromeliad flower had actually poked halfway into the room, and I could see small insects like moths with too many wings stuck to the petals, already in the process of dissolving. The scent of its pollen hung ripe and heavy in the air.

  “I’ll get that,” said Thomas, and pulled away from me, picking up a heavy wooden paddle and using it to nudge the flower gently back outside before closing the window behind it. The pollen that was already in the room lingered, but it already seemed lighter without the flower emitting more. I took the moment to look around.

  The room was simply furnished, which made it all the more jarring, because the furnishings were the sort of thing that wouldn’t have seemed out of place at home in Buckley. A low bed was shoved into one corner of the room, too small for more than two people to sleep comfortably, and for two only if they were content to be piled practically on top of one another. There was a dresser, four drawers and a cluttered top, one drawer partially open to reveal a tangled welter of clothing. A single bookshelf dominated the wall opposite the bed, mostly filled with rocks and oddly shaped pieces of wood, rather than actual books. The top shelf was entirely devoted to a tattoo kit that looked half as sophisticated as the one I had at home, which was already an antique.

  Something small was stuck to the wall above the bed, too distant from the door for me to see it clearly, even at this short remove. The bed itself was unmade, covers tangled and tossed and entirely unprepared for company. My pack leaned against the foot of the bed, top open, and my other revolver was on the bed itself, gleaming in the light from the window.

  I crossed to the bed and knelt to check that my bag was still closed and retrieve my second gun, feeling better once both of them were in my hands where they belonged. “Do I get my clothes and the rest of my gear back eventually?” I asked.

  “All your weapons are with Sally, except for the revolvers,” said Thomas. “I kept those, because I thought . . .” He trailed off, looking momentarily like he wasn’t sure whether he should continue. Then he nodded, apparently coming to an agreement with himself, and continued, “I thought, based on the description she’d given of our newest arrival, that you were the latest in a long line of assassins. One clever enough to have disguised yourself as my wife, but not clever enough to have started from an accurate description of her. And since you weren’t the real Alice, you must have been responsible for her death as I couldn’t see any other way she would have allowed those guns to leave her hands. Forgive me for thinking you’d be so easily overcome. After this much time . . . it grows easy to confuse what I know for the truth with what I hoped to be true. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten many of your failings in the intervening years, and remembered only how much I missed you, and your absolute conviction that there was no possible threat too big for you to handle. I had a shamefully easy time picturing a younger, faster assassin getting the drop on you in order to complete their disguise.”

  “So you kept my guns because you thought they were the only real thing about me?”

  “Not to put too fine a point on it . . . yes.” He looked at me hopelessly. “It’s still somewhat difficult to believe you are who you claim to be.”

  I glanced back at the wall, at the small item stuck there. It was the original photograph that the painting Sally showed me had been based on. Of course it was. It was faded and worn, with tattered edges, but still recognizable, and looking at it, I could so easily understand his concern. I looked nothing like that girl.

  The anger washed out of me, replaced by an exhaustion I had been fighting back for decades, never quite allowing myself to feel it, for fear that it would slow me down. I sat heavily on the edge of the bed, setting my revolvers on the mattress to either side of me, and just looked at him.

  Thomas. My Thomas, the man I had loved since the first day I saw him, long before it was appropriate for me to go falling in love with an adult man. The man I had spent what sometimes felt like my entire life trying to find. He was still looking at me like I was a miracle. He was just looking at me like I was a stranger at the same time, and the dissonance of that expression in his eyes was painful. The silence stretched out between us.

  “So this is where you live,” I said finally, choosing to smash the silence rather than allow it to fester.

  “Yes,” he said, walking toward me. “And this is where I sleep. Alone.”

  There were no signs that anyone else shared this room with him, but hearing him confirm it reminded my body what it had been doing before we were so rudely interrupted. My breath caught, and I met his eyes, not letting myself look away.

  “I know you still have questions,” I said. “So do I.”

  “My questions can wait.” He picked up the revolvers, placing them gently on the floor beside the bed, his eyes never leaving mine. “Can yours?”

  “I’ve waited this long,” I said. I expected him to sit beside me, but instead he slid down to kneel on the floor in front of me; from that position, he was still tall enough to be able to reach out and rest his hands on my hips.

  “So have I,” he said, pulling me toward him.

  I wrapped my legs around his waist and my arms around his neck. “So we can finish this discussion later?”

  “You were always less prone to prevarication in the afterglow,” he said, and kissed me.

  Kissing Thomas was like visiting a place I knew well but hadn’t visited in years, long enough that everything was familiar and strange at the same time, that I felt like a tourist again, when I would have expected to feel like I was coming home. He pressed closer, still kissing me, and I responded in kind; my split lip protested, but in the rush of endorphins flooding my body, it was nowhere near enough to make me stop. Honestly, the sting just lit me up more.

  I shoved myself backward to the middle of the bed and pulled him down on top of me, fumbling with our clothes. My robe was easy enough to remove, a simple tug on the knot letting me shrug out of it, but his clothes were a bit more complicated, trousers tied at either hip and shirt requiring us to pull apart long enough for me to work it off over his head.

  A bruise was already forming where I’d kicked him. I wanted to touch every inch of him, to relearn the taste and texture of him with my fingers and tongue. The smell of swamp bromeliads hung in the air, and only the absence of an Aeslin choir celebrating our reunion kept it from feeling like home.

  Except that it did. Everything about it felt like home and simultaneously like a dream, but I had had this dream so many times and this was too vivid for that.

  Too real. Everything was magnified, my mind struggling with the disconnect; even the overwhelming pleasure felt like too much. I tried closing my eyes, but that just took me deeper into the feeling of the dream, and opening them was like double vision, reality overlaid by memory. His hands on my body felt as new as if he were touching me for the first time, and yet everything he did was so familiar, so right, that soon what was the same and what was different stopped mattering as my mind and body finally came together, and I didn’t know where I ended and he began.

  By the time he rolled away from me, panting and staring at the ceiling, I was no longer a stranger in that once-familiar country; I was back where I belonged. We both were.

  I laced my fingers through his and rested my head against his shoulder, luxuriating in the mere warmth of his presence. He was here. He was real. This was really happening. I’d been right all along. That, or this dimension was a honey trap of hitherto undiscovered quality, and I was going to while away the rest of my life in a happy illusion of fucking, eating food that wasn’t really there, and feeling like I’d finally found what I’d been looking for all this time. Under the circumstances, I’d take it.

  If my choice was a perfect lie or continuing to run long after my quest turned hopeless, I’d take the lie. Maybe that makes me weak, but I honestly don’t care.

  Thomas turned his head to kiss my temple, burying his face in my hair. “You still smell right. God help me, you smell like yourself.”

  I pulled away slightly, not far enough to make him think I was going anywhere—not far enough to make my own skin start longing for him again, which seemed like a genuine danger right now—and looked at him. “You sound like you weren’t sure. Were you not sure?”

  “Alice . . .” He sighed and smiled wryly at me. “The crossroads stole me from my home and family and threw me so far away that even the hope of homecoming faded. I know how much time has passed here. Sally’s arrival . . .” His smile faded. “I won’t say I had been very hopeful before she came, but Sally’s arrival carried with it something terrible: a date. The year the crossroads took her, which was so far in the future of our lives together that it was unbearable. She was able to tell me precisely how many years I had been away from my family, and when she spoke, I knew that you were long gone. I love you too dearly to have any illusions about whether you’d ever have learnt how to be careful.”

  “Not a skill of mine,” I admitted. Being careful isn’t something we Healys have ever been particularly good at. Both my mother and my grandmother died alone in the woods after going out on what had probably seemed like perfectly normal hunting trips, too commonplace to need backup. I know better than most how easy it is for a moment of carelessness to cost you everything you have.

  “So when Sally told me a woman had appeared, and told me about the weapons you’d been carrying, I knew you had to be an assassin. And then you came to me, and you fought like my Alice, and you spoke like my Alice, and when you got angry, you even glared at me like my Alice, and I wanted so badly to believe that you were the woman I had lost. I wanted it badly enough to lie to myself, if necessary, but not badly enough to betray her if I was wrong. And I knew I had to be wrong. I knew there was no way. But then I kissed you, and . . .”

  He stopped, and I held my silence until it was obvious he was going to do the same. Finally, I asked, “So that’s why you slept with me?”

  The idea was like a knife to the gut—and that’s something I’ve experienced more than often enough to have a solid sense of what it feels like, and to be a lot calmer about it than I probably ought to be. I took a deep breath, tamping down my initial reaction, which involved assaulting him, and wouldn’t have been a polite way to say, “Thanks for not being dead after I spent five decades trying to find you.” My second reaction was similar, if less violent, and by my third, I was able to pull away and sit up, gathering the blankets around me as I looked at him.

  To his credit, he knew he’d fucked up; I could see it in his eyes. He sat up, widening the space between us, and let his hands rest between his knees, staring down at them. “You’re not the first, you know,” he said. “Only the most recent. I’ve had an ‘Alice’ show up here on a fairly regular basis since I arrived. Some of them were even human, people who’d made their own crossroads bargains and been convinced that killing one little villain would let them go back to their lives. Most weren’t. Humans are rare, pan-dimensionally, but people who look like humans are common as rocks. The crossroads . . . I always wondered why they cared so much about me, when they didn’t seem to care about anyone else they left here.” He chuckled, mirthlessly. “They were afraid of exactly this. That you’d beat them somehow, and find me, and bring me home. You terrified a cosmic entity by being too damn stubborn to give up when it should have been the right thing to do. So they sent their assassins, and I thought . . .”

  He sighed. “It’s been a while since the last one. I thought it was finally over, and then you asked me why I had kept Fran’s guns, and—I used to repair them for you, Alice. I know those guns. I knew they were yours. And them being here meant that either they were here with you, or you were gone. They were the proof that you were gone. By the time you put me on the floor, you were either the best imposter they had ever sent, and I was a widower, or you were the woman I’d been grieving for all this time. Either way, there wasn’t anyone for me to betray.”

  He looked back at me and winced. “Say something. Please.”

  I took before I took another breath and asked the only question that still mattered: “And now do you believe me?”

  “I believe you either are my wife, or such a good imitation that even she wouldn’t blame me for being fooled,” he said, looking briefly, deeply weary. “Or at least I hope she would forgive me, but I couldn’t . . . I just missed you so much. I tried, Alice. I tried so hard to get out of here and come home, but I couldn’t. The walls are all but unbreakable. I couldn’t find a way back to you, I couldn’t find—”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “You found a way to wait for me, and now I’m here, and we’re going to find a way home together.”

  He looked at me, and his face fell, and with no more warning than that, he began to cry. I pulled myself closer and wrapped my arms around him, and just let him weep against my shoulder for as long as he needed to. If nothing else, I could do that much for him. I could be here.

  Finally, after everything, I could be here.

  Twelve

  “My God, Enid, you beautiful fool. What have you done? How am I supposed to keep on doing this without you?”

  —Alexander Healy

  Naked in a bed with a man everyone thinks is dead, but who is most definitely and empirically alive, thank you very much

  It took a surprisingly long time for Thomas to stop crying. Surprising mostly because my eyes stayed dry the whole while, watching him closely, but not shedding a single tear. When he finally wiped his eyes, he looked at me somewhat bemusedly and asked, voice soft, “Alice . . . why aren’t you crying?”

  “Oh. I mean, I guess because I don’t have anything to cry about.” I pushed myself into a sitting position again, not bothering to pull the covers around myself this time. It wasn’t like I had anything he hadn’t seen anyway, even if much of it had been substantially more scarred the last time he’d had the opportunity. “You were out here, separated from your family and wondering if we were still alive for you to come home to. Well, I was left on Earth with the kids, and no proof the crossroads hadn’t chucked you straight into the first event horizon they had access to. So I had to convince myself. I had to spend so much energy believing you were alive and out here for me to find that it’s been all that kept me moving for the last fifty years. I’m sure I’ll have a little breakdown later, when I realize I don’t know what to do with myself anymore, but right now, I’m mostly just relieved to finally know for sure that I was right. Sally showing up here and knowing what time it was at home may have made you lose hope, and I bet that hurt. I bet that hurt a lot. Well, I never lost hope. I couldn’t. If I had, I would have fallen apart completely. So for me, this is all less overwhelming and more . . . inevitable is I guess the term. It’s inevitable. You were inevitable.” I smiled at him. “We were inevitable.”

  “I see.” He frowned. “Can we finish that conversation now, do you think?”

  “Unless you want to go for round two,” I offered. We had a lot of lost time to make up for.

  He shook his head. “Perhaps later,” he said. “I’m not as young as I used to be.”

  “All evidence to the contrary,” I said, half-grumbling, half-appreciative. “But if it’s answering questions time, can we start with how you’ve barely aged a day?” I paused. “Oh, I almost forgot.” I pressed two fingers to one of the small stars tattooed along my hip bone, concentrating. The star flared and vanished, leaving a blank spot where it had been. My head spun, briefly, before my body equalized and recovered from the relatively small expenditure.

  I pulled my hand away to find Thomas staring at me.

  “Alice,” he said. “what was that?”

  “My tattoos are all single-use,” I said. “They have to be, or I can’t carry them. Anything larger would require me to have the magic to power them, and I don’t.”